Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages

Anonymously composed during the mid-to-late fourteenth-century in alliterative verse, and later copied into the famous Thornton manuscript, Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages capture the moral, economic, and political struggles of medieval England. Once thought to share the same author, the two poems combine the genres of dream vision and poetic debate in the dialect of Midland England. Wynnere and Wastoure engages the two titular characters in an intellectual battle before a king over the proper use of money, between prudent expenditure and prodigality. The satirical commentary alludes to the fiscally frivolous reign of Edward III, as well as England’s struggle with a diminished labor force and sprawling crime following the Black Plague. The Parlement of the Thre Ages features a hunter’s vision of a debate between the three stages of man’s life: Youthe, Medill Elde, and Elde. Warren Ginsberg invites readers to reconsider the two allegorical poems in tandem.