Piers Plowman as Biblical Commentary

The centrality of the Bible in Piers Plowman is obvious from its many references to biblical texts, glosses, and commentaries, its personification of the Bible in characters named Scripture and Book, ¹ and its more than five hundred biblical quotations. These quotations are unusual not only in their number, but also in their range because Piers Plowman quotes from forty-six books of the Bible at a time when few individuals owned a whole Bible. ² Certainly both the poet and his characters are fully conscious of biblical texts as sources, and biblical quotations are presented as the voice of a holy book and the voice of God: "God seide" (1.46 [God said]), "wise wordes of Holy Writ" (1.72 [wise words of Holy Writ]), "Tobye techeth yow noght so!" (10.87 [Tobias doesn't teach you that!]).

But can Piers Plowman be called a biblical commentary? Certainly not in any ordinary sense. It is not organized as a single biblical commentary like a gloss or like quaestiones. That is, the quotations in Piers do not move in order from Genesis to Revelations, nor from the beginning to the end of any biblical book. Nor does the poem have the overall organization of distinctiones, another form of commentary consisting of alphabetical and topical gatherings of quotations. Rather, the organization of the poem as a whole seems to be that of its English text, narrative and fictional, a spiral structure with a beginning, a climax, and an end. However, within this overall English narrative structure, the poem certainly contains an extraordinary number of commentaries on biblical verses. It is the methodology of these commentaries with which I shall be concerned here.

John Alford reversed the ordinary way of reading the poem in 1977 when he called for us to look for "the structure of Piers Plowman . . . in the Latin" ("Role" 82). He listed the quotations, for example, in Passus 14 and showed how they form an outline of the English text which surrounds them. Judson Allen further showed that the Pardon Passus quoted a collection of texts perhaps taken from Hugh of St. Cher as a "batch" of distinctiones. Others since have written about the sources of other passages and the variety of their Latin styles. ³ In fact, a whole sub-category of Langland criticism, complex and important, has grown up around the question of why any Latin quotations are in the poem at all, and what relationship biblical quotations and other Latin lines have to the English narrative in which they are embedded, although no one yet, so far as I know, has tried to follow up Alford's idea to the extent of showing the Latin as structure for the whole poem. Some scholars, like Thomas Hill, insist that the Latin quotations are not the skeleton of the poem, but "are characteristically proof texts supporting or confirming some point made in the vernacular." ⁴ Recently, both Anne Middleton and William Elford Rogers have outlined new ways to look at this problem. Rogers argues that in Piers Plowman, texts, both Latin and English, "contend with one another" and constantly reinterpret one another. ⁵ Middleton, in her essay on "Langland's Lives," goes further; for her, too, there is contention or war between texts within the poem, but "the subject of the poem is the combined outrage and salvific necessity of this ceaseless borrowing from those who have gone before us." ⁶

Perhaps the best example in Piers Plowman of this contention and reinterpretation of biblical texts is in the famous debate of the four daughters of God in Passus 18. Mercy and Peace debate the possibility of human salvation with their sisters, Truth and Righteousness, and all four quote Scripture to prove their points. The four sisters can reach no agreement because they not only argue from different biblical texts, but they also use significantly different methods of interpretation. Truth and Righteousness are literalists, while Peace and Mercy...