Abstract
Piers Plowman has been having a moment. This lengthy, idiosyncratic, macaronic allegorical dream vision was called by the nineteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Wright medieval England’s first “national work.” A little like Walt Whitman, its author William Langland seems to have spent his entire career creating and then revising this single, encyclopedic poem, producing three versions between 1360 and 1390. About Langland himself we know almost nothing; we do not even know for sure if his name actually was William Langland. The manuscript evidence suggests Piers Plowman was the second most widely read English poem of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, surpassed only by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. While Chaucer, a royal bureaucrat, became a Lancastrian canonization project almost from the moment of his death, Langland’s considerable influence was of a more underground sort. Cited by the rebels of 1381, Piers Plowman became a figure for a variety of radical and reformist tendencies well into the sixteenth century.
Underexplored for most of the twentieth century, Piers Plowman has become in the past thirty years one of the most dynamic areas in Middle English studies—a development all the more surprising inasmuch as single-author scholarship has very much fallen out of favor in literary studies during that same period. Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas comes as a very welcome contribution to this burgeoning subfield. Thomas’s focus is the discursive relations between Langland’s poem and medieval canon law, specifically canon law dealing with penance. He opens the book by citing the will of the first known owner of a copy of the poem, an English cleric named Walter de Brugge, who spent much of his life in Ireland in the service of the Mortimer family. Langlandians have long known about this will, but have only recently begun to appreciate its significance as the account of a late medieval private library. Thomas zeroes in on a striking coincidence. De Brugge was as interested in canon law as he was in Piers Plowman. He also owned works by the canonists Raymond of Peñafort, Henry of Susa, and William of Pagula. From this promising point of departure, Thomas offers detailed analyses of five episodes and related discussions from the poem: Mede’s confession (Passus 3 in both the B and C versions of the poem) and the shorter invocation of Contrition’s confession (Passus 20 in B and 22 in C); Conscience’s subsequent denunciation of Mede (also in Passus 3) and passages relating to usury in C; Covetise’s confession (B.5, C.6); and Patience’s sermon (B.14, C.16).
In each case, Thomas compares Langland’s language to a wide variety of passages he finds in canon law documents or related texts—as he puts it, “from Gratian’s Decretum to the anonymous Memoriale Presbiterorum [an early fourteenth-century confessional manual]” (23). The verbal similarities are striking but even more impressive are the conceptual congruences, both in terms of shared ambiguities and of analogous modes of reasoning through them. Indeed, for this reviewer these complex convergences constitute the heart of Thomas’s book and its greatest strength. Thomas demonstrates conclusively that Langland finds poetic value in the language and reasoning of canon law even in some of its most technical aspects. After noting Langland’s emphasis on the primacy of contrition in the confessional scenes of Mede and Contrition, Thomas goes on to argue that Langland draws on the canonists’ treatment of usury to sketch a notion of restorative justice, both in the rest of the Mede episode and in the confession of Covetise. That notion leads in turn to a renewed emphasis on the importance of satisfaction in the trial of Wrong. In his final chapter Thomas turns to the problem of allegory. Noting Langland’s replacement of the figure of the letter patent in the B version of Patience’s sermon with the figure of the charter in C, he argues that this change anticipates, mutatis mutandis, Paul de Man’s deconstructive view of allegorical signs.
The scholarship in this book is impeccable. Thomas’s choice of passages from the canonists is surgical and his analyses of the encounter between these passages and Langland’s poetry is painstaking and thorough. His citation of previous scholarship is sufficiently thorough to give a reader unfamiliar with medieval canon law a map of the current state of the field, and his citation of the relevant Langland scholarship is equally thorough. Indeed, amid my favorable impressions of this book, I have only one reservation, and that concerns some of the larger claims it makes. Thomas argues that we should read the encounters with canon law in Piers as “intersections that will enable us to reconceptualize poetry as productive, not just derivative from, the discourse of canon law” (10-11). A little later he will characterize such intersections as the “active participation or co-production of the discourse of canon law” (22). More specifically he will claim that in the revisions Langland makes to C, the later version “emerges as more co-productive of canon law than B” and as “innovatively invested in the church’s institution of penance” (207). In his reading of Langland’s engagement with canon law on the question of usury, he will conclude that Langland’s revisions match “an increasingly sharp emphasis” that Thomas sees in the canonists’ on “the rigour of the law over and above any dispensatory grace that earthly lawmakers have,” such that canon law constrains even the pope. His analysis of Wrong’s trial leads him to cite it as evidence that Langland desires to move from “the domain of generalized secular law to that of the canon law of penance” (179). I suspect that what Thomas here means here by “secular” is actually “lay”—secular law, generalized or not, is not really a thing. The point may be a quibble but it points to a larger problem. These are big claims, and as convincing as Thomas is about the interpenetration of canon law and Langland’s poetry in the episodes he analyzes, these claims do not flow as inevitably from those analyses as he seems to think. Indeed, the narrowness of focus that contributes to the rigor of his readings leads to oversimplification when he tries to make them stand for Langland’s larger motives.
The canonists’ teachings were hardly restricted to penance. Likewise, penitential tradition in the later Middle Ages was not fully represented in the canonists alone. Thomas readily acknowledges the first point. He ignores the second. But that also means largely ignoring Langland’s most obvious engagement with penitential tradition, the confessions of the Seven Deadly Sins in B.5 and C.6 (from which Thomas takes his discussion of Covetise). The taxonomy of the deadly sins comes to Langland from the treatise on virtues and vices, especially the many English adaptations and translations of the immensely popular Summae on the Vices and Virtues of Willam Peraldus and the Somme le Roi of Frère Laurent. The taxonomy itself originally comes from Cassian, who offers it as an aid to the monastic practices of supervised, therapeutic self-examination that would ultimately evolve into the ritual of confession. Although more dominant in earlier medieval penance this monastic impulse never disappears. The laicized quest for spiritual perfection celebrated in the pastoralia outside of canon law, and aimed specifically at vernacular audiences, clearly held its own attractions for the fiercely anti-clerical Langland. It would have helped Thomas’s case had he at least acknowledged them. That is not to say Thomas’s larger claims are wrong; just that they are insufficiently demonstrated. There is no disputing Langland’s intense engagement with canon law in the episodes Thomas analyzes. It may now lie to Langland scholarship as a whole to reckon with their importance.