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The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity 1380-1590., 1380-1590.

The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity 1380-1590., 1380-1590.

Pp. 69-70, 73-80, 87-88: PPCreed shows how, in an act of self-purification, its Lollard author projects onto the friars many of the very charges levelled against his own sect. In moving from the literal base of the allegory in the first half of the poem to its spiritual meaning in the second half, the poem re-enacts the central Lollard ritual of the souls awakening through its debate with evil. The poem’s attack, in the portrait of Pierce, on the values implicit in the dream vision descriptio does not signal a rejection of fiction-making in general, only of a variety of fiction-making accomplished here through an inversion of values that makes the Mirth figure the villain and the friars his analogues.