Langland's Allegorical Modernity

Abstract

This essay explores the peculiar allegorical grammar of Piers Plowman in light of the larger question of the poem's modernity. William Langland wrote his great poem at the end of the fourteenth century, at a moment when the forms and institutions of medieval culture were suffering violent rupture. One of his tools for addressing the force of that rupture is allegory, which belongs to the medieval regime but which Langland fashions as the articulation of an alternative modernity. In his hands, the personified agents of allegory express modern anxieties and possibilities, and not because they have departed from their old lives as numinous presences into new life as mere abstractions or social types. They register, rather, the abiding power of the old presences, and they translate those presences into new forms, peculiarly modern forms, as the unstable residues of the incarnate divine in a disenchanted world.