Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text by James Simpson, and: Piers Plowman by William Langland

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER medievalism than to the literary study of the Middle Ages. If it delivers less than it promises in terms ofthe "new," in some areas-like Aers's essay and Barker's piece on the double-armed man-it provides an interesting perspective on the methodology and the phenomenon ofmedievalism as an ideological construction of the Middle Ages-especially today. CAROLYN P. CoLLETTE Mount Holyoke College JAMES SIMPSON. Piers Ploumzan: An Introduction to the B-Text. London and New York: Longman Medieval and Renaissance Library , 1990. Pp. x, 272. $49.95. WILLIAM LANGLAND. Piers Ploumzan. Trans. and intro. A. V. C. Schmidt. Oxford World's Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xlvii, 355. $5.95 paper. In response to the recent phenomenal growth of the Piers Ploumzan audi­ ence, the scholarly community has produced a number of studies that are meant to make the poem more accessible to its new and nonspecialist readers. More undergraduates are studying Langland than ever before, and they, along with their teachers, many of whom have themselves contrib­ uted to this burgeoning interest in the poem, have benefited from the guidance of some ofPiers Ploumzan's most outstanding editors and explica­ tors. James Simpson's engaging, lucid exposition of his reading of the poem and A. V. C. Schmidt's prose t�lation of the B text are two of the latest additions to this valuable pedagogical and scholarly enterprise. Simpson's book, a thorough and systematic presentation of the poem's action, argument, literary discourse, and structure, may very well become a staple in the "further reading" list for the poem's new students. As a sus­ tained analysis that reflects the major themes of the critical and scholarly reception of the poem and offers an individual interpretation as well, this introductory study provides a useful complement to the fine collection of essays edited by John A. Alford under the title A Companion to Piers Plow­ man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Like the latter work, Simpson's study will in its own way enlighten first-time, as well as ad­ vanced, readers of Langland's poem about its complex, unique nature and place in medieval English poetry; at the same time it will supply teachers 266 REVIEWS of the poem with an abundant supply of ideas about how to handle crucial matters in the classroom. The author of several closely argued articles on various aspects of Piers P/QUmZan, Simpson is clearly as interested in the teaching of the poem as in its explication-as if those two activities can always be easily separated. The movement of his interpretation is beauti­ fully shaped by a masterful use of a rhetoric of pedagogical exposition in which he regularly states his aims with clarity, frequently recapitulates his arguments at strategic moments without seeming to repeat himselfunnec­ essarily, and persistently poses crucial questions with acuity and a shrewd sense of timing throughout. With its chapter divisions keyed to the sequence ofvisions in the poem, for each ofwhich he provides a succinct summary, Simpson's reading ofthe poem is both easy and a pleasure to follow. As he leads us through the poem, he provides cultural, intellectual, and theoretical contextual back­ grounding for several of its concerns; makes some cogent comparative ob­ servations about Chaucer and Langland;1 and selectively points out some of the important differences between the B and C texts ofPiers P/QUmlan but does not mention what is possibly the most important difference between them, the deletion in C of the "tearing of the pardon" in B, passus 7. Overarching this reading is a two-sided argument that embraces the poem's content and form: In particular, I want to argue that Langland's commitment to the idea of unre­ mitting secular and divine justice leads him into positions of acute and fearful discomfort, and that in seeking a way out ofthis theological crisis he is provoked either to abandon or to seek to transform the social and ecclesiastical institutions to which he makes his initial commitment. I shall also argue that Langland, despite his initial commitment to 'closed' literary forms, ultimately creates a profoundly...