ANNUAL BIBLIOGRAPHY*

1999

*The annual bibliography attempts to cover the year’s work on Piers Plowman and other didactic or allegorical poems in the alliterative tradition (e.g., Winner and Waster, Parliament of Three Ages, Death and Life, Mum and the Sothsegger, Pierce the Plowman’s Creed, Richard the Redeless, The Crowned King) but not alliterative romances or the works of the Gawain-poet. Readers are urged to send abstracts of their books and articles to the associate editor, Andrew Cole, Department of English, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602 (e-mail: awc@uga.edu).

1. Adderley, Christopher Mark. "William Langland’s Piers Plowman: Structure and Genre." Diss., University of South Florida. DAI 60 (1999): 735A

2. Astell, Ann W. Political Allegory in Late Medieval England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Chapter two, "‘Full of Enigmas’: John Ball’s letters and Piers Plowman," points to the allegorical and enigmatic aspects of Ball’s letters. These letters are likely a digest of Ball’s sermons and, as such, evince a clerical model of discourse, especially complaint verse, deploying strategies of allusion familiar both to Ball’s audiences and readers of the letters. In writing the letters, Ball borrows from the Sayings of the Four Philosophers, reworking such sentential expressions as "Might es Right," "Frend es foo," "Fyght es flight," for an agrarian activist program; he also both alludes to L’s Belling of the Cat fable and uses Hobbe the Robbere and John of Ba(n)thon as "code names" for Sir Robert Hales and John of Gaunt. Ball had not misunderstood the poem at all (as some critics maintain) but rather in his letters appropriated L’s silences, the "politically dangerous" potential of the poem. Other chapters are: Introduction; Ch. 1. The Materia of Allegorical Invention; Ch. 3. Gower’s Arion and "Cithero"; ch. 4. Chaucer’s Ricardian Allegories; ch. 5. Penitential Politics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Richard II, Richard of Arundel, and Robert de Vere; ch. 6. Joan of Arc, Margaret of Anjou, and Malory’s Guenevere at the Stake.

3. Boitani, Piero. "Tommaso: agnizione e/o fede." Lettere italiane 51 (1999): 253-65. [in Italian]

Traces the figuring of Doubting Thomas from John 20 through medieval and even some eighteenth-century literature, finding in the Gospel account a foundational linking of "seeing" with "believing" but also an ambiguity in the Greek pistis between (rational) "belief"or recognition and "faith" that Thomas seeks. Medieval commentators recognize and seek to clarify the latter ambiguity by declaring that Thomas "sees" and rationally recognizes one thing but "believes" another (Jesus’s divinity). This distinction, and its combination yet separation of faith and reason, is influential in medieval literature and drama. In PPl, the double nature of Thomas’s seeing as "recognizing" and "believing," directly presented at B.19.166 ff., correlates with the poem’s theologically careful depictions of Jesus as mysteriously double in nature, as in C.15.33 ff. and B.18/C.20. L concludes his presentation of divinity with the direct presentation of God in his full power in the Harrowing, where now divinity appears in a mode more akin to the Old Testament than the mysterious double nature of incarnate divinity in New Testament theology.

4. Bowers, John M. "Dating Piers Plowman: Testing the Testimony of Usk’s Testament." YLS 13 (1999): 65-100.

Skeat’s dating of the C text between 1385-87, widely accepted by scholars of L, derives largely from his conclusion that Usk’s Testament of Love quoted from C, and that the Testament was completed near the time of Usk’s execution in 1388. But the Testament has subsequently been more precisely dated to 1384-85 (Ramona Bressie), and the "parallels" that Skeat finds between the Testament and C are either insubstantiable or wrong: some are widely documented commonplaces; almost all are also present in B; and four appear only in B, not C. As for the similarity between PPl’s Tree of Charity and the tree of love in section III of the Testament, the various components of the two trees have different correspondences, and each image may derive from diverse sources incorporating the tree allegory, such as Anselm’s treatise on free will, De Concordia Praescientiae or The Legend of the Holy Rood. Skeat’s perception of his role as editor and annotator, "to illustrate the social condition of the English people of the past," influences his tendentious assertions of these parallels since he assumes a temporal and cultural succession from L to Usk to Chaucer, all of whom may in fact have been writing contemporaneously. Skeat’s model abets the notion of an early humanist renaissance (Chaucer) following and displacing a religiously obsessed Dark Ages (L).

5. Davies, Rees. "The Life, Travels, and Library of an Early Reader of Piers Plowman." YLS 13 (1999): 49-64.

Known to have been a reader of PPl by the bequest of a copy in his will, Walter Brugge, parson of St. Patrick’s in Trim, Ireland, and receiver-general of the vast Mortimer estates, closely resembles the profile of the poem’s audience as described by Anne Middleton ("The Audience and Public of PPl" in David A. Lawton, ed., Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background [Cambridge, 1982], 101-23, 147-54). His library suggests a clerical education with a sound grounding in theology and canon law, yet his oversight of the Mortimer estates demonstrates a shrewd financial acumen as well. His expense accounts from the years 1386-89 show that his geographical world closely mirrored that of L. He may have been acquainted with Iolo Goch, the Welsh author of an encomium on the plowman, "Ode to the Laborer," and his duties included reviewing petitions from plowmen and peasants on Mortimer lands. Living on the cultural and linguistic divide between Wales and London, and the rich and poor, Brugge provides an example of the complexity and contradictions within the readership of PPl.

