The Work of Reform

The Work of Reform interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in Piers Plowman had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland, culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing. William Rhodes brings together a rich poetic archive with agrarian husbandry manuals, prose polemics, and imperial tracts to connect conflicts over land and labor on the English manor to those of Tudor Ireland, offering a new eco-Marxist literary history of ecological transformation across the medieval-modern divide.

In the aftermath of the Black Death, the depopulation of the countryside, and the beginnings of the Enclosure Movement, English poets imagined enforced labor as a panacea for social unrest precipitated by environmental catastrophe. Arguing that Piers Plowman established how poetry could envision religious and economic transformation based on agrarian production, The Work of Reform reveals that the Piers Plowman tradition's valorization of agrarian toil was open to appropriation by later writers developing totalizing, top-down colonialist projects.

William Rhodes is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa.

The Work of Reform advances a commanding and ambitious argument about Piers Plowman and its influence on how later writers envisioned the management of agrarian estates as the key to enforcing labor and maintaining social hierarchies. Original and timely, this book reveals the ongoing relevance of medieval and early modern models of political economy and ecological writing.