Abstract
The introduction presents a succinct discussion of those Scholastic fields of thought illuminating the dominant themes underpinning Piers Plowman, namely natural rights, epistemology, and freedom of the will. Within this discussion, it points out the intellectual continuity between the poet, William Langland, and the contemporary philosophers, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. The interchanges between the text’s main character, Will, and the allegorical personifications of learning underscore his ability to identify what is right, grasp its surety, and ultimately privilege an affective over an intellectual response. This “kynde knowyng” orders natural love, elicits charitable actions, and refines rational free choice. Realizing that love is the apex of the human condition proves that a sublunary thinker must properly align his intellectual focus to embrace a higher truth.
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Notes
- 1.
Anne Middleton observes that these allegorical interchanges are often characterized by combat or rivalry, “charged with opposition” (97). The prospect of revealed knowledge may initiate the action, but instead of finding a ready resolution, invariably result in contention. See Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience,” The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, eds. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 91–122. John Bowers identifies sloth as the source of spiritual lassitude and, as such, one cause of this contention. See Bowers, The Crisis of Will in Piers Plowman (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 61–96.
- 2.
Britton Harwood asserts that the narrator’s movement is dictated by the desire “to encounter love as some final truth about the nature of existence, so that human love is not one response among many possible, but evoked by the character of reality.” For him, this movement proves more illuminating as the search progresses. See Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 23–4; Also see, A.V.C. Schmidt, “The Inner Dreams in Piers Plowman,” Medium Aevum 55 (1986): 25–40.
- 3.
A.V.C. Schmidt, ed., The Vision of Piers Plowman 2nd ed. (London: J.M. Dent, 1995), xxxv.
- 4.
All passages from the B-text are cited from Schmidt, The Vision of Piers Plowman.
- 5.
J. Allan Mitchell also examines the salience of haecceity in deciphering the late medieval issue of individuality in Chaucer’s writings. See Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 21–5.
- 6.
Paul Vincent Spade, ed. and trans., Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), xiv.
- 7.
Michel Villey, La Formation de la pensée juridique moderne, 4th ed. (Paris, 1975), 261
- 8.
Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1995), 95.
- 9.
John Bowers addresses Scotus’s theory of the will in the context of the challenges posed by sin. While these challenges create “a crisis” in the will’s pursuit of virtue, Morton Bloomfield discusses the Scotistic picture of the interplay between the practical intellect and the will, stressing the means of performing a just act. Each focuses on the will as the means to better one’s person so that Christian perfection becomes an attainable goal. See Bowers, 41–60; Morton Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 111.
- 10.
James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 2nd rev. ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 152.
- 11.
Harwood, Problem of Belief, 103.
- 12.
Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,” Speculum, 53 (1978): 103.
- 13.
John Burrow examines the connection between Deguileville’s poems and Langland’s in Langland’s Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 113–8.
- 14.
Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 91.
- 15.
Upon identifying those virtues necessary to combat social ills, such as temperance and fortitude, as specialized skills, Harwood stresses the overriding importance of love: “Each ‘craft’ must love each other” (Problem of Belief, 128). Also see A.V.C. Schmidt, “Langland and Scholastic Philosophy,” Medium Aevum 38 (1969): 134–56; Mary Clemente Davlin, “Kynde Knowyng’ as a Major Theme in Piers Plowman B,” Review of English Studies (1971): 2.
- 16.
Andrew Galloway, The Penn Commentary of Piers Plowman Volume 1, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 4.
- 17.
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.
- 18.
See Isabel Davis, “Piers Plowman and the Querelle of the Rose: Marriage, Caritas, and the Peacock’s ‘Pennes,’” New Medieval Literatures 10 (2008): 49–86; Galloway, Penn Commentary, 3–10; 150–7.
- 19.
William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, (London: Atholone Press, 1975), iv. The idea that the B-text is the closest to a finished product culminates in the heated dispute between Lawrence Warner, who argues emphatically that the B-tradition takes shape under the influence of the C-tradition, and Robert Adams and Thorlac Turveille-Petre, who maintain the traditional stance. See Warner, The Lost History of Piers Plowman, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and his article, “Impossible Piers,” Review of English Studies 66 (2015): 223–39; Robert Adams and Thorlac Turville-Petre, “The London Book-Trade and the Lost History of Piers Plowman,” Review of English Studies 65 (2014): 219–35.
- 20.
Ralph Hanna, London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 243.
- 21.
Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 43.
- 22.
Henry Laycock, “Object,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/object.
- 23.
This lexical variability prompts Richard Firth Green to categorize truth’s meaning in terms of “senses.” He divides the thirteen primary senses isolated by the MED (s.v. treuth n.) into four main areas of meaning: legal senses, ethical senses, theological senses, and intellectual senses. See Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 9–31.
- 24.
Mary Carruthers, The Search for St. Truth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 10.
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Strong, D. (2017). Introduction. In: The Philosophy of Piers Plowman. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51981-4_1
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