Literary Representations of History in Fourteenth-Century England: Shared Technique and Divergent Practice in Chaucer and Langland

Both Chaucer and L present history in their works in ways their medieval readers will understand, and which modern critics can appreciate as Ricardian. A comparison of the two “brings out the ways that each relates the particular to the general, the way that each thinks about theory and praxis and how they are connected. This relationship is, for both poets, an important problem; in each case, too, the poet’s answers to the problem have important repercussions for his poetic, historical, and political thinking.”