Kindly Similitude: Marriage and Family in Piers Plowman (review)

Reviews 263 Tavormina, M . Teresa, Kindly Similitude: Marriage and Family in Piers Plowman (Piers Plowman Studies 11), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1995; cloth; pp. xix, 262; R.R.P. US$71.00. Some years ago, a review article described the N e w Zealand poet, James K. Baxter—a poet with a reputation as a vehement social critic and as a significant religious writer—as 'our great poet of family life'. By a curious coincidence, one of Baxter's poems is a 'Letter to Piers Plowman'—a Tdndly' coincidence, perhaps, for on the evidence of this study, Langland also emerges as a 'great poet of family life'. As Professor Tavormina points out in her preface, there has to date beentittlecritical attention given to Langland's not infrequent 'domestic elements'. Although her study does not attempt to provide an exhaustive account of these, it does give a very sane introduction to the area. The preface sets out two aims for the study: setting Langland's treatment of marriage and family 'within the more comprehensive historical framework that has become available in the last twenty or thirty years' and then providing an exploration of the poetic implications of this material. That historical framework' becomes immediately apparent in the first chapter, which provides contemporary social contexts for the marriage of Lady Meed. The social, legal and economic significance of marriage is carefully demonstrated, within an argument which also covers such details as pre-contractual impediments, charters of enfeoffment, marital negotiations and hrocage', paternal incest and iUegitimacy. Valuable though this section is for its rich annotation, it proceeds essentially by glossing the text rather than by presenting fresh readings. The exploration of poetic implications promised in the preface emerges more clearly in the next sections: the consideration of Dowel in the world, and the interpretation of the Trinitarian material in Passus XVI (B)/XVTI (C). Tavormina contends that marriage and family life emerge as central to Langland's view of h u m a n nature, and in both these sections she brings out Langland's awareness of the potential sanctity of marriage. In the Dowel debate, she concentrates in particular on Wit's speech, offering a valuable corrective to some 264 Reviews earUer assessments of the usefulness of that speech—a speech whose very complexity argues against its being irrelevant to Will. Perhaps the most interesting argument is that which looks at WiU's confusion over the 'tweyne lyues' and 'thre degres' in the Tree of Charity episode. The author focusses in particular on the C-text, with its difficult passage about the 'furste fruyte' and the 'fayrest thyng' (cf. C. XVIII, 85-100). Arguing that the 'furste fruyte' is not virginity but matrimony, which maidenhood (the 'fayrest thyng') is expected to honour, allows her to re-affirm the positive sanctity of marriage which she attributes to Langland. Similar affirmations of matrimony are discovered in Abraham's Trinitarian metaphors, although the arguments in this case are somewhat less persuasive. The approach through most of the book has been to focus on extended treatments of marriage or family in a single episode; the fourth chapter, however, ranges across the poem looking at lesser references, and organising them according to 'the h u m a n life-cycle'. Although most of the references are treated in a preliminary manner, this section contains some of the most interesting parts of the book, and the passage from childhood to old age arranges the material in a compelling way. The phrase 'kindly simititude' from which the book takes its title is an interesting one—a collocation which sounds thoroughly Langlandian. But the phrase is not Langland's, nor even coined by one of his contemporaries, so it is atittleunsettling to have it stand as the title without any discussion of the notion until almost the conclusion of the argument. A little unsettling, and an unfortunate decision, because the exploration of natural metaphor in Langland offered some of the most fascinating, but regrettably undeveloped material in the book. Peter Whiteford Department of English Victoria University of Wellington ...