Piers Plowman has long been characterized by its ruptures and discontinuities, what Anne Middleton influentially called its “episodic form.” [1] Alastair Bennett’s Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman acknowledges these qualities but takes a different approach. Rather than highlighting the poem’s serialized disruptions, Bennett directs readers’ attention to its ongoing efforts to arrange fragmentary experience into a coherent and meaningful whole through the technique of emplotment, a term Bennett borrows from Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory. Bennett argues that Langland draws on the resources of the medieval sermon tradition in order to teach his audiences--through the trials of the dreamer, Will--how to interpret the vagaries of lived experience and to locate oneself within the larger narratives of salvation history. Preaching and Narrative offers a valuable new perspective on Langland’s forms of meaning-making, understanding the poem’s fragments not as formal ends in themselves but as opportunities to leverage the recuperative power of narrative. Bennett’s extensive use of Ricoeur’s narrative theory, moreover, provides an insightful framework for interpreting temporality and storytelling in Piers Plowman, inviting its broader application in Middle English studies. [2]
Preaching and Narrative builds on an established body of research on preaching and literature, including observations of the profound role that preaching plays in Piers Plowman. As Bennett notes, “large parts of Piers Plowman seem to speak in a preacher’s voice” (1). Foundational works by G.W. Owst, Siegfried Wenzel, and H. Leith Spencer reveal that Langland’s poem is deeply informed by the resources of medieval preaching. Each of Bennett’s chapters reads Piers Plowman alongside contemporary sermons and preachers’ handbooks in Latin and Middle English, revisiting known analogues and exploring some new contexts as well. But in turning to narrative theory, Bennett aims to “reframe the kinds of questions” that scholars have previously asked about Langland’s relationship to arts of preaching and to actual sermons that he and his audiences may have heard or read (17). He argues that Langland does more than borrow techniques and motifs from contemporary sermons; he also “develops a richly elaborated and highly consequential theory of the way that sermons intervene in social life, reconfiguring their listeners’ understanding of the present time as a part of a larger, interpreted story” (17). Furthermore, as Bennett shows, Langland explores “how the narrative understanding cultivated in sermons could be deployed in new contexts,” including his own poem (17).
The book is carefully and thoughtfully organized, with rigorous signposting, much like the method of emplotment it explores. Its five chapters, which focus on the B-text while referencing significant revisions in C, present “five studies of preaching and narrative in Piers Plowman,” followed by a Coda that addresses a sixth, culminating episode. The chapters proceed roughly chronologically through the B-text, beginning with the Introduction’s exposition of Holy Church in B.1 and concluding in the Coda with Christ’s “extended act of emplotment” at the Harrowing of Hell in B.18 (29, 228).
In addition to establishing the context of previous scholarship on preaching and literature and summarizing Ricoeur’s narrative theory, the book’s Introduction reads Holy Church’s sermon in the poem’s first passus. Here she exemplifies what Bennett describes as the preacherly capacity to use narrative to draw audiences out of their preoccupations in the present moment, in which they experience life “as a simple succession of uninterpreted events,” and, instead, “provoke them to new action by locating that present moment in a larger, interpreted story” (1-2). At a moment when the dreamer is confused and uncertain, Holy Church’s sermon “provides [him] with a new perception of his place in history,” establishing a model that later preacherly figures in the poem will follow (22).
The book’s first chapter, “Preaching on the Coronation: The Prologue and the Sermon of Conscience” takes us back to a moment before Holy Church appears, analyzing the sermons of the Prologue’s three “preachers” (the lunatic, angel, and goliard) alongside Conscience’s much later sermon on Christ’s nativity in B.19. Bennett identifies a surprising continuity between these disparate scenes through their shared theme of adventus, describing them as “two historical turning points” (34). Both exemplify Ricoeur’s “axial moment,” a pivotal point in time that marks a break with the past while initiating new historical conditions (30, 34-35). In each passage, the poem’s preachers attempt to interpret these events for the people who experience them in the confusion of lived time. Drawing on historical sermons and political and liturgical contexts, Bennett shows how Langland develops the familiar association between the human monarch and the kingly Christ. While Bennett rightly emphasizes Langland’s awareness of the challenges of the “public voice,” he demonstrates that in both historical sermons and in Langland’s poem, preaching facilitates public discourse in transitional circumstances, offering the community opportunities to “to speak and act together in the context of an interpreted present” (72).
Chapter 2, “Preaching on the Half-Acre: Fear, Hope, and Narrative in the Second Vision” extends the framework of the first chapter, examining sermons by Reason and by Piers that “present the people with new narratives to explain their recent experience and guide their future efforts” (110). Once again, preaching intervenes--through narrative--when lived experience exceeds human understanding. Reason’s sermon interprets recent natural disasters as punishments for sin, attempting to motivate reform, while Piers, taking up Reason’s “interpretive project,” offers his own “life story” as a model for others to follow (93). Piers’s allegorical map to Truth renders “a confusing landscape...comprehensible by performing an act of emplotment, transforming past experience into a guide for future action” (98). In contrast to Reason’s effective preaching, however, Piers’s “interpretive labour” is increasingly met with “resistance and hostility” (101), leading Bennett to conclude that “no single sermon can permanently transform its listeners’ understanding of their capabilities and obligations in the present time” (110). Rather, Piers’s action in this episode dramatizes the necessity of lifelong interpretive labor, “an ongoing effort to render lived experience comprehensible” (110).
