Arvind Thomas's book helpfully compares the treatments of the penitential process in canon law and Piers Plowman. In that it is "penance," not "church law," that is its focus, this book contributes to a large body of scholarship, by John Burrow, David Lawton, John Yunck, Traugott Lawler, and others (some of it cited in passing, but not much substantially engaged with). I found it refreshing that Thomas explicitly "offers a riposte to [David] Aers's reading of the poem's adversarial or indifferent relationship to the medieval church" (25), which has been widely praised precisely for its rejection of what seems to me the obvious major theme of Piers Plowman: the centrality of penance to medieval English society. Thomas's primary argument is that "poet and canonist--even if the latter did not know or care for the former--were engaged in a common approach to, and common pursuit of, writing, revising, and thereby co-producing the law" (18; I assume that "latter" and "former" should be reversed here as the canonists in question are much earlier than Langland); his "subclaim" is "that the C text [of Piers Plowman], as presented in its modern editions, exhibits a sharper or more substantial engagement and enrichment of canon law than does B" (20).
The strengths of Thomas's book are its bringing to bear, for the first time in Langland studies, of a deep knowledge of canon law on some important episodes in Piers Plowman; its teasing out of the differences between the B and C versions of that poem, still surprisingly not a priority in Langland scholarship; and, drawing on both of these strengths, a brilliant interpretation, in the final chapter, of the differences between the "patent" (B) and "charter" (C) of Christ in Patience's sermon. I do feel that a fuller engagement with the relevant scholarship would have enriched this study, and also that if he were to look again at some of the passages he discusses he would recognize that they do not say what he assumes. A few hours with the annotated bibliographies in The Yearbook of Langland Studies and with the Middle English Dictionary and the like would have prevented a good handful of errors of a not inconsequential character. But if Thomas sometimes found there what he wanted to find, so do we all, of course, and there is no question that "Piers Plowman" and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages makes a signal contribution to our understanding of late-medieval thinking about penitence and of this greatest of Middle English poems.
Chapter 1's reading of Mede's "confession" "discover[s] a canonist's approach to contrition that is far more pervasive and pronounced in C than in B, and than previously thought by scholars" (34). "In pointedly identifying Mede's or Contrition's failure to produce evidence of contrition, the narrator stages a performative but canonistically orthodox recuperation of contrition from those Wycliffite followers who rejected oral confession or even the entire ecclesiastical institution of penance on the grounds that heartfelt remorse alone remits sin" (34-35). The chapter begins with a summary of the procedures a confessor should follow as laid out by Raymond of Peñafort's Summa de paenitentia of 1222-1225. These procedures--interrogation of the penitent to remorse; inducement to remorse; discernment of contrition; imposition of works of satisfaction--will be familiar even to Langlandians who are non-specialists in canon law, thanks to John Burrow's classic essay "The Action of Langland's Second Vision," and it might have been worth bringing that essay, and the episode of the confession of the sins that is its topic, into conversation with Thomas's astute analysis of Mede's "confession." [1] That aside, the reading here, especially of Mede's laughter, so inappropriate in a confessional context, is beneficial and illuminating.
Chapter 2 offers a fascinating interpretation of the relationship between penitent (Mede, again) and confessor (Conscience), with an emphasis on the C text's new lines on "mercede": "Mede's corporeal usury is gradually erased or used up to engender Conscience's spiritual usury, thereby enacting...usury's 'double bearing' of exhaustion and surplus" (113). Much of this relies on that new passage's concept of a "relacioun rect" ("right relation") in the lengthy grammatical analogy there added, though Thomas does not mention the that "relacioun rect" refers to inflexional agreement between parts of speech "In kynde and in case and in cours of nombre" (C.3.346). Instead he focuses on one of the subordinate examples of the concept: "What makes for 'relacioun rect' is the belief or trust in payment: 'as a leel laborer, byleueth with his maister / In his pay and in his pite... / So of hol herte cometh hope...' [C.3.347-51]," on which basis he analyses the "'relacioun rect' between gift-giver and recipient' (111). Such a reading might work for the X-family's (and thus Derek Pearsall's) version of the lines, "byleueth that his maister...," instancing OED "believe," to have faith and thus put trust in someone.
