Soul-Making in Piers Plowman

From Plowing to Penitence: Piers Plowman and Fourteenth-Century Theology

pardon. The document is, after all, sent by Truth, the divine authority whose tower overshadows the fair field. Its message "Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam; / Qui vero mala in ignem eternum" is an article of the Athanasian Creed and thus an orthodox tenet of the faith. Moreover, critics who argue that Truth's document is a pardon maintain that its text is consistent with the theme o...

Analyzing Walter Skeat's Forty-Five Parallel Extracts of William Langland's Piers Plowman

Walter Skeat published his critical edition of William Langland’s 14 century alliterative poem, Piers Plowman, in 1886. In preparation for this he located forty-five manuscripts, and to compare dialects, he published excerpts from each of these. This paper does three statistical analyses using these excerpts, each of which mimics a task he did in writing his critical edition. First, he combined...

Vulnerability Reduction for Bridge Piers

Soul searching

It is perhaps surprising, given the contemporary eminence of neuroscience within biological research, that it was not appreciated until the 17th century that the brain might have an important function. A compelling new book by Carl Zimmer surveys the scientific, conceptual and political upheavals in England at this time as a backdrop to the major experimental work carried out by a little-known ...

The Soul According to Rāmānuja

Rāmānuja was the founder of Visistādvaita Vedānta School, which is one of the three main schools of Vedānta. According to Rāmānuja, the soul (cit), Brahman, and matter (acit) constitute the three principal ontological realities. Rāmānuja provides some proofs for the existence of the soul, which are mostly based on self-consciousness. The relationship of the soul with the matter, on one hand, an...