Download PDF | Alastair Bennett - Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman (Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture)-Oxford University Press (2024).
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Acknowledgements
The idea for this book emerged from the doctoral thesis I prepared at the University of Cambridge. I am very grateful to Nicolette Zeeman, who supervised that project, and to Wendy Scase and Barry Windeatt who examined it and suggested how I might develop it for future publication. Some years later, Nicky read a full draft of this book and sent me an invaluable response that helped me see what its final form should look like. Three anonymous readers for Oxford University Press offered detailed and perceptive reports on the typescript that challenged me to refine and extend the argument. Katharine Breen and Ruth Livesey read individual chapters while I was at work on them and made excellent suggestions for how to improve them, and Ardis Butterfield read the whole text in its nearly-final form, and offered valuable guidance on the very last revisions.
For conversation and correspondence about this project, about Piers Plowman, and about medieval sermons, I am grateful to Cristina Cervone, Rita Copeland, Rebecca Davis, Curtis Gruenler, Michael Johnston, Veronica O’Mara, Mary Raschko, Ellen Rentz, Arvind Thomas, Lawrence Warner, Sarah Wood, and Siegfried Wenzel, among many others. My thanks to Veronica for loaning me her microfilm of Trinity College, Dublin, MS 241, and to Priscilla Barnum, who shared her unpublished transcript of the Longleat sermons with me. Thank you to Isabel Davis, who invited me to speak about this project at the Birkbeck Medieval Seminar and Nicholas Perkins, who invited me to speak about it at the Oxford University English Faculty Medieval Studies Seminar.
The audiences at these events, and at the many conferences where I have presented papers on the research for this book, offered questions and insights that helped me to shape the arguments presented here. Since 2017, it has been a privilege to edit the Yearbook of Langland Studies with Katy Breen and Eric Weiskott; I have learned a lot about Piers Plowman from them and from reading the excellent work of our contributors. While I was finishing this book, I took part in the online Piers Plowman reading group organized by Emily Steiner, which was a great opportunity to discuss the poem with new and experienced readers at a time when we were otherwise isolated from each other by Covid; my thanks to Emily, to the group leaders, and to the other participants. Thank you to my excellent colleagues at Royal Holloway, Catherine Nall and Jennifer Neville, and to colleagues at the other London colleges, all of whom make London a good place to be a medievalist. I continue to learn from the insights of my undergraduate and graduate students at Royal Holloway as they come to medieval literature with fresh eyes and new questions.
I am very grateful to my family and friends for their love and support and good company while I have been at work on this project. Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Emily Weal, for her patience, encouragement, and love; she made it possible for me to write this book, and also helped me keep it in perspective (most of the time). Our little boy Charlie was born not long after I submitted the final manuscript for this book, and has filled the last few months with his own infectious delight in the world around him. This book is dedicated to my parents, Nigel and Morag Bennett, with love and heartfelt thanks.
Introduction Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman William Langland’s Piers Plowman was written, revised, copied, and read during what Siegfried Wenzel has called a ‘golden age’ of preaching in late medieval England.¹ The poem describes a world where preaching was a vital part of public, intellectual, and parochial life, and it develops a sophisticated account of the way that sermons engaged and instructed their listeners, illuminating their lived experience and directing their spiritual efforts. Over the course of his allegorical visions, the poem’s dreamer-narrator Will encounters representatives of the many different groups who were authorized and obligated to preach in late medieval England: bishops and parish priests, the friars and the secular clergy, as well as individuals whose authority to preach was dubious and contested—charismatic ‘lollers’ and a corrupt pardoner. The personifications who appear in his dreams often preach to him, too, or offer him sermon-like discourses of instruction and exhortation.
While some of these speeches are briefly summarized, others occupy hundreds of lines of verse, with the result that large parts of Piers Plowman seem to speak in a preacher’s voice. Langland’s poem considers the effects that sermons create, both in the immediate moment of their performance and later, as they provide a framework for their listeners to understand their experiences. The most compelling sermons in Piers Plowman disclose new ethical imperatives in the complex circumstances of contemporary life and motivate new forms of social and spiritual action that unfold over many of the passūs, or ‘steps’, that comprise the poem. Langland’s examples of corrupt, self-interested preaching, meanwhile, create damaging forms of confusion and spiritual inertia, with long-lasting consequences for the people who hear them. Langland’s central insight into preaching, as I will argue in this book, is that sermons achieved these transformative effects through their characteristic use of narrative.
