Arts and Humanities

Accounts of Piers Plowman’s early modern reception tend to emphasize antiquarians and Protestant reformers, “readers for action” who used the poem for professional and political ends as an object of study or as evidence for ecclesiological polemic. This article discusses copies of the Crowley and Rogers editions of Piers Plowman now in the Bancroft and Beinecke Libraries, annotated by provincial readers in Derbyshire and Suffolk respectively, in order to articulate an alternative model of reception defined by “idleness” rather than action. The traces left by these “idle readers,” who had no clear professional investment in the poem or its contents, reveal a different way of engaging with the poem: distracted, pleasure-seeking, open to humor and surprise. Their responses suggest that not all early modern readers understood the poem as a useful artifact from a distant medieval past, but could treat it as a living document in their own moment. Because idle readers lack the readily identifiable motivations of reformers and antiquarians, however, they present methodological challenges to critics and book historians. Claims made about them must therefore be tentative and open to uncertainty.

This essay addresses the role of shame in Piers Plowman, focusing on Will’s experience of misspeaking and rebuke in passus 11 of the B text. Fourteenth-century devotional writing moralizes shame as the awareness of one’s own sins, or as a collective emotion brought on vicariously by the sins of others or directly by their persecution. In contrast, Will’s shame emerges from the apprehension of his incompletion as a thinking and speaking agent. Rebukes from Scripture and Reason repeatedly cast Will back into a scene of remedial education. As Imaginatif explains, Will’s shame is useful because it breaks, remakes, and teaches. Will’s shame maps a process of learning. Because passus 11 begins where the A text ended, and because Imaginatif connects Will’s shame to his poetic making, this meditation on shame also reflects on the shame and legitimacy of Langland’s lifelong work of revision.

Contemporary scholars sometimes analogize premodern acedia to modern depression, finding promise in ancient therapies for acedia—chiefly forms of bodily activity and mental discipline. This article identifies an alternative model of medieval ascetic therapy in a brief passage in Ancrene Wisse in which a mother playfully hides from her child, who is left to cry alone until she returns and embraces him. The scene, later dubbed “the play of love,” is presented as a similitude illustrating God’s withdrawal from the anchorite, which is experienced as the depressive state known to medieval thinkers as sterilitas mentis. Although it belongs to a long tradition on the benefits of temptation, the play of love also serves an immediate therapeutic end, allowing the anchorite to conceptualize her solitary suffering as part of an ongoing relation with a complex God. The form of the similitude, which facilitates identification across difference, is crucial to this process. Though the play of love operates differently from the therapeutic modes that emerge from other work comparing acedia and depression, it underlines the value of the analogy in the first place, whatever the risks of anachronism.

This article offers the first comprehensive history of the “play of love”—a similitude that compares God’s withdrawal in temptation to a mother at play with her young child—from its origin in Ancrene Wisse through its subsequent appearances in English and Latin devotional writing. In Ancrene Wisse, the scene allows an anchorite to understand her emotion in light of God’s love while acknowledging that God’s unprompted withdrawal causes suffering. The play of love was subsequently excerpted, translated into Latin, and circulated in England and on the continent. A Latin compilation misattributed to Richard Rolle, Quandoque tribularis (edited in the appendix), and later Middle English works refashion the play of love to prescribe specific practices or emotions. This case history thus reveals surprising connections between early English vernacular religious writing, Latinate European readers, and later medieval English compilers, as well as an object lesson in these readers’ changing expectations.

