1. Pearsall’s edition of the poem was published by Exeter University Press but was transferred in 2013 to Liverpool University Press, from which I received permission from Jenny Howard in September 2013. I am grateful to both Derek Pearsall and Jenny Howard. George Economou’s translation is William Langland’s “Piers Plowman”: The C Version (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). I am grateful to Jaime Marie Estrada and Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press for permission.
2. The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, in Three Parallel Texts: Together with Richard the Redeless, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2 vols. (1886; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), here see 2:xxi–xxiv. For the authorship issue, see George Kane, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for Authorship (London: Athlone, 1965); and Ralph Hanna, William Langland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993). On the published version of Piers Plowman, see Charlotte Brewer, Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
3. All quotations of Piers Plowman unless otherwise stated are taken from Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008). I have constantly consulted Piers Plowman: The C Version; Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best, ed. George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone, 1997). For the second version of the poem I have used Piers Plowman: The B Version, rev. ed., ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone, 1988). As for dating the C version, I am persuaded by Walter W. Skeat in the nineteenth century and most recently by Ralph Hanna that “Langland completed his C version around 1390.” Ralph Hanna, Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, Their Production, and Their Reading (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 156. In his edition, Derek Pearsall similarly surmises that this version of the poem was “not finished until soon after 1388” (Piers Plowman, 1).
4. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
5. For recent grand narratives in which the medieval has a substantial role to play that does not include Langland, see, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Michael Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).
6. Namely, Sarah Beckwith, James Simpson, Thomas Pfau, and Stanley Hauerwas.
7. Here see Thomas Aquinas’s exposition on the Pater Noster, section 1066 in his In Orationem Dominicam Videlicet “Pater Noster” Expositio, in Opuscula Theologica, ed. R.A. Verardo, R.M. Spiazzi, and M. Calcaterra, 2 vols. (Rome: Marietti, 1954), 2:228; see, too, Summa Theologiae I.39.4, resp.; I.39.5, resp.; I.39.5, ad 3 and ad 4; I.41.1, ad 2. I refer to part, question, and article with part of the article: I use unless otherwise indicated the six-volume (4 vols. in 6) Leonine edition titled Summa Theologica (Rome: Ex typographia Forzani, 1894).
8. Thomas Aquinas, The Literal Exposition on Job, trans. Anthony Damico (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), VI.28.
9. The best introduction to Langland’s modi loquendi remains the work of Elizabeth Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), together with her introduction to Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text (London: Arnold, 1967), ed. Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall, 3–58, reprinted as chap. 5 of her collected essays, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art, and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
10. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), 222.
11. See Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 169. This book involves a far more affirmative account of Scotus and Ockham than MacIntyre’s work habitually provides; compare Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), chap. 7.
12. Here I revisit and rehearse an argument made in “English Reformations” by myself and Nigel Smith in a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40 (2010): 425–38; here see 425–26, which comes from the part of the essay for which I was responsible. For the most relevant major work deploying this language, see James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
13. Taylor, A Secular Age, 61–88, 773–76. For exemplification of this thesis, see Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 38, 49, 85–86, 103–8. With this, consult Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Imprint on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (New York: Harper and Row, 1959).
14. ST II–II.11.3, resp.
15. See Gordon Leff, “The Apostolic Ideal in Later Medieval Ecclesiology,” Journal of Theological Studies 18 (1967): 58–82; see, too, Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chap. 7.
16. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: for my own somewhat critical comments on aspects of Duffy’s work, see “Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars,” Literature and History 3 (1994): 90–105; see Duffy’s robust response in the second edition of Stripping of the Altars, Preface, xx–xxviii.
17. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 328–65, 370–74. For a recent attempt to assess Langland’s relations with the Reformation, see Robert Adams, “Langland as a Proto-Protestant: Was Thomas Fuller Right?,” in Yee? Baw for Bokes: Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics in Honor of Hoyt N. Duggan, ed. Michael Calabrese and Stephen H.A. Shepherd (Los Angeles: Marymount Institute Press, 2013), 245–66; see, too, Robert Adams, “Langland and the Devotio Moderna: A Spiritual Kinship,” in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed. John A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), 23–40. Adams asserts Langland’s commitment to something called “democratic perfectionism” (“Langland as a Proto-Protestant,” 258), which allegedly links him to “the Radicals” of the Reformation in what seems a version of the pelagianism with which Adams has associated Langland elsewhere. On these issues, see David Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth-Century Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), chap. 4.
18. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, Preface, xx–xxii; see, too, the treatment of Wycliffites in Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
19. Throughout I cite Piers Plowman by passus and line numbers from Pearsall, ed., Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text, unless otherwise stated.
20. On the widely discussed tradition of Constantinian donation and the angelic voice proclaiming that it has poisoned the church, see the following: Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 154–57; Pamela Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980): 179–205, here 185–86; Hudson, Premature Reformation, 330, 334–46; Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-Clericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 88–91. For John Howard Yoder’s reflections on Constantinian Christianity and its different historical forms, see the following: The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), chap. 7; The Royal Priesthood (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 195–203; Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009), chap. 4. See, too, Stanley Hauerwas, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 22–36; D.H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), chap. 5. An excellent account of the political history in the fourth century is offered by Timothy Barnes, Athanasius and Constantine: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), especially 82–91, 95–116, 266–67.
1. All quotations of Piers Plowman unless otherwise stated are from Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text, ed. Pearsall, citing passus and line numbers. I have also used Russell and Kane, Piers Plowman: The C Version. For the B version, I refer to Piers Plowman: The B Version, rev. ed., ed. Kane and Donaldson. I still use the astonishingly learned commentary by Skeat in the second volume of The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.
2. For a discussion of the theology here and its relations to ideas of universal salvation, see Aers, Salvation and Sin, 114–19; for the notes to secondary material relevant to this, see 216–17. See too the introduction to Pearsall’s Piers Plowman, 37–38.
3. And apocryphal material: here see The Middle English Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. W.W. Hulme, EETS, e.s., 100 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1907). My reference to “so many theologians” points to the fascination with God’s potentia absoluta among the later medieval “moderni.” For a careful and lucid definition of what this is (and is not), see William of Ockham, Opus Nonaginta Deorum, chap. 95, trans. John Kilcullen and John Scott as Work of Ninety Days, 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2001), vol. 2; and Ockham’s Quodlibetal Questions, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Kelley, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), VI.1.1 and VI.2. For an introduction to this topic with citation of relevant commentaries, see Aers, Salvation and Sin, 38–45.
4. For these conventional examples of speculation concerning what God could do de potentia absoluta, see Ockham, Breviloquium V.2, translated as A Short Discourse of Tyrannical Government, trans. John Kilcullen, ed. Arthur McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 132; Ockham, Quodlibetal Questions, VII.55; Robert Holcot, quoted in Gordon Leff, Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 292. Leonard A. Kennedy, The Philosophy of Robert Holcot: Fourteenth-Century Skeptic (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1993), contains many arresting examples of such speculation. For an analysis of Holcot’s deployment of such material that contrasts with Kennedy’s, see Hester G. Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford, 1300–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), chaps. 3–5.
5. This is not the place where I intend to exemplify this claim: suffice it to say that anyone who spends any time reading the treatment of the Trinity in the commentaries on the first book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, distinctions 1–34, will find this to be so, as they will also find scripture marginalized. For an enthusiastic introduction to this theological tradition, see Russell L. Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and his essay “Medieval Trinitarian Theology from the Late Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, ed. Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 197–209.
6. For an example of the affirmation of scriptural foundations of doctrine, see Aquinas, ST I.1.1–2 and I.1.8–10.
7. See, e.g., Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Thought and “Medieval Trinitarian Theology; William J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Hester Gelber’s extraordinary doctoral dissertation, “Logic and the Trinity: A Clash of Values in Scholastic Thought, 1300–1335” (University of Wisconsin, 1974). For a useful overall introduction, see The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J.L. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
8. See Gelber’s “Logic and the Trinity” and It Could Have Been Otherwise.
9. I quote scripture from the Douay Rheims translation, The Holy Bible, rev. Richard Challoner (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1989); for the Latin text of the Vulgate, I use Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatem Clementinam: Nova Editio, 4th ed., ed. Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado (Matriti: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1965).
10. Earlier in the poem, Conscience, who disputes with Mede, had included the Trinity in his discourse as well as an apocalyptic discourse which I discuss later: III.344–406, 437–82a.
11. Matthew 5:44–45; Luke 6:27, 35. See too Pearsall’s note to XXI.114.
12. On “alle manere men,” see 1 Timothy 2:4. From Augustine through the Reformation this text elicited some of the most bizarre exegesis in Christian traditions as theologians tried to make it talk Augustinian or Thomistic or Calvinist predestinarian theology. For a typical example of this distressing chain, see Augustine, Enchiridion 24.97–25.1, translated by Bruce Harbert as The Augustine Catechism, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999); Augustine, The Predestination of the Saints 8.14 and Rebuke and Grace 14.44, trans. Roland J. Teske, in Answer to the Pelagians IV, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (hereafter WSA), ed. John E. Rotelle, pt. 1, vol. 26 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999). For Calvin, see Institutes III.24.16; I use the translation by John T. McNeill and Ford L. Battles, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960). For Aquinas’s place in this tradition, see ST I.19.6 and I.23.4, ad 3.