Langland’s preachers speak to audiences who are absorbed in the preoccupations of their present moment, experiencing life as a simple succession of uninterpreted events, and provoke them to new action by locating that present moment in a larger, interpreted story. A preacher’s account of contemporary history reveals the urgent need for social reform; the story of an individual life explains the need for penance and good works; the grand narrative of Christian eschatology explains the origins of sin and the possibilities for atonement. Narratives like these are both galvanizing and enabling for sermon audiences. In some cases, they produce an effect that seems close to metanoia, a profound transformation in the listener’s way of life. More commonly, however, they clarify the choices that listeners face and serve to refocus their spiritual efforts in the midst of their ordinary experience. As Holy Church explains to Will in the first passus of the poem, sermon narratives encourage people to ‘do þe bettre’ (B.1.34), a phrase that is echoed by Reason in his sermon to the king and the commune in passus 5 (B.5.17), and reformulated by the end of the second vision as the injunction to ‘Do wel and haue wel’ (B.7.112).²
Langland, I argue, is interested in the creative, interpretative activity that takes place when preachers reconfigure lived experience in this way, in the discursive resources these acts of narrative interpretation provide for listeners to understand themselves and their social and spiritual relationships in the present time, and in the models they provide for other forms of writing, including his own. In this book, I employ a critical vocabulary derived from the work of Paul Ricoeur to describe the process by which narratives are made and the way that narrative mediates lived experience. For Ricoeur, the composition of narratives involves the configuration of real or imaginary events into a tensive, provisional unity, organized not by the logic of simple temporal succession, but according to some other pattern of significance that the narrator discerns and seeks to express. This act of configuration, which Ricoeur, translating Aristotle’s muthos, describes as ‘emplotment’, is an active, ongoing process that shapes and transforms the way that readers and listeners understand their subjective experiences. It also has wideranging implications for ethical, social life: through the discursive mediation of narrative, Ricoeur contends, it becomes possible to think about action in the present moment in relation to an interpreted past and a projected future.
I will argue that Ricoeur’s account of narrative can illuminate Langland’s conception of preaching as a discourse that seeks not only to interpret but also to reshape direct experience. Langland’s preachers are engaged in the ongoing labour of emplotment, configuring meaningful narratives from the disparate events of their listeners’ experiences, disclosing new structures to understand the present time, and establishing the imperatives and opportunities for social and spiritual endeavour. For Langland, as for Ricoeur, the articulation of narrative constitutes an intervention in social life, one that gives rise to new forms of understanding and action. Langland’s presentation of preaching, with its particular focus on the role of narrative, reflects a nuanced, critical understanding, perhaps a practitioner’s understanding, of the way that real medieval sermons engaged their audiences. As Wenzel observes in an overview of late medieval preaching ad populum, sermons commonly ‘set their message in a narrative frame of Heilsgeschichte, the history of salvation’, a story that began with the creation of the world and the fall of Adam and Eve, turned on the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ, and concluded with the last judgement.³ The story of salvation encompassed all the other stories a preacher might tell, whether biblical, hagiographical, or historical, and conferred an ultimate significance on them.
It also explained the choices facing Christians in the present time, as Christ’s atonement on the cross established a New Covenant with human beings, holding out the possibility of salvation as an incentive to turn from sin and do good works. Alan Fletcher writes that popular preaching sought to establish its listeners in an interpreted present, to ‘settle . . . audiences in a position from which they could recognize . . . how the landscape of their lives was in fact a morally charged landscape, one in which the routes that they took would finally lead to different eternal consequences’.⁴ The story of salvation history is ‘ever present’ in the surviving corpus of sermon texts, as Wenzel argues, and it finds expression in many different aspects of their persuasive, exhortatory rhetoric and their exegetical form.⁵ In the chapters that follow, I will read Piers Plowman alongside surviving sermon texts, and accounts of preaching in performance, that reveal the dynamic, creative forms this narrative could take, and that describe its effects on contemporary audiences.
