Reviewed by: The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England Emily Steiner Kate Crassons. The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. 432. ISBN: 9780268023027. US$40.00 (cloth). In an age of global economies and Internet technologies, we are made constantly aware of poverty around the world and the difficult choices we face in responding to it. Medieval European writers understood as well as anyone the ethical complexities of poverty. In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons examines the literature of poverty in England, from the 1370s to the 1430s, focusing on socially conscious non-Chaucerian literature: Piers Plowman, Pierce the Plowman's Crede, Wycliffite sermons, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the York cycle plays. Crassons is an expert in this literature, as well as in the medieval debates about poverty from which it draws, and the many modern studies on the subject, by David Aers, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Anne Middleton, Anne Scott, Derek Pearsall, and others. What makes Crassons's book new and thought [End Page 78] provoking is her acute, often agonized sense of the difficulty of interpreting the signs of poverty. At the heart of Crassons's study is the question, "Who are ethical readers and writers?" For Crassons, ethical readers and writers embrace the "fundamental ambiguity" of poverty: They contend with the irreducibility of signs but strive to overcome ambiguity and irreducibility in order to address the needs of the poor. Ethical readers and writers also understand the conflicted nature of contemporary moral solutions. They acknowledge the difficulty of doing the right thing, but they observe how the language of poverty is co-opted by those whose primary concern is not with improving the lives of the poor. For Crassons, the best example of ethical reading and writing is William Langland's Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman may be steeped in major debates about the legitimacy of religious mendicancy and the virtues of labor, but the poet doesn't chase polemics. Instead, as Crassons explains in chapter 1, "Forms of Need," he views poverty without blinders, precisely because, as a poet, he revels in the difficulty of representing need. As Crassons argues, Langland understands that "need," whether it refers to empty bellies before the harvest or friars begging for alms, is a concept that tips over into excess (31). And those who speak for and about neediness, almsgiving, moderation, and the poor, as Holy Church and Patience do, are never fully in control of their discourse. Crassons's real contribution to Piers Plowman studies, however, is not her analysis of the poem's indeterminacy but, rather, her focus on discernment, how the poem goes about perceiving need and portraying "non-scrupulous empathy" with those perceived to be needy. The key moment of discernment in the poem is the Good Samaritan's encounter in C.19 with semivif, the man attacked by thieves and left for dead. Another critical moment of discernment is the conversation between the dreamer and Need at the beginning of C.22, a reflexive passage that dramatizes the subject's relationship to an other. Finally, as Crassons argues, two important passages introduced by Langland in his C-revision, the portrait of poor laborers in C.9 and the interrogation of the dreamer in C.5, together disclose two crucial facts about poverty: first, that the concealment of need is one of poverty's main characteristics and, second, that the challenge of literature is to discern that need. In chapters 2 and 3 Crassons takes to task several reformist works that don't measure up to Piers Plowman as examples of ethical writing. In chapter 2, Crassons argues that Pierce the Plowman's Crede, though ostensibly concerned with the plight of the poor, sells out real thought about poverty to antifraternalist polemic, that is, to the criticism of those who assume poverty as part of their spiritual profession but who [End Page 79] overcompensate for their own need. By resorting to antifraternalist polemic, the poet fails to represent the complexities of discerning real need; worse, he produces a "deliberately impoverished poetics" (137), which rejects poetic forms...