Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition by Helen Barr (review)

REVIEWS Baker's account of the possible theological influences and connections is set out fairly and clearly, and her study will be of use to all but the most specialist readers. Despite the abstruseness of some of the material, the book is written with exceptional clarity in good English-something worth congratulating in modern academe. Baker guides her reader towards an informed understanding ofhow Julian ofNorwich, without controvert­ ing theological orthodoxy, extends its understandings by the transforma­ tive shifts of emphasis that her visions and revisions enable her and her readers to see. BARRY WINDEATT Emmanuel College, Cambridge HELEN BARR. Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition. Piers Plowman Studies, vol. 10. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Pp. x, 188. $63.00. Those who welcomed Helen Barr's admirable edition of Pierce the Plow­ man's Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Crowned King (in The Piers Plowman Tradition [London: J.M. Dent; Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1993]) will also welcome the present volume, al­ though surely not at its exorbitant price. Building on its predecessor's careful textual work, it explores far more fully than its predecessor could how these highly political poems relate with each other and with the poem that inspired them, Piers Plowman. As its inclusion in a series much con­ cerned with linguistic matters implies, it treats the poems' distinctive use of language. But it comes at a time when we tend to explain such use politically, andMs. Barr superbly does just this. Her findings will likely long dominate discussion of these poems. Barr presents these findings in five main sections. The first, "Locating Tradition," argues the usefulness of the label "Piers Plowman tradition" as applied to these four poems in particular. The second, "Reading Tradition," explores the poems' concern with "right reading" in relation to the various kinds of wrong reading practiced by certain established institutions. The third, central section, "Signes and Sothe," considers the poems' "call for a transparent, monosemic use of language" (p. 53) in relation to their liking for the kinds of wordplay that characterize Piers Plowman. The fourth sec173 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tion, "'Signes of the times': Contesting Sothe," considers how Pierce the Plowman's Crede and Mum and the Sothsegger respond to ecclesiastical mea­ sures that increasingly sought to control what might and might not be discussed. And the fifth, "Legal Fictions," considers the poems' sometimes pervasive legal diction and how this helps define a truth-telling poetic. As Barr points out (pp. 93-94), it would be easy to dwell on the incompatibil­ ity between the poems' mission to speak the truth unequivocally and their playful verbal texture. She is more concerned to reconcile these features, however, by considering how these poems finally try to demonstrate "a right use of the manipulation of linguistic resources" (p. 168). The above sketch does little justice to the intricacy of Barr's argumenta­ tion and none at all to her penetrating discussion of the individual texts. But it can suggest something of her approach. She shows well how the poems she is mainly concerned with developed from the kind of reforming discourses represented by Piers Plowman but in times when the significance of such discourses was changing. As is well known, in the earliest of these poems, Pierce the Plowman's Crede, the result is overtly Lollard. Barr goes well beyond previous commentators, however, in the degree to which she also decodes the slightly later Mum and the Sothsegger as Lollard in its sympathies. She also shows well how the other two poems, while not themselves dealing with issues the Lollards made their own, deploy a dis­ course very similar to that ofthe Lollards. And she suggestively touches on what could happen when counterdiscourses resembling those of these poems give rise to further counterdiscourses-in the poem R. H. Robbins entitled Defend us from all Lollardry, for example, which Barr plausibly suggests exists in discursive symmetry with Pierce the Plowman's Crede (p. 111). Given that Barr does such a good job of considering the Lollard reso­ nances ofthese works, one might regret that she has not more fully consid...