Natural Entropy and Piers Plowman

This chapter considers medieval theories that sin produces bodily sickness and suffering, and that this might, paradoxically, undermine sin itself. These theories result from the psychosomaticism of medical-stoic thought; they assume that sickness is the body’s natural reaction to being ‘abused’ by vice. These theories were developed in later medical theory, according to which the vices have their destructive impact on the body via the ‘non-naturals’ (contingent phenomena that affect health), especially the passions. Influenced by these ideas, medieval pastoral thought frequently describes sinners as suffering physiologically and the visual arts contain many striking illustrations. If the overt purpose of such texts and images is to warn people off sin, their effect is also to show sin somehow naturally consuming or destroying itself; it will be clear that such theories are at odds with intentionalist ethics. Langland explores these ideas and paradoxes in Piers Plowman, where the personified sins, and Haukyn, are undoubtedly sad vices; related ideas also underlie the poem’s apocalyptic ending, which is characterized by the coincidence of endemic sin and physical suffering. But at this point it is not clear that the suffering has any beneficial impact. However, the chapter also observes that the poem’s ending reflects a kind of entropy that may derive from experiencing, but also writing and reading about, the reiterations of sin: it suggests that the natural entropy of sin may after all still play some part here.

Opposition and Debate in Piers Plowman

The chapter investigates the various work that insult and verbal violence can do in medieval dialogue and debate texts, arguing that aggressive language is not a carrier of fixed meanings, but a technique that can do many kinds of work—excitatory, catalytic, repudiatory, or apophatic. The chapter opens by looking at medieval rhetorical theories about the psychological and affective impact of sharp language. It then explores three traditions of agonistic dialogue and debate; in all three there is a conceptual dimension to the debate, and the speakers tend to be personifications or generic prosopopoiae. The first tradition is elementary pedagogical texts in grammar and rhetoric, and the second is a wider range of allegorical debate writings written under the influence of medieval schoolroom practice. Here it is clear that verbal rudeness is a mechanism with which writers stimulate response, highlight oppositionality, and sharpen the contours of difference. The third tradition is a series of spiritual texts that describe contemplative progress by using highly rebarbative language to cast aside ‘lower’ stages of experience and devotion. Here insult and verbal violence are used for the more extreme purposes of iconoclasm and apophasis. If the authors of some medieval debates use violent words to stimulate exchange, others use them to throw all such exchanges into question.

Ethical Adjacency in Piers Plowman

The chapter argues that the intellectual tradition that underlies medieval personification debate is Aristotelian and medieval logical teaching on ‘opposites’, the relationship by which opposed terms illuminate each other—available in Aristotle’s elementary logical works. This teaching has a special relevance to personification debate, where the heuristic drive is dramatized in speakers that represent opposed positions and phenomena, each of which is explored in the process of debate itself. This suggests why personification debate provides for over a thousand years one of the main tools with which allegory unpacks its structuring terms and reflects on its conflictual work. Aristotle’s teaching on opposites also enables us to query some aspects of the literary history of medieval debate literature; it suggests that a critical concern about resolution in debate, or its lack, fails to see where the real intellectual work of debate occurs. It also suggests that the critical distinction between supposedly open ‘horizontal’ debates and closed ‘vertical’ debates may be misguided. In fact, Aristotle’s subcategory of the ‘relative’ opposition (master and slave, artisan and tool) often involves a hierarchy. The chapter uses these materials to argue that personification debate can be formally unresolved and ‘vertical’, and yet also challenging and seriously investigative. This is illustrated with analyses of some debates, several hierarchical: ‘four daughters of God’, body and soul, Nature and Grace (Deguileville) and the Middle English Pearl.

Sharp Words and Violent Gestures in Piers Plowman

This chapter and the next investigate medieval theories about the possibility that the physical decline and suffering of the body might have some power to curb sin. These theories are connected to a tradition of ‘medical-stoic’ thought which assumes the mutual influence of the body and soul on each other. In the later Middle Ages, such ideas shape much medieval pastoral thought, and are reflected in allegorical writings and visual imagery. Although this does not necessarily mean that theologians thought that bodily suffering could substitute for moral effort, some thinkers may have considered that, by making sin difficult, bodily suffering might push the beleaguered human being in a moral direction. This means that these theories sit in an uneasy potential tension with intentionalist ethics. This chapter focuses in particular on the physiological decline associated with old age. It argues that in Piers Plowman Langland both countenances and questions ideas about the impact of the incapacitation of old age; but it also notes that by the paradiastolic last scene of the poem the poet casts doubt on the idea that age’s decrepitude makes people do better. At the same time, the chapter notes that the end of the poem is characterized by forms of exhaustion, and by even the spectre of the narrator’s death. It concludes by asking if the incapacity of old age has provided Langland with a means of closing his long poem.

Anger, Insult and Rebuff

The sharp words and violent gestures of Piers Plowman do a surprising and even disorienting range of work, both stimulating engagement and sometimes bring it to a stop. They are also closely linked to some fundamental features of the poem—its constant debates, its oppositional modes of thought, its pervasively dialectical procedures, and its disruptive allegory. This chapter claims that the poem’s often aggressive (and also ‘grammaticalizing’) debates echo the excitatory and catalytic work to be found both in much medieval allegorical debate, and in the grammatical pedagogy that lies behind it. But the chapter also argues that at some points in Piers Plowman strong words and aggressive gestures have an altogether more extreme effect, dismissing local speakers, particulars and situations in favour of some kind of spiritual and even apophatic turn. Although Langland is not a contemplative writer, the chapter claims that some of these dismissals (the tearing of the pardon, Conscience dismissing Clergy, Conscience leaving the barn of Unity) look remarkably like those to be found in apophatic contemplative writings.