13. For a very sympathetic account of indulgences, see R.N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). This work is a hymn to positivist methodologies of history.
14. On purgatory and pilgrimage, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 338–76, 205. This and subsequent references are to the second edition.
15. Ockham’s work after he withdrew obedience from the Avignon papacy will have a role in this essay. Marsilius of Padua’s critique of papal claims to plenitude of power in The Defender of the Peace, ed. and trans. Annabel Brett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), has some common ground with Ockham, but his solutions are strikingly different. See Cary Nederman, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of Marsilius of Padua’s “Defensor Pacis” (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).
16. St. Augustine, The Retractions, trans. Mary I. Bogan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), I.20. See with this his exposition on Psalm 60:3 and Sermon 295.1–4, in Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding, ed. John E. Rotelle, 6 vols., WSA, pt. 3, vols. 15–20 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001–4), here WSA, pt. 3, vol. 17; and Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill, 10 vols., WSA, pt. 3, vols. 1–10 (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990–95), here WSA, pt. 3, vol. 8.
17. Augustine, Sermon 76.1, in Sermons, trans. Hill, WSA, pt. 3, vol. 3.
18. See Catena Aurea, ed. and trans. John Henry Newman, 4 vols. (London: Saint Austin Press, 1999), 1:584–85.
19. For a brief introduction to some of this history, see Walter Ullman, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 22–28; still indispensable in following the ideology of papal monarchism and debates around it is Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). For Ockham here, see Breviloquium II.14, in A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government.
20. Breviloquium, II.14, in A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government.
21. As do even the best commentators on the poem: Skeat, Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, 2:130; Pearsall, IX.327a, note.
22. For a fascinating account of the kind of papal bulls Langland has in mind, see the “extraordinary” but “common rubric” in collections of prayers quoted by Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 287–98, at 290–91.
23. For commentary on this much interpreted scene of pardon which turns out to be “no pardon” in any sense that participants in Passus IX can grasp, see Pearsall, Piers Plowman, 31–32, “The Pardon sent from Truth,” with his note to IX.290. For my own reading, see David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 107–14.
24. For a particularly good introduction to the issues of penance in both the B and C versions of Piers Plowman, see Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” 191–93; also Hudson, Premature Reformation, 294–310. In general, consult Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
25. On Langland’s use of the liturgy from Passus XVIII–XXI (B XVI–XIX), see M.F. Vaughan, “The Liturgical Perspectives of Piers Plowman B, XVI–XIX,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3 (1980): 87–155; Raymond St.-Jacques, “Langland’s Bells of the Resurrection and the Easter liturgy,” English Studies in Canada 3 (1977): 129–35; Raymond St.-Jacques, “Langland’s Christ-Knight and the Liturgy,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 37 (1967): 144–58; Raymond St.-Jacques, “The Liturgical Associations of Langland’s Samaritan,” Traditio 25 (1969): 217–30.
26. See Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, 3 vols. (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 1:104–11.
27. Augustine, Sermon 192.1, in Sermons, trans. Hill, WSA, pt. 3, vol. 6. On Langland’s exquisite lyric, see especially Ben Smith, Traditional Imagery of Charity in Piers Plowman (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 21–34. See too the eloquent discussion in Cristina M. Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 115–17. On becoming “a god . . . lyk oure lord” scholars often relate Langland’s text to “The doctrine of ‘deification,’ as developed in the writings of St. Bernard”: Pearsall, I.86, note, citing Edward Vasta, The Spiritual Basis of Piers Plowman (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), 66, and see 65–67. Langland’s own combination of lyrical celebration, affirmation, and caution is shared and illustrated by the quotation from Augustine. As Augustine wrote in De Trinitate, IV.2.4, God took away “the dissimilarity of our iniquity, and becoming a partaker of our mortality he made us partners of his divinity”; see The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, WSA, pt. 1, vol. 5 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991). I draw on the illuminating discussion of “deification” in Gerald Bonner, Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 62–69.
28. For the Statute of Laborers and Langland’s relations to its conflicts, see David Aers, Community, Gender and Individual Identity (London: Routledge, 1988), chap. 1; see too Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor and Authorship, ed. Stephen Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 208–317.
29. For this scene and its historical contexts, see the works cited in note 28. Already in the B version Langland was representing the struggle of relevant political forces in postplague England. To the materials cited in Aers and Middleton (note 29) should be added the perceptive essay by the historian John Hatcher, “England in the Aftermath of the Black Death,” Past & Present 144 (1994): 3–35.
30. On the Folvilles, see E.L.G. Stones, “The Folvilles of Ashby Folville, Leicestershire, and Their Associates in Crime, 1326–1341,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1957): 117–39; R.H. Bowers, “Foleyvyles Lawes,” Notes and Queries 206 (1961): 327–28. For a recent attempt to trace the family of “Stacy de Rokayle, pater Willielmi de Langland” (from the famous entry in the Dublin C version of the poem, Trinity College, MS 212, fol. 89v), see Robert Adams, Langland and the Rokele Family: The Gentry Background (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013); and see 59–66 for the “reckless reputation” of some of this family, whom Adams sees as Folville-like. Adams imagines young William Langland growing up with stories of such “laudable” gentry violence (66).
31. For an illuminating explication of the political theology of this text, including its co-text in Acts 5:29 (“We ought to obey God rather than man”), see Aquinas on Romans 13:1–7 in his In Omnes S. Pauli Apostoli Epistolas Commentaria, 2 vols. (Turin: Marietti, 1912), chap. 13, lec. 1 in vol. 1, 180–85. The French translation offers superb annotations by Jean-Éric Stroobant and Jean Borella, Commentaire de l’Épître aux Romains (Paris: Cerf, 1999); here see 445–54. This commentary offers a salutary contrast with the magisterial reformation’s thoroughly Constantinian reading of Romans 13:1–7. A good starting point for pursuing this undistinguished tradition is William Tyndale’s 1535 Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin, 2000).
32. The best guides known to me in this field are the following: Pamela Nightingale, “Capitalists, Crafts, and Constitutional Change in Late Fourteenth Century London,” Past & Present 124 (1989): 3–35; Caroline Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics of Trade in London, 1000–1485 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). On Langland and artisan culture, the following has certainly been influential: James Simpson, “‘After Craftes Conseil clotheth yow and fede’: Langland and London City Politics,” in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. N. Rogers (Stamford: P. Watkins, 1993), 109–27.
33. The ways in which the Eucharist and rituals around it could sacralize social hierarchy have been richly displayed by the following: Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1991); Miri Rubin, “The Eucharist and the Construction of Medieval Identities,” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 43–63; Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writing (London: Routledge, 1993); Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 126–27.
34. For an introduction to the relevant material, see David Aers, “The Sacrament of the Altar,” in Sanctifying Signs, chap. 1; on Langland and the Eucharist, chap. 2; on Wyclif and the Eucharist, chap. 3.
35. Aquinas on the Pater Noster, section 1066, in his Opuscula Theologica, 2 vols., ed. R.A. Verardo, R.M. Spiazzi, and M. Calcaterra (Rome: Marietti, 1954), 2:228.
36. For an example of this pre-Wycliffite norm, see Robert of Basevorn’s Form of Preaching (ca. 1322), ed. and trans. in James J. Murphy, The Medieval Rhetorical Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 144–215, here 124–25 (chap. 4).
37. See S. Bihel, “S. Franciscus Fuitne Angelus Sexti Sigilli (Apoc 7.2)?,” Antonianum 2 (1927): 59–90; Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), esp. pt. 2.
38. I quote Chaucer from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); with The Canterbury Tales, rev. ed., trans. Nevill Coghill (London: Penguin, 1977). Further references are to fragment and line numbers in the original, followed by page numbers in the translation. On Chaucer and the friars, see Penn Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), chap. 6.
39. On Langland’s treatment of the friars, especially of Franciscan ideology, see Aers, Sanctifying Signs, chap. 5; Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, chap. 7.
40. Consult Pearsall’s introduction to Piers Plowman, 24–25, together with Ralph Hanna, “‘Meddling with Makings’ and Will’s Work,” in Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 85–94.
41. On status in Christian lives, see Aquinas, ST II-II.183–89; on poverty and perfection, II-II.184.
42. On Aquinas in this paragraph, see the following seriatim: In Omnes S. Pauli Apostoli Epistolas, vol. 1, on 1 Cor. 12, Lectio 3, 355–60; ST II-II.39.1, resp.; ST II-II.183.2.
43. See Documents of the Christian Church, 2nd ed., ed. Henry Bettenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 159–61.
44. These are abundantly and sympathetically illustrated in Friedman, Medieval Trinitarian Thought; and Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise.
