Kindly Similitude: Marriage and Family in Piers Plowman by M. Teresa Tavormina (review)

REVIEWS the manuscript and the recent work that has been done on them. One fears too that the concentration on Ellesmere alone may lead the reader to undervalue the importance of the other eighty-plus surviving man­ uscripts of The Canterbury Tales, some ofthem at least as splendid, or as textually important, as Ellesmere. But there is much here to absorb the reader. PETER ROBINSON De Montfort University, Leicester M. TERESA TAVORMINA. Kindly Similitude: Marriage and Family in Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman Studies, vol. 11. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995. Pp. xix, 262. $71.00. Perhaps the only happy and secure time to have been a reader of Langland's Piers Plowman was the period immediately following the publication of Skeat's heroic two-volume edition in 1886. The three versions had been clearly sorted out; A, B, and C were printed in a parallel-text format; the poet's biography was outlined with a fair amount of conviction; and generous annotations illuminated the myr­ iad details of the poem's contents. Since then, critical security has had a rough time. Much ofthe scholarly energy ofthe last hundred years has been marshalled to undermine Skeat's confidence in the singleness of authorship, the number and dating of the poem's three distinct ver­ sions, the reliability of the manuscripts to preserve authentic readings, and most recently the sequence ofthe canonic versions-A, B, and then C, or B, C, and then A? Not surprisingly, scholarly inquiry has tended to produce scholarly responses to these perplexities. We look down into the deep well ofthe past and see our own faces reflected at the bottom. Langland has been transformed into an Oxford-trained clergyman and Piers has become a theological text primarily concerned with the knotty issues of semi­ Pelagianism, Cistercian spirituality, the Ockhamist skepticism of the Moderni, and so forth. However, it is worth remembering that one ofthe earliest documented owners of the poem, the London rector William Palmere, decided in 1400 to bequeath his copy to Agnes Eggesfeld, pre­ sumably a laywoman of his acquaintance. What was there about Piers, 319 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER we might ask, that would have qualified this woman to take posses­ sion-and act as a capable reader-ofsuch a text ifshe was not schooled in semi-Pelagianism, Cistercian spirituality, and the Ockhamist skep­ ticism of the Moderni? Tess Tavormina's Marriage and Family in Piers Plowman goes far to­ ward answering this question by exposing in learned detail the homely images in the poem, images that a fourteenth-century woman would readily have understood-and understood with an immediacy and an urgency that has eluded the many commentators (myselfincluded) who have busied themselves among the dustier shelves of the PL. Piers and Will are both family men, after all. Nobody has ever accused Langland of writing a sexy poem, but Tavormina demonstrates that Piers is in­ tensely concerned with nearly every aspect ofmatrimony at all levels of society, from aristocrat to peasant, without ever losing sight of the fact that the poet struggles with a single spiritual imperative: "How I may saue my soule pat seint art yholden." With great industry and erudition, she deploys a series ofclose read­ ings of the most prominent passages, with special attention upon the marriage of Meed (B.2-4), Wit's speech (B.9) and the Tree of Charity (C.18). Constantly alert to revisions made from A to B and from B to C, she offers scrupulous accounts of each passage in terms of social, legal, and economic backgrounds. Then she advances to an interpreta­ tion in terms of the allegory, often moving back to the literal image to demonstrate how the spiritual meaning bestows some comment, almost invariably corrective, upon the contemporary practice of wedlock. Though Langland is not always the clearest of thinkers, the distinction between the literal and spiritual was already blurred. Marriage was not only a biological and social necessity, after all; it was also a spiritual state. It was the only sacrament instituted before the Fall and therefore was understood as contributing ideally to the spiritual repair of mankind. It was therefore the foundational expression of a "kindly...