Texts

A.V.C. Schmidt, Piers Plowman: The B-Text, Everyman, 1978
D. Pearsall ed. : Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text

Background

R.B. Dobson: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 rev. 1986.
related texts in R.B. Dobson (ed) The Peasant's Revolt, 2nd ed. (1983)
J. Coleman: English Literature in History: 1350-1400: Medieval Readers and Writers, (London, 1981)
V.J. Scattergood: Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century

General

E. Salter: Piers Plowman An Introduction
J. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the 'Gawain Poet',  London (1971)
M.W. Bloomfield: Piers Plowman as Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse
D. Aers: Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination
---, : Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (1975)
---,: Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, CH. 1
J. Lawlor: Piers Plowman: An Essay in Criticism
S.S. Hussey ed.: Piers Plowman:Critical Approaches
M. Godden: The Making of Piers Plowman (1990)
M. Stokes: Justice and Mercy in Piers Plowman: A Reading of the B-Text Visio. (1984)
J. Simpson: Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (1990)
J.A. Alford: (ed) A Companion to Piers Plowman (1988)
A.V.C. Schmidt: The Clerkly Maker (1987)

Particular studies

J. Burrow: 'The Audience of Piers Plowman';  'The Action of Langland's Second Vision'  Essays on Medieval Literature (1984)
A.Middleton: 'The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman' in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background ed. D.A. Lawton (1982)
*------; 'William Langland's "Kynde Name": Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth Century England', in Lee Patterson (ed.) Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530 (1990), pp. 15-82.
S. Justice: 'The Genres of Piers Plowman' in S. Trigg (ed.)  Medieval English Poetry, (1993), pp. 99-118.
R.A. Waldron: 'Langland's Originality: Christ-Knight and the Harrowing of Hell' in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G.H. Russell. eds. G. Kratzman and J. Simpson (1986)
P. Dronke: 'Arbor Caritatis' in Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett, ed. P.L. Heyworth, (Oxford, 1981), 207-53.
J. Wittig: 'The Dramatic and Rhetorical Development of Long Will's Pilgrimage', NM  76 (1975), 52-76.
*A. Minnis: Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Aldershot,1988)
----, 'Langland's Ymaginatif and Late-Medieval Theories of Imagination',  Comparative Criticism 3, (1981), 71-103.
* parts of Minnis, especially first and last chapters, more useful than others.

ALLEGORY
'Wynner and Wastour', ed. I. Gollancz, Select Early English Poems, (London, 1920) or, more conveniently, in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, Vol. 1, pp. 398-415.
S. A. Barney: Allegories of History; Allegories of Love, (Hamden Ct, 1979)
C. Hieatt: The Realism of Dream Visions: The Poetic Exploitation of the Dream Experience in Chaucer and his Contemporaries, (The Hague, 1967)
J. MacQueen: Allegory, Critical Idiom 14, (Methuen, 1970) (rather basic)
R. Tuve: Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity, (Princeton, 1966)
C. Van Dyke: The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory, (Cornell, 1985)
 

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