Title Background

A Selfless Ploughman and the Christ/Piers Conjunction in Langland’s <i>Piers Plowman</i>.

A Selfless Ploughman and the Christ/Piers Conjunction in Langland’s Piers Plowman.

Both Walter of England’s original fable no. 60, “De Duello Militis et Aratoris,” included in the popular school-text compilation Liber Catonianus, and commentaries on the fable in the Esopus Moralizatus and in the Auctores Octo feature a plowman as representative of militant Christianity in an analogue to Jesus in Piers’s armor as he rides forth before the Crucifixion.