But as Thomas's authority, A. V. C. Schmidt, notes, "a better parallel between the simile-example and the larger grammatical trope emerges if beleueth is read as 'remains' [as in the P-family] not as 'believes'," that is, as instancing OED "beleave," sense 6, "to remain, dwell with." [2] George Russell and George Kane follow suit. The passage Thomas quotes reads thus (this based on Schmidt's commentary [2:331, 506], skipping over another analogy that precedes the one in question): "'relacioun rect' is the right relation between adjective and substantive, agreeing in kind, case, and number. Just as a loyal laborer who remains with his master in his pay and in his pity and in his absolute uprightness expects him to pay him if he performs his duties, and to have pity if he fails, and expects to receive from him for his labor all the wages that Truth wanted, so from whole heart (that is, the condition of truth in the righteous man) comes hope...." This passage concerns not "the labourer's trust in earthly 'paye' from his master," as Thomas's argument necessitates (111; my emphasis), but rather his expectation of righteous treatment given the master's (i.e., God's) absolute uprightness.
Chapter 3, "Restitutio: From Rule to Law to Justice in Covetise's Confession," claims to "uncover" the C text's "innovative treatment of a 'rule' (regula) or maxim on restitution as well as an equally innovative recasting of the received canonistic distinction between 'rules' (regulae) and 'laws' (iura) in general" (118). The general point is that B focuses on the penitent, while C turns to the confessor equally subject to the canonistic maxim: "For þe Pope with all his pentauncers, power hem fayleth / To assoyle the of this synne sine restitucione: / Numquam dimittitur peccatum donec restituatur ablatum" (C.6.256-57a; "without restitution: the sin is never forgiven until the stolen goods are returned"). Thomas's placement of the B and C versions of the passage in the context of canon law rather than just the maxim's Augustinian origins is very helpful. But it strikes me as a but much to say that "Repentaunce mobilizes (in C) the Latin maxim in order to affirm that even 'the Pope with alle his pentauncers, power hem fayleth' to absolve a usurious sinner who does not make appropriate restitution" (126 [my emphasis]), as if that subjugation is the passage's point. It seems to me rather that Repentaunce here simply underscores the necessity of restitution in the process. Neither am I convinced that this is a C-only reference to the limits of the Pope's power. Haukyn's confession, much of which is taken on by Repentaunce's sermon in C, cites "legates of Holy Chirche," that is, ecclesiastical figures invested with papal authority, among those whose abuse of the penitential system is their "deeth deyinge" (B.13.422, 426). The specifics differ, but the general point at issue--the limits on papal authority--is here in B as well.
"Repentance goes on to expound and extend [this maxim's] punitive force," Thomas then writes, "to the unnamed and absent parish priest in lines in C that do not have any parallel in B," referring to C.6.298-307, which, so he claims, present Repentaunce "as digressing from hearing Covetise's confession to apostrophizing Covetise's own parish priest about any potential abuses of the cura animarum" (140). Again, it seems to me that one could as easily characterize B's equivalent passage, 5.264-78a, as focusing on the potential abuses of the cura animarum by Repentaunce himself, whose own role in the proceedings is after all his topic: "For were I a frere...I nolde cope us with thi catel...And I wiste witterly...I kan thee noght assoille" etc.
And, again, Thomas has misread the text by taking the initial term of C298's "Ȝe, þe prest þat thy tythe toek..." as the vocative: "You, priest, who took your tithe...." On its own this makes little sense, and the confusion of this construal is amplified by the sudden shift from polite or plural "Ȝe" to informal or singular "thy." This is not an apostrophe at all: as Russell-Kane's punctuation shows, "Ȝe! þe prest þat thy tythe...," this is an interjection, "Yes!" or "Indeed!" Thomas's lengthy subsequent reading of "Repentaunce's admonition to the parish priest within the penitantial forum" as "[o]riented to an audience of papal 'pentauncers' and the parish priests entrusted with the cura animarum," indicated by "the parish priest that he supposedly apostrophizes" (145), thus does not stand up. As Thomas grants, "even C's mention of the papal penitentiary's powerlessness to dispense with the rule on restitution extends barely over two lines and does not receive any further attention from Repentaunce in the rest of the passus" (157). This circumstance might profitably have been taken as a sign that the episode does not support Thomas's interpretation of it. I think it goes too far even to call this a "mention of the papal penitentiary's powerlessness": it is just a rhetorical reinforcement of B's equivalent theme, the necessity of restitution.
