"Piers Plowman" and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

Arvind Thomas has written a meticulous and innovative book arguing that Piers Plowman not only reflects the language of canon law but intervenes in canonical ideas about contrition, confession, restitution, and satisfaction, understood here as juridical in character. Indeed, taking a cue from John Alford, Thomas's argument is an extension of the idea that William Langland pushed the analogies between law and theology “further than anyone else dared” (24, quoting Alford 1977: 947–48). His argument is not simply that the poem takes up legal discourse (Sobecki 2020)—others have seen common law as the more prominent legal source for the poem—but that the entire edifice of Piers Plowman has a legal purpose that refers to and overlaps with its central penitential concerns. Thomas traces thematic and formal moments throughout Piers that are particularly informed by the discourses of canon law; in addition, he finds “a poetic remaking of canon law” (10), a specifically poetic vision of the law that critiques and revises the accounts offered by medieval jurists.As interested as Thomas may be in the juridical aspect of canon law, his understanding of that corpus is refreshingly flexible. Implicit throughout the book is the observation that canon law, rather than consisting of a fixed body of precepts, offers something more like literature, “less . . . a static compendium of norms than . . . a continuous process of interpreting them” (15). Accordingly, he observes in his careful introduction that many of the poem's characters adopt a dialogic or dialectical method that resembles the methods of juridical argument among medieval legal scholars (17). Thomas's argument also makes the important subclaim that, in comparison to the B version, the C version of the poem “exhibits a sharper or more substantial engagement and enrichment of canon law” (20). With this rich and complex method, Thomas's book will take a well-deserved place amidst the rich trove of scholarship on medieval law and literature by John Alford, Andrew Galloway, Emily Steiner, Richard Firth Green, Sebastian Sobecki, Jennifer Jahner, and others.The book's chapters unfold in a structure essentially based on the penitential process, beginning with, and often recurring to, contrition as a social and legal, not simply psychic and spiritual, action. Chapter 1 shows that, when the figure Mede early in the poem mocks canonistic advice, Langland portrays a lack of remorse as “a legal infraction and not just as a pastoral oversight” (49). Mede, along with the figure of Contrition late in the poem, does more than simply carry out Langland's anticlerical sentiments: such scenes raise questions also raised in canon law about the outward signs of contrition. By treating contrition as a semiotic problem, Thomas's analysis uncovers Langland's engagement with canonical discussions of the potential mismatch between declared legal norms and their implementation.Chapters 2 and 3 center on usury and restitution. Chapter 2 delves into the biblical prohibition of usury—a problem of economic justice writ large—to define further not only Mede's abuses but also the poem's effort to articulate, or at least to gesture toward, a legal discourse of labor reform. Chapter 3 focuses on the logic of restitution—one way of making satisfaction for sin—as portrayed in Covetise's confession to Repentance in passus 6. In the chapter's intricate examination of B and C versions of this confession, the most convincing argumentative stakes have to do with regulative language: a shift from pastoral language in B to the more juridical language of C emphasizes restitution to victims of usury. Thomas argues that Langland's intervention in canon law in C, by omitting some canonical mitigations, curtails the clerical power of absolution if the law of restitution is not carried out.Chapters 4 and 5 have the richest and most suggestive analyses of what Thomas calls the “poetics” of canon law—if by “poetics” we mean an attention to the making of (sometimes indeterminate) meaning through formally ordered language. In his analysis of the poem's use of the maxim “Nullum malum inpunitum . . . nullum bonum irremunderatum” (No evil unpunished . . . no good unrewarded; B.4 and 17, C.4 and 20), Thomas presents a particularly fine-grained analysis of verbal modes, enabling an interpretation of the maxim not as a stern justification of punishment but as a reflection on the conditions of proper satisfaction. Later in the chapter, he returns to chapter 1’s concern with the semiotics of contrition in a nuanced reading of the uses of metaphor in describing adequate satisfaction. Chapter 5 focuses on the shift from the “patente” of Christ in B.14 to the “charter” of salvation in the corresponding passage in the C version—from a covenant based on Christ's offer of penance to a charter based on the confessional process of the church, that is, from a patent that manifests Christ's sacrifice to a charter that refers to institutional roles and obligations. Thomas shows that these different modes of allegorization are attended by different verb tenses, levels of abstraction, and ways of mapping the human relation to divinity. Accordingly, the B and C versions engage with canonical discourse in different ways: Thomas argues that in C, Patience “contests the correlation between sign [of penitence] and referent theorized by penitential theorists” (228).In his readings, Thomas attends with admirable nuance to the malleability and mutual influence of both discursive fields (law and literature). Throughout the book, his thorough and convincing account of canonical works creates a thick legal context for the poem. He grounds the discussion in an equally careful close reading of Piers itself; he offers further grounding by toggling between the B and C versions of the poem to trace a “history of canon law told by . . . versional variations” (8). In chapter 2, he argues that in C, Conscience's critique of Mede in passus 3 defines usury more expansively than in B, and in chapters 1 and 5, he recounts C's comparatively greater focus on the responsibilities of confessors. If Thomas's attentiveness to hermeneutic nuance occasionally results in passive or overly Latinate constructions (or as noted by other reviewers, one or two philological howlers), such moments can surely be forgiven in a book whose conceptual insights and local readings come fast and thick, extending across both the canonical texts and the central poetic text (Warner 2020).Arvind Thomas has made a case for Langland's use of canon law in his penitential thinking, and indeed for his creation of a poetics of the law that seeks to redirect accepted legal discourse. This challenging book offers a new and resonant framework for understanding the problems of representation in Piers Plowman

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• Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages, by Arvind Thomas

  Open Access•Sebastian Sobecki•The English Historical Review•2020

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