45. On the traditions Langland deploys here, see D.W. Robertson and Bernard F. Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 17–20; S.A. Barney, “The Plowshare of the Tongue: The Progress of a Symbol from the Bible to Piers Plowman,” Medieval Studies 35 (1973): 261–93.
46. See Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity, 20–55; on London and the Statute, see Barron, London, 273–77, esp. 276 on the 1359 Proclamation that all able-bodied beggars are to leave London or be put in the stocks on Cornhill, a spectacle to Wille and Kytte, Piers Plowman, V.1–2.
47. Here I draw especially on Bertha Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers during the First Decade after the Black Death, 1349–1359 (New York: Columbia University, 1908), chaps. 1–3; and on Richard Smith, “‘Modernization’ and the Corporate Medieval Village Community in England: Some Skeptical Reflections,” in Explorations in Historical Geography, ed. Alan R.H. Baker and Derek Gregory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 140–79. On constables, see Helen Cam, “Shire Officials: Coroners, Constables, and Bailiffs,” in The English Government at Work, 1327–1336, ed. J.F. Willard et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 3:143–83, esp. 165–71.
48. The Vision of Pierce Plowman, Nowe the Seconde Time Imprinted by Roberte Crowley (1550): the copy I use is Cambridge University Library, Syn 7.55.25; the quotation is from an annotation to Passus VI (Crowley edits a copy of the B version). Unlike some modern critics, Crowley did see that the “wasters” are also workers.
49. See the texts in The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, ed. R.B. Dobson (London: Macmillan, 1970), 65 and 74 (1376 Petition).
50. Elizabeth Salter [Zeeman], “Piers Plowman and the Pilgrimage to Truth,” Essays and Studies 11 (1958): 1–16, reprinted in Robert J. Blanch, ed., Style and Symbolism in “Piers Plowman” (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 117–31. See too Vasta, Spiritual Basis of “Piers Plowman,” 107–20.
51. See especially Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’écriture, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64); on later medieval hermeneutics, consult Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
52. An excellent display of papalist ideology is provided by Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power; see the Latin and English texts edited by R.W. Dyson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), with a very useful introduction on the relevant historical contexts. With Giles of Rome, still extremely informative on papal monarchist ideology and the debates around it, see Wilks, Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages. An illuminating example of this papalist ideology is offered by the Carmelite John Baconthorpe; see Beryl Smalley, “John Baconthorpe’s Postill on St. Matthew,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 4 (1958): 91–115.
53. See Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent”; Hudson, Premature Reformation, 398–408.
54. This is from Opus Nonaginta Dierum, chap. 93, trans. Kilcullen and Scott as Work of Ninety Days; also in Ockham, Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings, ed. McGrade and Kilcullen, 105–6.
55. Throughout I use the translation of the Breviloquium by McGrade and Kilcullen, A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government, here, seriatim, II.1, II.2, II.3; further references are given in the text. I have been guided by the still indispensable study by Arthur S. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); and also by Takashi Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
56. McGrade, Political Thought, 147.
57. Ibid., 147–48.
58. William of Ockham, On the Power of Emperors and Popes, ed. and trans. Annabel S. Brett (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998), chap. 9.
59. McGrade shows how Ockham insists that “the gospel’s law is a law of freedom” (140–49), and here I quote from 141. On the role of Ockham’s teaching on Christian liberty, see too Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, chap. 6; and on the Christian’s right in relation to suspicions of heresy, see chap. 2.
60. On this scope and duty of Christians, see Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 83–104, 150–55, chaps. 2–3 passim, with special attention due to the section on “fraternal correction” and conscience, 118–35. Also see on this, McGrade, Political Thought, 219–24. Ockham’s understanding of the universal church accords with his understanding of universals developed earlier in his life when he was doing work as a conventional academic theologian. So the universal church consists not of some metaphysical corporation but rather of all the individuals who throughout history believe the true faith: see Brian Tierney on Ockham in On the Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1972), chap. 6; Janet Coleman, History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 176, 179–80; Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 238–42, 256–61; McGrade, Political Thought, 224.
61. See Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 135–37; on women and a general council, see McGrade, Political Thought, 222 n. 9.
62. On Wyclif’s “dualism” in contrast to Langland’s ecclesiology, see Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” 197–201, esp. 199–200; also very helpful here is Gordon Leff’s analysis of Wycliff’s ecclesiology in his Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 2:514–46. This account is not superseded in more recent work: Stephen Lahey, John Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); G.R. Evans, John Wyclif (Oxford: Lion, 2005); Takashi Shogimen, “Wyclif’s Ecclesiology and Political Thought,” in A Companion to John Wyclif: Late Medieval Theologian, ed. Ian C. Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 199–240. For a recent attempt to emphasize the overlappings between what the author calls “mainstream Christian tradition” and Lollardy, see Fiona Somerset, Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 130.
63. Tierney, Infallibility, 210.
64. On the second, allegorical scene of plowing, see David Aers, Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (London: Arnold, 1975), 128–31; see too Robertson and Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition, 217–22.
65. See Thomas Gilby on this in his edition of Thomas’s text in the Dominican Summa Theologiae, 61 vols. (London: Blackfriars, 1964–81), 1:133: “In the first question of the Summa the terms holy teaching and holy scripture are synonymous.”
66. For an introduction to the relevant contemporary conflicts, see especially Leff, Heresy, 2:511–16; Ian C. Levy, John Wyclif: Scriptural Logic, Real Presence, and the Parameters of Orthodoxy (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2003).
67. On the virtues here, rightfully identified as infused, see Morton W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 134; John Burrow associates them with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in Langland’s Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 68–69.
68. The central “duplex” structures I summarize here, natural and supernatural, pervade the Summa Theologiae: see, e.g., I.1.1, resp.; I-II.61.1, resp.; I.23.1, resp. Relevant here is Reinhard Hütter’s treatment of the conflicts of interpretation in Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), chap. 5. For a nuanced account of relations between Aquinas and Langland on the virtues, see Sheryl Overmyer, “The Wayfarer’s Way and Two Guides for the Journey: The Summa Theologiae and Piers Plowman” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2010).
69. John Burrow asserts that Langland’s figuration of the seeds being eaten is “at some cost to the coherence of his fiction” (Langland’s Fictions, 70). This might be true if Langland were writing a nineteenth-century novel or a manual on estates’ management.
70. Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:271 n. 314.
71. Calvin, Institutes IV.6.5–7.
72. Augustine, Retractions, trans. Bogan, I.20.1; see too Sermons, trans. Hill, 295.1–2 and 5, in WSA, pt. 3, vol. 8.
73. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, 360, 367. The work I have found most helpful in displaying such arguments in detail is Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Power, trans. Dyson.
74. On Psalm 132, see Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Boulding, WSA, pt. 3, vol. 20; for the Latin text of the homily on Psalm 132 from which I also quote, see Enarrationes in Psalmos, 2nd ed., 3 vols., ed. Eligius Dekkers et al., Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, vols. 38–40 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1956–90), 3:1927.
75. Pearsall’s note to the earlier appearance of the hayward at XIII.45, Piers Plowman 229; see too Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:62 n. 16 and 174 n. 45.
76. On Langland’s exploration of Franciscan ideologies and practices, see Aers, Sanctifying Signs, chap. 5; Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, chap. 7.
77. De Officio Regis is a major text in one’s understanding of the exorbitant role envisaged for the Crown in the disendowment of the church: see David Aers, Faith, Ethics, and Church: Writing in England, 1360–1409 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), chap. 5.
78. The B version here and elsewhere is quoted from the revised edition by Kane and Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The B Version.
79. See ST: I-II.61.5, resp.; I-II.61.1–2, 4–5; I-II.58.1. I should note that while Pearsall ascribes the passage I have just quoted from the Prologue to “the dreamer,” the one I designate the figure of the poet, George Russell and George Kane in their edition of the C version give the lines to Conscience. See Pearsall, Piers Plowman, Prol. 128 (note).
80. Augustine, City of God XI.2: for the Latin text I use De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1993), 1:463; English trans. by R.W. Dyson, The City of God against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 451.
81. There is an excellent commentary on the terms, the ironic play, and the historical contexts in J.A.W. Bennett, Piers Plowman: The Prologue and Passus I–VII of the B Text as Found in Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 581 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 96.
82. See Bennett, Piers Plowman, 96.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.; and see J.A.W. Bennett, “The Date of the B-text of Piers Plowman,” Medium Aevum 12 (1943): 55–64.
85. See John Finnis, Aquinas on Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 200–210.
86. Or, depending on how one is reading the poem’s complex temporalities, the passage is a memory of the past Pentecostal community.
87. From a substantial literature on this topic, I have drawn especially on the following: John T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); John W. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1959); Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money, and Usury according to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1992); Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (London: P. Elek, 1978); Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). I have found R.H. Tawney’s introduction to Thomas Wilson’s Elizabethan work on usury extremely helpful, as in Wilson’s A Discourse upon Usury by Way of Dialogue and Orations, ed. R.H. Tawney (London: Bell, 1925). Finally I should mention a great and apparently forgotten work: W.J. Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, Part 2: The End of the Middle Ages, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 1906); the study of the medieval and reformation history of usury is in chap. 6, “The Canonist Doctrine.”
