Late medieval England was wracked by calamitous events yet replete with transformative religious ideas, complex legislation, imaginative literature, and rebellious discourse. Kate Crassons confronts this rich world through a close study of late medieval ideologies of poverty. In The Claims of Poverty, Crassons examines a variety of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts, and their social and cultural contexts, to argue that during this period ideas of poverty and charity were transforming and competing. Previous scholars have noted the fall from virtue to vice that poverty experienced in the Middle Ages. Yet, with this work, through writers' numerous "claims" of poverty, and their capacious definitions of need, Crassons adds welcomed complexity to the discussion.
Early in her work, Crassons lays out the contending discourses of poverty in late medieval England. These included opinions on fraternal voluntary poverty (viewed alternatively as a spiritual value, a class-destabilizing idea, and a fraudulent, misguided reading of imitatio Christi), the laboring poor along with the so- called "deserving", involuntary, poor, as well as the interpretive acts that others were required to make in their almsgiving to these members of the poor. These multifarious views help drive Crassons' point home that medieval indigence "is a highly flexible concept that tests our capacity to define material reality and to assess its ethical implications" (4). She also helpfully describes in detail the labor legislation, including the 1349 Ordinance of Laborers and the 1388 Cambridge Statute, without which the comprehension of the social anxieties about poverty would be unfeasible.
Arguably the strongest portion of Crassons' book is her close reading of the C-text of Piers Plowman. In her first chapter, Crassons carefully unravels the images of poverty presented by Langland to reveal his ethical intervention in the discussions of need and his stance on the implausibility of discerning poverty clearly. For example, in her discussion of Wastour and Hunger in Piers Plowman, accompanied by an image of these figures from the MS in the frontispiece to the book, Crassons reveals Langland's understanding of the complexity of the issue at hand. Rather than a straightforward explanation of how hunger can be used as a tool to sort the deserving from the undeserving poor, these allegorical representations "expos[e] the troubling occlusions of the legal discourse on poverty" (40). Langland does not set these figures in opposition, instead he unites them in an "acquisitive desire" (44 and passim) to highlight the delicate balance of need and excess. As Crassons explains, once hunger (and one can also read poverty) is satiated, one tends to gluttony (or avarice). In her discussion of the figures of Rechelesnesse and Patience in Piers Plowman, Crassons argues that the poet presents Franciscanism as a "reckless form of spirituality" (48). Most interesting is Crassons' reading of Passus IX. She makes the case that in his taxonomy of the poor, where he attempts with great rigor to discern the deserving from the undeserving poor in order to aid the almsgiver, Langland in the end surrenders to such a project and illustrates the difficulty of such an endeavor, the "social invisibility of the poor" (88), and the importance of giving charity indiscriminately.
In chapter two, Crassons turns to Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, a late fourteenth-century Wycliffite poem often seen as an extension of the general sentiments expressed by Langland. Yet, Crassons stresses the dissimilarities between the two works both in form and function. In short, the Crede, she argues, does not tackle the ethical complexity and the role of the human will involved as Piers Plowman does. While Piers Plowman emphasizes the occlusion of signs, the Crede shows the transparency of signs, of both poverty and faith alike. In her words, "the Crede trades Piers Plowman's allegory for narrative, its dream vision for waking life, and its dialectical argument for unyielding dualism" (92). Crassons shows that the goals of the two poems are quite different, even though they both draw upon the same social criticisms and concerns. In a deceptively simple way, Crassons' argues, the anonymous poet of the Crede attacks friars on three fronts. First, the poet disparages friars on the grounds of landscape, for example in the isolated and opulent Dominican domains (98). Second, he scorns them for their clothing, like the Franciscans' white robes that "stareth as siluer" (101). Finally, the poet defames friars' speech by including a representative of each order who slanders the others, most often for covetousness. Crassons argues that this antifraternal display of the deceptive claims of poverty is meant to get a rise out of the medieval reader, to prompt indignation for friars who adopt the trappings of wealth without the responsibilities including taxes and charity, as well as the trappings of holiness without the spiritual purity (102). In opposition to these "disguises", the poet presents Pierce the Ploughman who clearly represents the working poor and true Christian in his tattered clothing and clear performance of the Creed. Despite its seemingly straightforward message, Crassons ultimately finds the Crede's ecclesiology ambiguous and its message problematic.
