Pier Plowman Piers Plowman Society A international group of scholars, teachers and students of Piers Plowman and its traditions.
Honoring Derek Pearsall & Anne Middleton

Prize & Fund

DEREK PEARSALL TRAVEL & RESEARCH FUND

Derek Pearsall

This fund honours Derek Pearsall (1931-2021), a medievalist who delighted in drawing people together and introducing scholars, especially younger ones, into conversations where they were not yet known.

With his wide interests, his breadth of knowledge, his tremendous curiosity, his love to see everything there was to be seen, he was an eager researcher and conference goer.

Anne Middleton Book Prize

Anne Middleton

The IPPS is delighted to announce the Anne Middleton Book Prize, to be awarded to the best book, published over a two-year period, substantively concerned with the literary, historical, religious, intellectual, textual-codicological, and critical contexts of Piers Plowman and related poetry and prose in the traditions of didactic and allegorical alliterative writing.

Since 1987

Yearbook of Langland Studies

The Yearbook of Langland Studies is the sole journal devoted to Piers Plowman and associated works. Since 1987, YLS has significantly shaped the expanding critical attention to the poem. Each volume — including essays, notes and interviews, reviews, and an annual annotated bibliography — offers access to the most significant and up-to-date scholarship on the poem and its literary, historical, codicological, and critical contexts. YLS welcomes articles and notes that deal with Piers Plowman and related poetry and prose in the traditions of didactic and allegorical alliterative writing, as well as with the historical, religious, intellectual, and codicological contexts of these works.

International Piers Plowman Society

News & Insights

  • IPPS is pleased to announce the 2023 recipients of grants from the Derek Pearsall Travel and Research Fund: Emily Youree, a PhD candidate at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Pearsall fund supported her research trip to the National

  • The Anne Middleton Book Prize for 2021-22 is awarded to Tekla Bude for Sonic Bodies: Text, Music and Silence in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). This, the author’s first book, is exceptionally full, ambitious and original.

  • The Anne Middleton Book Prize for 2019-20 is awarded to Nicolette Zeeman for The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Zeeman’s study offers a broad and expansive definition of allegory in terms of disruption,

  • Piers Plowman Reading Group May 14th: Professors Tom Goodmann and Jenny Sisk June 11th: Professors Sebastian Sobecki and Lawrence Warner  Contact Emily Steiner steinere@sas.upenn.edu for the Zoom link 

Al this I seigh slepyng, and seven sythes more

B. Prologue, 231