88. For an example of the former, Alexander of Hales, discussed in Little, Religious Poverty, 181; for Aquinas, ST II-II.78.2, ad 1.
89. Little, Religious Poverty, 180–83; and Kaye, Economy and Nature, esp. chaps. 4 and 7.
90. Giles of Lessines, De Usuris, printed as opusculum 66 in Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, vol. 17 (Parma, 1864). Little dates this text as “about 1280” and discusses it in Religious Poverty, 181–82. It was his discussion that made me aware of this fascinating work. Here I refer to De Usuris, Proemium, 413–14; further references are given in the text to this edition.
91. Little, Religious Poverty, 182; see De Usuris, chaps. 6–8 and 13, esp. 419–22.
92. Little, Religious Poverty, 182–83.
93. Ibid., 183: see too Kaye, Economy and Nature, chap. 4.
94. Still indispensable here is Jill Mann’s Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); and T.A. Yunck, The Lineage of Lady Meed: The Development of Mediaeval Venality Satire (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963).
95. I quote from John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth: Veritatis Splendor (Boston: Pauline Books, 1993). In the rest of the essay I give references to the work’s paragraph numbering in my text.
96. I allude to Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars.
97. Here I allude to Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation.
98. Conscience is of course touched on by most commentators on Piers Plowman, but the following works have a substantive focus on this figure: M.W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman; Sarah Wood, Conscience and the Composition of “Piers Plowman” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
99. Pearsall’s notes that XXI.335 echoes VIII.112 and observes that “the meaning is that he [Piers] leaves the vicinity of Unity to till truth elsewhere, as Jesus recommended to the Apostles (Matt. 16:15)” (XXI.335 note).
100. See Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), chap. “Resident Aliens: The Identity of the Early Church.”
101. See esp. City of God, I–VI; there is much illuminating commentary in Robert Dodaro, Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 1–3.
102. On the Donation of Constantine there is an understandable inclination to foreground Wycliffite attacks on this in discussions of Piers Plowman, but we need to remember the resonance of the angelic criticism in pre-Wycliffite and orthodox writers: see Gradon, “The Ideology of Dissent,” 185–86; Anne Hudson, Premature Reformation, 335 (with 334–46); Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), 195–96.
103. On Wyclif’s advocacy of coercive disendowment of the church by lay elites and their charity, see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 337–45; Scase, “Piers Plowman” and the New Anti-Clericalism, chap. 4.
104. On Wyclif’s “strongly regalian” politics and his followers, see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 362–67; Michael Wilks, Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice (Oxford: Oxbow, 2000), chap. 7, “Royal Patronage and Anti-Papalism from Ockham to Wyclif”; Leff, Heresy, 2:543–45.
105. See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 60; and, especially, Margaret Aston “John Wycliffe’s Reformation Reputation,” Past & Present 30 (1965): 23–51, reprinted in Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 243–72.
106. See G.W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007): on connections with the medieval history, 43, 172, 173; but for substantial exploration of the relevant antecedents, see Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), chaps. 3, 15; Jeremy Catto, “Religious Change under Henry V,” in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G.L. Harriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 97–116, at 97, 115. Catto argues that Henry V “had begun to act as supreme governor of the Church of England” (115).
107. William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, 2 vols., ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), 2:707 n. 215.
108. On the historical process of splitting off will from reason and its consequences, see Pfau, Minding the Modern, passim but especially chaps. 2–6, 8, 16. There is a relevant comment on the translation of Liber arbitrium in Brian Davies’s introduction to Thomas Aquinas, On Evil, trans. Richard Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 35–36.
109. My own understanding of Liberum Arbitrium is led by my reading of Langland’s composition of the figure, but I have been helped to understand his choices and emphasis by the quaestio in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, “De Libero Arbitrio,” I-II.83, along with I-II.82.1–2. For an attempt to link Liberum Arbitrium with St. Bernard’s writing, see Vasta, Spiritual Basis of “Piers Plowman,” 81–83; and before him, E. Talbot Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and Its Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 188–93. On Conscience, see note 98 above. According to Tierney, On the Origins of Papal Infallibility, 208 n. 1, all medieval theologians were “eclectic” in their philosophical theology, and to this Langland is no exception.
110. Norman Doe, Fundamental Authority in Late Medieval English Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 6, “Conscience and the Human Law”; quotation at 132.
111. On the natural disposition to know first principles, known as synderesis, see ST I.79.12; conscience is then treated in I.79.13. T.C. Potts’s book on conscience remains very helpful: Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
112. For my comments on the “duplex” (here and in note 68), see Laurence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters, 2nd ed. (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2010).
113. On the processes through which post-Nicene orthodoxy was made, see Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). It is striking that Faith’s analogy did not have Augustine’s admiration: compare XVIII.214–22 with De Trinitate XII.5 (Pearsall’s note here in his edition mistakenly cites De Trinitate II.5).
114. Has Wille forgotten the discussion with Liberum Arbitrium about “Sarresynes,” “the Iewes,” and their conversion to trinitarian faith (XVII.315–20a)?
115. On Isaiah 1:18, I slightly adjust the Douay Rheims (Challoner) text. The text links to 1 Peter 3:15.
116. This is true however many contemporaries one can produce for whom it would have seemed mistaken and even dangerous. For a discussion of just such a contemporary, Nicholas Love, see Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 12–24, 165–73.
117. For Christ the Samaritan, Luke 10, and the exegetical tradition Langland deploys, see Pearsall, XIX.49 note and its references.
118. On “inwit” and its meanings, see R. Quirk, “Langland’s Use of Kind Wit and Inwit,” JEGP 52 (1953): 182–89; Nicolette Zeeman, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 100–108, 121–25.
119. Aquinas rejects the views of Bonaventure and Franciscan masters on this: consult Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy, chaps. 3–4.
120. Sermons, 75.5, in WSA, pt. 3, vol. 3.
121. For a different approach, see Jill Mann, “Allegorical Buildings in Medieval Literature,” Medium Aevum 63 (1994): 191–210.
122. I use Susan Powell’s fine edition: John Mirk’s Festial, 2 vols., EETS, o.s., 334 and 335 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–11), vol. 1, sermon 10, quotation at 42. Powell offers a helpful commentary on Mirk’s sources (2:290–91). For a remarkable modern analogy, see the premonitory and posthumous testimony of the Trappist martyr murdered in Algeria by Islamic people in 1996, Christian de Charge: Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), 31–33.
123. I quote Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 412.
124. From the copious literature on the sacrament of the altar I am especially indebted to the following: John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” Past & Present 100 (1983): 29–61; James F. McCue, “The Doctrine of Transubstantiation from Berengar through Trent,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968): 385–430; Henri de Lubac, Corpus mysticum: L’Euchariste et l’église au moyen âge (Paris: Aubier, 1949); Gary Macy, The Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper (New York: Paulist, 1992); Rubin, Corpus Christi; Gary Macy, “Theologies of the Eucharist in the High Middle Ages,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages, ed. Ian Levy, Gary Macy, and Kristen Van Ausdall (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 365–98.
125. Aers, Sanctifying Signs, chap. 1.
126. Aquinas, ST III.76.1, resp. and ad 2; here I use the text and translation of the Blackfriars edition.
127. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 91: see chap. 3, “The Mass.” References below to Duffy’s work are given in the text.
128. Things had not always been thus. Gary Macy has recovered forgotten and denied histories: “The ‘Invention’ of Clergy and Laity in the Twelfth Century,” in A Sacramental Life: A Festschrift Honoring Bernard Cooke, ed. Michael H. Barnes and W.P. Roberts (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2003), 117–35; Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially in the eucharistic context I address around Langland, 63–66, 82–85.
129. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 131.
130. Walter Brut’s testament can be found in Registrum Johannis Trefnant, ed. W.W. Capes (London: Canterbury and York Society, 1916), 278–394. References in my text are to this edition. There is a discussion of this fascinating lay theologian in Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 67–82.
131. On Brut’s lack of sustained attention to this issue, see Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 82.
132. John Wyclif, De Eucharistia (Tractatus Maior), ed. Johann Loserth (London: Trübner and Co. for the Wyclif Society, 1892): “Nullus (inquam) fidelis dubitat quin Deus posset dare layco potentiam conficendi, sicut laycus cum possit esse sacerdos (ut dicit loyci [sic]) possit conficere” (98). The influence of Wyclif is very plain in the Lollard conclusions of 1395 so dramatically forced on Parliament’s attention. Any faithful man or woman (“potest quilibet fidelis homo et mulier”) can consecrate the sacrament (which is understood without the fictitious miracle of transubstantiation): Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico, ascribed to Thomas Netter, ed. Walter W. Shirley (London: Longman, 1858), item 4, 361–62.
