Georgic and Christian Reform
- Author / Editor
- Low, Anthony.
Georgic and Christian Reform
- Published
- Chapter 5 in Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 155-220.
- Description
- Two subsections of chapter 5 examine political and philosophical attitudes toward work in the Middle Ages and later eras, specifically the relationships among the revolution in agricultural technology, "the Protestant work ethic," and "modern industrial capitalism."
- Technological advances in industry and agriculture underlay the "great cultural and artistic accomplishments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries," but war, plague, and crop failure weakened the technological revolution in the fourteenth century.
- In the section "Work in the Middle Ages," Low demonstrates that critics of Catholicism defined it by its abuses, the convents and monasteries being seen as "hotbeds of vice,...laziness and economic parasitism."
- In "Chaucer and Langland," Low argues that Chaucer's proud Monk, with his aristocratic pretensions and contempt for work, served as a negative exemplum; the Plowman's "love of God and love of neighbor" make him the Monk's opposite. The fullest argument for manual labor is found in "Piers Plowman."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Monk and His Tale.
- Plowman and the Tale.