The Medieval Period: Chaucer and Langland

How do you write about a world that seems to be failing, even when you still love it? Does literature get in the way of changing the world, or does it imagine a way forward? That's the question that drives the two great medieval English works The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Piers Plowman, by his contemporary William Langland. Both works are learned, beautiful, hilarious and urgent--but in very different ways.