133. Hawisia Mone, in Norman Tanner, ed., Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 142. These reflections on Conscience’s ministry of the Eucharist, Walter Brut, the 1395 Lollard articles (item 4), and Hawisia Mone could include attention to a striking deletion in Langland’s C version of Piers Plowman. In the B version Ymagenatyf teaches Wille that among the reasons Christians need clergie is the role of clergie in the sacrament of the altar: he affirms that God’s body could not be of bread without “clergie” (B XII.85). In The Premature Reformation, Anne Hudson examines the relations of Langland’s work to Wycliffite writing (398–408). There she considers the deletion of this line (B XII.85) from the final version of the poem. She decides that it is “probably . . . not the result of a change of heart by the author concerning transubstantiation, but rather of an increasing scepticism of the role of the clergy as honourable intermediaries between God and man” (403). I agree with Hudson’s statement about the treatment of the clergy in the C version, and she may be right about Langland’s deletion not being the result of reconsidering the doctrine of transubstantiation against the emphasis in B XII.85. However, this remains an open question for me since the statement about the sacrament in Conscience’s offer of Passus XXI does not mandate that it be read according to the dogma of transubstantiation: we are given “bred yblessed” and “godes body thereunder” (XXI.385: as is B.XIX.385). This is perfectly compatible with the consubstantiational account of the sacrament. Condemned by the Roman Church, it was considered by Ockham to be the least incoherent of the models explaining the mystery as the church understood the conversion of the elements and rejected because, in those days before excommunication, he simply accepted the authority of the church. For Ockham’s summary of what he takes to be orthodox doctrine, see De Corpore Christi, chap. 2, esp. 91, in Guillelmi de Ockham: Tractatus de Quantitate et Tractatus de Corpore Christi, ed. Carlo A. Grassi, vol. 10 of William of Ockham, Opera Philosophica et Theologica (St. Bonaventure, NY: St. Bonaventure University, Franciscan Institute, 1986), 89–234.
134. See, e.g., Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 93; it is, however, congruent with Aquinas’s thought, ST III.80.10; and see Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 363.
135. On Communion as the making of the community of Christ’s body, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 123–30; Bossy, “The Mass as Social Institution.” For a theological statement of this theme, see Aquinas, ST III.73.3, resp., with III.80.4, resp.
136. On these producers two essays by Rodney Hilton are very informative: “Lords, Burgesses, and Hucksters” and “Women Traders in Medieval England,” chaps. 15 and 16 in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Social History (London: Hambledon, 1985). Also relevant is Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
137. See Confessions VIII.5.10; also VIII.7.18, VIII.11.26, VI.12.21–22, VII.17.23: Confessions, 3 vols., ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); with Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Especially illuminating here is John G. Prendiville, “The Development of the Idea of Habit in the Thought of Saint Augustine,” Traditio 28 (1972): 22–99. It is fascinating that in 1433 a statute was passed prohibiting people living in Southwark from being jurors: “This was because they were people ‘without conscience and of evil governance.’” Here we encounter the idea that repeated action creates habits which can change our nature to create a lack of conscience, as Langland shows. I quote from Doe, Fundamental Authority, 146 (see note 110 above).
138. Pearsall, note to XXI.409; Robertson and Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition, 225–27, quotation at 225.
139. For an example of such commentary, see Schmidt, Piers Plowman, 2:712–13, with its totally uncritical rehearsal of Rosanne Gasse, “Langland’s ‘Lewd Vicory’ Reconsidered,” JEGP 95 (1996): 322–35. For a recent Schmidtian reading of the “lewed vicory,” see Emily Steiner, Reading “Piers Plowman” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 215–16. For an admirably lucid and accurate account of the “lewed vicory,” see James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 230; and Pearsall’s notes at XXI.409, 413, 422, 426, and 427. Stephen A. Barney has a long note on this figure in The Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman,” 5 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 5:166–79.
140. See Pearsall’s notes to Prol. 132 and 134.
141. See XXI.424–28 and 434–39 with Pearsall’s note on the two plows at XXI.426.
142. The most concise and relevant work of Ockham here is On the Power of Emperors and Popes, ed. and trans. Brett.
143. On the historical contexts, see Pearsall’s notes at XVII.234 and XXI.428–29; and Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-Clericalism, 102–19.
144. Commentators from Skeat on have drawn attention to the poem’s allusions to the Great Schism: Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:198, 233, 273–74; Bennett, Piers Plowman, 96–97; Pearsall, Prol. 134 and XXI.428–29 with further references to commentary on the poem. On the Schism, I have found the following most helpful: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1375–1417 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas Izbicki, A Companion to the Great Western Schism, 1378–1417 (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Édouard Perroy, L’Angleterre et le Grand Schisme d’Occident (Paris: Monnier, 1933), esp. 175–205 on the Despenser crusade; Wendy L. Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages (Tübingen: Siebeck, 2011), esp. chaps. 4–5; Hudson, Premature Reformation, 330–34, 409–10.
145. Scholars disagree about the date of this passus (C XXI, B XIX). Compare, for example, Anne Hudson, “Piers Plowman and the Peasant’s Revolt,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 8 (1994): 85–106, esp. 100, with Barney, Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman,” 5:174–76. My own commentary does not depend on the outcome of such an argument, although my opinion coincides with Hudson’s. One has to acknowledge the relevance of Lawrence Warner’s claim about the relations between the B version and C versions, although I expect these claims will also divide opinion among Langland scholars. See Warner, The Lost History of “Piers Plowman” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
146. The sources on which I draw, giving references in my text, are the following: Norman Housley, “The Bishop of Norwich’s Crusade, May 1383,” History Today 33 (1983): 15–20; Margaret Aston, “The Impeachment of Bishop Despenser,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 38 (1965): 127–48; Perroy, L’Angleterre et le Grand Schisme, 175–205. For an extremely rich and much-needed account of the diversity of crusading discourses and the implied politics, see Lee Manion, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): on Despenser’s crusade, see 19–20, 108, 117; and Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 333–38.
147. On “his military tastes,” see Aston, “The Impeachment,” 133; and Housley, “The Bishop,” 16.
148. Aston, “The Impeachment,” 133.
149. Ibid., 134.
150. Housley, “The Bishop,” 18.
151. On Courtenay’s public support for Despenser’s crusade, see Housley, “The Bishop,” 18.
152. References are to Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G.H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), citing the parallel English and Latin texts.
153. Housley, “The Bishop,” 18.
154. For the ideology and practice of this treasury, see Swanson, Indulgences, 309–12; and Robert W. Shaffern, The Penitents’ Treasury: Indulgences in Latin Christendom, 1175–1375 (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2007).
155. Knighton’s Chronicle, 324/325. I have revised Martin’s translation to reflect Knighton’s second use of the important phrase “a pena et a culpa,” and I have modernized the spelling.
156. There is a substantial and discordant literature on this pardon in C IX and in its earlier form, B VII. In the latter, Piers tears the pardon in response to the priest’s challenge. For an introduction to the interpretations and arguments, see Pearsall, Piers Plowman, “The Pardon Sent from Truth,” 31–32. Cf. Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 107–16.
157. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1982), 2:430, 431.
158. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 16.
159. Housley, “The Bishop,” 17.
160. Aston, “The Impeachment,” 134, 135, 136.
161. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars. In “Altars of Power” I have drawn attention to the striking rhetorical and grammatical differences between the part of Duffy’s book devoted to the Middle Ages and that on the sixteenth century. In the second edition of Stripping of the Altars, Duffy responded persuasively to some of my criticisms but not to the one addressing the different analytic and narrative modes deployed in his treatments of the Middle Ages and Reformation, a difference with serious and unexamined consequences. See Stripping of the Altars, xxi–xxii.
162. Aston, “The Impeachment,” 133.
163. Ibid., 137–41.
164. William of Ockham, On the Power of Emperors and Popes, trans. Brett, chap. 7, 94.
165. James Simpson, Piers Plowman, 202, citing Mary Carruthers, The Search for St. Truth: A Study of Meaning in “Piers Plowman” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 157–73.
166. Passus VIII had already represented an example of the latter in “the statuyt” of laborers and the laborers’ anger (VIII.337–40). See section III of this essay.
167. Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:274–75; Pearsall, Piers Plowman, note to XXI.459–64.
168. J.L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (London: Dent, 1980), 92.
169. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), III.20–21 (140–41).
170. That Christ is the key to scripture, the one whose incarnation discloses the allegorical meaning of the Old Testament, was an exegetical commonplace. The best introduction to the theology of medieval interpretation of scripture remains de Lubac, Exégèse mèdièvale.
171. For the comment that “hermaphrodite or ambidexter” would be good names for the fusion of temporal and spiritual powers in the church, see item 6 in the 1395 Lollard “libellus” in Fasciculus Zizaniorum, 361. There is an English translation in Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 245–51.
172. See ST II-II.58.1, resp. with obj. 1 and ad 1.
173. The king’s assumption that his will and the law are synonymous was to become one of the marks of tyranny used to justify the deposition of Richard II in 1399. For a useful collection of documents concerning the deposition and its ideology, see Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 213–23.
174. Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:275.
175. An example of this convention is provided by Thomas of Wimbledon in his famous Paul’s Cross Sermon of 1388, edited by N.H. Owen, Medieval Studies 28 (1966): 176–97, here 179. The sermon is also edited by Ione Kemp Knight in Wimbledon’s Sermon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967).
176. See XVII.227–32. See references given in note 103 above to Wyclif’s “strongly regalian” politics.
177. Consult the materials cited in notes 105 and 106 above, with Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pt. 2.
178. See Aquinas, ST I.79.12–13 with I-II.19.5–6.
179. John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth, par. 106, original emphasis; subsequent references in the text are to paragraph numbers.
180. I draw on Quentin Skinner, “Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality,” Proceedings of the British Academy 76 (1990): 1–61, here at 7–8. Subsequent citations are given in the text. For the place of this analysis in Skinner’s wider reading of Hobbes, see his Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 138–80. In an essay on preaching the virtues, Richard Newhauser, without identifying paradiastolic speech and its traditions, as Skinner does, mentions the way medieval “moral theologians” seek “to strip off the disguises used by vices to masquerade as virtues.” See his “Preaching the ‘Contrary Virtues,’” Mediaeval Studies 70 (2008): 135–62. The Wycliffite William Taylor provides a nice example of paradiastolic speech in the sermon edited by Anne Hudson in Two Wycliffite Texts: The Sermon of William Taylor (1406); The Testimony of William Thorpe (1407), EETS, o.s., 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14, lines 415–27. Taylor notes how the devil baptizes sins under the names of virtue. Another nice example of paradiastolic speech is ascribed to the wicked (“implii”) in the Book of Wisdom. In chapter 2, they determine to “let our strength be the law of justice” (Sit autem fortitudo nostra lex iustitiae). This is, of course, closely related to the speech of the lord toward the end of Piers Plowman: there the infused cardinal virtues of prudence and fortitude become identified with tyranny (XXI.459–65). Robert Holcot’s ruminations on the Book of Wisdom are always very engaging, and he addresses this text (Sapientia 2.1) in Lectio 23 of his In Librum Sapientiae Regis Salomonis Praelectiones CCXIII (Basel, 1586).
181. For a more searching and critical exploration of Hobbes in a grand narrative of extraordinary erudition and attention to detail, so rare in such narratives, see Pfau, Minding the Modern, chap. 8.
182. For recent work on Hobbes most germane to my own concerns, alongside Pfau’s Minding the Modern, see A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and the essays in parts 3 and 4 of The Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. chaps. 12, 15, 16–17.
183. For some reflections on such possible connections, see Noel R. Malcolm, “Thomas Hobbes and Voluntarist Theology” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1983). For some fascinating reflections in the seventeenth century on Hobbes’s relations with late medieval theology of the “moderni,” see Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality: With a Treatise on Freewill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I.4–5. Such relations seem still very much understudied.
184. For a skillful description of conflicting interpretations followed by a wide-ranging investigation of a “need ethos” in Piers Plowman, see Jill Mann, “The Nature of Need Revisited,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 18 (2006): 3–29.
185. See Aers, Sanctifying Signs, chap. 5, on Nede, 150–56. Probably the most sustained commentary on “temperance” in the poem remains Bloomfield, Piers Plowman, 135–43.
186. R.M. Adams, “The Nature of Need in Piers Plowman XX,” Traditio 34 (1978): 273–301, quotation at 278.
187. For a different reading of this scene, see Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Stephen Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 208–317. She links the questioning of Wille in Passus V with Nede’s in Passus XXII and seeks to bind the former to the enforcement of the Statute of Laborers and its 1388 version.
188. I offer some reflections on the significance of this in Langland’s theology and ecclesiology in Sanctifying Signs, 149–50.
189. See, e.g., ST II-II.66.7, sed contra and resp.
190. I quote from Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, 272. On Nede’s relations to Kynde, see Zeeman, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, 263–83.
191. See ST II-II.66.7, resp.
192. See ST II-II.141.2–6; II-II.152–54.
193. Nede’s assumption that Temperance should primarily govern the destitute is shared by another fascinating figure in the poem, Patience, as is his confidence that destitution must generate Christlike humility (XXII.35–37; see Pearsall’s note to XXII.37 linking with Patience at XVI.57–99). For mistakes in Nede’s and Patience’s assumptions, see Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 127–32. Ironically, both figures propagate a materialist determination which occludes the need for divine grace in the making of Christocentric virtues, grace mediated by sacraments, according to Jesus the Samaritan (XIX.83–95).
194. See too Bloomfield, Piers Plowman, 137, 104. Bloomfield claims that Langland disagrees with Aquinas and agrees with Nede in the hierarchy of the virtues. This stance ignores both Grace’s account of the virtues, which I have been following, and Conscience’s insistence that Justice is the chief seed that Piers has sown (XXI.406).
195. On Nede’s attempt to appropriate Christ’s Incarnation for Franciscan ideology, see Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 151–52.
196. On mundus, see Zeeman, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, 211 n. 20.
197. There is a substantial literature on Antichrist and Langland’s version of this figure. A good introduction is Pearsall, Piers Plowman, 36–37; and I have found the following helpful: Richard K. Emmerson, Antichrist in the Middle Ages (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); Reeves, Influence of Prophecy; Henri de Lubac, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 2 vols. (Paris: Lethielleux, 1979); R.E. Lerner, “Antichrists and Antichrist in Joachim of Fiore,” Speculum 60 (1985): 553–70. Two scholars of Langland have presented him as a Joachite writer: Bloomfield, Piers Plowman; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and “Piers Plowman” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For my own critical distance from such presentations, see David Aers, “Visionary Eschatology in Piers Plowman,” Modern Theology 15 (2000): 3–17. I continue aspects of this discussion below.
198. Perhaps one might expect something like Huon de Mery’s tournament of Antichrist; see Emmerson, Antichrist, 188–93.
199. Kerby-Fulton is confident that Piers is metamorphosing from St. Peter into the evangelist St. John in accord with Joachim’s schemes of sacred history and the third status of the Holy Spirit manifested in contemplatives; she is also confident that “Piers will return to reform the Church” (Reformist Apocalypticism, 170). As my discussion of the poem’s closing lines will make clear, I see no grounds for such confidence. It is salutary to read a work by John of Rupescissa closely alongside the long version of Piers Plowman: even when there is some thematic overlapping (as on disendowment, or ecclesial apostasy) the difference of literary and theological modes should be very striking and the modes of speaking, as Aquinas taught, yield decisive doctrinal differences. A very manageable work of John of Rupescissa to read alongside Langland’s poem is Vade Mecum in Tribulatione. This was published by Edward Brown in the second volume of his Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum & Fugiendarum (London: Chiswell, 1690), 496–508.
200. John Hatcher describes mortality in the plague of 1348–49 as “at least a third of the population of the known world,” in “England in the Aftermath of the Black Death,” 3.
201. The processes I designate as de-Christianization are considerably broader and deeper than Scase’s “anti-clericalism.” In fact what she terms “the new anti-clericalism” in her “Piers Plowman” and the New Anti-Clericalism seems to be a name for an aspect of Wycliffite ideology and generates a Wycliffite obsession with sacerdotal failings from which the church will be rescued by the king and lay elites, a new Constantinianism.
202. Dante locates simoniac leaders of the church in the Inferno, canto 19.
203. Langland wrote the final version of the poem after the Earthquake Council; Hudson, Premature Reformation, 402; see Joseph H. Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), chap. 5.
204. E.g., Prol. 56–94, 95–127; II.59–80, 158–59; III.26–67, 185–95; V.173–77.
205. See Scase, Piers Plowman, 112–19.
206. See Margaret Aston, “William White’s Lollard Followers,” Catholic Historical Review 68 (1982): 469–97.
207. The history of Henry VIII’s revolution illustrates the range of theology and contradictory dogmatics compatible with enforcing this revolution. On the theology, J.J. Scarisbrick’s work is especially helpful: Henry VIII (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968; repr. London: Methuen, 1983), chap. 12. For what seems to me a far more superficial account of Henry’s theology as a coherent “middle way,” see Bernard, The King’s Reformation, chap. 6; for examples of Bernard’s claims about this “middle way,” see 475, 478–80, 488, 490–91, 494, 507, 521, 543, 546, 558.
208. Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent”; and Hudson, Premature Reformation, 398–408.
209. Since Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” and Hudson, Premature Reformation, the most distinguished contributions to this topic have been by Scase, Piers Plowman; and Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chaps. 2–3.
210. Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Diseent,” 187–88.
211. Margaret Aston, “‘Caim’s Castles’: Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment,” in The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R.B. Dobson (Gloucester: Sutton, 1984), 45–81, here 50. This superb essay is reprinted in Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire (London: Hambledon, 1997), chap. 4. References in my text are to the original printing in 1984.
