Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages by Arvind Thomas (review)

In Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law, Arvind Thomas examines the B and C versions of Langland’s poem and the treatment of penance in medieval canon law as two open, dynamic, and evolving textual corpora. Noting that scholars of Piers Plowman have often traced Langland’s quotations back to their origins in, for example, the writings of Augustine, Thomas directs attention instead to the more immediately contemporary sources for Langland’s thinking about penance in texts such as Gratian’s Decretum, Raymond of Peña-fort’s Summa de paenitentia, and William of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis. But he also seeks to question the conventional hierarchical relationship between source text and literary work, arguing that the poem not only invokes or reproduces but also reinterprets and transforms these materials. Piers Plowman therefore participates with the treatises, Thomas argues, in producing “the discourse of canon law” (22). In a further claim, Thomas proposes that the C version (traditionally assumed to be Langland’s final revision but here approached with a fashionable agnosticism as merely one variant form) “exhibits a sharper or more substantial engagement and enrichment of canon law than does B” (20).

Thomas is most compelling in his first chapter, which brings the corrupted or failed confessions of Meed (in passus 3) and Contrition (in B 20/C 22) into dialogue with the “contritionist procedures” set out by Raymond of Peñafort and others (35). This material on the proper conduct of confessions will be familiar in a general way to readers of Piers Plowman who have any knowledge of the many pastoral texts in the tradition of Raymond’s work, but Thomas’s detailed comparison of the poem with the treatises nevertheless brings into fresh view just how audacious a travesty Meed’s performance of penance really is. The “penitent” here usurps the role of the confessor (Meed gives the friar a little lecture about lechery) while the confessor adopts the “mildness of speech” proper to the penitent (42, 49). Thomas generally does not offer the treatises as direct sources in the conventional sense, but I found it easy to believe that Langland recalled Raymond’s warning that sins should not be confessed in haste “as money-changers count coins” when he described “the swift exchange of a coin (‘noble’) between Mede and the confessor” (44).

The subsequent chapters move from the practice of confession to more abstract and theoretical matters such as the prohibition of usury (chapter 2), the necessity of restitution (chapter 3), and the computation of penances (chapter 4). However, these discussions of the various treatises feel increasingly remote from the text of Piers Plowman. In chapter 2, for example, Thomas argues that Conscience’s newly expanded critique of Meed in passus 3 of the C version “adapt[s] concepts of credit, time, risk, and doubt used by canonists to theorize usury lurking behind credit sales such as advance (‘pre manibus’) payments” (93). But in order to claim that Langland had in mind here the canonists’ argument that loans on fungibles were unjust, Thomas must claim that Meed’s gifts of rings and gold cups “are fungibles as they are all expressible in terms of number, or weight, or measure” (102), a kind of special pleading that seems to come from the Rudy Giuliani school of jurisprudence. The comparison in the same chapter with Hostiensis’ discussion of conditional fiefs (104–105) is more persuasive, given that Conscience actually uses the same analogy (C.3.315–323, Piers Plowman: The C Version, 1997).

In chapter 3, Thomas’s effort to elaborate the “canonistic grounds” (118) for the poet’s invention similarly strains against the more obvious meaning of the text. Here, he argues that in employing a maxim from canon law (“Numquam dimittitur peccatum nisi restituatur ablatum”) as part of the confession of Covetise in C 6, Langland “reinvents” “canonist thinking [. . .] by placing or recognizing limits upon the pope...