Response to Scott’s “Nevere noon so nedy ne poverer deide’: Piers Plowman and the Value of Poverty”

Lauds Scott’s treatment but recapitulates its argument so as to stress that the author shifts from religion to social or venality satire, and that perhaps these topics can be treated more fully, and separately, in a larger study. The respondent here suggests that an analysis of Lady Meed as “an opposite of poverty,”could be useful, but that it might be worth keeping in mind that given all of the enormous economic, religious, and political changes at the end of the Middle Ages, PPl, and its particular form of engagement of poverty, might have been left behind. In other words, PPl represents something of the culmination of venality satire, if not its end.