6. Davis, Bryan Patrick. "As the Boke Tellith: Reading and Writing Piers Plowman in the 15th Century." Diss., Ohio State University. DAI 58 (1998): 2666.

7. Drout, Michael D. C. "Piers’s Good Will: Langland’s Politics of Reform and Inheritance in the C-Text." Essays in Medieval Studies 13 (1996): 51-59.

Early in passus eight of PPl (C text), L has his allegorical figure, Piers, prepare a will in the manner of a man going on a literal journey: "Forthy y wol ar y wende do wryte my biqueste./ In dei nomine amen: y make hit mysulue" (94-95). Piers’s will actualizes his decision to undertake the pilgrimage to Dobest; it also determines the specific disposition of his goods, narrowing a field of potential behaviors into a single social reality. A will’s efficacy is dependant upon the actions of individuals other than its maker, and the person who writes a will must take on faith the willingness of the social group to enforce his or her desires. The social group is bound to follow those desires by custom and law, but in the absence of the person leaving the bequest, such bonds can be tenuous. The successful operation of Piers’s will in C.8 demonstrates some of L’s attitudes towards social authority and illustrates the poet’s political positions in regard to the inevitable conflict between individual and social desires. Though L is clearly in favor of social reform, he argues against revolution: the poet is unwilling to change the social structure, and equally opposed to replacement of the individuals who hold positions in its existing hierarchies. L’s use of holy writ in Piers’s will also complicates the relationship. Although Piers’s command to his son to obey the biblical text would seem to ossify the existing social system, L’s example of the Pharisees raises the question of the fallibility of higher ranks. Piers thus calls the existing social structure into question in the same breath that he exhorts his son to fit into its hierarchy. Critics have called this position paradoxical, yet L’s stance on reform, hierarchy and obedience is an outgrowth of his faith in the voluntary but traditionally authoritative social bonds exemplified of the will. Though much of this clarity and faith in human communities is lost between passus eight and the poem's final apocalypticism, the depiction of Piers’s good will is one of the kernels of hope in and idealism about humans and their communities that keep L from despair.

8. Duggan, Hoyt, gen. ed. The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999-.

Accessible at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/piersmain.html. The international team of editors responsible for The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive is creating a research textbase consisting of electronic texts of all of the medieval manuscripts and sixteenth-century printed texts of PPl. PPl’s immense popularity among all classes of English readers subjected its text to massive interference and contamination with the result that it presents the most interesting textual challenge now facing students of Middle English literature. In order to produce critical editions of the three canonical versions of the poem, the team is preparing documentary editions of all fifty-six witnesses, including the hybrid scribal editions, each hypertextually linked to a color digital facsimile. The electronic texts so generated will serve as the basis for future literary and textual study as well as for analysis of late medieval paleography, codicology, dialectology, lexicography, metrics, and stylistics. The first two volumes of the Archive have been published by the University of Michigan Press on CD ROM. The first volume, March 2000, is a combined documentary and color facsimile edition of Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 201, conventionally designated with the sigil F. The second volume, December 2000, is a combined documentary/color facsimile edition of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17, prepared by Thorlac Turville-Petre and Duggan ("W,"the copy text for both K-D and Schmidt’s several editions of B).

9. Fletcher, Alan J. Preaching, Politics and Poetry in Late-Medieval England. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 1998.

Reprints essays. However, chapter 7, "Langland on Preaching," is new, discussing L’s views on longstanding themes about preaching re-popularized by Wycliffites. L appears to share common ground with the Wycliffites in his concerns about priestly hypocrisy, preaching for profit, and the (il)legitimate content of sermons. Reason’s sermon to the field of folk, which is addressed to the three estates and which is not an ad status sermon, further reveals L’s "rapprochement" with Wyclif and the Wycliffites, particularly Nicholas Hereford’s Ascension Day sermon and Wyclif’s De Blasphemia, both of which offer a program for the disendowment of the religious clergy not unlike Reason’s. And even though Reason’s remarks that "Caym shal awake" prior to a king giving the clergy a disendowing "knok" may have been cut from C owing to the "annexation of Cain to the disendowment question" in Wycliffite circles, "Reason’s sermon corresponds fairly well to what is known of Lollard preaching in practice during the early years of the movement." Chapter 8 reprints "The Social Trinity of Piers Plowman," RES 44 (1993): 1-19; see YLS 8 (1994): 221, item #23.

10. Fowler, David C. "Will’s ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua.’" YLS 13 (1999): 35-48.

The authors of the studies included in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship (Justice, Steven, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997]) all assume that the figure of Will in C.5.1-104 is intended as an autobiographical representation of L himself. An alternative reading is made possible if the revisions to the poem witnessed by BC are seen as the work of a different poet than that of A. In this model, the figure of Will from the "autobiographical" passage can be seen as a satiric representation of the A poet by the C reviser, who associates the A poet with the same idleness and feigned holiness which the A poet imputes to the beggars and "lewede ermytes" in the A prologue. The revision of the figure of Will is meant to subvert the radical ideology of the A text, at the same time that it cautions the A poet, "judge not lest that ye be judged."

