The Yearbook of Langland Studies

This article suggests that the temporal schematics of lolling and hanging in Piers Plowman reveal the inequities of fourteenth-century salvific politics and expose the precariousness of temporally-bound subjects from whom institutional powers benefit. Since the poem identifies the suspended pause of lolling as both necessary for and an obstruction to Christ’s return, Piers Plowman takes seriously the precariousness of lolling subjects and questions how those who are suspended in time and body can dowel and secure a spot in a salvific future.

Taciturnity, the inclination to keep silent, comes to matter for Will in the final episode of the third dream when his ‘out of mesure’ rebuke of Reason, whom Will deems responsible for reckless human conduct, results in losing his revelatory inner dream. Late medieval discourse on taciturnity in moral texts, rooted in a Roman ethic of cautionary self-interest, is employed, especially in C-text revisions and additions, to develop the destructive consequences of Will’s reckless speech. Then Imaginatif uses this discourse, as he interprets Will’s experience of loss, to open up the promise of longed-for knowledge to Will, who practices taciturnity during Imaginatif’s extended speech.

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.

In this essay, I detail new evidence for the clerical career of William Rokele, who has been suggested as the author of Piers Plowman. By examining manorial court rolls from Redgrave, where Rokele was the priest, I offer new, more specific dates for his career. I conclude by putting this biography of Rokele, the rural priest, into dialogue with evidence of Piers Plowman as a London poem, arguing that the dates of both Rokele’s life and the composition of Piers Plowman leave open the possibility that Rokele was the author.

This article reconsiders the conclusion to the A version of Piers Plowman attributed to John But. Where previous critics have sought to identify the historical John But on the assumption that this will shed light on the biography of William Langland, the article adopts a more sceptical stance. Instead of viewing John But as a member of Langland’s coterie, the article suggests that John But’s knowledge of the author may have been entirely derived from reading, and perhaps copying, his work.

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.

The thirteenth-century Manuel des pechiez, by William of Wadington, contains an early use of personification for pastoral instruction in its dramatized, multi-voiced depiction of the sin of sloth, which stands out among the treatment of the other seven deadly sins. The slippery, in-between qualities of this sin lent themselves well to an experiment with the fictive humanness of personification. Making sloth simultaneously a recognizable, ordinary human figure in a realistic landscape and an embodiment of utter spiritual failure allowed William both to encourage his audience’s self-examination and to explore the potential, and the boundaries, of personification itself.

This article considers Piers Plowman’s construction of personifications in light of New Materialism, arguing that the poem is particularly receptive to the ways in which matter plays on language even as language seeks to contain and police the material world. Specifically, it argues that personification involves an inversion of animacy hierarchies (the assignation of relative liveness, sentience, or humanness to objects in the material world that has an effect both on how these objects are interpreted in the world and on how they operate as grammatical constructs). By placing abstract concepts in human bodies, Piers Plowman creates a momentary poetic inversion of animacy hierarchies; personification can be thought of as a material act.

This paper examines some of the characteristics of Langlandian personification. Beginning with a brief look at the interpolations in The Cook’s Tale found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 686, this paper goes on to consider the notable lack of visual description linked to the personifications in Piers Plowman, as well as the comparative emphasis on sound and voice that distinguishes Langland’s use of personification.