Langland’s Tears: Poetry, Emotion, and Mouvance

This essay explores several incidents in Piers Plowman where a male character, most often Will himself, weeps tears. Most of these incidents of weeping seem relatively straightforward in comparison with the complexity of Langland’s theological, spiritual, personal and political concerns, but they generate intriguing questions about the expression and interpretation of feeling in medieval literature and its reception history, about the relation between feeling and bodily gesture, and the contribution medieval poetry can make to the history of emotions. Emotional responses also play a role in judgements about the fluid mouvance of the poem’s versions, in the multitude of competing readings.