While the first two chapters focus on the positive social and spiritual potential of preaching, Chapter 3, “Preachers and Minstrels: Study’s Complaint and the Feast of Conscience,” examines corrupt clerics who abandon pastoral duties to preach on esoteric subjects that amuse their wealthy patrons. These passages, however, are not simply satirical; rather, Bennett argues, they also imagine ways to reform preaching by cultivating the skill of discernment, a capacity rooted in study, patience, and love and opposed to the indiscriminate curiositas that drives corrupt preaching. “[L]ove,” Bennett writes, “emerges as an organizing principle that serves to discriminate between different kinds of knowledge, and that gives meaningful shape to a narrative of lived experience” (144). In contemplating preaching reform, Study also imagines an ethical role for minstrelsy, one that, Bennett notes, might even “imagine a space for a poem like Piers Plowman itself,” that is, a poem that performs the vital “interpretive labour” of preaching (148-9).
Chapter 4: “Preaching on the Lifetime: Sermons and the ‘Self-Constant’ Subject in Piers Plowman,” sets off into intriguing new territory, bringing Ricoeur’s narrative theory to bear on the poem’s apparent attempts to describe a life story. Here Bennett argues that Langland deploys the resources of medieval sermons to teach Will to “perceive the self as a narrative whole,” “an important precondition for ethical action” (155, 152). This chapter thus again reframes critical observations of narratorial fragmentation, the sense that Will is, as David Lawton puts it, an “open persona,” not a stable identity (152). [3] Without denying that the narrator’s life story--as readers receive it, and as Will himself experiences it--is fragmentary, Bennett, deploying Ricoeur, argues that the poem’s preachers use narrative to bring those fragments together into a coherent and “self-constant” whole. In doing so, Bennett also addresses the vexed relationship between “clergie” and “kynde,” or revealed and natural knowledge: in a series of interconnected scenes distributed broadly throughout the poem, Holy Church, Scripture, Ymaginatif, and Kynde perform acts of emplotment, recalling Will to himself by reminding him of the promises he made at his baptism and enabling him to interpret his lived experience by recalling the lessons of previous sermons that might guide him through moments of spiritual crisis.
Chapter 5, "Histories of the Self, the World, and the Sermon: Anima and the Tree of Charity," extends the previous chapter’s claim that preacherly emplotment mediates “moment[s] of personal crisis” as his encounter with Anima helps Will recover his sense of identity and to recognize his own life story within the framework of salvation history (32). Like Ymaginatif, Anima integrates “clergie” and “kynde” by acting as a quasi-clerical figure at the same time that he embodies Will’s own soul. As Bennett shows in analyzing the Tree of Charity episode, Anima deploys the techniques and motifs of preaching to teach Will how to integrate personal experiences with “large-scale political and eschatological narratives” (189). Here, again, Bennett’s use of Ricoeur’s vocabulary is salutary. He sheds new light on the narratorial “signature” in B.15, where Will announces that he has “lyued in londe” and that his name is “Longe Wille” (B.15.152). Bennett argues that, having absorbed Anima’s lessons, Will now “performs an act of emplotment,” shaping his fleeting and partial experience of charity into a narrative whole (198). Will forges a sense of “self-constancy” through a newly heightened awareness of time (having searched for charity “bifore” and “bihynde,” B.15.153), that enables him to produce the “concordant discordance” of an interpreted “holos” (198). The chapter concludes with Anima's discussion of Mohammed’s skill as a non-Christian preacher, contrasting it with historical Christian evangelism. Anima’s turn to history, Bennett argues, reframes contemporary crises, offering “further opportunities for the dreamer to sharpen his skills of narrative interpretation” (219). At the same time, Bennett acknowledges, Anima’s exhortations to evangelize also disturbs the stability of the poem’s master narrative, revealing that Christian eschatology is “not universally available or universally accepted” (219).
Bennett’s Coda, “Atonement and Emplotment at the Harrowing of Hell,” examines the poem’s sixth vision in B.18, where Christ speaks before the gates of Hell. Bennett interprets Christ’s speech as a sermon--a final act of storytelling that “synthesize[s]” the “disparate narrative interpretations” of the Four Daughters of God and brings the poem’s account of salvation history, if not the poem itself, to a close (222). Curiously, while Chapter 1 addresses Conscience’s sermon in B.19, Bennett’s Coda does not return to the poem’s final two passus. Some scholars indeed believe that the B archetype ended with B.18, prior to being corrupted by material from C, but Bennett does not make that claim here. Thus, while his interpretation of Christ’s speech in B.18 provides an apt conclusion to the book’s larger argument that Langland used medieval preaching techniques to create unified narratives that enable ethical action, the final two passus of the received B-text remain a challenge to Bennett’s thesis: after the resolution of B.18, B.19-20 depict a poem, and a world, beginning to come apart again. One wonders how this final movement might fit within Bennett’s nuanced and compelling argument about the role of emplotment in the poem’s reiterative cycles. At the very least, the poem’s conclusion underscores the urgency of the “interpretive labour,” preacherly or otherwise, that Bennett’s study so richly elucidates.
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Notes:
1. Anne Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 91-122.
2. Bennett generously engages with other medievalists who have put Ricoeur to use, including Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Gillian Adler, Chaucer and the Ethics of Time (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022); and Mary Raschko, “Storytelling at the Gates of Hell: Narrative Epistemology inPiers Plowman,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 44 (2022): 165-92.
3. David Lawton, “The Subject of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 1 (1987): 1-30, 11.