The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman ed. by Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (review)

This collection fulfills what Langlandians have increasingly recognized as a pressing need: it assesses, in a single compact volume, the current state of scholarly efforts to understand Piers Plowman. Informative and insightful essays under the rubrics “The Poem and Its Traditions,” “Historical and Intellectual Contexts,” and “Readers and Responses” are accompanied by a chronology (of political events, historical events used to date the poem, and important moments in the lives of major fourteenth-century authors), a map of late fourteenth-century London, and a bibliography of further reading keyed to individual chapters. By its publication in a Companion series, the collection consciously positions itself to stand beside and to update significantly John Alford’s 1988 Companion to Piers Plowman.

Part I (“The Poem and Its Traditions”) offers four essays that in different ways give readers some purchase on the features of Piers Plowman that make it uniquely difficult. In “Major Episodes and Moments in Piers Plowman B,” Helen Barr introduces the complex relationships that connect the poem’s different episodes (for example, the Mede sequence establishes the poem’s recurring interest in material and spiritual recompense/reward; the Atonement sequence at the poem’s climax looks back to the pardon impasse and the trial of Wrong at the conclusion of the Mede episode). Ralph Hanna’s “The Versions and Revisions of Piers Plowman” then turns to the complexity of the poem’s plurality of forms. Describing the differences between the A, B, and C traditions, this essay, like Barr’s, will be especially useful to new readers of the poem, but Hanna also offers food for thought to scholars and teachers by assessing the value of parallel-text editions in relation to separate A, B, and C volumes. Hanna notes that while parallel texts aid comparison of versions, separate volumes provide a window into Langland’s compositional method, clarifying the necessity for both publication formats. The third essay in this section, Steven Justice’s “Literary History and Piers Plowman,” highlights the way that Langland’s poem fails to conform to standard narratives of English literary history by repeatedly convincing readers “that it has no part in such a history, that it is something more than art” (p. 51). Justice argues that Langland’s use of formal literary techniques to create this effect may in fact be his poem’s greatest legacy. (Elsewhere Justice has discussed Chaucer’s “history-effect”; here he suggests that it is actually something that Chaucer learned from Langland.) Part I concludes with Jill Mann’s “Allegory and Piers Plowman,” which situates the poem in relation to the allegorical traditions available to Langland. This positioning highlights the complexity of Langlandian allegory, in which “allegorical personifications and metaphorical motifs are combined with typology in fluid and shifting configurations” (p. 71).

Part II (“Historical and Intellectual Contexts”) opens with Robert Adams’s “The Rokeles: An Index for a ‘Langland’ Family History,” which asks readers to take seriously the possibility that the author of Piers Plowman belonged to the prominent and affluent Rokele family, as is suggested by an inscription in the Trinity College Dublin manuscript. The chapter concludes with a selective index of documentary evidence of the Rokele family network. The next two chapters think through the poem in terms of Langland’s interest in contemporary institutions. James Simpson (“Religious Forms and Institutions in Piers Plowman”) and Matthew Giancarlo (“Political Forms and Institutions in Piers Plowman”) argue that for Langland the individual self/soul, despite its creative and potentially reformist conscience, is fundamentally dependent upon, constrained by, and defined by and against powerful institutions (for Simpson, the Catholic church; for Giancarlo, secular government). Together these essays reconcile Piers Plowman’s double interest in reforming the self and reforming institutions: for reasons these chapters illuminate, neither enterprise can occur without the other. “Christian Philosophy...