An Introduction to Piers Plowman by Michael Calabrese (review)

Michael Calabrese's An Introduction to Piers Plowman, newly released in a paperback edition, is committed to two dauntingly ambitious propositions: that Piers Plowmanshould be a staple of the undergraduate classroom at all kinds of institutions, not just the most elite ones, and that the poem should be taught with close attention to Langland's revision process across the A, B, and C texts of the poem. That the book's aspirations pay off so richly is a testament to the verve, grace, and passion of its author as a scholar and teacher. At the same time, his success in this book will no doubt further realize his ambitions as it inspires others to teach the poem, in all of its complexity, to a range of undergraduates.

Calabrese's Introductionjoins an increasingly crowded field of handbooks to the poem. This includes edited collections by John Alford ( A Companion to Piers Plowman[California, 1988]) and more recently by Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway ( The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman[Cambridge, 2014]). In the category of stand-alone guides, James Simpson's classic Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-text(Longman, 1990) has subsequently been joined by Anna Baldwin's A Guidebook to Piers Plowman(Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and Emily Steiner's Reading Piers Plowman(Cambridge, 2013). Calabrese's work most resembles Simpson and Steiner in offering a detailed running commentary on the whole text of the poem, while adopting some of the most useful features of the study guide genre represented by Baldwin's Guidebook. Calabrese's Introductionsurpasses previous guides in directing sustained attention to the C-text and bringing the recent critical turn toward careful consideration of the poet's revision process (an approach exemplified by Sarah Wood's Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman[Oxford, 2012]) into the classroom.

Like a skilled teacher, Calabrese does not entirely remove disorientation from the experience of reading, allowing students to encounter the poem in all of its complexity and contradiction. But also like a great teacher, he continually focuses readers' attention on important points and running themes—for example, how the Haukin episode recalls, through the trope of bread and baking, earlier episodes with Hunger and the half-acre (p. 183). Throughout, Calabrese strikes a nice balance between summary and commentary; while particular issues clearly interest him (class politics, marriage and sexuality, the negotiation of religious difference), this does not overwhelm a largely diplomatic reading of the poem's more controversial points. Calabrese's guidance is especially welcome in the later passūs, as the vivid (and more easily teachable) events of the Visiofall away and readers become entangled in some of the poem's most difficult questions of learning and knowledge. Here Calabrese is a reassuring guide, clearing a path through the poem's densest thickets. While the book is never remedial or watered-down, student readers (and perhaps also their teachers) will appreciate the book's features for classroom use: a list of characters; a chronology and biography of the poet; an annotated bibliography of editions of the poem and reference works; brief summaries of the poet's literary sources and works by Langland's contemporaries; and, finally, a pronunciation guide (in a wonderfully inclusive move, pitched toward native speakers of Spanish, pp. 310–11).

Calabrese never wavers in his conviction of the poem's relevance to the concerns of twenty-first century undergraduates. Yet his frequent references to pop culture (the Beatles are a favorite touchstone) at times unintentionally highlight the timelessness of the poem in contrast to the ephemeral nature of pop culture, reminding us that today's pop songs are tomorrow's footnotes. More curiously, despite the book's stated hope that Langland might soon rival Chaucer in the canon of Middle English literature (p. xxx), he seems to assume that students have already encountered the latter's works, as when he asks them...