cular might be misled into sorting through rather dense and precious philosophical arguments on their merits, without due consideration given to the intellectual environment in which the arguments were put forward. The content of Piers Plowman, in that view, becomes less important to Marenbon than the context in which it emerged.
This is not a clever way of avoiding the content of the arguments themselves, but it seems useful to point out that knowing that philosophers and theologians worked from a social and political agenda to arrive at the incorrigibility of an abstract argument can facilitate appreciation of such arguments. It helps to know, for example, that medieval intellectuals were, during the period Fremantle describes as the age of belief, preoccupied with Aristotelian metaphysics and the myriad nuances of faith-versus-reason discourse. Freemantle notes that in the middle of the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas came under an intellectual cloud by religious rivals in the Church, though he outlasted them and was canonized within 100 years of his death. More generally, there was during Aquinas's time and for long afterward not the least hint of what would become Protestantism and the Reformation. Despite evidence of Langland's criticism of a church in which pardons for sins can be purchased by rich lawyers from corrupt churchmen, there is in Piers Plowman perhaps only a poetical hint that the church as it has evolved in England is doomed. But Henry VIII's dramatic break with Rome was more than 100 years away in 1362-1370. Skeat does find resonance between the work (at least the C text) and a secular political revolt of 1381, Wat Tyler's Rebellion, which involved peasants protesting against a poll tax and presaged the abdication of Richard II.
In any case, Holy Church personified functions as the dreamer's guide through the course of the overall dream. While the specific injunctions of Piers Plowman are of course ...