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This book addresses the need for scholarly attention to the field of alternative, non-Augustinian apocalypticism and its implications for the study of Piers Plowman. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton discusses the major prophets and visionaries of such alternative traditions, who are characterised by their denunciation of clerical abuses, the urging of religious reform, and an ultimate historical optimism. Her book offers a proposal for the importance of such traditions, particularly as represented in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, to the understanding of Langland's visionary mode and reformist ideology. Dr Kerby-Fulton also explores the relevance of the prophetic mentality fostered by Joachite thought, and the reactionary response which it triggered in antimendicant eschatology. Above all, this book provides a stimulating challenge to assumptions that Langland's views of the course and end of history are wholly conventional, or easily explained by Augustinian eschatology. The outcome of this study of contexts for Piers Plowman suggests that Langland's position in relation to different apocalyptic traditions was at once more sophisticated and more original than scholars have hitherto realised.

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V. H. Galbraith declared of theModus tenendi parliamentum: “[Its] claims for the representative elements in parliament would be sufficiently challenging if they belonged to the end of the century. Put back to the reign of Edward II they astonish us.” Like all scholars since, Galbraith was puzzled about where exactly to “put” theModus.Dating the text, even roughly, has remained so difficult that it now forces us to ask, as the final section of this essay suggests, fundamental questions about how we do history itself. But even more important than theModus's status as a famous historical crux is what Galbraith aptly called its capacity both to “challenge” its contemporaries and to “astonish” us today. In the unusual dignity it accords the lower grades of parliament, in its unusual concern for the rights and working conditions of the parliamentary clerks themselves, and in many small touches of clericist idealism (like the notion of giving free parliamentary transcripts to those too poor to pay for them), theModusstands as an extraordinarily socially generous document. This is a work that makes parliament a matter of record, and of public record.

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