A Companion to Piers Plowman ed. by John A. Alford (review)

REVIEWS JOHN A. ALFORD, ed. A Companion to Piers Plowman. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xii, 286. $32.50. In this new book John Alford has supplied a much-needed guide to the problems and contexts of Piers Plowman, arguably the most difficult poem of the English Middle Ages. Like Piers, the book is arranged in trinities: three sections of three chapters each. The first, "PiersPlowmanand the Late Middle Ages," contains essays on the design of the poem byJohn Alford, on its historical context by Anna Baldwin, and on Langland's theology by Robert Adams. The second section, "Generic Influences on Piers Plowman," focuses on allegorical visions (Stephen Barney), on satire (John Yunck), and on medieval sermons (Siegfried Wenzel). The final section, "The Text and Language of Piers Plowman," offers essays on the text by George Kane, on the dialect and grammar of the poem by M. L. Samuels, and on alliterative style by David Lawton. In conception these trinities are certainly not a progression from Do-well to Do-best; rather the design seems to proceed from the least to the most specialized. The three sections in turn are symmetrically bracketed by Anne Middleton's Prologue on the history of Piers criticism and Anne Hudson's Epilogue on the influence of Piers. This is an all-star lineup: all the contributors are leading experts on their areas, and some of them have done groundbreaking work on the poem. Each of their eleven essays concludes with a lengthy and useful bibliography on its own subject. The Companion seems intended for an audience well advanced in medieval studies, especially graduate students, for whom it is likely to become a vade mecum. Even specialists will benefit from its up-to-date summaries of recent research. None of the many passages in the poem's difficult Middle English, however, and very few of the citations in Latin are translated. The essays of part III are often quite technical. Hence under­ graduates are likely to profit most from Alford's perceptive "interpretive summary" (which is also a structural analysis) of the poem and from Anna Baldwin's examination of the fourteenth-century historical context. Bald­ win focuses on the poem's intersection with the feudal system, the prob­ lems of agricultural labor (especially as a consequence of the Black Death), the Peasant's Revolt, the Wycliffite movement, the conflict of secular and 89 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ecclesiastical authorities over properties and rent, the Hundred Years' War, and England's unstable governance and kingship. In his fine survey of"Langland'sTheology," RobertAdamsdeals first with three traditionally controversial questions about the drift of Langland's thought. IsPiers's central concern theredemption ofsociety or theredemp­ tion ofthe individual? IsPiersa poem aboutthe way to perfection orsimply the way to salvation? Is Langland's approach to God mainly "vertical" or "horizontal," the mystic's ascent beyond time, or the prophet's pilgrimage through time? Then Adams turns to more recently controversial topics: Langland's theology ofGrace (and his semi-Pelagianism, a topic on which Adams has done pioneering work); Langland's attitude toward the sacra­ ments, especially baptism and penance; and Langland's apocalypticism. Finally, the chapter summarizes Langland's theological sources and paral­ lels among monastic writers, the moderni, and Wyclif and his followers. Stephen Barney's chapter on "Allegorical Visions" studies the traditions of allegory and visionary literature in biblical, prophetic visions, in the Apocrypha, in the platonic tradition of Macrobius, Boethius, Martianus Capella, and Bernard Sylvestris; in French literature; and in English liter­ ature before Langland. John Y unck surveys the sources and traditions behind Langland's satire in estates literature, Menippean satire, and the medieval sermon, as well as in fourteenth-century satirical writers ofpoems and drama. He locates the "spiritual intertext" and the ethical interests of fourteenth-century satire in the great religious renewal that began in the thirteenth century with the Fourth Lateran Council, the rise ofthe mendi­ cant orders, and the institutionalization of the universities. The gem of the section on generic influences, however, comes from Siegfried Wenzel, on medieval sermons. His survey ofscholarship on both sermon content and sermon form is excellent...