Beyond Reformation? An Essay on William Langland’s Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity by David Aers (review)

Long-time fans of the work of David Aers (this reviewer included) might be puzzled with the form, content, and composition of this, the latest of his many works on Piers Plowman. Aers often writes conversationally, sometimes in fragments, in a rhetorical mode more suited to lecture than to a critical monograph. Such a style, with its jarring voicing, struggles to capture the sympathy and concern of the reader. The book has no chapters nor headings but is divided into passūs like the poem itself, yet it does not address the poem’s passūs in any corresponding way (focusing primarily on the end of the poem in its C-text form), and thus the structure strikes readers as yet one more rhetorical idiosyncrasy if not an indulgence. The title refers to the so-called Donation of Constantine, a forged document granting the medieval Church temporal powers—an event lamented by Langland, Dante, and other poets who condemn it as the origin of Simony and of the church’s worldly ambitions. The essay intends to contextualize Langland’s poem in Reformation history more astutely and sensitively than some other historians have done by examining the complex ways that the poet meditates on papal authority and royal power. Aers reveals how the poem ponders “the disastrous consequences of Constantinian Christianity” in ways that contribute “to our growing understanding of the ironies in the neo-Wyclifite reformation of Constantinianism.” For Langland’s “critical speculation” about disendowment into the hands of lay elites, continues Aers, would become an actual “historical event in sixteenth-century England with Henry VIII, and then his daughter Elizabeth, as the new Constantine” (82). Aers questions how Lollardy should be understood in the narrative of religious history, challenging James Simpson’s distinction between reform and revolution. Receiving harsher critique, Eamon Duffy, author of The Stripping of the Altars, is accused of showing “nothing but condescension and scorn” for pre-reformation Christians. And Aers takes both men to task for their failures “to find any spiritual, theological, and political vitality among any Wycliffites (also known as Lollards)” (xiii). These controversies, handled somewhat roughly, as it were, freight the book with remains of long-standing battles that readers may not be privy to. Nonetheless Simpson has graciously penned a laudatory blurb on the book’s jacket.

Some confusion about audience arises as Aers enfolds the poem into theological history, offering fleeting references to Mennonite theologians, Joachim of Fiore, Marsilius of Padua, William Ockham, and even to Pope John Paul II. Aers speaks affectionately in the acknowledgements of teaching graduate courses at the Divinity School of Duke University, and this essay appears to be written with those students in mind. The desire to serve this audience, which Aers imagines, no doubt correctly, as steeped in theological history but ignorant of Middle English, makes the book of considerable less interest to Piers Plowman scholars. To target a non-literary audience, Aers provides translations from George Economou’s translation of the C version of Piers, and yet he points out that the Wycliffites were also called “Lollards,” something one would imagine theologians would already know. Perhaps with such glosses he intends to address non-medievalists, but the entire enterprise of audience for this essay is muddled and inconsistent. One jacket blurb calls the book “completely accessible,” which is not true unless one sports an encyclopedic knowledge of Aquinas and reads (the often untranslated) Latin better than (the always translated) Middle English. That such a blurb comes from a Yale professor of religious studies, bound to a particular sense of accessibility, reveals much. At its best, for those in religious studies wanting to ponder Piers Plowman in European religious history, this essay may open some eyes or inspire some affirmative nodding.

But reading the essay is nothing less than a chore, and Aers’s basic rhetoric contributes mightily to...