William Langland's Poem Piers Plowman

This research examines William Langland's 14th-century extended narrative poem The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman (aka Piers Plowman) as a poetic exercise in social satire. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context and literary history surrounding the production of Piers Plowman and then to discuss the pattern of ideas and narrative devices in the text that tend to support the view that it is structured in a way meant to comment on society and the social behavior familiar and important to Langland, namely, a society in which the most important feature of the quality of life was the quality of faith, or the individual's experience of God.

In his anthology of philosophical and theological writings of the 12th to 14th centuries Marenbon says that the study of medieval discourse "calls for the skills of both the historian and the philosopher":

the historian's in order to understand the presuppositions and aims which made the concerns of thinkers in the Middle Ages so different from those of modern philosophy; the philosopher's, because the achievements of medieval thinkers can only be appreciated by the close philosophical analysis of their reasoning.

Marenbon cuts his study of medieval texts off in the middle of the 14th century, just before the period in which Piers Plowman was first composed--1362 according to Skeat and the Attwaters (who follow Skeat), 1370 according to Ryan. But his comments about the medieval mind speak to

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iate attitude toward money are driven home in the narrative of Passus IV, when Conscience has exhausted its argument and the king has sent for Reason as the basis for rule for king and Parliament alike. This does not prevent Meed from tempting Wit, Wisdom, Wrong, and all lawyers from preferring Meed to Reason when given the choice. "I fall in with florins," says one, "and then my speech fails." Despite the one-dimensional nature of the allegorical characters, the device of personification of specific traits of human behavior, qualities, emotions, and relative states of grace (as in the Seven Deadly Sins) enables Langland to address issues directly without attributing them to individual living persons, however imaginary. Even the figure of the king, who conveniently pops in and out of the dreamer's account, and who would have been identified with Richard II instead of Edward III by the time of the appearance of text C, goes unnamed. Indeed, only Piers himself and the (unnamed) dreamer have anything like full-blown human verisimilitude, though at various points in the text one or more among the "field full of folk" observed by the dreamer in the Prologue assumes the characteristics of some human need. In Passus V, which presents

Category: Literature - W