Conscience and the Composition of “Piers Plowman.” by Sarah Wood (review)

This necessary and welcome study provides a full account of the figure of Conscience in Piers Plowman. Conscience is more frequently called one of the most important figures in the poem than he is treated as such, perhaps only because he has proven so highly resistant to explanation or definition. It is difficult to see either how or why Lady Meed’s reluctant fiancé in B III becomes the pilgrim looking for Piers in the final lines of B XX, and the large gaps between Conscience’s appearances discourage narratives of gradual evolution to account for the changes. Through its study of the figure Conscience, then, Wood’s book also explores questions about the “unity” of Piers Plowman itself. Rather than seeking unity in the coherence of individual A, B, and C versions, Wood reads the appearances of Conscience in all three versions as a single unfolding narrative.

To date, most efforts to explain the manifestations of Conscience have attempted to define the figure in terms drawn from the scholastic categories of synderesis and conscientia, which may be respectively summarized as the theory and practice of conventional morality. Wood begins by demonstrating quite rightly that these scholastic categories “tend to flatten the texture” of the poem when it is read exclusively in such terms: Conscience’s characterization is grounded “as much in ‘social experience,’ in institutional practices (such as law), as in scholastic philosophy” (5). In this sense the problem of defining Conscience merely instantiates a larger problem for Piers Plowman scholarship: it is difficult to provide coherent accounts of a textual tradition that simultaneously appears to be a document of social experience, a satire of institutional practices, and a learned work of scholastic theology, and that moreover appears to move back and forth between these different modes at will.

In crafting her own approach to the figure of Conscience, Wood relies heavily on David Lawton’s influential article “The Subject of Piers Plowman” in Yearbook of Langland Studies 1. As Wood explains, Lawton draws on “modern French theories” to argue that the narrator Will does not learn and develop over the course of Piers Plowman, but rather is differently constructed in different discursive contexts (12). Each chapter examines individual appearances of Conscience, working from the premise that scholars have too narrowly focused on parallel passages in their studies of the relationship between A, B, and C versions of the text. We are not bringing to bear all the evidence we have, if we read the difficult “grammatical analogy” of C III only in terms of its specific departures from the corresponding B passage. Instead, we must also read C III in light of B XX, where Conscience’s discussions of mendicant endowment appear to mark a shift in the author’s thinking on the topic of “reward” in general, which has led him to treat Meed more harshly in his C revisions. Hence Wood’s work relies on the narrative of Langlandian revision reconstructed by scholars like George Kane and Ralph Hanna.

The first chapter of the book argues that the discourse shaping passus III–IV is that of topical debate poems, along the lines of Wynnere and Wastoure. This discourse is constituted by several modes—debate, invective, slander, and complaint—as manifest not only in English poetry, but also in Walsingham’s Chronicle, parliamentary documents, and even formal petitions. Wood compares the rhetorical strategies discernible in the dialogue between Conscience and Meed to the strategies of these source texts, and she argues quite perceptively that the forms of argumentation employed by Conscience and Meed are in fact the substance of their debate. Conscience uses complaint and even slander to articulate his charges against Meed: in one sense, this is formally appropriate (charges often use complaint and slander to inspire outrage in their intended audience), but in another it is problematic, because Conscience’s sensational rhetoric gives Meed an occasion to plead that his complaints are unproven. Conscience’s...