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Anne Middleton Book Prize

Anne MiddletonAbout the Prize

The IPPS is delighted to announce the Anne Middleton Book Prize, to be awarded to the best book, published over a two-year period, substantively concerned with the literary, historical, religious, intellectual, textual-codicological, and critical contexts of Piers Plowman and related poetry and prose in the traditions of didactic and allegorical alliterative writing. “Book” refers to a substantial and original piece of scholarly and/or creative work (e.g., editions, translations, monographs), published in any format.

Donations to the fund are always welcome.

There will be two awards of the prize, one covering works with a publication date of 2019-2020 and one covering 2021-2022.  Winners will receive a cash prize and free membership of the Society for one year (if recipients are in the “standard” category) or two years (if in the student or independent scholar categories).

One nomination per book, of no more than ca. 300 words, to be sent to piersplowmansociety@gmail.com, should include title, publication details, an abstract of the book, and a sentence or two saying how the book contributes to Langland studies or to that of the “world” of Piers Plowman. Anyone may nominate a work: publishers, authors self-nominating, colleagues. The Committee reserves the right to award the Prize to a work that has not been nominated.

Deadline for receipt of nominations and submissions is 15 January 2023. The two prizes will be presented at the IPPS Conference to be held in London in July 2023.

Prize Winners

Tekla Bude, Sonic Bodies: Text, Music and Silence in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Nicolette Zeeman, The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman” (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Curtis Gruenler, “Piers Plowman” and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017)

Rebecca Davis, Piers Plowman” and the Books of Nature (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Bibliography of Anne Middleton’s scholarship related to Piers Plowman

compiled by Professor Steven Justice

“Two Infinites: Grammatical Metaphor in Piers Plowman,” ELH 39 (1972): 169–88.

“The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 94–114. Reprinted in Medieval English Poetry, ed. Stephanie Trigg (London: Longmans, 1993), 24–46.

“Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays on Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 91–122, 280–83.

“MAPping the Field: Piers Plowman at Claremont,” Chronica [newsletter of MAP, the Medieval Association of the Pacific] 30 (Spring, 1982): 2–10.

“The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background, ed. David A. Lawton (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Totowa, NJ: Boydell and Brewer, 1982), 101–23, 147–54.

Piers Plowman.” Chapter XVIII in A Manual of Writings in Middle English, Vol. VII, general editor Albert Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986), 2211–34 (Commentary), 2419–48 (Bibliography).

“The Passion of Seint Averoys [Piers Plowman B.13.91]: ‘Deuynyng’ and Divinity in the Banquet Scene,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 1 (1987): 31–40.

“Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman,” in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward D. Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph Wittig (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1988), 243–66.

“Introduction: The Critical Heritage,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 1–25.

“William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth Century England,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15–82. Awarded Beatrice White Prize, 1994, by UK English Association. Reprinted in Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader, ed. Derek Pearsall (Blackwell Critical Readers in Literature). Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell, 1999, 206–45. Excerpt reprinted in Piers Plowman: The Donaldson Translation (A Norton Critical Edition), eds Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H.A. Shepherd (London & New York)

“Loose Talk from Langland to Chaucer.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2013 – muse.jhu.edu

“Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography” and the Statute of 1388.”  In Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, UPenn Press, 1997

“Commentary on an Unacknowledged Text: Chaucer’s Debt to Langland.” The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 2010 – brepolsonline.net

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Thank you for your support of the Anne Middleton Book Prize Fund.