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Derek Pearsall Travel & Research Fund

Derek PearsallAbout the Fund

This fund honours Derek Pearsall (1931-2021), a medievalist who delighted in drawing people together and introducing scholars, especially younger ones, into conversations where they were not yet known.

With his wide interests, his breadth of knowledge, his tremendous curiosity, and his love of seeing everything there was to be seen, he was an eager researcher and conference goer.

Following his example, the International Piers Plowman Society has established the Derek Pearsall Travel and Research Fund. This fund will issue awards to provide financial aid to students and scholars traveling to conferences on, or conducting archival research related to, Piers Plowman, its manuscripts, its contexts, and its traditions, particularly the alliterative tradition.

Award Recipients

Emily Youree (2023)

Liam Cruz Kelly (2023)

Bibliography of Derek Pearsall’s scholarship related to Piers Plowman

Compiled by Professor Tony Edwards

Derek Pearsall‘Rhetorical ‘descriptio’ in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ Modern Language Review, 50 (1955), 129-134.

Ed. (with Elizabeth Salter), Piers Plowman (London: Edward Arnold, 1967).

Old English and Middle English Poetry. The Routledge History of English Poetry Volume 1 (London: Routledge, 1977).

review George Kane & E. Talbot Donaldson, eds, Piers Plowman: The B Version, Medium Aevum, 46 (1977), 278-285.

‘The Origins of the Alliterative Revival,’ in Bernard S. Levy & Paul E. Szarmach, eds, The

Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981), pp. 1-24.

‘The ‘Ilchester’ Manuscript of ‘Piers Plowman’,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 82 (1981), 181-193.

review Priscilla Martin, Piers Plowman: The Field and the Tower, Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), 435-37.

‘The Alliterative Revival: Origins and Social Backgrounds,’ in David Lawton, ed., Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 34-53, 132-36.

review Guy Bourquin, Piers Plowman: Études sur la genèse littéraire des trois Versions, Modern Language Review, 77 (1982), 915-19.

review A. G. Rigg & Charlotte Brewer, eds, William Langland: Piers Plowman: The Z Version, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 137 (1985), 181-84.

‘Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman,’ in Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron & Joseph S. Wittig, eds, Medieval English Studies presented to George Kane (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 167-85.

‘The Gawain Poems: A Statistical Approach to the Question of Common Authorship,’ Review of English Studies, n.s. 39 (1988), 365-385. (with R. A. Cooper)

review A. V. C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker: Langland’s Poetic Art, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 11 (1989), 288-90.

 An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Langland (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).

‘Lunatyk Lollares in Piers Plowman,’ in Piero Boitani & Anna Torti, eds, Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 163-78.

‘Piers Plowman Forty Years On,’ in Helen Phillips, ed., Langland, the Mystics and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 1-9.

review John Alford, Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction, Speculum, 65 (1990), 363-64.

Derek Pearsallreview Piers Plowman: The Three Versions, English Language Notes, 27 (1990), 73-77.

Introduction (with Kathleen Scott) to Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 104 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992).

‘Authorial Revision in some Late-Medieval Texts,’ in Charlotte Brewer & Alastair Minnis, eds, Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), pp. 39-48.

‘Manuscript Illustration of Late Middle English Literary Texts, with Special Reference to the Illustration of Piers Plowman in Bodleian Library MS Douce 104,’ in Miceal Vaughan, ed., ‘Suche werkis to werche’, Essays on Piers Plowman in Honor of David C. Fowler (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1993), pp. 191-210.

‘The Timelessness of The Simonie,’ in O. S. Pickering, ed., Individuality and Achievement in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), pp. 59-72.

‘Langland’s London,’ in Steven Justice & Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds, Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 185-207.

‘Courtesy and Chivalry in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,’ in D. S. Brewer & Jonathan Gibson, eds, A Companion to the Gawain Poet (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), pp. 351-362.

‘Piers Plowman and the Problem of Labour,’ in James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg & W. M. Ormrod, eds, The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer/York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 123-32.

William Langland, William Blake, and the Poetry of Hope. The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures on Medieval English Poetry, V (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003). Reprinted in Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson and Nicholas Watson, eds, The Morton Bloomfield Lectures, 1989-2005 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), pp. 201-219.

‘Crowned King: War and Peace in 1415,’ in The Lancastrian Court, Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, XIII (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2003), pp. 163-72.

‘Langland and Lollardy: From B to C,’ Yearbook of Langland Studies, 17 (2003), 7-23.

Derek PearsallEd., Piers Plowman by William Langland: A New Edition of the C-Text (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008).

‘The Text of Piers Plowman: Past, Present and Future,’ Poetica, 71 (2009), 75-92.

‘The Poetic Character of the C-Text of Piers Plowman,’ in John Burrow & Hoyt Duggan, eds, Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 153-165.

‘Editing the C Text: The Athlone Press Edition of 1997,’ Yearbook of Langland Studies, 24 (2010), 21-37.

review A. V. C. Schmidt, ed., Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, 2: Introduction, Textual Notes, Commentary, Bibliography and Indexical Glossary, Speculum, 85 (2010), 701-03.

‘The Necessity of Difference: The Speech of Peace and the Doctrine of Contrarieties in Langland’s Piers Plowman,’ in Christopher Cannon & Maura Nolan, eds, Medieval Latin and Middle English: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), pp. 152-65.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Essay in Enigma,’ in Daniel Donoghue, Susanna Fein, David Raybin, James Simpson & Nicholas Watson, eds, Chaucer, Langland, and Company: Studies in Middle English Literature in Honor of C. David Benson, A special issue of The Chaucer Review, 46 (2011/12), 248-58.

review Miceal F. Vaughn, ed., Piers Plowman: The A Version, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 26 (2012), 296-99.

“The Idea of Universal Salvation in Piers Plowman B and C, JMEMS 39 (2009): 257-81).

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