Response [to Mary Carruthers ‘Imaginatif, ‘Imaginatif, Memoria, and “The Need for Critical Theory” in Piers Plowman Studies

Issues of historicism and politics must be brought into discussion of the teaching of PPl, a poem that “foregrounds the difficulties of interpretation at the expense of interpretative authority.” Teaching interpretative skills that the author largely assumed is problematic; in particular, an interpretation of the descriptio of Lady Meed must take into account the modern politics of the image, here the heterosexual, masculinist interpolation through the readerly gaze.