Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Later Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas (review)

Reviewed by: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Later Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas Míċeál Vaughan Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Later Middle Ages. By Arvind Thomas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4875-0246-1. Pp. xiv + 267. $77.00. In an introduction and five chapters, Arvind Thomas compares selected episodes in the two longer versions of the late-fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman to assess how they engage with Catholic church law dealing [End Page 166] with sin and redemption, as well as with restitution, usury, and simony. His goal is to show how the poems actively and creatively interact with, and reinvent, the Church’s rich tradition of canon law. His stimulating book speaks most directly to an audience of historians and literary specialists with interests in medieval pastoral theology and vernacular religious practices associated with the Sacrament of Penance. Readers interested in the history of confession and the forgiveness of sin will find its thoughtful, carefully detailed examination of nuanced textual issues in both canon law and in the two longer versions of Piers Plowman instructive and provocative. Thomas focuses on the period following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which marked a milestone in medieval Christianity by formally adopting seventy canons on issues of dogmatic theology and ecclesiastical practice. He deals especially with the impact of Canon 21, which required all Catholics who had reached the age of discretion to confess all their sins to their parish priest at least once each year. This requirement (not for the first time) led to a profusion of pastoral documents, in Latin and in the vernaculars, detailing rules and practices governing the three stages of the sacrament of Penance: contrition, oral confession, and satisfaction. Thomas’s chapters examine the first and the third especially, and add to them extended discussions of usury, simony, and restitution, which are inherent in penitential doctrine and practice, and furthermore implicated in the development of capitalist economics into the modern period. This is not the first book to link Piers with canon law (and especially with sin and forgiveness), but Thomas’s thesis differs from those of most of his predecessors in treating Piers as something other than a vernacular “derivation or reflection” of “putative sources” in “normative” penitential treatises (22). He insists instead that the poems are each engaged in dynamic, generative fashion with the debates and practices surrounding penitential topics in the later fourteenth century, and evidence a “poetic remaking” or “re-envisioning” of evolving canon law (10). He locates Piers in a “conceptual community” involved in the “co-production of canon law and literature” (6). Given the prominence of ecclesiastical values and practices apparent throughout the multiple dream visions that make up the poetic landscape for each of the versions of Piers, and the prominent citation of authorities in Latin and the vernacular, most readers of the poems will welcome Thomas’s treatment as a refinement rather than a fundamental departure in understanding the origins of and audiences for the poems’ discourses. While Thomas acknowledges that the two versions (B and C) are by the same poet, William Langland, he avoids in large part treating them as an original-and-revision, instead comparing them as two separate texts and working carefully through their choices of words and their other significant differences. As a long-time student of Piers, I was disappointed that he did not take account of the earlier versions, Z and A, the latter of which lies obviously behind many of the passages of B that he examines. Avoiding the [End Page 167] process of the repeated rewritings of Piers allows him to keep free of the “development” of the poems’ (and the poet’s, or poets’) ideas, but setting A aside may unhelpfully narrow the time-period in which the differences between B and C occurred. After its useful Introduction, the first chapter—“Contritio Cordis: The Laughter of Mede and the Tearlessness of Contricioun”—examines “the canon law pertaining to contrition as a set of procedures that confessors were required to follow to elicit and evaluate the penitent’s remorse” (25). It focuses on...

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