The Yearbook of Langland Studies

This essay contributes to the ongoing conversation on Langland and romance, arguing that Piers Plowman’s engagement with the genre extends beyond the kind of courtly pastiche that characterizes the Christ-Knight allegory of passūs 16-18. Rather, the insular heroes of historical romance, and that of the Middle English Stanzaic Guy of Warwick in particular, model a relationship between the individual subject and the production of national (or even universal) history that impacts Langland’s own exploration of lay piety. Piers Plowman becomes a framework in which to view the transformation of romance from a literary genre to a historical temper exerting itself on other forms of medieval fiction.

This article considers the significance of the ‘blered’ eye as a figure for covetousness in Piers Plowman and ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’. It argues that Langland and Chaucer drew on the particular symptoms of the ‘blered’ eye, and on its complex moralized, idiomatic, and allegorical meanings, to describe covetousness as a characteristically ‘unkynde’ sin, which alienates people from ‘kynde’ relationships and ‘kynde’ knowledge.

Huntington Library MS 114 contains one of the more unusual versions of Piers Plowman, along with a range of other vernacular texts (Mandeville’s Travels, Troilus and Criseyde, the Pistil of Susan, an English translation of the Epistola Luciferi ad Cleros, and an excerpt from The Three Kings of Cologne). The entire manuscript was copied by a single scribe whose identity was recently established by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs. Using their research on this scribe, one Richard Osbarn, this article explores the possible reasons for Osbarn’s compilation choices, his methods of copying, and the mise en page in each of the six texts. The evidence suggests that Osbarn initially copied the three large texts - Piers, Mandeville, and Troilus - separately, very likely for his own use or for circulation among his immediate colleagues. However, quire counts on the finished manuscript indicate that the compilation was eventually a purchased product. This article speculates that Osbarn joined the three long texts together in response to a customer’s request, most likely a non-aristocrat lay reader of limited means who wished to have access to a book of popular literature. This kind of reader was part of a growing group in late medieval London; reading for pleasure was no longer a pastime just for the wealthy and the titled. After choosing these three texts to make up the book he was selling, Osbarn completed the codex by filling in the blank pages at the end of Mandeville and Troilus with shorter texts whose contents complemented or supplemented the longer works. He therefore transformed what were initially his own personal copies of popular Middle English texts into a single book that was both affordable and marketable.

This essay takes up the problem of agency in Piers Plowman by considering the failure of the ploughing of the half acre in passus 6 in terms of the political ecology of agrarian husbandry and estate management. The failure of the community formed on the half acre allegorizes the limitations of human agency to approach Truth, figured through the ecological and communal constraints within which individuals live in an agrarian society. As medieval husbandry manuals reveal, growing food required the coordination of an array of social and natural factors, which were often unpredictable and difficult to manage. The dangers of interdependence are enacted in the crisis precipitated by Wastour, in which the collective ways humans meet their bodily needs block their ability to discover Truth.

The fourteenth-century alliterative Siege of Jerusalem has been cited for its unabashed anti-Judaism by some critics while others have argued that it is ethically nuanced and ambivalent with respect to Jews. This essay argues that the Siege should be read in the context of high medieval Aristotelianism and the late medieval intellectual culture it engendered. The essay considers the rationalist mode of definition in which opposites such as black and white define one another and in which parts and wholes are mutually constituent of one another. The article then examines interactions between characters, especially the Jewish general Josephus and the Roman generals Titus and Vespasian, as well as between the poem and its sources in order to situate the Siege within the dialectical and related logical traditions. These include so-called rationalist evangelism that at once provides support for vitriolic anti-Judaism and sharp criticism of the same. The Siege is also engaged in the rationalist project of seeking to define the parameters for inclusion in the human community. The essay concludes that the Siege’s ambivalence toward its Jews and the resulting breadth of critical treatments are effects to be expected of the poem’s investment in dialecticism and related rationalist modes of definition. The Siege of Jerusalem is more heavily invested in the interdependence of religious adversaries than in the eradication of Christianity’s religious others.

This article argues that the arguments defending image-worship in Dives and Pauper are designed to rehabilitate, rather than to hereticate, the Lollard sympathizers who make up its implied audience. The author of Dives and Pauper does this by casting images as books which must be read and interpreted, rather than as pictures depicting their subjects. This strategy seeks to build consensus among image-venerators and their potential opponents by appealing to their interest in books and their suspicion of the affective devotional practices that frequently surrounded images. The article suggests that the difficulties that scholars have in categorizing Dives and Pauper (all call it ‘orthodox’ but feel the need to footnote or qualify that designation) indicates a wider and more interesting variety of ‘orthodox’ stances than has previously been acknowledged.

This essay argues that Piers Plowman line C.20.231 (‘And aftur, god auntred hymsulue and toek Adames kynde’) can be read as taking part in a late medieval conversation about how to talk about kenosis in English, and about the competing models of Christian selfhood, polity, and social relations that the choices of particular words entailed. Langland’s line is simultaneously an oblique translation of Philippians 2. 7 (‘and emptied himself, taking the form of a servant’), and an occlusion of the controversial word (anientisen) normally used to translate the kenosis verb in English. In this reading, the figure of Piers the Plowman, as servant of Truth, represents the metaphorics of Christian service, embodying a kenotic critique of the ‘serve and deserve’model of grace and merit.

This essay provides an overview of the history of the PPEA, discusses the recent launch of the PPEA online, describes how the resource can be used in scholarship and in the classroom, and concludes with a call for future collaborations.