Work of Reform

<p><b><i>The Work of Reform</i></b><b> interweaves literary economic and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in </b><b><i>Piers Plowman</i></b><b> had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing.</b> 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. </p><p>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 <i>Piers Plowman</i> established how poetry could envision religious and economic transformation based on agrarian production <i>The Work of Reform</i> reveals that the <i>Piers Plowman</i> tradition's valorization of agrarian toil was open to appropriation by later writers developing totalizing top-down colonialist projects.</p>