The Yearbook of Langland Studies

This essay thinks with the language of Disability Studies to develop a new understanding of the representation of Anima in Piers Plowman. Anima, I argue, represents a narrative and physiological prosthesis which supplements Will’s disability bodily, intellectually, and spiritually. Anima also exceeds conventional definitions of prosthesis as an extraordinary body himself. Finally, he enhances all Christian life, bringing into focus a new perspective on the poem’s theology: Christian salvation requires prosthesis.

The Tree of Charity is a key site for understanding how allegory in Piers Plowman produces understanding. In the B text, the episode involves two distinct types of allegory: simple, diagrammatic pictura and enigmatic obscuritas. The properties of trees in medieval thought expressed in these differing allegorical forms allow the Tree of Charity to operate as a hinge between the discussion of charity and the irruption of salvation history into the poem. The combination of the thought-aiding tree and allegory mutually reinforces the ability of both techniques to depict complex ideas about time, salvation, and the role of humans in relation to concepts of vast scale. Ultimately, the Tree of Charity and the ensuing passūs revise the genealogical conceptions evoked by trees elsewhere in the poem, demonstrating instead that twin dependencies - on God and on the aid to contemplation granted by allegory - guide the reader to understanding the contact between human history and the infinite that is the Incarnation.

This essay brings readers’ attention to the role of Piers Plowman in the writings of two major modern authors, Marilynne Robinson and Maureen Duffy. At first glance these authors differ dramatically - Robinson is an Iowa-based Christian passionate about Calvinistic theology who came to Langland only recently, while Duffy is a longtime Londoner and patron of Humanists UK, for whom Piers Plowman has been a lodestar for over sixty years. Yet both place the poem in an ethical, utopian, and prophetic literary genealogy, one in which anti-racism is central, culminating in William Blake, which they see their own works as continuing.

In revising the description of the Tree of Charity for the C text, Langland drew on Hugh of St. Cher’s commentary on John 4. 34, to which Langland refers in the revised text of the poem. Hugh’s reading of that verse offers a source for Langland’s association of the Biblical idea of Christ’s food with charity, and gives Langland a means to connect grace and works in his poem in order to articulate a theology of salvation by grace while maintaining space for the crucial role of works in the Christian life.

The phrase ‘kneweliche to paye’ at B.19/C.21.187 has been glossed in different ways (most often, ‘to acknowledge satisfactorily’) and its components have likewise been grammatically analysed in varying ways. This note attempts to clear up the confusion by proposing that ‘kneweliche’ is a noun, denoting the legal process known as ‘recognisance’, which secures a loan or sale by committing the beneficiary to legal acknowledgment of the debt in advance of the date for payment, so that if he or she defaults, his or her goods are immediately liable to distraint without further legal proceedings. This legal commitment is used by Langland to represent the mutual commitment involved in the acceptance by the people of their obligations in return for the pardon granted them by Piers Plowman.