The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England

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The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England. By Kate Classons. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010, Pp. xi, 389. $40.00, paper.)

A central argument in Kate Crassons' study is that literature, rather than history, best reveals the most urgent concerns that characterized the debates on poverty in late medieval England (5). A historical approach, Crassons maintains, would likely reveal a somewhat steady hardening of cultural attitudes toward poverty. Such an approach would show that I here was a shift in cultural discourse away from viewing poverty as the fulfillment of Christian practice and piety (Franciscanism), toward …