"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum
William Langland's allegorical poem Piers Plowman is becoming ever more popular in medieval English literature courses. But most current introductions focus primarily on the B text, leaving a gap in available resources for the poem's study. As Piers Plowman continues to gain academic attention in all its three versions (the A, B, and C texts), teachers and students need a new perspective and new approach to the poem as an evolving whole. This first comprehensive introduction to Langland's masterful work covers all three iterations and outlines the various changes that occurred between each. Useful for individuals reading any version of Piers Plowman, this engaging guide offers a much-needed navigational summary, a chronology of historic events relevant to the poem, biographical notes about Langland, and keys to characters and proper pronunciation. Calabrese's definitive and refreshingly lively volume allows readers to navigate this daunting poem and to contextualize it within the literary history of Western culture.
William Langland's 14th-century poem Piers Plowman, a disturbing and often humorous commentary on corruption and greed, remains meaningful today. The allegorical work revolves around the narrator's quest to live a good life, and takes the form of a series of dreams in which Piers, the honest plowman, appears in various guises. Characters such as Conscience, Fidelity and Charity, alongside Falsehood and Guile, are instantly recognizable as our present-day politicians and celebrities, friends and neighbors. Social issues are confronted, including governance, economic relations, criminal justice, marital relations and the limits of academic learning, as well as religious belief and the natural world. This new verse translation from the Middle English preserves the energy, imagery and intent of the original, and retains its alliterative style. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet's words and the lawyer's world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England's great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman's preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions' representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the "literary" informs and transforms the "legal" until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poem's narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langland's mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and today's medievalists.
An outlaw plowman falsely accused of murder An alchemist's virgin who is more than she seems A fiendish murderer hiding in open sight Cathar country, (now) southern France, year: 1200. When the woodcutter's only daughter is murdered, the bailiff tries to arrest Bertwoin the Plowman, who flees to a master alchemist and his professional virgin, Flowia, for help. Bertwoin must find the brutal killer while the grieving woodcutter, the relentless bailiff, and righteous monks pursue him. His search for clues takes him to the corpse room inside an abbey, to a torture pit near the Devil’s Doorstep, and to the accursed home of a heretic priest. When monks capture him, wily Flowia rescues Bertwoin from the Bishop’s dungeon and hides with him where no one would think to look for them.
This book uses the methodologies of cultural studies and the history of the book to show how editors and readers of the Sixteenth through the early Nineteenth century successively remade Piers Plowman and its author according to their own ideologies of the Middle Ages.
This title was first published in 2001: Product and particularly customer profitability are black holes in most managers’ understanding of their business. Identifying customer revenue is easy but identifying what they cost - so we can understand whether or not they are profitable - is difficult. In a world in which competition, regulation and the increasing use of the Internet put ever greater pressure on margins it is vitally important to understand both product- and customer-profitability. Activity Based Management (ABM) enables you to do this. This book explains the power of using ABM to increase the profitability of your business. It provides step-by-step guidance on basic principles, comparisons between traditional methods, definitions of processes, activities and cost-drivers as well as details of data collection techniques and implementation steps. Through the book’s numerous detailed examples a logical picture builds up of how to obtain the benefits that ABM can deliver. On its own ABM will change management decision-making: by showing how ABM also supports other profit improvement initiatives such as Business Process Reengineering, Shareholder Value Added and Customer Relationship Management, managers will learn how they can use the best possible toolkit to put their business firmly on the road to leaps in profitability.
The best just got better. FitnessGramis the gold standard for assessing the health-related fitness and activity levels of youths. The Cooper Institute has updated the FitnessGram Administration Manual with new material to ensure that FitnessGram is the most comprehensive and informative program that can drive meaningful behavior change and set up children for a healthy future. The fifth edition of FitnessGram Administration Manual: The Journey to MyHealthyZone offers K-12 teachers two primary assessment resources that allow them to produce individualized reports for each student in their class. FitnessGram provides a complete battery of health-related fitness assessments that are scored using criterion-referenced Healthy Fitness Zone® standards. The standards are age and sex specific and are based on how fit children need to be for health. New to this fifth edition: • Audio of cadences and videos and photos for test protocols, making it easier for you to administer tests • A chapter on communicating with stakeholders (students, parents, faculty and staff, administrators, and the community) • A chapter on data mining and using data to inform your instruction and help you make sound curricular decisions • A design that enhances your ease in using the material and administering the tests You will learn how to administer the tests, interpret the results, and provide feedback to your students on their results. FitnessGram Administration Manual also offers a web resource that includes video clips that demonstrate the assessments; audio for the PACER, curl-up, and push-up tests; and reproducible forms. Through FitnessGram, you can assess children’s fitness in these areas: • Aerobic capacity • Muscle strength • Muscular endurance • Flexibility • Body composition Several test options are provided for most of those areas; one test item is recommended. As a FitnessGram user you also have access to everything the Presidential Youth Fitness Program has to offer. The Presidential Youth Fitness Program helps physical educators assess, track, and recognize youth fitness and physical activity. Through this program you are also provided with the following: • Instructional strategies for promoting student physical activity and fitness • Communication tools to help physical educators increase awareness about their work in the classroom • Options for recognizing fitness and physical activity achievements This latest version of the FitnessGram Administration Manual: The Journey to MyHealthyZone is your guide to conducting the test protocols, recording the data, interpreting the results, and sharing those results in ways that will encourage students to be physically active and adopt healthy behaviors throughout their lives.