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  • The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England
  • Jamie Taylor
The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England. By Kate Crassons. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 390. $40.

Kate Crassons's The Claims of Poverty valuably builds upon examinations of late medieval portrayals of labor, charity, and need offered by critics like Kellie Robertson, Michael Uebel, and D. Vance Smith by tracing the multiple conceptualizations of poverty in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. Yet rather than specifically examining medieval economic theory or labor practices, The Claims of Poverty explores how fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers negotiated competing ideologies of poverty, examining how they intervened in increasingly hostile debates about the nature of need and the definition of charity. For Crassons, poverty in the Middle Ages is, as now, "a highly flexible concept that tests our capacity to define material reality and to assess its ethical implications" (p. 4). She thoroughly points out the instability of poverty as a cultural signifier and convincingly shows that literary and dramatic texts helped shape the many ways poverty was understood as a moral, legal, and cultural category in the later Middle Ages.

Crassons focuses on how various communities and institutions—from Franciscan theologians to guild bureaucrats—deployed poverty as an ideological principle, even as they claim to define and address need in material and moral terms. Indeed, discourses around poverty, need, idleness, and work were inextricably bound up with urgent concerns about representation. For Crassons, "questions of poverty are simultaneously questions of poetic practice" (p. 13), and accordingly, [End Page 528] literature and drama are crucial resources for understanding how poverty functioned in late medieval England both as a wide-ranging discourse and as an object of urgent debate.

In the introduction, Crassons frames her argument with a discussion of the Franciscan idealization of poverty and the antifraternal writing that emerged in its wake, as well as with brief discussions of the legal statutes that sought to articulate and discipline idleness as a social ill. Examining tensions between theological ideals and the material realities of poverty, Crassons argues that literature helped shape the debates that centered on the moral value of poverty, the definition of need, and the ethical requirement of charity. The first two chapters work in conjunction to posit Langlandian allegory as an important mode through which medieval writers thought about interactions between idealized and material forms of need. The first chapter, "Forms of Need: The Allegorical Representation of Poverty in Piers Plowman," ably reads the poem's repeated debates around questions of poverty to demonstrate how seemingly antagonistic ideologies (embodied by Waster and Hunger, for example, or Rechelessness and Patience) are closer than they seem. The analogy between poverty and allegory—Crassons suggests that both must be understood in simultaneously material and spiritual terms—is most clearly fulfilled in her reading of Langland's Good Samaritan episode, which emphasizes the hermeneutic labor performed by the Samaritan as he reads the bodily signs of the semyuief 's neediness while ignoring the man's identity and status. The episode reveals how Langland conceptualizes social relations in terms of charitable aid and, moreover, how Langland works to accommodate both literal and allegorical senses of poverty and need.

Crassons argues persuasively throughout her first chapter that Langland's meditations on material need, labor practices, and poverty are always meditations on his own poetic mode. In contrast, her second chapter shows that Pierce the Ploughman's Crede empties itself of the allegorical complexity Langland strains to produce to construct a world in which poverty functions as a legible, stable register of moral sanctity. Crassons thus argues that "the Crede poet strategically attends to the atypical dimensions of Piers Plowman in order to de-emphasize the potentially opaque elements of his literary language" (p. 133). By abandoning personification allegory, the poem also abandons the vexed interior debates about poverty and need so richly depicted in Piers Plowman. Instead, it sharply distinguishes between false friars and virtuous Christians by imagining a world in which material reality offers a transparent look into the state of the soul. Such "impoverished poetics," to use Crassons's...

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