11. Galloway, Andrew. "Reception and its Discontents." YLS 13 (1999): 1-6.

An introduction to the topic of the volume, reception of the poem. PPl has always imposed questions of reception, since this is at the heart of the issue of the different versions and the order in which they were composed. Foundational essays by Burrow and Middleton have set the terms for considering the poem’s style, topics, and internal audience in terms of its contemporary audience and manuscript contexts. The reception history of PPl has been most thoroughly grounded in manuscript study, though codicology is not the governing approach of many of the essays on reception history presented in this volume. Since the controversy characteristic of the poem’s scholarship imposes a degree of self-consciousness about any position, the ‘discontents’ of reception theory are not to be avoided.

12. Galloway, Andrew. "Uncharacterizable Entities: The Poetics of Middle English Scribal Culture and the Definitive Piers Plowman." SB 52 (1999): 59-87.

The appearance in recent years of several major editions of PPl and major textual studies on or relevant to PPl–including R-K; George Kane’s and Janet Cowen’s edition of Chaucer’s LGW; Ralph Hanna III’s Pursuing History; and Schmidt’s Parallel-Text Edition–allows a critical overview of some of their principles and results, especially those defining Middle English scribal characteristics and those addressing the changing nature of L’s style of composition and revision. Each of the scholars in this conspectus of recent textual work on PPl is seen to operate via a species of "profiling" that should be questioned, and the stable and separate entities that this method yields rejected or conceived more fluidly. The Athlone editors employ such "profile" textual criticism the most aggressively and eccentrically, moving from a profile of B’s author as meticulous to, in C, the work of both a zealous but obtuse "literary executor" as well as a zealous but often negligent author, entities that should instead be collapsed together; yet the Athlone editions well serve readers of the poem because these editions force readers to consider the inextricable involvement of the author and scribal culture, imposing on readers the great difficulties of distinguishing these, hence, paradoxically, the impossibility of sustaining the scribal and authorial profiles that the Athlone editions propose as their goals: "The efforts [the Athlone editions] exact from the reader, prompting that reader to contest and construct chracterizations at any given moment and on the basis of a comprehensive array of scribal and authorial evidence, stands finally as the measure of the greatness of their editorial achievement." Tracing a brief history of editorial thinking behind R-K and linking these projects and editions by means of a consideration of their profiles of the author and his scribes, the essay engages various specific points current in debate: e.g., Hanna’s rejection of a pre-C authorial version witnessed by HM MS 114 and Univ. of London S.L. MS V.88, as argued by Wendy Scase, does not fully explain the evidence, which instead points toward L’s style, displayed at every point in his writing, of doubling phrases when inserting new materials. The discussion closes with a comparison between R-K (and the Athlone project as a whole) and Schmidt’s parallel text edition, focusing on a small crux at A.1.38-39 / B.1.40-41/ C.1.38-39. Here the readings used in the Athlone editions imply a shifting profile of the author that is implausible yet usefully provocative, while Schmidt’s clear and simple solution offers PPl a chance to achieve the stability and "susceptibility for memorization" enjoyed by Chaucer, yet, by emending a reading found in all A manuscripts, contradicts Hanna’s and Kane’s evidence that A’s seven archetypes cannot be linked by any one shared error, and generally provides less compulsion to the reader to consider L’s involvement in scribal culture.

13. Green, Richard Firth. A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

The rapid spread of vernacular literacy in Ricardian England, driven by the bureaucratic and legal demands of an increasingly authoritarian central government, brought about a fundamental shift in popular attitudes to the nature of evidence and proof. The paradigm for "truth" shifts over the course of the fourteenth century from communally authenticated troth-plight to the judicially enforced written contract. By the Ricardian period, the element of fidelity to an oath becomes the essential ingredient of all ethical senses of the word. In its intellectual sense, "truth" is opposed not to error but to deceit, until by the late fourteenth century when the word begins to usurp the sense of "sooth." (The problem of indeterminacy between these meanings is most acute in PPl, where the morality of not revealing what one knows to be the "truth" is not divorced from ethical considerations.) But at the fringes of literate culture, the concept of truth had to correspond to ideal principles of fidelity to family, kindred, lord, etc. This sense lingers at least down to the Enlightenment, though increasing reliance on written records forces people to confront not only the fallibility of human memory, but the unreliability of human "trouthe." In the case of the oath, the plighting of troth imbues the word with the qualities of a piece of property, one to be guarded and defended. Oaths are solemnized by the exchange of tokens, symbolic objects, which perform a mnemonic reinforcement of the oath itself. In the fourteenth century, written charters could be invested with talismanic properties, as they replaced traditional tokens of "wed." Documents were seen to symbolize, rather than to record, the legal facts to which they attested. The translation of authority from token to parchment contributes to a demystification of tokens in general, to which Berengar’s heresy, that the eucharist symbolizes rather that consists of the body of Christ, is indebted. As evidenced by such tokens as "earnest pennies," pledged to saints in return for intercession, medieval oral culture viewed the relationship between supernatural beings and their followers in the same reciprocally contractual terms that bound earthly neighbors. This attitude informs the covenantal notion of Christ’s relationship to humanity, in which he acts as a "borowe," or as a trickster, on our behalf.

PPl B makes use of these traditions. For L, patient poverty is a positive theological virtue for which God is obliged to reward those who practice it with a place in heaven. The dreamer is obsessed with the paradox at the heart of the baptismal contract: If Dowel is not possible for sinful humanity, how can God justly enter into a contract whose fulfillment is impossible? If it is, how can salvation be denied to the virtuous unbaptised, since they go so far as to respect a contract not formally binding on them? The theology of entitlement presented by Ymaginatif is modified by Scripture’s assertion that works of charity form a condition of God’s covenant. The demonstration of Will’s faith at the end of B.18, contrasting Haukyn’s pessimism, aligns L with traditional covenentalism, as Christ’s victory restores the rights of humanity to salvation.

