Mary Raschko
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Teaching unreasonable tales
The parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard
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Chapter 1 investigates how writers reconciled the labour politics of late medieval England with a Gospel story that subverts common economic practices. The post-plague economy, marked by labour shortage, depended upon the full employment of all able-bodied individuals, yet the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard features a landowner paying workers for a full day when they only worked a single hour. Middle English translations reveal sharp disagreement over whether the parable affirms or condemns contemporary socio-economic structures. The chapter initially focuses on translations within sermons and identifies a prominent trend to retell the parable in ways that encourage work in traditional social roles. It then argues that the well-known rendition of the Vineyard parable in the Middle English poem Pearl should be read as a counter-narrative challenging a predominant homiletic discourse: the Pearl retelling dismisses the analogies between the human and divine realms upon which the sermons depend and rejects the notion that salvation could depend upon prescribed social practices.

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The politics of Middle English parables

Fiction, theology, and social practice

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