The Yearbook of Langland Studies

This essay explores the place of Fortune in PPl as both allegorical figure and lowercase synonym for ‘chance’ as well as the fifteenth-century future of this combination of religious poetics and vernacular philosophy, biblical moralism and secular Fortuna. I examine two poems whose debts to L have never before been recognized, found in a manuscript traditionally associated with an aristocratic, country house milieu, Cambridge Ff.1.6 or the Findern Manuscript. These poems open a new window into PPl, showing us how a fifteenth-century reader might have interpreted the poem’s small but significant engagement with Fortune, beginning early on in passus 6 and concluding in the very final passus of both the B and C texts. The Findern poems, ‘How Myschaunce Regnythe in Ingeland’ and ‘A Complaint to Dame Fortune’ testify to the importance of reading intertextually, not only laterally or backward in time, but forward as well; as I will show, the anonymous composers of these poems are astute readers of L’s work -- so astute, in fact, that they have noticed an important theme in PPl that contemporary criticism has largely missed.

This essay argues that close attention to the literary forms of a set of Lollard sermons reveals how reformist concerns about productive labor and effective preaching yield rhetorical practices that often are reminiscent of Langlandian literary modes. In these sermons, poetic modes serve didactic and hortatory ends, rendering scriptural exegesis accessible and familiar through extended description, dramatic dialogue, and passages of rhythmic alliteration interspersed with the expository prose.

The copy of PPl in MS HM 114 (Ht) has been the subject of intermittent interest because of its eccentric textual qualities: mainly its conflation of the different versions of the poem and its pervasive linguistic interventions. Here passus 3 is given the close scrutiny that discussion of Ht has hitherto lacked. This is the earliest passus of the poem where the full character of the scribe/editor’s interventions becomes evident. Study reveals a developing coherence in his editorial approach to the poem. A nucleus of special interests, emphases and evasions emerges. Ht creates a synthesis of the known versions of the poem, working his way as an early ‘parallel reader’ through a series of textual paradigms. There is an ‘antiquarian’ aspect to his task, as well, perhaps, as a sense of producing a definitive and linguistically accessible text for a new readership with new interests. These interests can be characterized by a particular focus on matters of law, governance and commerce. The text appears to be the result of a sophisticated and exacting commission, although as a book MS HM 114 is a humble product. The study sheds some further light on the poem’s shadowy reception in the fifteenth century.

This article explores the evolution of Tudor press regulation as an influence on Crowley’s presentation of PPl in print, especially the preface, with its interest in L’s historical biography, and Crowley’s addition of marginal annotations. Each of these features corresponds with explicitly regulated aspects of print, as attributions of texts and marginal annotations came under specific scrutiny. As a reaction to the development of print culture under Henry VIII and to the new regime at Henry's death, Crowley’s edition was both timely and innovative. Its interest in localizing and historicizing L as an aid to interpreting the poem reflected new ideas about the role of the author in literary and political history, ideas that Protestant polemicists of Crowley’s circle developed in dialogue with Henry VIII’s attempts to regulate the press.

This article uses Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) to explore the logical limits of language in PPl, contending that for both L and Wittgenstein language is bound to the world by dint of mirroring its logical structures. Concentrating on the devices of personification and typology, it suggests that L’s allegory maps reality qua language, through its syntactical and logical relationships. Reading the beginning and the end of the poem, it also examines the figure of I/Will as an instantiation of the first person around and through whom both language and the world are necessarily constructed.

Readers of L have not sufficiently appreciated his consistent satiric emphasis on the corrupt system by which thieves, extortioners, and other fraudulent takers, ‘miswinners’, are granted absolution—invalid, of course--in confession, usually by friars but also by seculars, in return for a donation, with no requirement of restitution. Lawler argues that this ‘system,’ as he calls it, is never far from L’s mind: a major theme in the B and C versions, and strongest in C; that L indeed regards it as the chief evil facing the church in his time; that in undermining penance it undermines the poem’s major value; and that its importance both accounts for and is verified by the final scene of the poem, in which for the last time a friar absolves a thieving lord in exchange for a donation. Though he offers numerous analogues from other late medieval writers, and suggests the particular influence of Peter the Chanter and Richard Fitzralph, Lawler does not posit sources, claiming only that though L did not invent the issue he drives it home more insistently than any other writer. The system has been touched on long ago by Hort, Frank, and Bloomfield, and more recently most specifically by Wendy Scase, less so by Penn Szittya and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. References to it in the poem are usually indirect, even opaque. The most explicit treatment occurs in the C version at 17.32-50, but Lawler argues for its presence in numerous places in the poem, beginning in the Prologue, and offers new readings of many lines, such as 4.113, ‘And harlotes holynesse be an heye ferie,’ the source of its title (‘harlots’ holiness’ being the false appearance of holiness brought about by phony absolution granted to thieves), or 13.142, ‘y sey …/ how þat men mede toke and mercy refusede,’ which is taken to mean, ‘I saw how friars took meed, and refused absolution till they got it.’ The final two passus receive extensive discussion; Lawler insists that the issue all through the siege is not sin in general but miswinning, and lax treatment of it, in particular; in the final confession, Contrition is a lord, his sin is miswinning, and the friar’s glosing consists in offering absolution (‘comfort’) without requiring restitution. Five appendixes offer in turn: twenty-three passages illustrating the treatment of the theme in other writers, particularly Peter the Chanter, Richard Fitzralph, and the author of Memoriale presbiterorum; a chart showing the growth of the topic across the three versions of the poem; and analyses of C.3.77-127 (Non-clerical Miswinning), C.9.256-80 (Bishops), and C.15.42-50a (Feasting on What Men Miswon).

Despite the pervasiveness of the practice, no one has yet surveyed English literature for instances of maintenance. In a nutshell, maintenance was a kind of mutually beneficial relationship between a lord and a servant, and nearly everyone in later medieval England was involved. This article illustrates how affinities, groups of retainers, were depicted in PPl, concentrating on the rat court and the Meed episodes. ‘Retaining Men’ argues that to ignore the issue of maintenance is to miss a central theme in PPl that shows development over time. By exploiting the parallels between maintenance relationships between men, and the legal relationship between husbands and wives, L is able to critique a fundamental cultural institution safely.

This essay suggests that the figure of the plowman in late medieval literature has beguiled scholars into misunderstanding the medieval peasantry. For literary critics, the plowman genre has encouraged a limited, canon-dominated approach to the cultural remains of late medieval peasants. For historians, the figure of the plowman has flattened the medieval peasantry into a single class and a single (male) gender.