14. Halloran, Susan Margaret, "The Mirror Speaks: The Female Voice in Medieval Dialogue Poetry and Drama." Diss, The University of Oklahoma. DAI 60 (1999):1124A.

15. Hanna, Ralph, III. "Piers Plowman and the Radically Chic." YLS 13 (1999): 179-92.

In their study of the illustrated C text of Bodleian Library MS Douce 104 (Iconography and the Professional Reader: the Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman: see YLS 13 [1999]: 243-45, item # 40), Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres postulate a democratic, progressive politics for the production team which produced the manuscript, a claim unsupported by any evidence, and one rendered prima facie suspect by the probable colonial interests of the producers. The desire to find a progressive politics at work in the manuscript derives from a chic interest in reading medieval figures as the precursors of modernity. Kerby-Fulton’s efforts to place the manuscript in the context of the circumambient literature is commendable, but incompletely executed. In prioritizing scribal reception of the poem, both authors ignore the extent to which L’s text itself highlights certain kinds of issues and stimulates certain responses. The pursuit of an imaginary "progressive" scribe-illuminator enforces either a willed ignorance or repression of contrary evidence, making the authors complicit in the same project of censorship they claim to abhor.

16. Hazard, Mark D. "The Literal Sense and the Visionary Foundation of Experience in Late Medieval Commentary and Literature." Diss., Cornell University. DAI 59 (1999): 4423A.

17. Holsinger, Bruce W. "Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance." Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 99-141.

The alliterative poem "The Chorister’s Lament" (BL MS Arundel 292) represents an unrecognized response to PPl. In the passage at the end of Trajan’s speech (B.11.303-14), L conflates legal and musical terminologies as a strategy for reinforcing the natural authority of the liturgy, but his own performance, deleting some of the text from Psalm 46, fails to hold liturgical practice to the same standards of consistency and truth supposedly embodied in the law. In passus 5, Sloth’s lack of musical proficiency, corresponding to a lack of canonical skills, is echoed by Mum and the Sothsegger, De Veritate et Consceincia, and in the "Lament." Like L’s "solfe" (B.5.416), the muscial terminology of the "Lament" derive from the discourse of "solmization," a pedagogical method developed by the eleventh-century Benedictine Guido of Arezzo. Unlike the earlier poems, the "Lament" reacts to the liturgical representations of PPl by removing the practices of musical learning from juridical control, exposing the exercise of clerical authority as violent and unnatural. The poet of the "Lament" may have been reacting to the musical expansion at the priory of Norwich, during which secular boys were enlisted to sing in the choir, and adumbrates the emergence of Lollard polemic against liturgical excess.

18. Kane, George. "An Open Letter to Jill Mann about the Sequence of the Versions of Piers Plowman." YLS 13 (1999): 7-34.

Mann’s argument that the A text represents a "simplified version" of B carried out by a redactor for an audience of laity and "the young" fails to take into account the primarily literary evidence that demonstrates L’s sequential manner of revising from A to B to C. Latin quotations in A which do not appear in B argue against a redactor concerned to omit Latin in order to appeal to the non-literate, just as the presence of macaronics would seem to demand a knowledge of Latin to be comprehensible. Mann’s putative redactor is said to accommodate the hypothetical audience by "omission of sexual material," as well as criticism of the clergy, yet such material is well represented in A. The notion of reducing the figurative language of the poem to make it more accessible is preposterous, since A is by its genre an extended figure of thought. The difference between the A and B versions consists in topics more extensively developed, answering to conceptual growth and movement of events. Thus, the portrait of Wrath, absent from A owing to a weakened distinction between Wrath and Envy in the hamartiologies, is left to be developed in B according to estates satire of clergy and friars, and broadened to include lay instances in C. The fall of the rebellious angels, the lineage of Meed, and the relationship between Reason and Conscience all demonstrate a particularization and development carried out through progressive revision, as does the development of the thematic framework of Charity, central to B and C, out of the simple personification of Dowel in A.8.155. The A text concludes on a note of dissatisfaction with the Augustinian doctrine of predestination. L’s failure to deal adequately with this problem is solved in B, in which the triumphant Christ of passus 18 proclaims the possibility of universal salvation. C further revises on this point by pejoratively associating the doctrine of predestination with Wyclif (11.202-07). The extensive revision over the three versions result from L’s concept of the poem developing as he wrote it, having undertaken an ambitious work with no models to imitate.

19. Kelen, Sarah. "Plowing the Past: ‘Piers Protestant’ and the Authority of Medieval Literary History." YLS 13 (1999): 101-36.

PPl becomes by the sixteenth century emblematic as a native English model for satire, giving rise to a genre of Protestant plowman writings. The recognizability of the figure of Piers as a character from a centuries-old poem invests him with the authority of antiquity, mitigating the frequent charge of Protestant "newfangledness." Reprintings of Pierce the Plowman’s Creed, as well as Crowley’s edition of PPl, call attention to the preservation of archaic diction, by which obsolescent language become textual "relics," substituting Protestant veneration of the word for the corporal relics of Catholicism. In the case of I Playne Piers, the spurious claim to antiquity and the speaker’s self-identification as the "grandsire" of the contemporary puritan literary figure Martin Marprelate makes use of both the claim to antiquity and the appeal of topicality: rather than Piers being made modern by his affiliation with a contemporary polemical voice, Martin is rendered antique through his association with Piers. Crowley’s dating of PPl during the reign of Edward III seeks to imply a pair between that era and that of Edward VI as times of reformation, reinforcing his parallel between L and Wyclif.

