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This article triangulates John Gower’s revisions to the Mirour de l’Omme and Vox Clamantis, William Langland’s revisions to Piers Plowman, and English responses to the Western Schism. The Schism forced Gower to rework portions of the Mirour and the Vox and influenced Langland’s depiction of the papacy in the B text of Piers. Recovering Gower’s and Langland’s representations of the Schism not only brings these two contemporary poets into direct dialogue, but it also illuminates an undertheorized set of religious, political, and imaginative discourses centred on the institutional nature and shape of the church. This article concludes by suggesting that scholars understand these discourses as a loose but recognizable ‘vernacular ecclesiology’ common to both the poetic works of Langland and Gower as well as much broader spectrum of later medieval literature.
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