ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one specific figure which is testament to the power of radical pastoral in the early Reformation period: the ploughman. Of course, the ploughman had a complex history well before the Reformation. Paul Freedman has described how this 'complex image', at times analogous to the wickedness of Cain, the first man to till the earth came in some cases to be a powerful symbol of peasant agency, piety, integrity and humility. Sarah Kelen and John Bowers have both recently produced books on the post-medieval literary history of Langland both of which reach all the way into the nineteenth century, when the poem was edited for the first time since 1550. In early printed ploughman literature one can discover the complexity of the ploughman figure in the earlier Henrician period especially in the 1520s. The chapter discusses sixteenth-century ploughman literature: Robert Crowley's editions of Piers Plowman.
