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

In his opening acknowledgments, Arvind Thomas notes that his book took many years to write, a fact made evident in the title's combination of Piers Plowman and medieval Church law. William Langland's Piers Plowman is a notoriously difficult text to read, and even more difficult to explicate. Compound that difficulty with the erudition needed to consider Church (or canon) Law as well, and the proposed task becomes a formidable one. I was, therefore, not surprised that this book took several years to write. After reading his deeply learned exposition on the conversation between Langland's poem and canon law, the surprise is that he accomplished so much in so little time.

Unlike many studies of Piers Plowman (which comes down to us in three, maybe four, distinct versions) Thomas's study considers two versions, the B version and the C version, in order to hear not only the dialogue between the two versions but also their engagement with canon law's evolving teaching on an important clutch of issues. While scholarship concerning the semantic, structural, and ideological exchanges between late-fourteenth-century English law and literature has been rather robust of late—with an increasing number of articles and books, along with the recently released Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature—most scholarship has considered the role of manorial and royal law. Late-medieval literature's engagement with canon law, however, has not received due consideration. Scholars of medieval literature seldom dip a toe in ecclesiastical law; even fewer immerse themselves as thoroughly as Thomas has. The resulting monograph is a marvel of deep scholarship and provocative risk taking. Not only does it take readers on a tour of the evolving positions found in canonical law and Langland's evolving conversation with them, it also suggests that Langland's verse offers correctives to that ecclesiastical law.

Reminding us that, in the fourteenth century, canon law was neither fixed nor closed but an open and "dynamic method of constituting" norms (12), Thomas introduces us to its modes of dialectical interpretation enshrined in the scholastic precept "differences are not contradictions" (diversa sunt, non adversa). Together, these modes create a hermeneutic of continuous interpretation, a way of understanding shared by literary texts such as the B and C incarnations of Piers Plowman. Thomas begins by establishing the physical and conceptual proximity shared by Piers Plowman and canonical treatises, explaining that the two sets of texts shared "a community of concepts," especially regarding the basic stages of penitential practice: contrition, confession, restitution, and satisfaction (6). By focusing on this narrow band of concepts, Thomas traces the poem's "range of critical and creative approaches to canon law" across Version B to Version C (9). Moreover, he brings to the fore the ways literary elements—such as Langland's decision to write in both English and Latin—inform and construct law and justice. Ultimately, the book argues that Piers Plowman's versions reinvent canon law in two ways: by embedding elements of canon law and attributing those statements to characters, and by allowing characters to mobilize "modes of legal thought in novel ways or for novel ends." That is, Piers Plowman creatively deploys canon law in a poetic context that reflects the canonists' own dialectic techniques.

Because Thomas limits his study to the penitential process, he therefore focuses on those passuses invoking these steps: Mede's contrition, Covetise's confession, Repentaunce's call for restitution, and Wrong's satisfaction. Then, patiently and thoroughly, he attends to and elucidates the dialectic between the B and C versions of each selected passage, as well as Piers Plowman's engagement with evolving canonical thought. Ultimately, Thomas concludes, Piers Plowman energizes a "poetics of shaping the law by courting and contesting the received canonist thought" (235).

Realizing that he is inviting readers to overhear a conversation (among the multiple versions of...