20. Kelly, Stephen. "Hermeneutic Encounters with Piers Plowman." Diss., Queen’s University, Belfast. DAI 60 (1999): 223C.

21. Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, with Denise Despres. "Fabricating Failure: The Professional Reader as Textual Terrorist." YLS 13 (1999): 193-206.

Hanna’s review article (see no. 13) participates in the same distortion in the professional reading process as that of an unreliable medieval scribe. The errors of fact or judgment he finds in Iconography are in fact illusions created either by strategic use of suppression, ellipsis, over- hasty reading, or conflation of independent statements. Nowhere does Hanna disagree with a single one of the book’s central arguments, and he has apparently been convinced that both the Douce manuscript and its contemporary Anglo-Irish milieu are worthy of serious study. Hanna’s hostility to the book seems motivated by an English-based model of Langlandian codicology, a preference for textual culture over material culture, and a post-romantic notion of the centrality of the author in literary studies. Iconography adopts a more democratic approach, treating text and images with equal force, an approach which threatens the old critical hegemony, whose representatives want only literary writing to be creative, but who want reading(s) to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ But reading is creative, and creates cultural artifacts itself.

22. Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. "Piers Plowman." David Wallace, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 513-38.

Begins with a brief account of what is known of L’s life and a synopsis of the poem. The A-B-C model of the versions offers the best idea of the stages of composition, though no MS likely represents L’s final, or even provisional, intentions in a pure form. The Ilchester MS, preserving authorial passages from C in their pre-publication state, demonstrates that readers were eager to secure L’s material even before it was finished. The A text is more obviously rooted in a West Midlands alliterative tradition and rural perspective, and founders on questions of salvation. In B, L’s world is now firmly in London, and the revision exhibits a new audacity in political allusion and urgency in denunciation of ecclesiastical abuse. Will’s encounter with predestination in B.11 is resolved by the Bernardine image of Jesus as mother, calling all who thirst for salvation. In C, L’s latent social conservatism is more apparent, the political edge is softened, and the apocalyptic prophecy is heightened. Piers charismatic conversion to the evangelical life of holy carelessness, signaled in AB by the tearing of the pardon, is replaced by the disparagement of lollers–peasants who take on the outer garments of the contemplative life for the wrong reasons–and a description of the lunatic lollers, the only lay charismatics who can really be trusted, since no one would be tempted to emulate them. L shared with his audience a primary concern with pastoral care and the moral, social and legal issues it raised, and manuals of pastoral care provide L with both ideology and elements of plot. He seems also to have participated in some form of academic reading community, though his composition habits reflect less of dialectical systems of thought than to an older monastic habit of mind. Latin religious visionary writing, chronicles, Latin satirical literature, and early alliterative poetry–all monastic genres–had a powerful impact on him. His method of "shifting allegory" probably derives from Mechtild of Hackeborn’s Liber Specialis Gratiae, which circulated in England, and is rooted in a monastic meditative tradition of exegesis which involves loose association of symbolism, further encouraged by the development of concordances and other tools for biblical study.

23. Kimmelman, Burt. "The Language of the Text: Authorship and Textuality in Pearl, The Divine Comedy, and Piers Plowman." Albrecht Classen, ed. The Medieval Book and the Magic of Reading. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999. Pp. 123-48.

Fourteenth-century allegory, with its reliance on symmetry, conforms most suitably to a fundamental agenda of later medieval poets called "the poetics of authorship"; this poetics is a means through which poets can assert their individuality while, simultaneously, adhering to and modulating an older mandate to subsume oneself within the tradition of writerly authority. The article is premised on the idea that poets are drawn to theology and philosophy of their time, and that these are appropriated in order to assert individual authorship. The tension between literary anonymity and literary fame is grounded in Western generally and Christian specifically conceptualizations of textuality and especially in the idea of the book. Thus Pearl’s discourse is metatextual to the degree that its jewel (poem) / jeweler (poet) motif is a metaphor signifying authorship. The Divine Comedy, which actually resembles PPl more than does Pearl, asserts a protagonist who is a poet named after its author and who travels with another poet, Virgil, as he learns about the Christian dispensation and how poetry involves it, which culminates in depicting the ultimate reality of Paradiso as a single book ("volume"). PPl, likewise, carries on this central allegory by positing the eponymous character Piers as a metaphor for writing and the poem’s protagonist Will as, named after the poem’s author, a poet whose literary production is contingent on the exercise of the will (voluntas), a key issue in L’s time, and on the witnessing of divine truth, as typified in the C-text’s Harrowing of Hell episode (C.20) in which the events of Christ’s life are related by the allegorical figure Book. Discussions of pertinent medieval language theories form the context for close readings of the poems.

