Piers Plowman – Page 3 – Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything

July 16, 2015December 1, 2020

Walking at Night: Scribal Variants, Poverty, and Prostitution in a Piers Plowman Manuscript

In one of the most moving additions to the C-text of Piers Plowman, Langland highlights the plight of impoverished mothers, who are some of the most vulnerable and underrepresented figures of his society:

And hemsulue also soffre muche hunger
And wo in wynter-tymes and wakynge on nyhtes
To rise to the reule to rokke the cradel,
Bothe to carde and to kembe, to cloute and to wasche. [1] (77-80)

Saint Mary of Egypt, a reformed prostitute saint, is depicted outside the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois in Paris. Photo credit © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons

Though these lines form only a part of Langland’s snapshot of working-class women, they poignantly convey the life of a working mother as she sacrifices her own well-being to feed her children, obeys the regulation of an infant’s nocturnal feeding schedule, and takes in domestic labour to make ends meet.

The passage excerpted above has been passed down through the Pearsall edition of the C-Text, but a little digging into the scribal variants across different manuscripts opens up a realm of possibilities for additional layers of meaning that could be added to the text. The scribe of the Cambridge University Library Dd. 3. 13 manuscript invokes a particularly intriguing possibility when he writes that these women were not “wakynge on nyhtes,” but “walkynge on nyhtes.”

‘Walking at night’ was associated with all sorts of immorality in medieval England, summed up in Chester Mystery Cycle when Jesus declares that “whosoever walketh abowte in night, hee tresspasseth all agaynst the right.”[2] Night-walking is specifically associated with sexual immorality by the Wife of Bath when she excuses her own desire to walk at night by saying that she is doing so to see the “wenches”[3] that her husband sleeps with (III l.397-398). Religious and secular legal discourses indicate that there was little distinction made in medieval England between women of “loose morals” and those who were involved in prostitution.[4]

In the Cambridge manuscript, then, there is a possibility that at least one scribe allowed for a moving portrayal of women forced by economic necessity into prostitution, even if he retain associations of immorality. Canon law made no allowances for such a thing, as the church viewed extreme poverty as a condition that led a woman into a life of prostitution, but not a mitigating factor.[5] On the level of the particular scribe, however, the addition of a single letter pushes us to consider the possibility that at least some readers could understand shades of complexity in a practice that is otherwise condemned, even by Langland himself.

When it comes to a poem with such a complex and enigmatic textual tradition as Piers Plowman, each manuscript bears an important witness to the text. Each scribal variant might get us a little closer to an authorial reading, but it also might give us insight into the ways the text could be misread or misunderstood by scribes and readers. Even if the reading in the manuscript bears little or no resemblance to Langland’s poetry, it may be the product of a scribe “elucidating the sense and significance in a text according to the priorities of their own period and culture.”[6] Even when a misreading is simply an error on the scribe’s part, it provides an example of how some medieval readers might have encountered and interpreted the text in ways that complement or contradict the authorial sense of a passage.

Leanne MacDonald
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

References:

[1] William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008)

[2] “The Glovers Playe” from The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 244.

[3] From The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987). Ruth Mazo Karras argues that though Alysoun is not a prostitute per se, she uses language of commerce to talk about her sexuality and the practicalities of marriage. See Karras, “Sex, Money, and Prostitution in Medieval English Culture” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 202.

[4] Karras, “Sex, Money, and Prostitution,” 211.

[5] James Brundage, “Prostitution in the Medieval Canon Law,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 836.

[6] M. B. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 68.

June 25, 2015October 10, 2017

Super P[ow]iers

Avengers assemble!

First launched by Timely Comics 1941, and revived by Marvel in 1964, stories surrounding Captain America brought heroism to a new level as they combined contemporary needs with a superhuman figure (Howe 18). While the popularity of the Avenger may have initially been based upon his status as a World War II super-soldier, the values that he exhibits stem from a long tradition of literary heroes and are still applicable today. Arguably defined as “personal values that philosophers since ancient times have put forward as defining personal excellence,” these attributes appear throughout heroic literature time and again (White vii). In fact, on their way through literary history from Aristotle to Captain America, they even make a pit stop in the fourteenth century alliterative poem, Piers Plowman.

