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This essay argues that the medieval homiletic commonplace of ‘body and soul’ - itself a fractious, unstable pairing - helped to shape the practice of personification in Piers Plowman. In the episodes considered (the confession of the Sins, the exchange between Hawkyn and Patience, and the infiltration of the Barn of Unity), allegory at once depends upon the analytical similarity of body and soul and turns against that similarity as a dangerous confusion. Langland’s poetics of animation emerges from the distinctive manner in which he entangles the logics of corporeal and allegorical animation to drive the poem toward crisis.
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