Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poets words and the lawyers world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal makyngs in Englands great Middle English poem by William Langland.

Focusing on Piers Plowmans preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the literary informs and transforms the legal until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poems narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langlands mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and todays medievalists.