A study of Piers Plowman, the fourteenth-century alliterative dream vision famously described as "a commentary on an unknown text." This course will focus on the B-text of the poem with excursions into the A and C texts, giving special attention to issues including economic and social justice, poverty and perfection, legal and literary representation, learning and study, and the relationship between Latin and the vernacular. Throughout, we will investigate the way that Piers uses literary form to express and analyze ethical and spiritual dilemmas. We will also survey major literary critical approaches to the poem and its late fourteenth-century context.