Chapter 4, "Satisfactio Operis: Maxim and Metaphor in Wrong's Trial," takes a similar approach: "By attending to the divergences between the confessors' interpretation of the same Latin maxim in B and C," that is, "For 'Nullum malum þe man mette wiþ inpunitum / And bad Nullum bonum be irremuneratum'" (B.4.143-44; C.4.140-41: "The man No-ill encountered unpunished / And urged that No-good go unrewarded"), "we can see the poem's intervention in the administration of the penitential forum that canonists such as Raymond of Peñafort sought to regulate" (167). Thomas provides a nice analysis of the grammar of Reason's account of the reasons for prosecuting Wrong (B134-48 / C131-45), whose "interplay of the subjunctive, indicative, and imperative moods orients attention away from a parliamentary to a penitential approach to Wrong's misdeeds" (169). And as before, the canonistic context is rich and will be wholly new to most Langlandians. But, again, I fear that much of the argument relies on a misconstrual of the poem's text. "To witness the poem's reinvention of satisfaction, as it were," he writes, "we need to get to the point where Reason exhorts confessors to translate the quotation into 'werk'" (187), citing B146-48 / C143-45, "And if ye werchen it in werk, I wedde myn eris / That Lawe shal ben a laborer and lede afeld donge, / And Loue shal lede þi lond as þe leef likeþ." Reason's "address to confessors" (193), his "call to confessors to 'werchen' the quotation into 'werk'" (196), provides the basis for the following lengthy discussion. But "ye" refers not to "confessors" but to the passage's actual addressee, the King: "Late þi confessour, sire Kyng, construe þis [on] Englissh, / And if ye werchen ..." (B145f. / C142f.). (At one point alone a seeming knowledge of this fact appears in passing: "only if the confessor(s) and / or king 'werchen' the quotation into 'werk,' 'Lawe shal ben a laborer'..." [194; my emphasis].) The injunction for the King to "let his confessor," singular, "construe" the text, says Schmidt, "perhaps impl[ies] that observance of the principle may require absolution for the king's past faults in this regard" (2:515). The episode is about the penitential process only insofar as it concerns royal power. It is certainly not the address to confessors that Thomas's argument again necessitates.
By contrast, I found chapter 5's reading of the shift from B.14.174-95's "patente" of Christ, "a document that is as immediately visible and available to the people as Christ himself has been shown to be in the B passage" (214), to "the historically grounded verbal sign of the 'chartre'" in C.16.22-36 (218), utterly brilliant. Thomas aligns this shift with that of the larger passage to "the institutional (rather than the Christological) means by which penance is to be administered. The substitution of the 'patente' with the 'chartre' marks a shift in emphasis from a penitential strand grounded in Christ's covenantal words (the context for the 'patente' in the B passage) to one grounded in the church's confessional process (the context for the 'chartre' in the corresponding passage in C)" (209). Patience identifies the three Dos (Do-well, Do-bet, Do-best) as the terms of the charter, thus "enact[ing] grammatically the penitential action as 'a mode of flowing' or 'inclination' towards the referent remission" (233, citing Albertus Magnus on the infinitive verb). The charter, unlike B's patent, "functions as a sign that points ahead in time towards a referent whose availability to penitents is not certain" (234). In this instance the text clearly backs up the argument, which strikes me as in turn a sign that points ahead in time towards a referent whose availability might not be patent in this book as it currently stands, but which has the promise of being made manifest in the future, thanks to the hard work Arvind Thomas has put into this book.
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Notes:
1. John A. Burrow, "The Action of Langland's Second Vision" (1965), rpt. in Essays on Medieval Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 79-101. This appears in a brief list of scholars who, writes Thomas, "have painstakingly identified Langland's many 'debts' to penitential treatises, including those composed by canonists" (22; see n. 63), but that does not strike me as an accurate description of Burrow's essay, which shows, among other things, that there is no need for recourse to canonistic literature at all to make sense of Piers Plowman and penitence.
2. Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, rev. edn. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011), 2:331. The other editions here referred to are Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), and Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone, 1997).