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

Most readers will need some context to appreciate this study, with its seemingly niche focus on church law and its “reinvention” in the later 14^th-century English poetic allegory Piers Plowman. One way to set the stage might be this. Medieval Christian church law has its clearest foundation and articulation in the series of 12^th-, 13^th-, and 14^th-century compendia of old texts and authoritative snippets on the moral principles and divine law that should govern the priestly caste as well as the laity, insofar as the activities of either fall under the categories of the sacraments, the qualifications of the clergy, and the practices risking deadly sin. These weighty books, probably inspired by the recent rediscovery and consolidation of ancient Roman “civil” law (which itself influenced much secular contract and property law), were initially launched with the Decretum compiled c. 1140 by the monk Gratian, followed by commentaries and a series of other authoritative collections commissioned by popes through the following centuries, all aimed at telling the clergy how to bring Christian souls to salvation amid the mortal coils of this world, including the complexities of marriage contracts, penance, usury (and other ill-gotten gains), simony (the commodifying of spiritual goods), and other topics arising from the aspiration of salvation amid humanity’s imperfect condition of sinful desires and private ownership, as well as the condition of slavery and serfdom (although natural law, as Gratian emphasized at the outset, recognized neither servitude nor private ownership). Church law possessed a more international character than any secular legal systems, with its own jurisdictions and courts, but its scope spilled into secular life and literature in many ways. In England, canon law was not only elaborated (as throughout Christendom) by academic Latin glosses and treatises and sermons, on usury and other topics, but also reframed in confessional guides for parish priests and (often university-trained) friars who regularly intervened in pastoral labors. For example, an early 14^th-century rector in Berkshire, William of Pagula, produced a series of handy summaries and elaborations of topics from the canonists tailored for the working priest. French and English poems were composed for and sometimes by canons and priests directly involved in “handling sin,” to evoke the title of the Middle English poem Handlyng Synne by Robert Mannyng, an expanded translation of the late 13^th-century Anglo-Norman Manuel de pechez.

As long recognized, a large part of Piers Plowman’s literary and intellectual matrix derives from the pastoral level of such materials. In Piers, for instance, the Sins themselves strive to confess to Repentance, with predictably futile but entertaining results. The Sins’ self-indicting statements directly but implicitly respond to the questions found in confessors’ guides. It is also clear, however, that Piers Plowman’s intellectual subtlety and depth go much further upstream in educated and legal learning than this. Many inquiries into its theological, grammatical, and secular legal diction, satire, and allegory have contributed to understanding how subtly Piers Plowman engages both learned and less learned audiences.

But no one has previously demonstrated the poem’s pervasive debts to the higher end of canon law noted above, the sprawling panoply of decretal texts and commentaries, and the often technical focuses and presumptions they encompass. Arvind Thomas skillfully positions Piers Plowman amid a number of the canonists’ terms and topics to treat those as both general sources and parallel instances of canonical thinking. That last claim is particularly striking. Thomas shows not only that Piers Plowman invokes, often by silent implication, key concerns of canon law — especially gradations of usury, restitution of ill-gotten gains, and canonists’ criteria for penance in general — but also that the poem approaches such issues as open questions, to be adapted and resolved in ways often quite different from canonists’ emphases, and explicitly applied to non-clerical venues. Thus when Piers Plowman’s author has Conscience associate...