The following chapter, "'Clamerous' Beggars and 'Nedi' Knights", extends the discussion by bringing into consideration other Wycliffite texts to reveal the centrality of poverty in Wycliffism's attack on the church. Like the author of the Crede, other Wycliffite writers expressed deep concern over the institutional and individual wealth of the church and its clergymen. Yet, as with the Crede, in sermons like Defensio Curatorum and Omnis plantacio, Crassons uncovers a deceptive simplicity that allows her to challenge other scholars' interpretations of Wycliffism's support of the poor. In her reading of these texts, Crassons argues for Wycliffites' use of "poverty as a relativistic term" (140). Perhaps unsurprisingly in these sermons, Wycliffites' anticlericalism and their animosity to mendicancy as a Christian virtue is clear. Yet, Crassons also exposes their slippery ideas of poverty. For example, the anonymous author of the Omnis plantacio promotes an ideal of "evangelical poverty" (158) for clerics that is reminiscent of the middle ground between hunger and gluttony put forth in Piers Plowman. Simultaneously, in a different sermon, William Taylor, attacks the church for preventing the laity from pursuing the Christian virtue of productivity and thus placing them in poverty (166-7), a poverty that is not limited to the lower classes. In both of these sermons the authors present the view that the contemporary church's sinful accumulation of wealth is destabilizing society by, in particular, placing the secular lords in poverty (169). Rather than espousing poverty as a clear virtue or a simple societal ill to resolve among the third estate, poverty appears in these sermons as a marble rolling across a pocked surface of a game board, stopping to fit into one definition only to be dislodged to slide into another depending on the subject. With this exposition, Crassons returns to her central theme: need, as represented in these sermons, is a knotty issue. In these Wycliffite texts, it competes with ideas of apostolicism, economic self-sufficiency, and hierarchy.
Seemingly at odds with Wycliffism's antifraternalism, Margery Kempe's Book charts her experience of voluntary poverty in her spiritual quest. Employing the methodology used in previous chapters, in her fourth chapter, Crassons peels back the faìade of Franciscan- like poverty in The Book of Margery Kempe to reveal another late medieval text with a "shifting meaning of need" (178). Also similar to her previous discussions, Crassons relies on context--here the economic culture of the urban elite--to clarify how poverty operates in Kempe's Book. What she finds is a new definition of poverty. Through a close reading of the Book, including a new look at the relationship of Margery and Richard, a member of the deserving poor, Margery's voluntary poverty appears as a form of sanctity, and as a result, she is presented as immune to physical and material need. Because of this immunity, Margery is able "to maintain financial security, the will to dominion, and an interest in economic exchange...ironically reinforc[ing] the commercial pressures she seeks to abandon" (179). In the end, when Margery confronts challenges like the physical hardships of her travels, recording her experience, and defending herself from accusations of heresy, Crassons discovers that another alternate definition of poverty surfaces: an absence of social power.
In her last chapter, Crassons wrestles with the slippery performance of the city of York's Corpus Christi plays. Performance allows for a unique opportunity: "by placing the signs of need in the bodies and speech of actors, the theater makes poverty visible" (17). The challenge comes with interpreting the meanings behind the performances and the motivations of the actors. Yet, in a salutary way, this chapter allows Crassons to come full circle with her work. The documents of York (both plays and guild records) reflect the competing ideologies of poverty present in the other texts as well as the socioeconomic and cultural concerns crucial to the shaping of those ideologies. Ultimately, through an examination of three pageants, Crassons argues that a century after the enactment of the labor legislation with which she began the book, the debate continued, at least in York, between, on the one hand, the existence of the able- bodied poor and the virtue of indiscriminate charity, and on the other, a civic order buttressed by labor and hierarchy.
In the final pages of the book, Crassons compares medieval texts with Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, to explore the enduring ideology that if a person is able to work, she can have no claim of poverty. In addition, Crassons examines the criticisms of Ehrenreich's methodology made by others. In these criticisms, Crassons sees the antifraternal discourse present in Piers Plowman and the Wycliffite sermons. Although no longer expressed in the same terms, the sentiment remains strong in these critics' views that "voluntary poverty is...interpreted primarily as an act of fraud" (287). The Epilogue is a creative and thought-provoking way to emphasize the relevance of her study.
The Claims of Poverty is a delight to read, as Crassons' thesis is rich, her prose crisp, and her readings of the texts sharp and provocative. Throughout, she successfully blends close reading, theory, and analysis of the texts with attention to historical context and historiography. As a whole, her work complements earlier social and cultural histories on the topic of medieval poverty by such scholars as Sharon Farmer, Bronislaw Geremek, Barbara Hanawalt, and Lester Little, and it will be an important addition to the reading lists of graduate students in History and English alike. The Claims of Poverty could be assigned to advanced undergraduate students; however, as Crassons assumes a familiarity of her audience with Middle English, manuscript traditions, and authorial complexities, undergraduates might find it to be a challenging read. This is perhaps unfortunate, as the epilogue would resonate well in the classroom. That said, in a modern world in which the layers of poverty often remain invisible until they are peeled back by force, and a world in which the political discourse of welfare is often deceptively straight-forward, Crassons offers up a work that encourages her audience to consider the far-reaching historical and literary memory of these social and cultural challenges. Few works cross disciplinary divides so effectively while simultaneously making clear the relevance of medieval discourses on poverty and charity.