Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in un-rhymed, alliterative verse divided into sections called passus.
William Langland is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as Piers Plowman, an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes. The poem translated the language and concepts of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by a layman.
The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, is the national legal deposit library of Wales and is one of the Welsh Government sponsored bodies. It is the biggest library in Wales, holding over 6.5 million books and periodicals, and the largest collections of archives, portraits, maps and photographic images in Wales. The Library is also home to the national collection of Welsh manuscripts, the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, and the most comprehensive collection of paintings and topographical prints in Wales. As the primary research library and archive in Wales and one of the largest research libraries in the United Kingdom, the National Library is a member of Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL).
The Hengwrt Chaucer manuscript is an early-15th-century manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, held in the National Library of Wales, in Aberystwyth. It is an important source for Chaucer's text, and was possibly written by someone with access to an original authorial holograph, now lost.
The Black Book of Carmarthen is thought to be the earliest surviving manuscript written solely in Welsh. The book dates from the mid-13th century; its name comes from its association with the Priory of St. John the Evangelist and Teulyddog at Carmarthen, and is referred to as black due to the colour of its binding. It is currently part of the collection of the National Library of Wales, where it is catalogued as NLW Peniarth MS 1.
The Hendregadredd Manuscript, is a medieval Welsh manuscript containing an anthology of the poetry of the "Poets of the Princes" (Gogynfeirdd); it was written between 1282 and 1350.
The Simonie, also known as Symonie and Couetise, is a Middle English poem on the evil times of the reign of King Edward II.
Pierce the Ploughman's Crede is a medieval alliterative poem of 855 lines, lampooning the four orders of friars.
There are two pseudo-Chaucerian texts called "The Plowman's Tale".
The Piers Plowman tradition is made up of about 14 different poetic and prose works from about the time of John Ball and the Peasants Revolt of 1381 through the reign of Elizabeth I and beyond. All the works feature one or more characters, typically Piers, from William Langland's poem Piers Plowman. Because the Plowman appears in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer but does not have his own tale, plowman tales are sometimes used as additions to The Canterbury Tales, or otherwise conflated or associated with Chaucer.
"The five royal tribes of Wales" and "The fifteen tribes of Gwynedd" refer to a class of genealogical lists which were compiled by Welsh bards in the mid-15th century. These non-identical lists were constructed on the premise that many of the leading Welsh families of their time could trace their descent to the "five royal tribes of Wales" or the "fifteen noble tribes of Gwynedd".
Brut y Brenhinedd is a collection of variant Middle Welsh versions of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin Historia Regum Britanniae. About 60 versions survive, with the earliest dating to the mid-13th century. Adaptations of Geoffrey's Historia were extremely popular throughout Western Europe during the Middle Ages, but the Brut proved especially influential in medieval Wales, where it was largely regarded as an accurate account of the early history of the Celtic Britons.
Charlotte Brewer is professor of English language and literature at Hertford College, Oxford. Before joining Hertford in 1990, she was a thesis fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She has also taught at the University of Leeds and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her teaching covers Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English language.
The volume NLW MS 735C comprises several Latin texts on astronomy that were copied c. 1000 to c. 1150. Thus, it is the oldest scientific manuscript in the National Library of Wales. It contains a description of the constellations in Germanicus' Latin translation of the Greek Phaenomena by Aratus, with illustrations that demonstrate the interrelatedness of myth, astronomy and astrology during the period around 1000, when this section of the manuscript was created in the Limoges area. The second section of the manuscript was completed by a scriptorium in the same part of France c. 1150.
The De Grey Hours is a book of hours that was produced in Flanders, where the artist tailored the manuscript for the English market by including a miniature of St Thomas Becket and naming appropriate festivals in the Calendar. There are sixty-seven illustrations in the De Grey Hours, including illuminated miniatures and historiated initials. The manuscript dates from around 1400.
Canu Llywarch Hen are a collection of early Welsh englyn-poems. They comprise the most famous of the early Welsh cycles of englynion about heroes of post-Roman North Britain.
"O Spiritual Pilgrim" is a part song by Gustav Holst based on the poem "The Gates of Damascus" by James Elroy Flecker. Holst dedicated the piece to Gregynog Hall, the home of the art patrons and philanthropists Gwendoline and Margaret Davies. Holst wrote the piece for soprano and mixed chorus. Michael Short, writing in the liner notes of the 1994 Hyperion Records recording of Holst's part songs wrote that Holst treats the journey in Flecker's poem "as a metaphor of life itself" and it ends "with a quiet evocation of spiritual peace and reassurance".
Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.
