The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (review)

In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons addresses the competing intellectual responses to poverty in later medieval England. In the texts Crassons analyzes—Piers Plowman, Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, three Wycliffite sermons, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the pageants of the York cycle—poverty is figurative; it is a theological construct or a legal category, as much as a lived personal or social experience.

The moral status of poverty was central to writings in both the Franciscan and antifraternal traditions in the later Middle Ages; moreover, both labor law and estates satire depend on their audience’s understanding of the right relationships between work and wealth. Scholars have certainly recognized the echoes of these contemporary debates in the literature of late medieval England. Crassons’s accomplishment in The Claims of Poverty is to bring together a range of discourses around poverty and show both their interrelationships and their pervasiveness in the literary culture. Crassons demonstrates that writers from Langland to Kempe to the anonymous authors of the cycle drama were deeply influenced by ongoing theological and political debates about how to understand poverty.

In her first chapter, which deals with Piers Plowman, Crassons extends the previous scholarship on Langland’s complex and shifting representations of poverty by focusing on the hermeneutic challenges inherent in discourses on poverty. The need to differentiate the truly needy from idlers, and the poem’s concern with its characters’ labor status, intersects with the poem’s organizing question of what it means to do well. In this chapter, the book’s longest, Crassons is particularly concerned with the semiotics of poverty. Must need be visible? Can the poor represent themselves, or must their identity be seen (and thus constructed) by others? What does the presence of the needy mean for a community? How can one recognize those worthy of charity? These questions are, Crassons argues, of a piece with Piers Plowman’s shifts in voice, genre, and narrative structure, all of which complicate interpretation of the poem. In the different perspectives characters in Piers Plowman bring to the questions of how to differentiate the truly needy from idlers, or legitimate from illegitimate means of living, Crassons sees “a certain reluctance on Langland’s part to make hard and fast distinctions among the poor” (76).

In Chapter 2, “Poverty Exposed: The Evangelical and Epistemological Ideal of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede,” Crassons argues that the author of the Crede intentionally elides all of the epistemological questions that Langland associates with poverty and need, replacing them instead with a certainty that one can transparently differentiate true poverty (like that of the plowman) from feigned need (that of the fraternal orders). Crassons argues that the Crede’s Wycliffite semiotics and its “willfully impoverished poetics” deny artifice and ambiguity (92), even if the poem’s “goal of [perfect] transparency is, of course, ultimately impossible to attain” (132). This argument is persuasive, although it could have been expressed in fewer than forty-eight pages, given that Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede itself is only 850 lines long. Chapter 2 is, however, a useful bridge between Crassons’s first chapter on Langland’s ambivalences about poverty and her third chapter on the surprising economic theories evident in some Wycliffite sermons.

Anticlerical Wycliffite writings are a predictable subject for a book about medieval conceptions of poverty, but in her third chapter, “ ‘Clamerous’ Beggars and ‘Nedi’ Knights: Poverty and Wycliffite Reform,” Crassons goes beyond the obvious rejection of clerical wealth to show exactly whose economic interests the Wycliffite sermons serve: those of the lay elites. The sermons Crassons cites challenge the notion of apostolic poverty, arguing that Christ valorized work over idleness and that Christ himself was incapable of poverty, since he had natural dominion and literally could not beg. Moreover, the sermons argue that fraternal mendicancy and the church’s accumulation of goods both invert the proper distribution of wealth and...