Radical Pastoral, 1381–1594: Appropriation and the Writing of Religious Controversy by Mike Rodman Jones (review)

Mike Rodman Jones’s Radical Pastoral: Appropriation and the Writing of Religious Controversy makes the case that Early Modern political and religious polemic borrowed from Piers Plowman (and the fifteenth-century Piers Plowman tradition) more than Langland’s literary character, who would become iconic in his later incarnations. Jones asserts that polemicists from fifteenth-century Lollards to Elizabethan anti-Episcopalians inherited from Langland’s fourteenth-century satire a literary style that Jones terms “radical pastoral.”

Jones uses the term “pastoral” quite broadly to include works that valorize the rural and agrarian over the urban. The pastoral subjects of these works are typically not pastors (shepherds) at all but farmers. As is the case for the pastoral as traditionally defined, the texts that Jones analyzes were written by those whose own lives were very far from those of their rural characters. Unlike the traditional pastoral, however, Jones’s “radical pastorals” do not idealize the pleasures of rural life. Instead, they cite the difficulties and discomforts of agrarian life and labor. In defining “radical pastoral,” Jones quotes the gruesome image of Piers the Plowman’s impoverished family in Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede: Piers’s wife’s feet bare and bloodied and his infant swaddled in rags. Jones argues: “what might seem to be anti-pastoral is in fact polemical pastoralism” because “[t]he poverty of the Wycliffite ploughman allows him to more directly criticize the quasi-urban buildings and ostentatious wealth of the clergy and mendicant orders” (p. 67). For Jones, the hallmarks of “pastoralism” as a rhetorical device are rural simplicity, an ethos constructed around poverty as spiritually authorizing, and antiurban satire.

This broad definition of “polemical pastoralism” leads to one of Jones’s most interesting observations: fifteenth-century Wycliffite plowman texts such as Jack Upland or Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede attack the mendicant orders using the same rhetorical self-fashioning of their speakers as the righteous and simple poor that the mendicants used in differentiating themselves from the regular clergy. In the second chapter of the book, “Polemical Pastoralism: The Reformation and Before,” Jones analyzes the literary debate between “Jack Upland” (a Lollard opponent of the friars) and “Friar Daw” (a pseudonymous opponent of Jack Upland), to show that the three texts in the debate engage in “a conflict over the rhetorical ground of ‘Holy Simplicity’” (p. 72). Throughout the book, Jones maintains this focus on the rhetorical strategies of self-fashioning that appear in polemical works both within and countering the “radical pastoral” tradition.

Jones’s third chapter, “‘The Living Ghost of Piers Plowman’: The Ploughman in Print, 1510–1550,” is a useful extension of recent writings by several scholars on the Early Modern printing of Piers Plowman and on sixteenth-century editions of other plowman texts. Jones is careful to cite earlier scholarship where he either follows or diverges from previous authors, and he does introduce into the scholarly conversation some works not yet studied in this light, such as the dialogue Of Gentleness and Nobility (1525), possibly by John Heywood. Jones also brings to the conversation a focus on the textual format of Crowley’s Piers Plowman editions, noting that the title page device was used also for the Book of Homilies, which leads Jones to claim that Crowley’s Piers Plowman was produced to appear as a “classic,” “part of a striking literary and cultural canon” (p. 127). I am not completely convinced that an Early Modern reader would consciously draw this conclusion from a recycled device, although I think it could well have a subliminal effect, analogous to the way packaging designers today use earth-toned colors to make products seem more ecofriendly.

In his fourth chapter, “The Elizabethan Ploughman: From ‘Piers Marprelate’ to Pierce Penniless and back to Piers Plowman,” Jones extends his analysis of Piers Plowman’s literary offspring chronologically further than many of his scholarly predecessors have done. This...