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  • Beyond Reformation: An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity by David Aers
  • Gaelan Gilbert
David Aers. Beyond Reformation: An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Pp. xix + 256. isbn: 9780268020460. US$35.00 (paper).

David Aers's self-described "somewhat idiosyncratic little book" is a riveting personal exploration of Piers Plowman (C-text) that responds with depth and ingenuity to literary-historical and secularization grand narratives about late-medieval and early modern England. The organization of the book is at first mystifying, split into seventeen untitled sections, but the reader ultimately sees the logic insofar as the recursive nature of Aers's analysis demands a certain aloofness from the petri-dish of narrative detail in order to delineate patterns of topical structuring. Over the course of the study, Aers gradually tightens his focus on a semilinear network of ideas within Langland's shape-shifting poem, boldly attempting to trace and connect congealing vectors of imagined community. The mode of his argument is accretive, but reinforced by a sort of backward reading (25, 28) that recalibrates early forms and figures in light of later ones, assuming the necessity—as in scriptural exegesis—of rereading. There are few who know Piers better than Aers, and it is a thrill to move through its episodes with his expert guidance. In what follows, I will try to sketch the larger outlines of his analysis, with moments of reflection on both revelations and contradictions, taking the latter term as another way of describing the dialectical movement of progression that Aers identifies in Piers itself. [End Page 105]

As any coherent account of the poem must be, Aers's argument depends complexly on the "dialectical process" of Piers, which nonetheless has a "teleology" (99) toward Christ. Like Norm Klassen's recent study of The Canterbury Tales contends of Chaucer, drawing analogously on Dostoevsky's dialogic polyphony, so Aers says that Langland writes "multimodal, dramatic, lyrical, adventurous" poetry, which moves "by exploring a range of positions and their consequences" (98).1 Even more than Chaucer, Langland does so with particular energy and the rapid accumulation of adjacent, juxtaposed perspectives and voices. Aers's deft navigation of repeated terms in the poem presupposes an immense indexical mastery of colloquies and contexts across wide expanses of narrative, channeling streams of "sentence" as he does from the poem's conversational cataracts. In short, Aers's own method mimics Langland's, though the seventeen Passus of Beyond Reformation seem a humble deference to Langland's twenty-two.

One result of this methodological mimicry is that Aers depends to a great extent on the centrifugal momentum of Langland's poem for moving his own argument along. The poem's path, of course, is jagged and rollicking, sometimes accelerating through ideational landscapes and at other times slowing for roadside (or tableside) discussions. Every good tour guide knows that pausing for a closer look is sometimes apropos. Aers does so, to the relative neglect of large swathes of Piers, at two key Passus clusters: VII–IX and XIX–XXII. These Passus provide in differing fashions sustained explorations of community formation, each deploying metaphorical imagery that develop an implicit relationship between agrarian work and Christian spirituality. In VII and XXI especially, Aers attends carefully to the contours and characteristics of Langland's imagined intentional community, devoting the substantial core of his study to the sundry figures and forces that both constitute and interrupt genuine ecclesial Christian life. Having drawn the ideal—a formidable feat in both positive allure and acute critique—Langland nonetheless obscures his nice picture with dashes of contemporary reality. He dramatizes the corruption of the Roman Church, giving it viewable form and visceral quality.

For Piers is concerned, ultimately, with ecclesiology, but especially on the local level. Aers sensitively handles the English priest-poet's aching regard for the laity of parochial England, betrayed by their clergy and thus left beholden to their vices, despite a wealth of written resources to hand. Ellen Rentz's recent study on the medieval parish provides a nice contextual companion to...

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