Advise or Consent?: Conscience and Power in Mum and the Sothsegger

Abstract

This essay explores the politics of conscience in the anonymous early fifteenth-century English poem Mum and the Sothsegger. Holding a prominent place in what critics have called the “Piers Plowman tradition,” Mum is also often looked to as evidence of a growing literate voice in late medieval English religion and politics. The poem itself diagnoses English society as captive to “Mum” or self-interested quietism, and it champions an ethic of truthtelling in response. But if the voice of conscience demands literal utterance in this poem, what does it say? Who is called on to speak it? What sources of authority does it appeal to in making its claims? Mum seeks to expose contemporary forms of injustice, but it does so in a rhetoric that itself courts inflated royal power and coercive violence. Staking out a public voice in terms found in the ecclesial practice of fraternal correction, Mum seems to disregard defining features of that practice. The Mum poet likewise shows himself to be a tellingly selective — perhaps an adversarial — reader of Langland. We may better identify the particularities of the “voice” conscience assumes in this poem as we recover the arguments in which that voice is constituted.