Dr. Curtis A. Gruenler of Hope Church and the Hope College English faculty has won the Anne Middleton Book Prize from the International Piers Plowman Society for his volume Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric and Theology. The award, for books published during 2017-18, was announced during the society’s 2019 meeting, held in Miami, Florida, in April. Gruenler’s book was published in 2017 by University of Notre Dame Press. “Piers Plowman,” named for one of its characters, is a 14th-century, 7,000-line allegorical poem attributed to William Langford that explores biblical themes. Gruenler considers how the poem, like similar works of the Middle Ages, invites readers on a journey of discovery through a sort of playful obscurity regarding ideas—hence the term “enigmatic.”
