“Songes of Rechelesnesse”: Langland and the Franciscans by Lawrence M. Clopper (review)

REVIEWS sal capacities of cognition even when they are not deliberately trained and codified, Carruthers offers us a ductus, a new way of knowing, into medieval texts and those who crafted them. Her insights into the thought techniques of Augustine are among the many lasting rewards of this study. Deeply and comfortably erudite, generously voiced and inviting to the reader, this should become one of those indispensable books for anyone who wants to recognize a medieval world populated by persons recognizable through their differences. Nancy Partner McGill University Lawrence M. Clopper. ‘‘Songes of Rechelesnesse’’: Langland and the Franciscans . Madison, WI: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp. 416. $57.50. ‘‘Songes of Rechelessness’’ is a book acutely aware of its own belatedness, the sense that it is indelibly marked by the central contentions of Piers Plowman studies of the last two decades. ‘‘Why in these latter days,’’ writes Clopper in the introduction, ‘‘should we discover a Franciscan orientation to the poem?’’ (p. 15)—as if to ask, what place does this book, nearly twenty years in the making, have at a moment when biography by and large has been set aside in favor of event or the play of authorial indeterminacy; when historicizing Piers Plowman more often means identifying the cultural contexts that follow rather than precede the hazy dates of the poem’s composition; when ideology is privileged over theology and late-medieval vernacular piety over the canon of Latin biblical scholarship. As Clopper no doubt knows, despite the impressive scholarship that subtends ‘‘Songes of Rechlesnesse,’’ now is not the most receptive time for a book on Langland’s Franciscanism; yet its author nevertheless makes a very strong case for the value of such a book in the insightful arguments that he finally makes about Langland’s poetic imagination. The book is divided into three areas of inquiry, each of which unfolds logically from the one preceding it: Chapters 1 (‘‘Mendicant Debate and Antifraternal Critiques’’) and 2 (‘‘Langland’s Friars’’) argue that Piers Plowman’s well-known critiques of the friars, which made the poem at535 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:09 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tractive to Lollard and Reformation writers alike, share more with Franciscan ‘‘internal’’ critiques of the practice of poverty than they do with ‘‘external’’ critiques of the mendicant way of life. If some of the poem’s rebukes of fraternal laxity resemble external critiques, they do so only because they reflect internal concerns; by contrast, Langland rejects those external critiques opposed to the mendicant ideal of absolute poverty or that seek to deprive the friars of the rights to confess, bury, and preach. Chapters 3 (‘‘Langland’s Exemplarism’’) and 4 (‘‘Trifunctional Images in the Visio and Langland’s Political Agenda’’) explore the moral and political dynamics of exemplarism in Piers Plowman, the relationship , that is, between the trinitarian theology of Bonaventure and the perplexing triads (Dowel, Dobet, Dobest) that constitute the poem’s mode of inquiry and promised end. The last four chapters argue that Piers Plowman served in many ways as a wake-up call to a Franciscan ideal: by invoking the apostolic return embodied in Francis’s ‘‘idiotae’’ and Langland’s ‘‘lunatic lollers’’ (chapter 5); by exploring the seeming contradictions in the concept of ‘‘recklessness’’ so important to the Franciscan Rule (chapter 6); by heralding the friars’ role in salvation history (chapter 7); and by inventing an authorial persona who is ‘‘conflicted’’ or constituted at the site where ideal and contemporary Franciscanism clash (chapter 8). The assumption of all three sections, of course, is that Langland was familiar with all things Franciscan, from the intricacies of polemical exegesis , to a Bonaventurian trinitarianism as distinct from both Aquinas and Augustine, to a longing for the apostolic way of life translated both into the historical trajectory within the poem and the very identity of the dreamer. One problem with this assumption is that these three represent very different forms of influence and reception, a problem that Clopper tries to accommodate by grouping them under rubrics such as ‘‘ideology,’’ ‘‘mentalité,’’ ‘‘disposition,’’ or ‘‘ethos.’’ Equally troubling is the idea that the poem’s ambiguities force us to confront two audiences: the Franciscan...