24. Millar, Bonnie. "The Role of Prophecy in the Siege of Jerusalem and its Analogues." YLS 13 (1999): 153-78.

The alliterative Siege, as well as other medieval accounts of the destruction of Jerusalem, derives ultimately from the account of Josephus’ The Jewish Wars but structures the portents of the destruction according to its own principles. Focusing on the disposition of the portents, Millar shows how Hegesippus’ Latin adaption of Josephus, in tandem with Josephus, inspires Higden’s account in the Polychronicon and Jacob of Voragine’s in the Legenda Aurea, as it well as the alliterative Titus and Vespasian. Each of these writers saw themselves as collectors and interpreters of oracles; the Siege poet does not merely reinterpret the portents which foreshadow the fall of Jerusalem, but positions those portents so that they build toward the climax of the poem, which depicts the Jewish people as coerced by tyrannical leaders into a deadly course of action. A comparative theory of prophecy narratives is advanced and tested against this material.

25. Moore, Stephen Gerard. "A Shifting Paradigm: The Act of Reading Actors in Medieval Allegorical Narrative." Diss., Queen’s University at Kingston. DAI 59 (1998): 2014A.

26. Muscatine, Charles. Medieval Literature, Style, and Culture: Essays by Charles Muscatine. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

Reprints essays. Those dealing with PPl are "Locus of Action in Medieval Narrative" (Romance Philology 17 [1963]: 115-22), and "Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer" (Poetry and Crisis in the Age of Chaucer, Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature 4 [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972]).

27. Pantaleo, Nicola. "The Language of Wit in Piers Plowman." Dieter Stein and Rosanna Sornicola, eds. The Virtues of Language: History in Language, Linguistics and Texts. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 87. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1998. Pp. 51-65.

Wit in PPl operates as a synonym for understanding one’s true self. Comprehension is not merely a mental fact but also the outcome of the linguistic process of verbal confrontation, as Will by stages gains knowledge or is baffled by the guide figures of Holy Chirche, Anima, Thoght, Ymaginatif and Reson. The lexeme "Wit" is polysemous within the poem, and the crowd of personifications of Wit’s various attributes leaves the reader with an ultimate feeling of intellectual frustration.

28. Papka, Claudia Rattazzi, "The Limits of Apocalypse: Eschatology, Epistemology, and Textuality in the Commedia and Piers Plowman." Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, eds. Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. 233-56.

Portions of PPl, especially its apocalyptic passages, can be read as a "fiction of judgement: a work that claims access to divine revelation while acknowledging its status as a human artifact, and in which visions of order and meaning are presented by the author as if from a divine perspective." The Tree of Charity scene sets in place an epistemological problem (much like the Fall of Humanity) that can only be addressed (but finally left unresolved) through eschatology, offered in the final four passs of PPl (C). In the scene of Christ’s passion, L draws from various scriptural and apocryphal accounts, which Will in turn narrates literally as one truth, thereby reducing what is the usual epistemology of the poem of presenting diverse and competing perspectives throughout. This literalist version of the passion is L’s way of articulating divinity unmediated by form, a divinity often occluded by allegory in other eschatologies, such as Dante’s. Yet passs 21 and 22 return to narratives of fragmented and partial truths in, respectively, the "cloudy" representation of Piers as Christ and the invasion of Antichrist and the advent of pestilences (22.97-103). L’s representation of the plague in the end times represents a marked rupture in eschatological epistemology in the post-Plague years in England and Europe (David Herlihy): L cannot find significance in the destruction of social order and is, unlike Dante, finally pessimistic of apocalyptic textuality as a form of metaphysical inquiry.

29. Pearsall, Derek, ed. Chaucer to Spenser: A Critical Reader. Blackwell Critical Readers in Literature (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999).

Reprints essays on L. The first essay, "Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Orthodox Late Medieval Representations and The Humanity of Christ: Representations in Wycliffite texts and Piers Plowman," is a fused version of two chapters by David Aers collected in Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Press, 1996); see YLS 11 (1997): 233, item #1. The fourth essay, by Elizabeth Fowler, "Misogyny and Economic Person in Skelton, Langland, and Chaucer," originally appeared in Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 10 (1992): 245-73, see YLS 10 (1996): 223, item #23. The eighth essay is Anne Middleton’s, "William Langland’s "Kynde Name": Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England," first published in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15-82. See YLS 5 (1991): 222, item #38.

30. Plumer, Danielle Cunniff. "Langland, Kempe, Chaucer, and the ‘Makynges’ of Authority." Diss., University of California, Davis. DAI 59 (1999): 2490A.

31. Rogers, William E. "Knighthood as Trope: Holy Church’s Interpretation of Knighthood in Piers Plowman B.I." Sewanee Mediaeval Studies 9 (1999): 205-18.

For Holy Church, the custodian of propositional truth, knighthood represents in B.1 not only a social relation but also a cognitive capacity–namely, the power of discrimination or definition. Good knights set and maintain boundaries, or "define" in the etymological sense. Knighthood sustains the division of the social continuum into significant units, just as clergy fix meanings so as to differentiate one sign from another. Holy Church’s claim to speak authoritatively about society depends on the possibility of dividing the social continuum into distinct classes. Thus, Holy Church construes the social world as a text, and particular social organizations (e.g., feudalism) as ways of interpreting that text. Knighthood for her is the social analogue of correct interpretation. On the other hand, the metaphoric structure of Holy Church’s discourse on love undercuts the hermeneutic of definition. Holy Church’s tropes of love are drawn from the realm of the feminine, the relative, and the commercial, as opposed to the realm of the masculine, the absolute, and the feudal. The tropes call into question whether Holy Church’s notion of authoritative, truthful interpretation can coexist with the activities of love. As custodian of propositional truth, Holy Church speaks strongly via the trope of knighthood for the hermeneutic of definition. As proponent of love, she implies the necessity for a hermeneutic of mediation, via a family of tropes opposed to knighthood. This dissonance raises the most disturbing question of all: can Holy Church still claim to speak authoritatively for a society based on the new money-economy, if her notion of truth rests on a hermeneutic of social reality that is fundamentally connected with the vanishing feudal economy? Holy Church’s thought demonstrates how for L the issues of textual interpretation and social reform are a single issue.

