Reviews for William Langland

The average rating for William Langland based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-11-18 00:00:00 Melvin Lugo Chaucer died about 1400: date uncertain. He was a protégé of Richard II, in whose reign Chaucer’s anti-Church writings were accepted. When Richard was deposed and murdered, Archbishop Thomas Arundel—“the Henry Kissinger of his day” —was given free rein. Opponents of Church hegemony were murdered. Chaucer may have been one of them. Burning at the stake for heresy was brought to England.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-04-04 00:00:00 Kevin Mcgeough I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I thought I might find it amusing -- weird, that someone would think to try and figure out who murdered someone who common knowledge doesn't peg as being murdered, about which we have no forensic evidence. (So not like, say, King Tutankhamen, where at least there's potential forensic evidence to go on.) But this isn't like that: Terry Jones et al freely admit that there is no proof that someone did murder Chaucer: what they did was put forward a convincing argument as to why certain people would have wanted Chaucer silenced, and the evidence they can dig up which suggests it's possible he was, including censorship of his work, possible veiled references by other poets of the period, the lack of a will, and of course the abrupt ending of his life. All of these things have other explanations, which the authors admit, but taken all together, the idea isn't so outlandish. It isn't an exercise like trying to discover who murdered someone because of fractures on their skull that could, barely conceivably, point to blunt-force trauma as a cause of death. It's a much more literary affair that I recognise -- being a historicist, this is what I do, for texts, except Terry Jones et al are reading history as a text. They look for motive, they identify the principle characters. Just as I might want to look at why Shakespeare endorsed the Tudor myth, they look at the politics of the time and apply it to Chaucer's writing, and that of his contemporaries. My main criticism is that I was a little turned off by the sheer level of detail, much of it not relating to Chaucer. It's certainly an education about the whole situation in that period, though. I hadn't even really thought about the fact that Chaucer lived during the transfer of power from Richard II to Henry IV. Now I can't stop thinking about it.