212. On the theological virtues in this context, see Aquinas, ST I-II.62.1–3; on charity, II-II.23.1–2 and 24.1–2 (charity as a habit of the will leading to friendship with God).
213. Scase, Piers Plowman, chap. 4.
214. On this extraordinary episode and its centrality in Piers Plowman, see Aers, Salvation and Sin, chap. 4.
215. For lucid commentary and reference to secondary literature, see Pearsall, Piers Plowman, XX.11 note.
216. For an example of my understanding of how Langland’s dialectic works on a specific topic of inquiry (Franciscan ideologies of poverty), see Aers, Sanctifying Signs, chap. 5.
217. See Elizabeth Salter’s fine “Piers Plowman: An Introduction,” in Piers Plowman: Selections from the C-Text, ed. Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall (London: Arnold, 1967), 3–58; reprinted in the collection of essays by Salter, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art, and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 111–57; together with her Piers Plowman: An Introduction. Note, in the latter, her description of the poem’s “episodic quality” (20, 22), perceptions elaborated by Anne Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Sigfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 91–122.
218. I am drawing especially on Wyclif’s Tractatus De Officio Regis, ed. A.W. Pollard and C. Sayle (London: Trübner, 1887), esp. chap. 1 (pp. 14 and 13) and chap. 3. On this topic, consult Hudson, Premature Reformation, 362–67; Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2:542–45; Michael Wilks, “Royal Patronage and Anti-Papalism from Ockham to Wyclif,” Studies in Church History Subsidia 5 (1987): 135–63; reprinted in his Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow, 2000), 135–63; Shogimen, “Wyclif’s Ecclesiology and Political Thought.”
219. See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 60 (“stella matutina,” Bale’s term for Wyclif); Aston, “John Wycliffe’s Reformation Reputation.”
220. See Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, chaps. 9–12; Bernard, The King’s Reformation, chaps. 3, 5, 6; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, chaps. 11–12.
221. I refer to the printing of the B version by Robert Crowley, The Vision of Pierce Plowman, now the second time imprinted by Roberte Crowley (1550), using the copy in the Cambridge University Library, Syn 7.55.25. The B version’s passage on disendowment is at XV.553–69. I draw here from Crowley’s “Printer to the Reader” and “A briefe summe of the principall poynts” and from his marginalia. Crowley is an evangelist who admires the way Langland “doth most christianlie instructe the weake, and sharplye rebuke the obstynate blynde” (“Printer to the Reader”). There is discussion of Crowley’s Piers Plowman in Sarah A. Kelen, Langland’s Early Modern Identities (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Jamie K. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 146–48; Brewer, Editing “Piers Plowman,” chap. 1.
222. So despite disagreements over wider issues concerning Langland’s theology, I agree with James Simpson’s emphasis on the differences between Langland’s work and Wycliffite Christianity in Reform and Cultural Revolution, 371–74.
223. Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2:543.
224. See the brilliant essay on the Knight’s Tale by Elizabeth Salter, Chaucer: The Knight’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale (London: Arnold, 1962); see too her essay “Chaucer and Boccaccio: The Knight’s Tale,” in Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 141–81.
225. Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:279.
226. Repentaunce is both an act of the soul and, according to Pearsall, a “priest-confessor” (note to VI.1).
227. Sources for the “horn” of Hope and the quotations here are discussed by Pearsall in his notes to VI.151–54; some amplification is offered by Schmidt, Piers Plowman, 2:544.
228. See Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:63–65, as so often in Skeat, a thoroughly engaging commentary.
229. Pearsall, Piers Plowman, VI.115, note.
230. See VIII.23–55, 149–66, 329–38 (with notes 47–48 above).
231. For characteristic examples of this basic distinction, ST I.1.1, resp.; I.23.1, resp.; I-II.5.3–5; I-II.62.1. For relevant literature on the debates around this “duplex,” see note 68 above.
232. The most sustained study of “kynde” in Piers Plowman is by Nicolette Zeeman in her “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, chaps. 5–7. I acknowledge this to be an outstanding work which I greatly admire. But her understanding of “kynde,” in my view, turns Langland into a natural theologian with little interest in Christology. It is significant in this respect that her capacious index does not even have an entry for “Christ.”
233. See, e.g., Kenneth Surin’s informative study, Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
234. Excellent notes by Pearsall link the relevant passages in VIII and XXII at his Piers Plowman XXII.80 and VIII.168. Schmidt seeks to gloss away the obvious meaning of Conscience’s final prayer for vengeance (Piers Plowman, 2:726). Here it is appropriate to recall the Prick of Conscience, that immensely popular medieval poem so helpfully reedited by Ralph Hanna and Sara Wood in Richard Morris’s “Prick of Conscience”: A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text, EETS, o.s., 242 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The preface of the poem articulates the view that people can be terrified into virtue (lines 320–47). Much in the work’s treatment of purgatory and hell enacts this view.
235. On this episode and its relevant secondary literature, see Aers, Salvation and Sin, chap. 4.
236. Ockham, A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government, ed. and trans. Kilcullen, 59 (chap. 19).
237. For Walter Brut, see my admiring discussion in Sanctifying Signs, 67–82. For relevant views by East Anglian Wycliffites, persecuted by the church, see Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, ed. Tanner, e.g., 71 (John Pyrye of Martham), 96 (Robert Cavell of Bungay), 42 (Margery Baxter of Martham), 86 (Richard Fleccher of Beccles), 142 (Hawisia Mone of Loddon), 148 (John Skylan of Bergh Apton), 153 (William Hardy of Mundeham). Similar views are expressed in the 1395 Lollard “libellus,” in Netter, Fasciculi Zizaniorum, item 10 (366–67). On Christian discipleship and nonviolence among Wycliffites, see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 367–70.
238. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, pt. 2, in The Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1971).
239. I have just quoted from Pearsall’s note on XXII.183.
240. Calvin, Institutes, II.8.44.
241. I refer to passages of disputation in Passus XVI–XIX, XXI.
242. See ST III.46.6–8 and III.47.3; also III.15.5–10. My understanding of what Aquinas is doing here and of his motivations has been immeasurably helped by Paul Gondreau, The Passions of Christ’s Soul in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Münster: Aschendorff, 2002; repr. Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2009).
243. These were, of course, traditional affirmations in orthodox Christianity, commonplaces of late medieval preaching. Our resurrection is enabled by and prefigured by Christ’s (1 Cor. 15). A classic example of the tradition is in Augustine, City of God, XXII.4–30; see also ST III prologue and III.56.1–2; and Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis, 5 vols. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), IV.79–88 (vol. 5).
244. I refer to City of God XX.7; further references are given in the text. I use De civitate Dei, ed. Dombart and Kalb; and the English translation by Henry Bettenson, The City of God against the Pagans (London: Penguin, 1984), together with that by Dyson, The City of God against the Pagans.
245. For an example of such calculation in 397, see R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; repr. 1988), 20.
246. I have found the following accounts of Joachite ideology and exegesis especially helpful: Reeves, Influence of Prophecy; Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore (London: Macmillan, 1985); Jeanne Bignami-Odier, Études sur Jean de Roquetaillade (Johannes de Rupescissa) (Paris: Vrin, 1952); Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries.
247. See Lerner, “Antichrist and Antichrists in Joachim of Fiore,” 563, 567.
248. On Jean, see Bignami-Odier, Études; E. Jacob, “John of Roquetaillade,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 39 (1956–57): 75–96.
249. Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, 226–27.
250. See Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, 227 and chap. 3; further references are given in the text. She draws on Bignami-Odier, Études, using her detailed and lucid summaries of Jean’s works. I have also drawn here on Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poetry, Saints, and Visionaries, 181–82. Kerby-Fulton addresses Jean de Roquetaillade in her Reformist Apocalypticism and “Piers Plowman,” 188–91. Her commitment to offering “a Joachite perspective on Piers Plowman” (191–200 passim) tends to encourage the confusion of what a text reminds her of with the establishment of influence.
251. The summary of Jean’s prophetic work is drawn from Bignami-Odier, Études, 53–172; Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, 320–24; Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poetry, Saints, and Visionaries, 181–82. On the making of God into an Englishman, see Michael Wilks, “Royal-Patronage and Anti-Papalism from Ockham to Wyclif,” Studies in Church History Subsidia 5 (1987): 135–63, reprinted in his Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice (Oxford: Oxbow, 2000), 135–63, where he uses J.W. McKenna, “How God became an Englishman,” in Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G.R. Elton from His American Friends, ed. D.G. Guth and J.W. McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 25–43. For examples of the life of Joachite traditions in the Reformation, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Penguin, 2004), 189, 205–7.
252. On Mede, see Yunck, Lineage of Lady Meed.
253. Pearsall observes: “The story . . . is not intrinsically a very good one for the illustration of meed” (III.409–42, note).
254. See ST II-II.4.2 with III.47.2.
255. See ST II-II.4.2 with III.47.2; and Milton, Paradise Lost, I.1–5, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007).
