Reddere and Refrain: A Meditation on Poetic Procedure in Piers Plowman

Eleanor Johnson

6 citations0/0 files storedThe Yearbook of Langland Studies

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Medieval Literature and History Poetry Analysis and Criticism Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of Piers that centres on the poem’s famous and muchstudied repetition of reddere. Rather than construing that repetition as simply repetition, the essay suggests that we think of that repetition as a poetic refrain in the poem. In making this suggestion, the essay also synthesizes and contributes to the extant body of theories of refrain - both in contemporary and medieval contexts. Encountering reddere as a refrain fosters a non-linear and non-argumentative orientation toward the poem’s deeply-graven commitment to economic justice.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

References

1986Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism 1983The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After 2011Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages 2007Piers plowman and the medieval discourse of desire 1981The Figure of Echo 1977The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman 1986FROM REASON TO AFFECTIVE KNOWLEDGE: MODES OF THOUGHT AND POETIC FORM IN "PIERS PLOWMAN"1983The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.