This panel at the Medieval Colloquium at Sewanee (10-11 March 2017), sponsored by the International Piers Plowman Society, invites papers exploring the theme of borders and margins in William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Papers might address this question from any number of perspectives, including but not limited to questions of literary interpretation: e.g., how does the poem construe those at the margins of society (the poor, the disabled, the non-Christian others)? Or how does the poem establish boundaries between its different genres or modes (e.g., romance, allegory, didacticism, preaching)? But we also welcome papers that address the physical margins and borders of the poem’s many surviving copies: how, for example, did readers respond to the poem? What do the poem’s frequent marginal glosses tell us about response to the poem? Or what light do the occasional illustrations found in the margins tell us about how the poem was read?

Panel Respondent: William Rogers, Professor of English, Furman University.

Professor Rogers is the author of Interpretation in "Piers Plowman" (Catholic University of America Press, 2002)

To submit to this panel, please visit http://medievalcolloquium.sewanee.edu/. For questions, please email Michael Johnston at mjohnst@purdue.edu.