Conscience and the Composition of ‘Piers Plowman’ by Sarah Wood (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conscience and the Composition of ‘Piers Plowman’ by Sarah Wood Anne M. Scott Wood, Sarah, Conscience and the Composition of ‘Piers Plowman’ (Oxford English Monographs), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012; hardback; pp. xii, 187; R.R.P. £68.00; ISBN 9780199653768. The Introductory chapter in this interpretation of Piers Plowman lays out the book’s argument with admirable clarity. Sarah Wood deftly unravels several strands in the influential critical interpretation of Conscience, concluding that attempts to make one continuous interpretation of this important figure throughout the poem fail because Conscience assumes different forms. Like Kate Crassons (Claims of Poverty, 2010), who systematically resists efforts to accept allegorical figures like Patience as ‘unerring’, and instead demonstrates their instability, Wood invites us to move away from established modes of reading Conscience as a character, or a personification of scholastic thought and, instead of tracing the role of Conscience diachronically within each version, to consider his development over the A, B, and C versions. Her thesis is that the key to our understanding of Conscience and his role within Piers Plowman is form. Each chapter reads Conscience in the context of such aspects of form as debate, invective, slander, complaint, penitential texts, the medieval sermon, and anti-fraternal satire. Examples are aptly chosen, and the discussion is tightly argued. This attention to form insists that the poem is read as a work of literature, not history, but set firmly within its contemporary context, an approach that this reader finds wholly satisfying. While Wood builds with a keen critical intelligence on the scholarship of others, the interpretation of Conscience in his various emanations is all her own, illuminating and convincing. Arguably the most inspiring part of the book comes in Chapter 6 and the Conclusion. Here, Wood demonstrates what she has been arguing towards: that to make sense of apparent inconsistencies within the poem, it should be read across all the versions, starting with A and ending with C. Tracing the development in Conscience by this means demonstrates ‘a series of stages in the compositional and argumentative process of the poem’ (p. 161). It is an approach that can be applied to other figures in the poem, as Wood herself suggests – and it leaves me itching to get back to the text to begin reading it all over again. This slim volume is a great read – though not for the faint-hearted. It contains an extensive bibliography and a useful index. One small quibble: I was looking out for some interaction with Lawrence Warner’s book, The Lost History of ‘Piers Plowman’ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Perhaps [End Page 235] the timing of publication precluded this; but I think the two books would have some interesting synergies. Anne M. Scott The University of Western Australia Copyright © 2014 Anne M. Scott