Reviewing this book is a bittersweet task. "Winner and Waster" and Its Contexts is Mark Ormrod's final monograph, published posthumously after a prolific, field-defining career unfairly abbreviated by illness. A book-length study of a single poem might seem an unlikely pendant to a scholarly corpus that has reshaped our understanding of late medieval English political and social history, but the book's comparatively narrow topic serves as a pretext for a compelling wider study of mid-fourteenth-century English politics and culture. As Ormrod remarks in the opening pages of the book, Winner and Waster is a poem of its moment, but what moment precisely is up for debate. The alliterative satire, though copied in the fifteenth century, is clearly a product of the fourteenth: the debate between its two eponymous figures, personifications of miserly prudence and dissolute extravagance respectively, is studded with references to mid-fourteenth-century people and events; the conflict is resolved, with no clear winner, by a king clearly modeled on Edward III. In his 1920 edition, Israel Gollancz dated the poem to 1352-53 on the basis of somewhat dubious internal evidence. Ormrod argues that it was composed in the mid or late 1360s instead. Though this book is not the first to question Gollancz's 1353 terminus ante quem, it offers the most extended dismantling of Gollancz's early date. Moreover, Ormrod makes the dating question an opportunity to survey the political economy of mid-fourteenth-century England. The first four chapters marshal the evidence for a 1360s Winner and Waster. The first chapter's bravura opening swiftly demolishes the 1353 terminus ante quem: Ormrod convincingly argues that Fitt One's tournament setting references the spectacular 1358 feast of the Order of the Garter. The remainder of the chapter underlines the point by turning to the poem's antifraternalism, which Ormrod argues proceeds as much from English frustration with the papacy in the 1360s as from specific controversies over the mendicant orders in the late 1350s. Chapter 2 turns to questions of law and order. Though Gollancz viewed the poem as topical commentary on the 1352 Statute of Treasons, Ormrod argues that it instead reflects longer-running developments in legal practice: its references to private war, bouts of lawlessness, and itinerant courts apply equally to events decades before and after the statute. More salient for Ormrod are the threats of violence traded by Winner and Waster, despite their submission to royal arbitrationtheir lawlessness reflects longstanding complaints about Edward's household that grew more potent as he declined in the 1360s. Having thus unpinned Winner and Waster from one watershed piece of English legislation, Ormrod attaches it to another. Lamenting the "social ambiguities" (75) of an increasingly mobile society, Winner and Waster satirizes the showy dress of the arriviste classes. The same anxieties elicited the sumptuary laws of 1363, which tried to impose a hierarchical sartorial regime in language reminiscent of the poem's. These contextual maneuvers push the poem a decade forward in time, though the disproving of the old dates can be more convincing than the positive arguments for new ones: as Ormrod acknowledges, lawless retainers and extravagant dress are perennial subjects of satire. More importantly, though, the redating allows us to see the poem in a new light. Ormrod's Winner and Waster is not a debate between a profit-seeking bourgeois and a profligate aristocrat, as it has usually been read; rather, it depicts two positions within the same landed class. The poet is not hostile to the laboring classes, but indifferent. And as the fourth chapter argues, its comments on public finance reflect unhappiness over peacetime fiscal policy rather than war levies. The book concludes with two chapters considering the implications of its argument. Having unmoored the poem from its old berth in literary history, the fifth chapter anchors it instead in the household of a magnate or a prelate, suggesting that Winner and Waster is better read as a predecessor of Gower or Hoccleve than as a source for Piers Plowman or a harbinger of the largely debunked "alliterative revival." In lieu of a conclusion, a short sixth chapter considers 1326 Reviews Speculum 99/4 (October 2024

What goes out of the body, out of its pores and openings, points to the infinitude of the body proper and gives rise to abjection. (Julia Kristeva) 1 T his essay focuses on a metaphor for emotional experience that is both entirely conventional in late medieval poetry and so reflexive and widespread as to be nearly synonymous with the experience itself: the sense that a strong emotion swells, often in the chest, until it bursts out as tears, speech, or even the act of writing. 2 Hoccleve reproduces this metaphor throughout his poetic career, but it enjoys particular pride of place in the Series: the collection begins and ends with swelling and bursting. These moments, defined as they are by their ambivalent relationship to originalitya cliché that nevertheless conveys an embodied particularity -call to mind the question past critics repeatedly posed about the Series: is it a work of fifteenth-century convention, or does it relate an account of experience locatable in the hard facts of a person's body and brain? This question has long since been superseded, its implied binary demolished by John Burrow, who sensibly pointed out that 'convention and autobiographical truth' need not 'be taken as incompatible alternatives'. 3 In James Simpson's reading, the singularity of the Series emerges from the agonistic play between unique personal circumstance and the well-worn tracks of literary tradition. 4 But 1