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

Reviewed by: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (bio) Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Middle Ages Arvind Thomas University of Toronto Press, 2019. 288 pp. $85.00 hardcover, $85.00 e-book. Arvind Thomas's book will forever dispel the idea that canon law dwelt in dusty tomes, unfrequented by poets and irrelevant to critics. Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Middle Ages argues compellingly that not only did Langland use canon law as a major source, but that he also used his poetry to remake canon law. This two-way analytical street provides breathtaking views in both directions, going well beyond prior source studies and distinguished voices. Since poetry is a more multivalent medium than law, Thomas argues that Langland was actually "reinventing" (in Latin both "finding" and "re-founding") church law. Moreover, he notes, there were trained canonists listening, as evidenced among early scribes and owners of Piers manuscripts (a rich line for further enquiry, not yet exhausted). As if this were not ground-breaking enough, Thomas offers even more, demonstrating profound differences between the B and C versions evidently spurred by the poet's changing engagement with canon law—and revealing C (contrary to popular opinion) as the most consistently creative response. Langland was impatient with current church law when he saw it fail the laity's salvational needs, or social equity here on earth. Thomas's is a fresh new angle on this urgent visionary reformist poet we all know and love: till now, we have too rarely understood the burning canonical questions of the day Langland was trying to solve, or which church laws were at stake. Chapter one, for instance, examines why the C-text introduces laughter into Lady Mede's infamous confession ("Loueliche…laghynge" 3.55), which Thomas of Chobam's Summa confessorum listed among the emotional behaviours indicating false penance, with implications, too, for Mede's exploitative friar-confessor. Chapter two shows how Conscience's denunciation of Mede adapts the canon law of usurious loans, constructing a new model of wage-labour governing lords and tenants. Chapter three asks: were there limits on the pope's power to bind and loose? In C especially, yes: anchored in Repentance's influential insistence that even clerical absolution is conditional on restitution, Thomas reveals how Langland's canonistic thinking offers a "lateral not vertical relationship" to its Latin sources. The C-text Thomas consistently finds more coherent, newly preoccupied "with the 'relacioun rect' between members of the Christian community," and a "projective horizontality" (162-163) assuring no one, including the pope, is above the law. Chapter four asks what constitutes true satisfaction in trials of the unjustly [End Page 150] injured: in the trial of Peace vs. Wrong, Langland's reformulation of the "Nullum malum inpunitum…" maxim reveals stunning versional differences between B's simoniacal and C's non-simoniacal solutions to the crisis. Though Thomas's chapters progress systematically through the stages of church-supervised penitence, his real overarching theme is Langland's preoccupation with whether the delivery of salvational justice occurs equitably across the social classes and clerical ranks. By "church law" Thomas means not only canon law (standard medieval reference works by Pope Gregory IX, Gratian, Ivo of Chartres, Hostiensis, and others), but also the treatises on pastoral care issuing from such law (by William of Pagula, Raymond of Peñafort and more). In literary terms, Thomas also explores legal genres Langland deployed for his "reinvention" of canon law (including trial scenes, confessions, pardons, patents or charters), going beyond prior scholars like Emily Steiner, Candice Barrington, John Alford, and Richard Firth Green. In Chapter five, building especially on Steiner's work, he compares Langland's deployment of the "patente" genre in B to its C revision as a "chartre," a shift in legal terminology made because, following Michael Clanchy, a "patente" referred to primarily oral acts articulated through material and visually expressive symbols—a tradition…characterized as oral, memorial, reciprocal, and feudal. By contrast, the 'chartre'…evokes a later medieval tradition in which documents relied increasingly on verbal signs. (208-9...

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