<i>Piers Plowman</i> and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages, ArvindThomas, University of Toronto Press, 2019 (ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐0246‐1), xiv + 267 pp., hb $77

Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages asks the radical question of whether a poem like William Langland's Middle English Piers Plowman, rife with legal quotations in Latin, can ‘do’ law, and Arvind Thomas thinks it can. Thomas deploys Sheila Jasanof's model of co-production, originally applied to the relationship between science and society, to describe processes of literary and legal production in Piers: the poem, read in light of canon law and theological sources, is both generated by and generative of church law. Thomas' work presents to historians and literature scholars alike one alternative to the more hierarchical and unidirectional ‘influence’ model where a work of literature engages concerns already articulated in historical sources. Thomas uses the term ‘reinvention’ in two senses: to re-invent is at once to find or discover again, and to found or create something new. In a moment where literary scholars have become wary of historically deterministic readings, this acute dual analysis of the poem and its relation to late medieval theological and legal discourses is especially timely. Thomas shows that Piers Plowman as a poem viewed broadly through its B and C versions could ‘court, complicate, and co-produce the institutional discourse of penance’ (p. 25). Chapter One shows Piers courting the canonical problem of contrition in the two confession scenes that bookend the poem, using the power of dramatic fiction to illuminate what canonists could only describe in the abstract, and even to highlight the holes in the process as so described. Practically, as Thomas shows, the confessor was expected to discern whether there was indeed true contrition for sin, and some of the most important evidence he needed was performative rather than verbal: performances like weeping, looking downcast, blushing, kneeling, and lying prostrate were thought to be accurate reflections of this key interior disposition. The confession scenes in Piers dramatize the canonically described process, but both penitents and priests perform their roles poorly. Despite the canonists' sense that proper procedure of penance would elicit contrition in the penitent, Piers points out that there is a great gulf between ‘playing a penitent’ and ‘being a penitent’, and a similar gap between confessors' education in procedure and their actual practice. Piers' narrative dramatization of canonical procedure accepts the terms of institutional church law, even highlighting the importance of authentic performance in the process of confession, while also bringing to the fore its greatest shortcomings in practice. Chapter Two takes on through the famous trial of Lady Meed the canonical prohibition against usury grounded in the Deuteronomic command not to charge one's brother interest. Thomas shows that the poetic process of thinking through a canonical problem—a process accessible to us by comparing the differences in its B- and C-text versions—extends the law beyond its original application. In canonistic discussions, usury had since the twelfth century been applied to an increasing number of concrete economic situations. Thomas reads Langland as extending the definition of usury further still to cover any desire to turn a profit by buying something cheaply and selling it for a higher price, that is, regratery. The motive for so doing was concern for the poor, whom Langland saw as paying the price for the wealth and success of the mercantile class. Thomas reads Piers as ‘finding’ and ‘founding’ canon law at once: in Meed's trial, the poet borrows terms and judgments from his canonist contemporaries but extends them to fit the economic the ‘profit-oriented basis of labour-relations’ (p. 100), and its inherent social injustice. The legally productive tactic Thomas explores in Chapter Three, the creation of a law from a rule, is the extension of jurisdiction. The subject is restitution and its relationship to absolution of sin in the sacrament of penance. Langland's poetic intervention can be seen in the confession of Covetise to the confessor Repentance. The confessed sin is usury, and the confessor's response includes quotation of the rule on restitution, reworked in the C-text in language and meter to be much more absolute and non-discretionary than in Pope Boniface's Liber Sextus. Rewritten and reframed thus, the rule-turned-law now holds all confessors, even as high as the papal penitentiary, to its enforcement, and constitutes a careful critique of the papacy's power to grant absolution. In this confession scene, Thomas sees a moment of not merely engagement or anxiety, but actual intervention: working from within a canonistic discourse, the poem argues that no one, not even the papal curia, is above the canon law pertaining to restitutive justice. Chapter Four reads Piers in light of canonical discourse on satisfaction, the final phase of the penitential process, and the poetic intervention is hermeneutic. Extensive penitential handbooks from before the twelfth century recorded the dominance of bodily labour, that is corporal satisfaction, as remedy for the injustice created by sin: fasting, almsgiving, or physical acts of service were once normative penance. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a shift in canonistic thinking that subordinated the penances assigned to the work of cultivating internal contrition: the confessor's goal was to assign enough of and the right sort of penance so that the penitent understood the gravity of sin and could be truly sorry. Thomas argues that when the character Reason quotes a maxim on satisfaction during the trial of Wrong, the poem rediscovers and revives this older view of satisfaction as corporal labour. In addition, however, to reviving this older received view as a function of justice, the C-text ‘invents’ a hermeneutic for the discretion of the confessor, based on legal hermeneutics. The confessor should judge what is most needful for the penitent with the same principle of caritas, balancing justice with mercy, that canonists were expected to employ. Chapter Five takes a wider view both of penance and of the poem's allegorical form as it tackles the soteriological mechanics of the sacrament as depicted in Piers and in contemporary theological discussions: if contrition was of the greatest moment, how did the institutionalised process of penance factor into the economy of salvation? Thomas' close readings of both versions of the sermon given by the character Patience reveal a subtle shift. In B, the penitent Hawkyn receives a patente, in C, a chartre as a symbol of his completed penance. Reading each of these symbols in light of semiotic discussions on penance among canonists and theologians, Thomas shows that the C-text courts canonistic thought, playing with the same schemata of sign and referent to describe the relationship between internal contrition and formal absolution. In the C-text, Langland contends that institutional penance offers a charter that can advocate for a person on doomsday but does not of itself guarantee salvation. Reading the two versions against contemporary semiotic discussions illuminates a perilous and uncertain vision of salvation: the institutional church's canonical penance is valid, says the poet, but not sufficient to secure salvation, which lies solely in divine judgement. At this moment, the poem is at once a product of canonistic thought and productive of limits upon it. Arvind Thomas' Langland is a poet in pursuit of justice, a maker of canon law as much as a maker of fiction. Langland's poetic process is a justice-seeking enterprise and its products, particularly the C-text of the poem, constitute the legal discourse from which they draw. Thomas' elegant historicism follows some of the key work in contemporary Langland studies in challenging medievalists of all disciplines to attend sensitively to the intellectual milieux within which their sources exist. The book also serves as a keen reminder that to view medieval canon law as static, dogmatic, and immovable is to misunderstand it. As much recent work on medieval canon law has shown, it was a dynamic and capacious mode of discourse that could be adapted to changing social circumstances. Moreover, Thomas' conceptual community of law and literature may be a productive paradigm for the modern age insofar as it invites mutually generative friendship between genres and ideas of the sort that this highly interdisciplinary monograph exemplifies.

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