Piers Plowman: The A Version by William Langland, and: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

Reviewed by: Piers Plowman: The A Version by William Langland, and: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages Ryan McDermott Piers Plowman: The A Version. By William Langland. Translated by Michael Calabrese. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2020. Pp. xlvii, 160. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-813-23343-7.) Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages. By Arvind Thomas. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2019. Pp. xiv, 267. $81.00. ISBN 978-1-487-50246-1.) For those capable of appreciating it, Piers Plowman is arguably the most compelling work of medieval English literature. The tautology of that claim conveys the major conundrum of teaching this sprawling, allegorical, theologically sophisticated, prosodically intricate, visionary work of Middle English alliterative verse. If you teach premodern literature at the undergraduate level, you have to assume zero prior familiarity with not only the text but also all relevant context. So how does the college teacher attract students to a poem that requires competency in Middle English, a feel for alliterative poetry, familiarity with Christianity, and an appreciation of allegorical imagination? By eliminating two of these hurdles—the linguistic and the religious—Michael Calabrese aims to make the book-length poem accessible. For his translation in modern English, Calabrese has chosen an early version of the poem, the A-text, which was “published” on its own [End Page 808] before two later versions (B and C) roughly doubled the length of the work and added manifold layers of theological depth and complexity. Although the shorter A-text introduces the religious personifications Holy Church, Saint Truth, and Scripture, as well as the ambiguously Christian Piers Plowman, it is possible to focus, without loss of sense, on universal themes, such as “the historical treatment of the poor, and the eternal human quest for honesty, equity, and compassion in social relations” (xix), as Calabrese’s introduction and notes suggest. As a translation, this text is a tremendous success. As an undergraduate introduction to Piers Plowman, however, the volume leaves much to be desired. The introduction assumes far too much prior knowledge to be useful as a startup kit for undergraduates. For example, it makes passing reference to “a corpus of Lolland [sic] sermons” (what is a corpus?) as part of a “critical movement that readers will recognize as anticipating Protestantism” (p. xxi). But only if the reader knows what Protestantism is. The section on the translation itself is nearly as long as the rest of the introduction, which skimps on historical and religious orientation (assuming, for example, that the reader knows what “vernacular” means). I wish I had Calabrese’s translation of the C-text to teach in the classroom. Piers Plowman attains its stature of imaginative virtuosity only at its full length, when the characters introduced in the A-text are allowed to explore the theological and moral landscape introduced there. What we really need is a student edition of Piers Plowman C, the most mature version of the poem, with facing-page Middle and Modern English, in a translation as fresh and alliteratively lively as Calabrese’s, ideally incorporating and updating Derek Brewer’s introduction and notes. For now, I will continue to assign the Norton B-text and recommend that serious new readers buy both George Economou’s translation of C to read alongside the Brewer Middle English edition. If the translation assumes the literature classroom, Arvind Thomas argues compellingly that Piers Plowman ought also to be read by scholars of canon law— not only because it contains and comments on legal material but especially because it “co-produces” late-medieval interpretation and application of church law. To put it bluntly, Piers belongs to the corpus of canon law as much as Gratian’s Decretals. This might sound like a stretch, but the best evidence we have for early copying and ownership of Piers manuscripts places the text in the scriptoria and libraries of canonists. Thomas marshals ample evidence, both internal and external to the text, that Piers must be considered an integral part of the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English practice of penitential law. The chapter on...