Abstract
Poetry does not merely react to or reflect culture. In late medieval England, poetry often co-produces and reinvents contemporary culture, language and even canon law. Arvind Thomas’ recent book makes a compelling case that poetic compositions like Piers Plowman and canonistic compositions like the Decretum, the Decretales, and the Oculus Sacerdotis are related to one another not only materially but also conceptually. The relationship between Langland’s poetry in particular, and specific examples from canon law is not—Thomas insists—merely that of canon law influencing Langland’s poetry. Rather, Thomas marshals significant evidence to demonstrate specific examples of the co-production and reinvention of canon law through Langland’s poetry.
Thomas’ thesis is particularly provocative in its claim that ‘Piers Plowman’s mobilization and modification of juridical properties not only engender a poetics informed by canonist thought but also express a vision of canon law alternative to and even critical of that offered by medieval jurists and recorded by modern medievalists’. 1 Thomas reminds his reader that late medieval canon law was not a ‘closed corpus’ but rather ‘continued to grow’ and remained a dynamic method of constituting legal norms with a view towards realising justice on a case-by-case basis. While canon law was ‘always in the making’, this making was not limited to canonists writing in Latin but was also available to poets like Langland. For Thomas, poet and canonist were engaged in a common approach to, and common pursuit of, writing, revising and thereby co-producing the law. The evidence Thomas presents derives from a comparative reading of the B and C versions of Piers Plowman coupled with a method of dialectical interpretation between the poem and various canonical texts. He presents development and disagreement across late medieval jurists—with particular attention to the sacrament of penance—in order to demonstrate Langland’s co-production and reinvention of canon law.
Unfolding over five chapters, Thomas’ analysis in the first four chapters is structured thematically around developing canonical procedures pertaining to the penitential process: contrition, confession, restitution and satisfaction. In each of these first four chapters, Thomas skilfully traces developments and disagreements within contemporary canon law, then dialectically reads the B and C versions, and argues for the distinct contributions each version offers to the ongoing co-production of poetry and canon law through Langland’s work. The fifth chapter steps back to consider canon law governing all three stages (contrition, confession and satisfaction) more broadly and then argues that the B and C versions of Piers Plowman offer two distinct approaches to canon law.
Among many unique contributions emerging from Thomas’ book, his analysis of Langland’s canonically minded proposal for addressing usury in chapter three is particularly illuminating. Concluding chapter one, Thomas draws attention to the collapse of ‘hous Vnitee’ at the poem’s end. He asks what kind of reinvention of canon law can be drawn from a poem in which the closing lines so vividly depict the collapse of the institutional church. His answer is that Piers Plowman finds fault not with the procedures of canon law but with those entrusted with its implementation. Chapter three explores this question in detail by tracing the range of perspectives medieval jurists held concerning usury and restitution. Interestingly, Thomas’ sophisticated and careful reading of Piers Plowman attends to the complicated ways in which priests, confessors and even bishops could become embedded in and benefit from webs of usurious gain through ecclesial gifting. Thomas demonstrates how repentance in the C version makes the priest answerable for such complicity and argues that ‘it is this difference that reveals the poem’s addition to the received canon law that is otherwise silent about the culpability of confessors on the matter of restitution’. 2 Unlike contemporary canon law, Langland demonstrates a vision that ‘holds the clerics entrusted with such unrestituted gains answerable in the afterlife: the confessor is subject to penalties in purgatory should he profit from them, and the bishop, likewise, is subject to “divine judgement” (the hey dome)’. 3 This is one example, among many in Thomas’ learned work, that demonstrates how Piers Plowman co-produces and reinvents canon law—even if the late medieval church ultimately decided to go in different directions than those proposed by the poet.
In both his introduction and conclusion, Thomas describes his book as a ‘riposte’ to David Aers’ most recent work. While Aers takes Piers Plowman to be a serious work of receiving and working within inherited traditions, he also takes seriously the poem’s straining beyond those same traditions and institutions. The key difference between Aers and Thomas is evident in their respective attempts to account for the tension between the poem’s ending and the poem’s embeddedness in and co-production of theology, canon law and culture. While Thomas’ argument certainly succeeds in its rigorous account of the poem’s agency as a co-producer of canon law, Thomas fails to take the theological nuance of Aers’ recent work seriously enough. This leads to confusion, or at least a lack of clarity in regards to theological concerns that Aers has studied in depth.
Indeed, Aers’ recent work raises haunting questions that Thomas entirely ignores. In an important pre-curser to his Beyond Reformation, Aers’ ‘Langland on the Church and the End of the Cardinal Virtues’ raises the stakes for the tension that Thomas attempts to resolve above. 4 Therein, Aers demonstrates how Langland’s poetry interrogates the possibility not merely for bad actors to act corruptly within an otherwise holy church. Aers suggests that Langland’s poetic imagination goes further to consider the haunting possibility that the church’s own language, sacraments and practices could become utterly co-opted and inverted through long processes of redescription—a rhetorical device Aers draws on from Quentin Skinner called paradiastole. Aers argues that Piers Plowman does not merely co-produce possibilities of reform, perhaps through reform to canon law as Thomas insists. Rather, Aers demonstrates how Piers Plowman depicts the long processes through which the institutional church and its network of participants engage in both linguistic and practical forms of slippage resulting in practices being called virtues that would have been described as vices in prior versions of the church’s life.
Beyond Reformation is in many ways the development of this initial insight by carefully tracing Langland’s focused attention on the possibility of the church as a historical institution becoming gradually habituated in forms of vice until its language veils communal practices and sacraments that have themselves become reconstituted into their opposites. Here, Aers’ works illustrate Langland’s preoccupation not simply with what Augustine famously referred to as the ‘splendid vices’, but something far more frightening. Namely, the possibility of the historical institution of the church slowly becoming enculturated by vices bit by bit over time until the institution and its practices perpetuate death and despair rather than faith, hope, love and life.
While Thomas succeeds in showing Langland to be a co-producer of canon law, he fails to ask the daring question that Langland and Aers refuse to avoid. What if the institution bearing the name ‘church’, and the complex network of laws and procedures that order the church’s life, have become something else entirely? What if the development of canon law is not merely reducible to having made some good decisions and some bad decisions, but rather caught up in a subtle process of slippages compounding over time until the institution, its laws and its sacraments are utterly unrecognisable to prior generations? If such processes are possible—as Langland vividly depicts through characters like Covetous, Will’s conversion into recklessness, and the poem’s final passus—then Thomas’ account of the poem’s conclusion is untenable on the poem’s own terms. This becomes apparent when Thomas fails to ask why or how the vast tradition of canon law can be ‘silent’ on the issue of ecclesiastical benefit from usurious gain. Indeed, Thomas’ disinterest in this question belies the point that Aers’ recent work makes with such force. That is to say, Thomas’ disinterest in canon law’s silence on this point should press him to offer a more robust account for why Langland refuses to be silent on this point and to then offer a more nuanced account for the poem’s conclusion in light of late medieval canonists’ silence.
A deeper theological engagement with Langland and Aers could benefit Thomas’ study and create space to demonstrate ways in which Thomas and Aers’ respective investigations might mutually benefit one another’s account of the poem’s agency as a co-producer of both canon law and theology in late medieval England.
Thomas’ book should be read widely by anyone interested in the complex interrelations between poetry and cultural production in the late middle ages. His work also adds a needed chapter, perhaps even revising, received histories of canonist theory and practice. Thomas provides an excellent model for his dialectical method of reading the poem and the contemporary tradition of canon law in order to further substantiate the claim of poetry’s capacity to produce—rather than merely react to—its surrounding culture.