Piers Plowman and the problem of belief (review)

Reviews 151 H a r w o o d , Britton J., Piers Plowman and the problem of belief, Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xii, 237; R.R.P. CAN$60.00. This book makes more sense of Piers Plowman than any book I have read on the poem since T. P. Dunning's exposition of the A-text The book has a thesis and a principal method, the first slightly less successful than the second. The thesis shifts slightly in the course of the book, a phenomenon which is familiar in critical work on Piers. At the start, the thesis is that the poem records a quest by the author for an immediate experience of God. The argument for this is sophisticated. The author seems to have spent the eighties working in post-structuralist theory. The claim for the overlap of author and narrator/Dreamer draws on work by Brian Stock and others on the growth of literacy in the Early Middle Ages, Lacan on the inonci, and work on the dream convention. But Harwood also argues that the inner dream of Passus 11 is 'predictive of a later crisis in [Will's] life' (p. 76), in which case the author even of the B-version must be at least older than the Dreamer. The main point is one about the quest and its object and this is based on late medieval nominalist thinking. Harwood insists that Langland does not need to be a philosopher for it to be possible that 'his crucial term "kynde knowyng" resonates with—conceivably replaces for him—"notitia intuitiva", one of the terms essential to philosophy for the previous hundred years' (p. 9). Next however, it emerges that this immediate knowledge of God is the essential element in both conversion and faith. The documentation of these last two points is less meticulous and one could object on behalf of merely b o m Christians whose conversion is continuous that Harwood's attitude is faintly revivalist. In the end, the argument seems to turn on a claim in William Lynch's Christ and Apollo that 'sacrifice is . . . a positive principle for epistemology'. It becomes that Will sees Christ in the suffering of the honest working man, Piers Plowman. He sees Him also in his own 'Conscience' because he is converted. This makes quite good sense of the poem, particularly when allied to the principle method, which is to examine the poem in terms of its allegorical characters and their relation to scholastic psychology. This contains many illuminating suggestions, such as that 'Wit' is much concerned with means ('ingenium'), that 'Imaginative' must by definition have caused the substance of Will's Inner Dream in Passus 11, and so on. The subsidiary method, which focuses on the Pardon and the ending, is less convincing. The book claims tofilla gap. 'Despite more than a century of scholarly explication, no satisfactory formalist-historical reading of the poem has yet I think, been pubished' (p. x). For m e it does so. It leaves m e thinking that 152 Reviews Piers Plowman may be the great poem that A. V. C. Schmidt claims it is. While the argument is frequently complex, as one would expect given the text the writing is clear and quietly authoritative. The documentation from the poem, as well as of criticism and of contemporary sources and analogues, is very full and exact. The exposition is heavily into theology, but theology, Harwood makes one see, was not only the Middle Ages' strong point but Langland's also. Kevin Magarey Department of English (emeritus) University of Adelaide Haywood, John, Dark Age naval power, a reassessment of Frankish and AngloSaxon naval activity, London & N.Y., Routledge, 1991; cloth; pp. xii, 232; 5 maps, 11 ilustrations; R.R.P. AUS$135.00 [distributed in Australia by die Law Book Company]. This admirable book will be the definitive study of this topic for some time to come. A large range of sources make referencetopiracy and migration along the North Sea and Atlantic coasts in the late-Roman, sub-Roman and early medieval periods. That some of these sources are untranslated, and some only available in inconvenient nineteenth-century editions...