The narrative that Wenzel describes is distinct from the short, embedded stories that occupied their own discrete space in some medieval sermons, biblical parables and non-scriptural exempla, although it often provided a context to understand them.⁶ Both parables and exempla can be understood as narrative genres in their own right, and both were adapted and reimagined in other contexts besides the sermon. Biblical parables were recast in a range of devotional and literary texts, as Mary Raschko has shown.⁷ Illustrative exempla were a mainstay of the secular ‘mirrors for princes’ tradition, a tradition that overlapped with preaching and pastoralia in complex ways, as Rita Copeland has recently demonstrated.⁸ Scholarship on parables and exempla has emphasized their dynamic, experimental qualities, the opportunities they provided for different communities of readers to think through ethical questions.⁹ Langland himself was engaged with these qualities, rethinking biblical parables as part of the allegorical action of his poem, and invoking exempla in its pastoral dialogues and debates.¹⁰
In his preaching scenes, however, Langland attends to the narrative logic of the sermon as a whole, rather than to narrative as one of its constituent parts. The work of emplotment that sermons perform, and that constitutes their discursive intervention in the social world, arises from their particular combination of argument, exegesis, and exhortation, as opposed to the citation of other narrative sources. Piers Plowman draws on multiple traditions of medieval personification allegory, where ideas of personhood, embodiment, and volition could be configured or distributed in a wide range of abstract and seemingly counterintuitive ways.¹¹ Yet, the poem’s personifications are also embroiled in the material realities of its contemporary social world, and the allegorical action brings them into frequent contact with ‘realistic representatives of everyday fourteenth-century society’, as Jill Mann observes.¹² Preaching scenes in the poem often take place at the meeting point between these different representational modes: sermons are voiced by personifications, but heard by representatives of the late medieval commune in various recognizable social contexts.
Nicolette Zeeman has recently shown that Langland’s personification allegory draws on the longstanding use of prosopopoeia in the literature of educational instruction and philosophical inquiry; in its pastoral dialogues, in particular, Piers Plowman is engaged with a rich tradition of writing and thinking about instructive speech and its effects on the student.¹³ I will argue that the poem’s preaching scenes take place in a related context: drawing on the artes and on his own experience of preaching practice, Langland dramatizes the strategies by which preachers engaged their audiences, and considers the psychological complexity of listeners’ responses. Staging sermons as part of the allegorical narrative, Piers Plowman is also able to register the long-term effects of preaching on both individuals and communities: preaching initiates forms of individual and collective action that extend over several passūs, and on several occasions the dreamer recalls sermons he has previously heard as he looks to explain his present circumstances.
At its most effective, preaching in Piers Plowman presents its listeners with narratives that are coherent, unified, and integrated, configuring disparate elements into a cohesive, interpreted whole. These narratives stand in contrast to the fragmentary and discontinuous qualities that so often characterize the dreamer’s experience, and which have been theorized extensively by readers of the poem. In her foundational study of the poem’s ‘episodic form’, Anne Middleton described Piers Plowman as a series of ‘argumentative encounter[s]’, each of which follows the same ‘basic pattern’: an exchange between two or more characters becomes ‘charged with opposition’ to the point where it breaks off, producing ‘a rupture or abrupt shift of ground’.¹⁴ These combative but inconclusive episodes are so ‘deeply characteristic’ of Langland’s compositional practice, Middleton argues, that they might be understood as his ‘poetic signature’.¹⁵ Other critics have explored the generative potential of the ruptures that Middleton identifies. D. Vance Smith argues that Langland reflects on the ‘problem of beginning’ as he resumes his poem after each new interruption, exploring the different models for beginning a text and the new kinds of initiative that a text might produce in the world.¹⁶ Zeeman associates the poem’s shifts and ruptures with a reiterative pattern of rebuke and denial, where knowledge and understanding are withheld from the dreamer and from readers of the text. For Zeeman, these moments of deprivation create intense, open-ended forms of desire, which the poem then sublimates towards spiritual ends.¹⁷ Part of my argument in this book is that the sermons in the poem promise to recuperate these fragmentary, inconclusive experiences, by configuring them into a narrative: preaching offers the dreamer a set of resources to conceptualize his life, and his visions, as an interpreted whole.
