Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman

Abstract

Early contractarians such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stretched the idea of contract to encompass all realms of society: the political, the economic, the familial. Contract is still a fundamental concept for many modern disciplines; indeed, it names fields in political philosophy, in economics, and in law. There was no such governing notion of contract in the fourteenth century, no metaphor of exchange that could link together ideas about agency, conditions, profit, and responsibility from different disciplines and provide a theory of the basis of society itself. Retrospectively it may seem that scattered ideas about contract were, in fact, being developed: for instance, by the common law in the actions called debt, covenant, and trespass; by constitutional theory, in conciliarism; by economic thought, in a miscellany of glosses and laws redressing fraud and regulating prices and markets; by theology, in discussions of will, intention, and the marriage sacrament; by the civil law, in Roman law of contract; and by canon law, in treatments of individual consent and incapacity in marriage. Yet nothing about this discontinuous hodgepodge predicts that a fundamental connection among those topics will emerge in later political theory. To find a powerful combination of social analysis and political philosophy that takes up the issues deliberated by the later contractarians, we can call upon a medieval allegorist. In a brilliant intellectual synthesis, the fourteenth-century English text we call Piers Plowman draws ideas about agency from three separate arenas in order to inaugurate a proleptic general consideration of contract: the three ideas are unity of person (from marriage law), just price (from economic thought), and constitutional monarchy (from political philosophy). Centuries before modern contract theory, Piers Plowman manages to think across disciplinary boundaries, to see agency in its various philosophical, legal, sexual, economic, and political contexts, and to invite its audience to compare the different accounts of agency