Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry

Chapter Four: Transforming Work

four | Transforming Work The Reformation and the Piers Plowman Tradition Thus far, this study has argued that the history of pastoral belongs properly to a history of “writing rural labor.” Such a history must take into account not only specific changes in how rural laborers might be represented—the distinguishing characteristics of shepherds, for example, which were discussed in chapters 2 and 3—but also shifts in what I’ve been calling the symbolic imagination around rural labor: that is, how and what rural labor can mean. The sixteenth century witnessed a momentous disruption in that symbolic imagination during the Reformation in the struggle over the religious significance of “works,” with which rural labor had long been associated. To investigate that struggle, this chapter must momentarily set the pastoral mode aside and concentrate on its alter ego—the Piers Plowman tradition—which haunted the English pastoral from the beginning. Nevertheless, an implicit argument about the pastoral guides this reading: that the Reformation redefinition of “works” helped, however indirectly, to make the new pastoral mode intelligible, even possible. Works played a vital role in Reformation debates: the central doctrine of justification by faith alone meant the subordination of works to faith.1 Yet the extent to which this shift in doctrine (the meaning of 111 works) caused a shift in how labor was viewed (the meaning of work) during the sixteenth century is still an open question. Max Weber famously argued that the Puritan position on works had consequences for how we understand work, or “worldly activity,” but he located that transformation in the seventeenth century.2 Scholars of the sixteenth century have, in contrast, typically held religion and labor (indeed most economic questions) separate, claiming that Tudor texts demonstrate a radical religious reformism and a conservative social vision. In his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R. H. Tawney writes, That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was torn by religious dissensions more acute than ever before, may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of its history. But differences of social theory did not coincide with differences of religious opinion, and the mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Germany and in England, is its conservatism.3 More recently, Andrew McRae has noted that sixteenth-century complaint literature, much of it in the “plowman tradition,” such as Hugh Latimer’s “Sermon on the Plowers,” “conflates a radical religious agenda with an essentially conservative socio-economic vision.”4 Two assumptions guide this perspective: first, that the Protestantism of mid-sixteenth-century texts is entirely uniform and internally consistent, and second, that the direction of influence runs from religious belief to social/economic views and not vice versa. Both assumptions are problematic. First, the Reformation was not a switch, by which Protestant beliefs were “turned on” in a sudden and radical break with the past. One must rather speak of “reformations” or a process of transformation.5 Second, as Tawney himself noted, the mid-sixteenth century was characterized by a striking simultaneity of changes, making it difficult to sort out causal relationships between religious and social views.6 In short, we cannot assume that these texts “do” what they say they are doing—whether insisting on the traditional social order or on new religious beliefs. That the relationship between religious belief and socioeconomic views was complicated in this period is apparent in some of the most 112 Transforming Work popular examples of complaint literature: texts in the Piers Plowman tradition. These include editions of William Langland’s latefourteenth -century poem, Piers Plowman, which was printed three times by Robert Crowley (1550) and once by Owen Rogers (1561); imitations of Langland, such as “I playne Piers which cannot flatter” (?1547), Pyers plowmans exhortation, vnto the lordes, knightes and burgoysses of the Parlyamenthouse (1550), and A godly dialogue and dysputacyon between Pyers plowman, and a popysh preest (1550); and finally, the pseudoChaucerian Plowman’s Tale (printed in Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s poetry in 1542).7 At first glance, these texts fit the pairing described above: social conservatism and Protestantism. That is, all insist upon the traditional three-estate structure and its mutuality; they also align themselves with the “new” religious beliefs or lament that reform is not moving quickly enough. But the oddity of choosing Piers to represent this particular relationship should...