32. Rossen, Janice. "Philip Larkin at Oxford: Chaucer, Langland, and Bruce Montgomery." Journal of Modern Literature 21 (1997): 295-310.

The recently available papers of Bruce Montgomery in the Bodleian contain Larkin’s essays from a Middle English tutorial, in which he considers the respective merits of Chaucer and L. Larkin exhibits a natural affinity to L’s work, which exudes a moral indignation in accord with his own, while he seems impatient with Chaucer’s elevated social station and disinterest in social concerns. A drawing of Larkin’s in the margin of one essay entitled "The Vision of Piers Plowman" depicts a farmer with a plow looking off into space at an imaginative bubble enclosing a foaming mug of beer. Larkin’s distaste for L’s emphasis on hard work surfaces later in the poem "Toads."

33. Rydzeski, Justine. Radical Nostalgia in the Age of Piers Plowman: Economics, Apocalypticism, and Discontent. New York: P. Lang, 1999.

Explores the ways in which the changing demographics and growing profit economy of fourteenth-century England troubled the author of PPl, fanned society’s apocalyptic fears, and induced the Rising of 1381. After exploring the increasing dissonance between religious tradition and economic life and language, this book examines late medieval expressions of social dissatisfaction, including the actions and communications of the 1381 rebels, L’s moral objections in PPl, and the complaints central to the other "plowman poems" of L’s imitators. After contrasting regenerative agrarian metaphors and apocalyptic visions with eschatological, urban visions of paradise, the author argues that L and the 1381 rebels exhibit "radical nostalgia"–a longing for agrarian Christian roots that projects the traditional social structure of the past onto a renewed, if not millennial, society. The phrase "radical nostalgia" addresses this backwards glance disguised as a vision of the future, this longing for early Christian roots as the basis for social regeneration. Chapter 1, "PPl and the History of Apocalypticism," examines the importance of apocalyptic thinking to medieval notions of history. In the later Middle Ages, the Church nurtured the urban, eschatological, teleological vision, while the rural imagery that promised the great communal renovatio mundi fell mostly to literary, popular, and sometimes heretical culture. L embraced both views: his restored world and idealized plowman reflect the agricultural, regenerative tradition, while the changes in the individual from "dowel" to "dobet" to "dobest" represent the individual’s salvation and the linear, eschatological view of history. Examining concepts such as redemption and satisfaction as salvific exchanges, chapter 2, entitled "Economics and Salvation: Paying for Sin and Reaping Reward," discusses the conflated nature of economic and religious ideas in the Middle Ages and explores the relationship between individual and communal salvation. The agricultural signs and metaphors in apocalyptic representations often suggest the proper "work" for salvation, a problem with which L is preoccupied throughout PPl. Chapter 2 also discusses how changes in the administration of the sacrament of penance put additional emphasis on the sinners’ intentions and reflected the growing importance of both working for salvation and labor in general. Chapter 3, "Demographics and Discontent in Fourteenth-Century England," examines shifts in demographics, changes in the money supply, and imbalances of trade in order to present an overview of the economic trends that stimulated discontent in the late fourteenth century. Contemporary scholars continue to debate whether the period was one of prosperity or economic devastation, and these conflicting observations signal a rift in England's economic and social organization. One’s impression depends on just which sector of the economy one examines: in general, the fourteenth century saw the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the frustration of those who were becoming poorer became fuel for the era’s apocalyptic hopes of remedy. Chapter 4, "Fellowship and Apocalypticism: PPl and the Nature of Association," explores the changing basis of fellowship and society in the fourteenth century and examines the clash between the beginnings of the capitalist economy and the values of feudal and religious life. Adapting the apocalyptic scheme of the saved and the damned in final conflict, L presents a society divided into fellowships of good and evil, of Holy Church and Meed. The millennial society awaited in PPl is marked by its conservative roots; while radical in the sense that he wished society to return to early Christian roots, L envisioned a transformed society by re-inscribing traditional social organization and orthodox religious belief. The fifth chapter, "Reading and Rebellion: Imagining Radical Change and the 1381 Revolt," explores the rebels’ manipulation of L’s language and imagery. In the hands of revolutionaries, L’s apocalyptic imagery, potentially inflammatory language, and persistent calls for reform are no longer the musings of a conservative idealist, but the fuel for social action. When John Ball and other rebel leaders reiterate the spiritual allegory of PPl–the progression from Dowel to Dobet to Dobest–so that L’s salvific pilgrimage becomes a series of code-words to indicate stages of the revolt, they transform the allegorical framework of PPl into a plan and rationale for action. This study concludes by examining the legacy of PPl and surveying the significance of plowman figures in poetic works which PPl inspired. Poems such as Mum and the Sothsegger, Pierce the Plowman’s Creed, and The Complaint of the Plowman demonstrate how poets advocating religious and social reform adapted the language and imagery of PPl to further their own causes. Such poems reflect the changing economic realities of the later Middle Ages and even embrace idealized work as the means to build the kingdom on earth and earn individual salvation.

