Six Ecclesiastical Satires

Written by anonymous Lollard authors, this edition compiles six Middle English anticlerical texts. Composed in the late-fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, each satirizes friars as greedy, disloyal, and hypocritical. The first two poems invoke Langland’s Piers Plowman, a humble farmer, as a spiritual ideal in contrast to corrupt clerics. The alliterative Piers the Plowman’s Crede follows a poor man trying to learn the Apostle’s Creed from friars, who try to swindle him. The Plowman’s Tale, imitating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, gives voice to a heretofore silent pilgrim who narrates a debate between two creatures, a Papist Griffin and a Lollard Pelican. Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoinder deploy a fictional rustic and a chatterbox friar in a debate over the hypocrisy of clergy. Finally, in Why I Can’t Be a Nun, young Katerine yearns to enter a convent but is discouraged when she has a dream-vision of one infected by sin.