Political Prophecy and the Form of Piers Plowman

Abstract

The peculiar manner in which William Langland’s Piers Plowman evades narrative and lyric genres was a strategy Langland learned from reading a genre unknown to the ancients and little studied by modern critics. Political prophecy provides a proximate model for the work of Langland’s form, what medieval literary theory designated the forma tractandi (“form of handling”). The forma of Piers Plowman resembles the forma of political prophecy more than it resembles any εἶδος (“form; kind”) theorized in Aristotle’s Poetics and more than it resembles the formae tractandi of any of the more familiar late medieval European genres. After reconstructing a Langlandian lineage within the corpus of political prophecy from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Wynnere and Wastoure, this essay reads the prophecy-like forma of Piers Plowman in its three authorial versions. Surface-level contacts between Piers Plowman and political prophecy are compelling in themselves, but fleeting. It is at the level of form that the conventions of political prophecy may offer some footholds for reading Piers Plowman. Minimally, I contend that greater familiarity with the genre of insular political prophecy clarifies the historical basis for modern interpretations of Piers Plowman as recursive.