In a comparison of Steve Rogers, alias Captain America, and the devout pilgrim of William Langland’s allegorical dream narrative, Piers Plowman, it is clear that their values conflate on multiple levels. In this blog post, I will address three moral values. These values — drawn from the construction of Captain America and explained throughout The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero by Mark White — are courage, responsibility, and humility.

Covetousness. William Langland, Piers Plowman; England, 1427; Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 104 fol. 27r.

While adherence to these values runs rampant throughout Piers Plowman, I am especially concerned with Passus VIII. Throughout lines 19-111, “Perkin the Plowman” (l. 1) converses with a knight and instructs him in the art of courage in the face of temptation, responsibility to himself and those he serves, and exhibiting humility with all beings that he encounters. (It could also be said that Piers is instructing the knight on how to defend himself against such “super villains” as Covetousness, Sloth, and Hunger.)

Sloth. William Langland, Piers Plowman; England, 1427; Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 104 fol. 31r.

Thus, Piers challenges the knight to remain virtuous in the face of temptation and highlights the internal courage necessary for the promotion of pure judgement.

‘Sikerliche, sire knyhte,’ sayde Peris thenne,
‘Y shal swynke and swete and sowe for vs bothe,
And labory for tho thow louest al my lyf tyme,
In couenant þat thow kepe Holy Kerke and mysulue
Fro wastores and fro wikked men þat þis world struyen;’
…
‘And a ȝut a point,’ quod Peres, ‘Y preye ȝow of more:
Loke ȝe tene no tenaunt but treuthe wol assente;
And when ȝe mersyen eny man, late mercy be taxor
And mekenesse thy mayster, maugre Mede chekes.
And thogh pore men profre ȝow presentes and ȝyftes,
Nym him nat, and aunter thow mowe hit nauht deserue;
For thou shalt ȝelden hit, so may be, or sumdel abuggen hit.
Misbede nat thy bondeman—the bette may þou spede;
Thogh he be here thyn vnderlynge, in heuene, paraunter,
He worth rather reseyued and reuerentloker sitte:’
(Piers Plowman, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt, C.VIII.23-43)

‘Certainly, sir knight,’ said Piers then,
‘I shall toil and sweat and sow for us both
And labor for those you love all my lifetime,
On condition you protect Holy Church and me
From wasters and wicked men who spoil the world’
…
‘And still one point,’ I ask of you further:
Try not to trouble any tenant unless Truth agrees
And when you fine any man let Mercy be assessor
And Meekness your master, despite Meed’s moves
And though poor men offer you presents and gifts
Don’t take them on the chance your not deserving
For it may be you’ll have to return them or pay for them dearly.
Don’t hurt your bondman, you’ll be better off;
Though he’s your underling here, it may happen in heaven
He’ll be sooner received and more honorably seated.
(Economou pp. 70-71, ll. 19-44)

Hunger. William Langland, Piers Plowman; England, 1427; Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 104 fol. 38r.

Ultimately, the values exhibited within this passage show that heroism does not necessarily mean that one has to be an Avenger or a devout pilgrim. Like Captain America, Piers is an advocate for the success of the common man, and their conflation proves that values and virtues can transcend both social classes and centuries. The character of Piers is manifest as a plowman instructing a knight, proving that even in the fourteenth century—and like today—virtues can be found among all social classes and depend more on personal integrity than anything else. Furthermore, as possibly the most celebrated “knight” today, Captain America proves that these values have not been lost, despite the six centuries separating his wars from those of the Piers’ compatriot. Through the success of Captain America and the entire collective of the Avengers within pop culture today, it is clear that just as these values can transcend societal levels in Piers Plowman, so too can they transcend the centuries, remaining valuable to people throughout time, and even appearing in theaters today.

