‘Piers Plowman’ and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas

Abstract

Reviewed by: ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas Elise Wang ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages. By Arvind Thomas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2019. xiv+258 pp. £55. ISBN 978–1–4875–0246–1. There is no conversational partner quite like the Middle English poem Piers Plowman. Scholars have spent many fruitful years listening in on the dream vision’s generative, manic, and always partial dialogues with the major forces of the time: scholasticism, theories of the mind, book culture, and common law. It is part of the poem’s charm that, given enough attention, it can seem almost exclusively invested in any conversation for which the reader has an ear. Arvind Thomas’s new book adds canon (or church) law to this list and demonstrates that this conversation was exceptionally productive. The book starts from the position that Piers Plowman was a ‘co-producer’ (p. 6) of canon law, and that therefore the poem should be understood as part of this law’s interpretative tradition. This assertion is the book’s most exciting contribution. It diverges from the usual formulations of law and literature, in which either law provides a source for a literary text or a literary text uses scenes of the law for its own purposes; instead, Thomas argues that we ought to ‘reconceptualize poetry as productive of, not just derivative from’ the discourse of law (pp. 10–11). Thomas manages the ambition of this project by confining himself to the canon law of penance, aligning each chapter to a stage of penitential procedure, and focusing each chapter on just one or two passages of the poem. Rather than arguing for direct influence, he extracts related passages from canon law and the poem and collects them together, much as medieval readers were wont to do. The proof of this method lies in how productive it is. Chapter 1 addresses the failed confessions of Mede (Passus 3) and Contrition (B 20 and C 22). Thomas’s diligent comparison of Mede’s famous confession with the performative procedures for contrition shows that William Langland did not mean either character to seem contrite, and instead used them to criticize the way the sacrament was administered. Mede returns in Chapter 2, and Thomas uses his method to excavate the passage’s deliberation on usury across two different versions of the poem, B and C. In Chapters 3 and 4 Thomas unfolds Langland’s engagement with restitution and satisfaction, first with Covetise’s confession and then with the trial of Wrong. He traces law’s maturation from the ‘pastoral approach’ of the B version to the ‘judicial and canonistic’ (p. 124) attitude of the C version. Thomas finishes the book with a meditation on the most famous scene in Piers Plowman: Patience’s sermon and the tearing of the pardon. Such a wide-ranging study could have used a more argument-focused Conclusion to bring its many directions back into alignment. Thomas’s Epilogue eschews this work for an after-history of the ‘inevitable sundering of the ways shared by Piers Plowman and the legal treatises’ (p. 236), which successfully closes the issue but does not help the reader recover her feet. As Thomas points out, canonists shared with Langland an interest in methodology over norms, which made their collaboration a happy one. He grants both canonist and poet the ability to ‘invent’ (inventio) law in both senses—by finding [End Page 698] and by founding. Throughout, Thomas’s strength is that his analysis uses the same attitude his sources do: associative but scrupulous, imaginative but extractive. His readings, like theirs, are often unapologetically narrow, trusting the reader’s interest in the smallest of distinctions. Nonetheless, the book is conscientiously pedagogical, never leaving an obscure source unglossed, always directing the reader to the implications of the argument. As Thomas listens in on a conversation between Piers Plowman and canon law, he also engages with the poem in a lively one of his own, one that it is a pleasure to overhear. Elise Wang California State University, Fullerton Copyright © 2022 The Modern Humanities...