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Reviewed by:
  • Piers Plowman and the Poor
  • Helen Cooper (bio)
Anne M. Scott , Piers Plowman and the Poor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 263 pp.

When the lord in the parable in Luke 14 invites the poor to be guests at his feast, it is not because they have deserved it, as Anne Scott notes, but because they are available: they have no other commitments. The contradictory nature of poverty, marked as it is by social exclusion and divine favor, forms the subject of this book. It is at once the worst of social evils and a liberation from care; undertaken voluntarily, it offers itself as an imitation of Christ. Riches are correspondingly corrupting unless they are used in charity for the alleviation of poverty, but not for material provision alone: since all men are made in the image of God, full humanity also requires that the poor should be treated with dignity and given access to justice. Langland's concern with the poor is obvious to any reader of Piers Plowman, but in Scott's "poor reading" (the ideological equivalent, that is, of a feminist reading), the depth and originality of his concern emerge as startling. It differs from a Marxist analysis, or even from Engels's investigation into the industrial poor, by virtue of the dreamer's sharing of the condition he describes, and because Langland cannot envision any social structure by which poverty could be eradicated: bad harvests and famine were facts of life. His Piers Plowman does have a shot at constructing an ideal society, but human nature being what it is, not least the human nature of the unwillingly poor, it is a miserable failure (Marx could indeed have learned much from the poem). Instead, the rich have an obligation to do what they can to relieve poverty, to eradicate it piecemeal; and Langland insists, in a move distinctly unusual for its time, that such giving will be much better for their souls than giving to the church or to that rather specialized medieval form of institutionalized poverty, the mendicant orders. Piers Plowman offers an ethics of obligations rather than rights: it was, after all, only the comparatively well-off who would have access to manuscript culture and so would be in a position to follow its injunctions. But the poem also insists that, in God's eyes, the indigent do have rights, and it is down to their blood brothers in Christ to see that they get them.

Helen Cooper

Helen Cooper holds the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge University. Her most recent book is The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare.

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