Angela Lake
MA Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame

Sources:
Howe, Sean. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: Harper, 2012. Print.

Langland, William, and Derek Pearsall. Piers Plowman. Exeter, UK: U of Exeter, 2008. Print.

Langland, William, and George Economou. William Langland’s Piers Plowman: The C Version: A Verse Translation.Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1996. Print.

White, Mark D. The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: UK: West Sussex, 2014. Print.

June 18, 2015October 10, 2017

Interpreting Impairment in MS. Douce 104 Piers Plowman

Bodleian Library MS. Douce 104, dated 1427 by the scribe, contains the only extant cycle of illustrations in a copy of Piers Plowman. The manuscript contains 72 miniatures, ranging from major characters to allegorical personifications to figures mentioned only in passing in the text of the poem. As Kathleen Scott has noted, illustrators in the fifteenth century generally worked from templates or models of figures used in other texts; because of Douce’s singularity in its extensive illustrations of the poem, we can conclude that the images in the manuscript were inspired not by commonly used models, but by the illustrator’s personal response to the text at hand. Thus, the Douce images offer modern readers a unique opportunity to understand how medieval readers (or at least professional readers, like scribes and illustrators) of Piers Plowman may have interpreted Langland’s famously complex poem–and, for the purposes of this post, the poem’s impaired sinners.

While Langland describes his Seven Deadly Sins as rather grotesquely impaired and occasionally disabled in the C-text, the Douce illustrator largely normalizes physical aberrance in his images of the Sins. When taken together, the descriptions in the poem and their accompanying images encourage an interesting relationship between sin and impairment, namely that while sin indeed results in physical impairment, the impairments are perceptible largely to the sinner him- or herself.

Sloth; William Langland; *Piers Plowman*, England, 1427; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 104, f. 31r

For example, in MS. Douce 104, Sloth is depicted as a young man with rumpled clothing and a boot on only one foot; the other foot remains bare and tucked up behind the booted foot in what could perhaps be a protective gesture (though it’s equally likely that he has just curled up in his sleep). Though Sloth is initially described in the poem as “byslobered with two slimed yes” (C.VII.1), the only concession the illustrator makes to any physical deformity is that single missing shoe, likely indicative of Sloth’s gout, the swelling from which would have prevented him from wearing his boot. What is most interesting here is that the illustrator’s interpretation seems to have normalized Sloth’s appearance from the description presented in the poem, in which Sloth is quite obviously impaired or even deformed.

Envy; William Langland, *Piers Plowman*, England, 1427; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 104, f. 25r

Envy provides another relevant example. In the C-text of Piers Plowman, Envy laments the physical repercussions of his sins: “no sugre ne swete thing [may] aswage my swellynge” (C.VI.88); further, he complains that he has become “so megre for Y ne may me venge” (C.VI.94). In spite of these physical descriptions, the Douce illustrator’s interpretation of Envy is in no way noticeably impaired. Envy appears in folio 25^r, an adult man wearing a belted tunic and boots, his left hand raised in a fist (presumably in reference to “A wroth his fuste vppon Wrath”) while his right hand clutches his shirt. In contrast to Langland’s Envy, who describes himself as simultaneously swollen and “megre,” his stature is neither stout nor thin; he actually looks quite healthy and strong. When taken together as they appear in Douce 104, Langland’s written description and the illustrator’s image enable an interpretation of Envy’s physical ailments as discernible only to Envy himself, perhaps indicating that the consequences of sin, though physical, are felt most acutely by the sinner.

There is, of course, much more to say about sin, impairment, and disability in Piers Plowman; for the moment, though, let us revel in both the fascinating glimpse into fifteenth-century reception of the poem and the interpretive possibilities for modern readers provided by the illustrator of MS. Douce 104.

Dana Roders
PhD Candidate
Department of English
Purdue University