The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature.

Incidental references to PPl in a chapter entitled “The Canterbury Tales: Apocalypticism and Chaucer’s Pilgrimage” (portions of which are a revised version of “The Canterbury Tales in Eschatological Perspective,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke, Daniel Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen [Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 15; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988, 404-24]): cryptic prophecies, hopeful millenarian visions of a reformed society, portrayal of friars as false prophets, and arguments of specific characters such as Need show a fully developed, orthodox apocalyptic imagination in PPl, which extends from the apocalyptic dualism of the Prologue, to WL’s interpretation of ecclesiastical abuse in apocalyptic terms, to the attack of the eschatological Antichrist.

Rev. Penn R. Szittya, YLS 9 (1995): 158-63.