Animate Oppositions

Opposition is especially pertinent to Piers Plowman, a poem whose allegory is characterized by markedly dialectical and ‘negating’ modes of procedure; opposition both drives Langland’s debates and shapes the relation of those debates to each other. The chapter claims that Langland is inward with the tradition of personification debate shaped by elementary Aristotelian theories about ‘opposites’. A Langlandian complication, however is that alongside the debating opponents there are also other debating companions with whom one of the opponents may also share forms of likeness: here, the allegorical play of opposition works in conjunction with the allegorical play of likeness. We see this in the debate of the ‘four daughters of God’, where Mercy opposes Truth and Rightwisnesse opposes Peace, but Mercy and Peace also have much in common, as do Truth and Rightwisnesse. The main body of the chapter analyses three dialogues or debates involving the multi-dimensional personification Conscience. These debates allow Langland to do some complex investigative work on Conscience, whom he situates and re-situates in relation to different interlocutors. Conscience opposes the corrupt Meed, the vulnerable Haukyn and finally, at the barn of Unity, a series of dubious figures culminating in a flattering friar. But in these debates Conscience also shares features with a series of companions: Reason, Patience, and, in B.20, Peace and Hende Speeche. Langland takes Aristotelian oppositionality and the personification debate to a whole new level of investigative activity.

Conclusion

Given that medieval allegory constantly uses personification debate as a tool for analysing its characteristic polarizations and oppositions, the Excursus investigates what we call ‘personification’, and its relation to speech, debate literature, and allegory. It argues that personification is a fundamentally hybrid figure. It claims that the speakerly aspect of the trope, which Classical and medieval theorists often also called prosopopoeia (the ‘speaking figure’, a figure of rhetorical enlivenment), has been occluded by the post-medieval term ‘personification’, along with a post-medieval tendency to define the trope of this name almost exclusively in terms of the animation of abstractions or inanimate phenomena. The Excursus illustrates this claim with an analysis of Classical and medieval rhetorical texts, showing that even when personification is defined in substitutive terms, as the animation of some usually non-animate phenomenon, it is still strongly associated with speech and even dialogue. The Excursus then goes on to explore the widespread use of dialogue in Antiquity and the Middle Ages for many kinds of pedagogy, especially where accessibility was a desirable; it also notes the recurrence of the speaking personification/prosopopoeia in such contexts, with its further endowment of rhetorical energy and persuasiveness. The claim is that these contexts go a long way towards explaining the deeply embedded connection between personification, speech, debate and the work that these figures and structures do in medieval allegory.

Introduction

The Introduction summarizes the book’s arguments and expands on the critical tradition of allegory theory that underpins the book. It discusses the five conflictual allegorical structures that will be the focus of the book as well as their appearance, substantially remodelled, in Piers Plowman. These are the paradiastolic ‘hypocritical figure’ (vices and virtues made to look respectively like ‘adjacent’ virtues and vices), personification debate, violent language and apophasis, narratives of bodily decline associated with age and sin, and grail romance. Through the study of these five allegorical structures, the book will pursue a larger thesis about the fundamentally disruptive nature of allegory, a form of writing that comes into being wherever two or more contrasting languages are brought into a relationship or used to comment on each other. Drawing on a number major theorists of allegory, the Introduction reaffirms that the characteristic modes of the most thoroughgoing and serious allegorical narrative in the Middle Ages are dialectical, conflictual, episodic, hypotactic, ironizing, and linguistically diverse. The Introduction further argues that such forms of strategic dissonance and the questioning of perceived continuities may be particularly common in religious allegory, with its tendency towards critique, iconoclasm and apophasis.

Tales of Piers and Perceval: Langland, Romance Aventure, and Doing Well

Noting that Piers Plowman has often been described as multi-generic, the conclusion reviews the claim that the five diverse allegorical narrative structures analysed in the book all occur in Langland’s poem. It affirms that in Piers Plowman they bring with them their own internal conflicts and disruptions, but are also in constant tension with each other. They overlay, pressure and contradict one other, illustrating the entrenched nature of the text’s dialecticism and its inexhaustible determination to unpack its own terms. The Conclusion ends with an analysis of the feast of Patience, in which many different descriptions of ‘do-well’ are brought together to ‘undo’ each other. Its implicit claim is that this is the kind of work allegory does best.

Piers Plowman and the Grail Romances

The previous chapter showed how the large narrative structures of both the Gospel of Nicodemus and the French grail romances, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Perlesvaus, permeate the poetic diegesis and thought of Piers Plowman, albeit reformulated in Langland’s distinctive terms. This chapter homes in on three particular structures that Langland shares in varying degrees with the grail romances: first, travellers in a landscape, whose discovery of imperfect forms of understanding is imagined as ‘news’ transmitted across the landscape; second, multiple quests, seekers and absent objects of desire—some of them seekers who are sought by other seekers; third, narratives that are predicated on a crucial and usually involuntary mistake, often committed unknowingly by a main protagonist. These intertwined narrative structures focus with a distinctive emotional intensity on instances of inadequacy and loss, all of which contribute to the inculcation of desire—both for the protagonists, and for the reader. The chapter tracks these structures in the later parts of Piers Plowman (B.16–20) and then across the poem as a whole. It also explores possible connections between the protagonists Perlesvaus and Piers Plowman, noting the syllable ‘Per’ shared in their names. The last part of the chapter revisits two passages of Piers Plowman to focus on how romance structure is here both intertwined with, and at odds with, ethical instruction.