34. Somerset, Fiona. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

An investigation of how late medieval English writers who translated specialized academic knowledge from Latin into English often projected unprecedented sorts of lay audiences for their writing, and exhibited self-consciousness as to the potential results of making the information they presented more widely available. Chapter 2 addresses L. Will and other exponents of "lewed clergie" exemplify to varying degrees a mode of critical questioning, an attempt at authorizing vernacular writing about clergy. The obscurity of Will’s own clerical status, in addition to the paradox of Piers’s apparent literacy, confronts the problem of lay access to "clergie": that is, authority on matters concerning the clergy. Will is also extraclerical in that he rejects conventional answers and uncovers new questions that his interlocutors have difficulty addressing. Ymaginatif’s defense of "clergie" rests on his conflation of "clergie"/book-learning, though this strategy creates a contradiction between his insistence on the superior authority of clergymen and his claim that anyone can achieve "clergie" through learning or through grace. Anima’s exposition, while deriving from homiletic prose, claims a "lewed" allegiance to authorize lay critique of clergy but then imputes a pejorative meaning for "lewed" to the clerics he criticizes. The "lewed" vicar of B.19 opposes the king’s claim to supreme power by virtue of his extraclerical position, yet he strongly criticizes the pope and is more pessimistic than most figures in the poem about the possibility of reform. In the references to writing at the beginning and ending of B.19, L avoids any direct reference to the audience for whom he is mediating "clergie" and wraps his self-description as a mediator around his darkest vision of its potential social effects.

35. Steiner, Emily. "Piers Plowman and Medieval Documentary Poetics." Diss., Yale University. DAI 60 (1999):

36. Taylor, Sean. "Annual Bibliography 1998." YLS 13 (1999): 229-58.

Seventy annotated items and a list of book reviews.

37. Wenzel, Siegfried. "Eli and His Sons." YLS 13 (1999): 137-52.

The allusion to Hophni and Phineas made by Conscience in the C Prologue as a reproach to bishops who profit by the common people’s worship of saints is parallelled in a particular discourse regarding pastoral duties in which Eli and his sons held the status of a commonplace moral example against pastoral negligence. Visitation sermons made particular use of the example, as did Bishop Fitzralph in an All Saints’ Day sermon in 1356, decrying the worship of images of saints. In the sermon literature, Eli and his sons are invoked as representatives of two priestly faults: greed and incontinence, and failure to correct people under one’s care with sufficient vigor. L adopts the moral of both Scripture and contemporary preachers, while the polemic against clerical profit-taking anticipates Wycliffite condemnation of the same practices.

38. Wilsbacher, Gregory James. "Art and Obligation: Reading, Ethics, and Middle English Poetry." Diss., Indiana University. DAI 59 (1999): 3448A.

39. Benson, C. David, and Lynne Blanchfield. The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: The B- Version. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Rev. Rob Adams, YLS 13 (1999): 207-13; A. S. G. Edwards, MLR 94 (1999): 1071-72; Ralph Hanna, RES 50 (1999): 74-75; A. V. C. Schmidt, MÆ 68 (1999): 322.

40. Brewer, Charlotte. Editing Piers Plowman: The Evolution of the Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rev. Wendy Scase, MLR 94 (1999): 491-92.

41. Clopper, Lawrence M. "Songes of Rechelesnesse": Langland and the Franciscans. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Rev. Wendy Scase, YLS 13 (1999): 213-15.

42. Copeland, Rita, and David Lawton, eds. New Medieval Literatures 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Rev. H. L. Spencer, RES 50 (1999): 511-12.

43. Craun, Edwin D. Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Rev. K. L. Lynch, Speculum 74 (1999): 398-400; Rev. Joan Blythe, YLS 13 (1999): 220-27.

44. Dean, James. The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Academy of America, 1997. Rev. Hugh White, RES 50 (1999): 372-73.

45. Douglas Parker, ed. The praier and complaynte of the ploweman vnto Christe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Rev. Jill C. Havens, YLS 13 (1999): 216-20.

46. Fisher, John H. The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Rev. D. Moffat, Speculum 74 (1999): 161-62.

47. Justice, Steven, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds. Written Work: Langland, Labor and Authorship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Rev. Andrew Galloway, Libraries and Culture 34 (1999), 185-88; Wendy Scase, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 361; A. V. C. Schmidt, RES 50 (1999): 369-70.

48. Kimmelman, Burt. The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: the Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona. Studies in the Humanities 21. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Rev. J. M. Ganim, Speculum 74 (1999): 443-45.

49. McCarl, Mary Rhinelander, ed. The Plowman’s Tale: the c. 1532 and 1606 Editions of a Spurious Canterbury Tale. Renaissance Imagination Series. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. Rev. Kari Kalve, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 367-70.

50. Pickering, O. S., ed. Individuality and Achievement in Middle English Poetry. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Rev. Margaret Connolly, MLR 94 (1999): 1069-71.

51. Russell, George, and George Kane, eds. Piers Plowman: The C Version; Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better and Do-Best. London and Berkeley: Athlone Press, 1997. Rev. Robert Adams, Speculum 74 (1999): 1082-85; Ebbe Klitgard, ES 80 (1999): 483-84; E. G. Stanley, N&Q 46 (1999): 101-6.

52. Somerset, Fiona. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rev. Ronald Waldron, N&Q 46 (1999): 513-14.

53. Tavormina, M. Teresa. Kindly Similitude: Marriage and Family in Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman Studies 11. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995. Rev. Rob Adams, JEGP 88 (1999): 256.