Arvind Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xiv, 267 pp.

Abstract

Abstract: As the law and literature movement in law schools reminded us several decades ago and Hans-Georg Gadamer before that, law and literature share much cultural work in common: they tackle some of the same communal problems; they interpret and revise norms for conduct; they evaluate written sources; they weigh what constitutes authority; and they both use and invite similar hermeneutical methods. This is especially so with medieval canon law and Piers Plowman. That capacious dream vision is chock full of forensic elements – trials, lawyerly debates, confessions, penalties, acts of restitution, pardons – and it is studded with so many legal terms and maxims that John Alford compiled a book-length glossary of them. From the late fourteenth century, readers have been interested in the poem’s legal language and its profound rethinking of how society can reach justice, especially in economic transactions. Now Arvind Thomas examines how the B and C versions of Piers understand legal problems somewhat differently from canon law and use legal thought in new ways for different ends, types of what he terms “reinventing” canon law. To do this, he focuses on private sacramental penance, organizing his study around the penitential process: contrition, confession, restitution, and satisfaction.