Politics and the Psyche in the Piers Plowman Tradition (A Roundtable)

Sponsored by the International Piers Plowman Society 

We seek papers that engage Piers Plowman and/or related texts as works of political psychology. If, as Katharine Breen has it, personifications are “machines of the mind,” how do these complex and multivalent texts allow their authors and audiences to think through the dense interrelation of political and psychic dynamics? How does Langland’s highly variegated and combinatorial approach to allegory allow him to think through this interrelation? What techniques for depicting the intersection of an individual mind and collective institutions does Langland inherit from earlier authors, and what do later authors inherit from him? Can we recover theories of group psychology from late-medieval satire, life-writing, or moral instruction—and if so, what kind of scholarly method is adequate to describe them?

We welcome papers that engage the methodologies of psychoanalysis, affect theory, and/or the history of emotions. But we particularly encourage authors to consider the continuities and discontinuities between modern theories of political psychology and those articulated or implicit in the Piers Plowman tradition, rather than simply applying modern critical paradigms to interpret medieval texts. We construe the Piers Plowman tradition widely, inviting papers that consider these questions in relevant adjacent discourses as well, including pastoralia, regiminal texts, and non-Langlandian alliterative poetry. As this session is a roundtable, shorter and more exploratory reflections and provocations are welcome.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a completed Participant Information Form, to Paul Megna (paul.megna@purchase.edu) and Spencer Strub (spencer.strub@princeton.edu), by September 15, 2024.