Langland’s attention to the role of emplotment in contemporary preaching reflects the larger importance of narrative in his own poetic project. As Zeeman has argued, ‘narrative figuration constitutes one of the central means by which Langland thinks’ in Piers Plowman.¹⁸ Sermons stand at an intersection between two large categories of knowledge that are often distinguished and sometimes opposed in Piers Plowman: revealed knowledge, derived from the study of sacred texts, often named as ‘clergie’ in the poem, and knowledge that arises intuitively or experientially from life, described, from the first passus on, as ‘kynde knowynge’ (B.1.138).¹⁹ When preachers perform the work of emplotment, they place these forms of knowledge in dialogue, interpreting ‘kynde’ experience using discursive resources drawn from ‘clergie’, and reaffirming ‘clergie’ using evidence drawn from ‘kynde’. Langland often refers to the different ways in which a preacher might ‘preue’ his sermon: the alliterative collocation ‘prechen’ and ‘preuen’ recurs in many scenes where characters listen to sermons, or debate the effects of good and bad preaching.²⁰ In some contexts, ‘preueing’ a sermon involves the citation of confirmatory authorities, a procedure known as confirmatio in the artes.²¹
In others, however, it describes the way that direct experience might challenge or affirm a preacher’s discursive claims. Langland uses the collocation ‘prechen’ and ‘preuen’ to explain how a preacher’s way of life might confirm or undermine the message of his preaching, fulfilling the longstanding imperative to teach by word and example, docere verbo et exemplo, or falling short of it.²² As Anima declares in the fifth vision, ‘to prechen and preuen it noȝt—ypocrisie [hypocrisy] it semeþ!’ (B.15.110). Langland also uses this collocation to describe the way that natural examples might reaffirm a preacher’s argument, as when Reason ‘preue[s]’ that recent storms and pestilences are punishments for sin (B.5.13). In contexts like this, I will argue, the language of ‘preching’ and ‘preueing’ draws attention to the way that sermons engage with lived experience, configuring real events into narratives, whose claims can be tested, challenged, or reaffirmed through direct observation.
The poem’s critical engagement with preaching is an integral part of its commentary on contemporary social and spiritual life, its investigation into the available discourses of instruction and the institutions and individuals who articulate them. Yet the preaching scenes in Piers Plowman are also often a site of self-theorization, where Langland considers his literary debts to sermons, and imagines forms of poetry that might extend, subvert, and transcend the practice of contemporary preachers. When Ymaginatif confronts the dreamer about the time he spends composing poetry near the end of the third vision, he challenges him to distinguish his own work from the work that preachers already do: ‘for þere are bokes ynowe [enough] / To telle men what Dowel is, and Dobet and Dobest boþe,/ and prechours to preue what it is, of many a peire freres [pair of friars]’ (B.12.17–19). In his hesitant, qualified answer, Will suggests that other people’s preaching is insufficient to locate the imperatives to do well, and establishes a rationale to continue the labour of emplotment in ‘makynge’ of his own (B.12.16). Here and elsewhere, I will argue, Langland acknowledges the affinities between preaching and Piers Plowman, while also insisting on the distinctiveness of his own poem.
The remainder of this Introduction is divided into three parts. In the first, I position my own project in relation to the existing scholarship on Piers Plowman and late medieval preaching, scholarship that has produced some enduring and influential models for reading the poem. Readers have found many analogues for Langland’s images and ideas in the surviving corpus of sermon texts and in the compendia that preachers used to compose them, and have looked to the exegetical structures of preaching as an influence on the poem’s amorphous and digressive form. Next, I consider the speech of Holy Church from passus 1 as an early and richly elaborated example of preaching in Piers Plowman, and one that demonstrates the central role of narrative in sermons as Langland understood it.
Here, as I will show, Holy Church reinterprets the dreamer’s vision of the contemporary world, where people experience time as a simple succession of events, and invites him to understand his present moment in time as part of a larger narrative. By locating the present time in salvation history, moreover, she discloses new imperatives to ‘do wel’ and to seek truth. Finally, I offer an introduction to Ricoeur’s theory of narrative, which informs my discussion of Piers Plowman and medieval preaching through this book. Ricoeur’s work, I will argue, serves to illuminate the transformative effects that narrative could produce, both for medieval preachers and for Langland.
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