The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (review)

Kate Crassons's debut text (derived from her Duke University dissertation) is a lively and original survey of medieval accounts and understandings of poverty from the 1300s to the fifteenth century. Fascinatingly, the book is also contemporary in its emphasis. Crassons leaps into this theme, asserting from the outset that the ambiguity in both defining and judging poverty is as salient to medieval England as it is to the twenty-first century. Crassons also engages directly with the charged meanings given to poverty and to the 'involuntary poor', both in the Middle Ages and in the present.

Although her text is based on the reading of texts from medieval England, she begins with some analysis of St Francis of Assisi. Doing so means she is from the outset acknowledging that how people judged the poor, and also how the poor behaved, was subject to shifts in meaning and emphasis. For example, Francis himself can be understood as both an elite man who 'exploited the poor to enhance his own social credit', and as a ground breaking figure in terms of advocacy of the poor (p. 4).

The ambiguity she finds in Francis of Assisi links to one of the main themes of this book, which is to account not only for the intricacies of attitudes to the poor, but also for a shift in cultural understandings in poverty which gradually transformed medieval literary accounts of poverty and its victims. According to Crassons, theological and cultural attitudes to poverty gradually became more hostile, as ideas on the virtues of poverty receded.

The book is also conspicuously multi-disciplinary. The core of the text is analysis of medieval literary texts. Piers Plowman receives the lion's share of attention; no other text is subject to such in-depth treatment and the chapter relating to it is thus the lengthiest. The book is also indebted to methodologies and insights from cultural studies and a number of other disciplines. One of these is economic history, for as Crassons acknowledges, poverty is as much economic as epistemological in the faces it presents to interpreters and scholars.

Within these frameworks, Crassons offers a nuanced and sophisticated epistemological analysis of how medieval writers conceived of poverty. She takes this analysis to the most precise level, assessing shifting understandings of the concepts 'need' and 'claim', finding in the latter term a word that can be understood as both a noun and a verb. By this, Crassons means that poverty made demands of society but also occupied different traditions within medieval literature.

Similarly, the complexity of understanding 'need' as a concept is explored through Piers Plowman (p. 22). For mendicants, poverty manifested spiritual perfection. Others contested this claim on both meaning and virtue, and Crassons charts the ongoing disputes between mendicants and anti-fraternalists, who disputed the very idea of poverty as comprising a religious practice. Her extensive analysis of Piers Plowman contributes to this analysis. Crassons finds in Piers Plowman that the poem expresses suspicion at the idea of poverty embodying perfection. Crassons exhibits the same willingness to assess complexity in meaning in the poem itself, such as Langland's contrasting of 'truly needy' with the 'unworthy poor'. The complexity which she insists on as informing Langland's approach to poverty contrasts with earlier readings by scholars, who were more inclined to see Langland viewing poverty as informing spiritual perfection.

Passing from Piers Plowman itself, Crassons also examines the 'Piers Plowman Tradition', including a Wycliffite text Pierce the Plougman's Crede. Crassons thus charts Langland's suspicion of poverty into less orthodox territory, in the critical commentary that the Crede author offered on fraternal claims to perfection. Crassons explores the Wycliffite responses to poverty; attacks on fraternal perfection were concomitant with the use of the voices of the 'pore' to offer an affront to the Church.

Crassons insists that the themes of her book comprise 'enduring...