Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma

In this book, Curtis Gruenler proposes that the concept of the enigmatic, latent in a wide range of medieval thinking about literature, can help us better understand in medieval terms much of the era’s most enduring literature, from the riddles of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Aldhelm to the great vernacular works of Dante, Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and, above all, Langland’s Piers Plowman . Riddles, rhetoric, and theology—the three fields of meaning of aenigma in medieval Latin—map a way of thinking