Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature by Rebecca Davis (review)

Classroom discussion of Middle English literature may often be enriched by exploration of the word kynde, a word whose primary senses were mostly taken over by the French loan nature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leaving the modern noun and adjective with such attenuated meanings as "type" and "nice," respectively. In coming to see these modern senses of kind as semantic outcroppings of a submerged mother lode, students obtain insight into the processes of language change and obtain a linguistic entrée into thinking about material existence and moral responsibility. Readers of William Langland's Piers Plowman encounter kynde in its full range of "natural" senses, plus one provocative sense apparently unique to this poem: early in the third vision, the character Wit states, in definitional mode, that "Kynde" is "creatour · of alle kynnes þinges / Fader and fourmour · of al þat euere was maked / And þe gret god · þat gynnynge had neuere / Lorde of lyf and of lyƷte · of lysse and of peyne" (I quote from The B-Version Archetype, ed. John Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre [2014]). Thus, kynde = God, at least for Langland's Wit. Wit's peculiar usage is duly recorded in the Middle English Dictionary (s.v., sense 8c), and in George Kane's and A. V. C. Schmidt's glossaries to Langland's poem, and it underwrites Rebecca Davis's new book, "Piers Plowman" and the Books of Nature.

Davis's titular "Books of Nature" are, in the first place, the twelfth-century Neo-Platonist personification allegories featuring Natura as demiurge: the Cosmographia of Bernard Silvestris and the De Planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille. These works and their tradition are passed in review in Davis's Chapter 1. It seems that a note by A. V. C. Schmidt pointed Davis down this path. In his singlevolume edition of the B Text, Schmidt glosses Wit's Kynde as "Nature's creator [sic], natura naturans, not created Nature, natura naturata" (quoted by Davis at pp. 8 and 113; Schmidt corrects his rendering of natura naturans in the three-volume parallel-text edition). The naturans/naturata distinction was established by the scholastics in the thirteenth century and appears, intriguingly, in Robert Grosseteste's Château d'Amour, a work that Langland knew. (See Davis's too-brief discussion of Grosseteste, pp. 113–19.) Langland might also have known Alan's De Planctu, and probably did know Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose and Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, works that would have supplied precedent for his varied personifications of Nature/Kynde, though not for Wit's affirmation that Kynde is God.

Wit's notion of Kynde is truly strange: one should probably recall that Wit himself represents (and enacts) undisciplined, free-form intellection. Dame Study, Wit's wife, famously shuts this discourse down at the opening of the next passus; this, and subsequent developments, suggest that Wit's statements should probably be considered his productions, not necessarily authoritative. Early in her study, Davis aptly remarks that "[i]n assigning Kynde's introduction to Wit, Langland announces Kynde's status as an invention, a figure of understanding" (p. 17). In her Chapter 2, the main discussion of these issues, Davis nevertheless reads Wit's discourse straight, assigns his words to the poet, and flattens the discursive texture of the poem: "Langland insists that God creates 'wiþouten any mene' (B.9.34). In Wit's introduction of Kynde as '[f]ader and formour,' Langland's God becomes the direct cause of creation" (p. 87), she writes. One may note, parenthetically, that Langland's glossators and the Middle English Dictionary fall into the same trap, taking Wit's idiosyncratic identification of Kynde to establish a distinct lexicographical sense of this word. With the intriguing exception of the C-Version speech of Imaginatif, each of the later instances of kynde adduced in Kane's Glossary under the...