Langland and the Reinvention of Array in Late-Medieval England

Abstract

Abstract Tradecraft lurks throughout the allegories of cloth-making in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, more fully and sympathetically expressed than scholars have realized. But in spite of the depth of lore there, the poem continually examines the problem of supervising such craft production and producers. Assessing this double perspective adds a distinctive chapter to understandings of how Piers Plowman invokes and requires wide economic and social contexts, specifically those focused on cloth production, a topic more amenable to ‘thing theory’ than the ‘costume rhetoric’ often applied to the presentations of array in Chaucer and other poets. All writers in the period were confronted with major changes in how clothing was made, sold, and worn, but Piers Plowman’s concerns differ significantly from contemporary writings both in how intricately the poem invokes the cloth industry yet how frequently it indicates the need for its punctilious governance (and that of craft and labour in general). Langland’s presentations of array offer not only an original and highly informed contribution to a central instance of late-medieval social and allegorical signification but also a contradictory response to its changing social, industrial, and institutional dimensions. Langland uses array and its making and remaking to affirm craft, process, and aesthetics in general while imagining new forms of governance, religious and political, that might contain its social and ethical disruptions.