Abstract

To begin with the familiar: Piers Plowman is loaded with Latin. There are Latin verses, Latin proverbs, and quotations from the Latin Bible. There are allegorical characters like Concupiscencia Carnis, one of Fortune's daughters, whose very names are in Latin, and there are scattered Latin words and phrases. Even the structural divisions of the poem, according to manuscript rubrication, bear the Latin title passus and not the native fit