256. See 1 Henry IV, 3.1.11–66, and King Lear, 1.2.102–33, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
257. See Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, chap. 4 (Wyclif) and chap. 2 (William of St. Amour).
258. See Aers, “Visionary Eschatology,” 7, and citations in n. 17 of this essay to Jean of Roquetaillade.
259. Isaiah 2:2–5 was “read at matins in the first week of Advent” (Bennett, Piers Plowman, 141).
260. Henri de Lubac discusses the compromising of Christ Jesus’s full significance in the economy of salvation in Exégèse médiévale, II/1:538; see the whole of chap. 6 on Joachite exegesis and ideology.
261. Here I rehearse distinctions basic to Aquinas, as in ST I-II.109.1–2 or I-II.62.1; see note 68 above.
262. See Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 88–92, 97–107.
263. Holcot, In Librum Sapientiae.
264. In Lectio 58: “Nam circa eius adventum calculatores & pseudoastronomi seducti sunt,” In Librum Sapientiae, 206–7. For a study that goes against the grain of current inclinations to reject the Leffian and Gilsonian accounts of “skepticism” in fourteenth-century theology, see Kennedy, Philosophy of Robert Holcot.
265. For John Wyclif’s similar rejection of Joachite projects to discover the times and moments, see the statement quoted in Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2:543 n. 2, from Johannis Wyclif Opera Minora, ed. Johann Loserth (London: Trübner, 1913), 375.
266. Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, chap. 6, here at 210.
267. See Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings, 13.
268. Ibid., 206.
269. Ibid., 218.
270. Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 232; cf. Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 238. Tierney strongly disapproves of Ockham’s teaching on authority and hermeneutics (e.g., 228, 235–36). In my view, his conviction that Ockham’s teaching is anarchic and subjective simply evades the problems that Ockham identified in his church. Contrast Shogimen, 256–61.
271. John Milton, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon, eds., Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, 1136. Abdiel’s arguments and acts are recounted in Paradise Lost, V.803–VI.198; the Abdiel-like just men are encountered through books XI and XII. For Milton’s articulation of his ecclesiology after the Revolution, see his De doctrina christiana, I.29 and 31; as in Ockham, his ecclesiology is inseparable from his teaching on Christian liberty (I.27). For De doctrina christiana, see the parallel-text edition by John K. Hale and J.D. Cullington, in vol. 8 of The Complete Works of John Milton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). On Ockham’s innovative account of Christian liberty, see McGrade, Political Thought of William of Ockham, 141–49, 160–66; with Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, chap. 6.
272. On this topic, the fusion of ecclesiology and predestinarian dogmatics, Pamela Gradon offers a lucid and decisive account of the differences between Langland and Wyclif, in “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” 199–202; as does Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2:516–46; and Hudson, Premature Reformation, chap. 7; also more recently Shogimen, “Wyclif’s Ecclesiology and Political Thought,” 220–21.
273. Breviloquium, V.4, in A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government, 136.
274. Ibid., 137.
275. Ibid., 138.
276. I quote from the fine translation by Maria Boulding, Expositions of the Psalms, exposition on Psalm 73:1. For the Latin text, see Augustine, Enarrationes In Psalmos, 1004–23. Milton’s version of the remnant pervades both editions of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth; see The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 6, Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings, ed. N.K. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 461–523, esp. 520–23. Keeble’s comments on Milton’s version of the remnant rightly bring out its “elitism and exclusivity” (106). Unlike Milton, Langland has absolutely no idea that his “fools” should wield the sword and civil power in a republican politics of “elitism and exclusivity” with rabid contempt for the people. Milton, we recall, had long before judged the people to be “an inconstant, irrational and Image-doting rabble” (Eikonoklastes, 424, in the same volume). After the Restoration, in political defeat, Milton offers a version of the remnant separate from the lust for dominion: see, e.g., Paradise Lost XII.479–551.
277. For the commonplaces here, see Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation, 104–33; on penance in Piers Plowman in relation to Wycliffite views, see Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” 191–93; and Hudson, Premature Reformation, 294–301.
278. Netter, Fasciculus Zizaniorum, 278: “Item quod si homo fuerit debite contritus, omnis confessio exterior est sibi superflua, vel inutilis.”
279. William Thorpe, Testimony of William Thorpe, in Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts, 80–84. Such views were common among Hawisia Mone and her friends in Norfolk and Suffolk; see Tanner, ed., Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 140–41 (Hawisia Mone), 135 (John Eldon), 48–49 (Margery Baxter, a more elaborate story), and many more similarly, one of the most widespread beliefs in opposition to church dogmatics.
280. I am not persuaded by Scase’s description of the final passus as “anticlerical apocalypticism,” in “Piers Plowman” and the New Anti-Clericalism, 113. This classification occludes Langland’s critique of lay elites alongside clergy. Perhaps Scase’s terminology is shaped by her preoccupation with Wyclif.
281. Conscience’s dismissal of Clergie is proximate to Rechelessnesse’s wrathful dismissal of “clergie” which Ymagenatyf later corrects: XI.272–303; XIII.129–30; XIV.99–130. On clergie, see Zeeman, “Piers Plowman”and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, 23–24 and chaps. 4, 6, 7.
282. Aers, Sanctifying Signs, chap. 5, provides references to primary and secondary sources.
283. For William of St. Amour, see Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, chap. 1; on Jean de Meun, 184–90.
284. Like the reader, he may remember III.38–76 and XII.11–36.
285. On Chaucer’s friars in his Summoner’s Tale, see Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, chap. 6. Jill Mann’s discussion of the friar of the General Prologue and the traditions of satire to which he belongs remains indispensable: Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 37–54.
286. For an exploration of what constitutes a state of perfection, see Aquinas, ST II-II.186.1–2.
287. Wyclif, Tractatus De Blasphemia, ed. Michael Henry Dziewicki (London: Trübner and Co. for the Wyclif Society, 1893), 46; see also 218. On Wyclif’s teaching on the friars, see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 347–51, 168–73.
288. On the friars here, see Pearsall’s note to XXII.276, with Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, 282.
289. On the Fourth Lateran Council’s canon 21, “Omnis utriusque sexus” (1215), see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner, Latin and English, 2 vols. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990), 1:245, par. 21.
290. I refer to Scase, “Piers Plowman” and the New Anti-Clericalism, 119; contrast Sarah Wood, Conscience and the Composition of “Piers Plowman,” 88: “as earlier a king’s knight and now castellan of Unity,” Conscience in Passus XXII becomes “a lordly conscience easily misled by friars.” Yet on the consequences of this, Wood and I seem far apart.
291. There is an engaging passage in Wyclif’s De Blasphemia where he discusses how friars are generally the confessors and counselors of lay lords (192–93) and where he attacks clerical elites for taking on the most secular work for the Crown (199, 200). Indeed: but had he forgotten his own earlier missions for Crown and elites? For an extremely informative study of the ecclesial contexts, see Robert C. Palmer, Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350–1550 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), which presents a striking comparison with Duffy’s materials in his Stripping of the Altars.
292. Szittya gives a fine exposition of penetrantes domos in Antifraternal Tradition, 58–61, 185–86, 284–85.
293. Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. A. Brandeis (pt. 1), EETS, o.s., 115 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1900).
294. Similarly Szittya, Antifraternal Tradition, 276, 286.
295. On dwale I follow Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:284–85: “an opiate, a sleeping draught,” citing Chaucer’s usage in his Reeve’s Tale, CT I.4161; the Riverside Chaucer glosses dwale as “sleeping potion.”
296. See ST III.62, III.64.1, III.64.7, III.84.7, III.85.3.
297. Below I will address the relations between Holy Church in Passus I–II and Holy Church in Passus XXII.
298. It is important to recognize the history congealed and reified in the encyclical’s language of “Magisterium.” For a helpful introduction by a Roman Catholic theologian, see Yves M.-J. Congar, “Pour une histoire sémantique du terme ‘magisterium’” and “Bref historique des formes du ‘magistère’ et de ses relations avec les docteurs,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 60 (1976): 85–98, 99–112.
299. Recent examples can be found in Schmidt’s annotations in Piers Plowman, vol. 2: rejecting readings of the poem’s ending which have some affinities with the one offered in this book, he asserts that they simply must be wrong because they “would be out of keeping with his [Conscience’s? Langland’s?] upright and loyal nature.” So how are we to read Conscience leaving the church in the final lines? “The possibility therefore [sic!] cannot be excluded that the ending was to receive further revision, perhaps on the scale of the text up to Passus XX” (726). Luckily for Langland, assumed to share Schmidt’s version of Christian orthodoxy and authority, the modern editor’s gloss now in effect provides the “further revision” Langland failed to provide in either long version of his work. Schmidt thus now makes it into a fitting conclusion for an “upright and loyal” Christian in his own rather un-Langlandian image of orthodoxy.
300. 1377, Parliament: the quotation is from Michael Wilks’s discussion of the text on “Royal Patronage and Anti-Papalism,” in his Wyclif, 131–32.
301. See Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 371–72, 375.
302. See Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 590; also consult the important essay by Jeremy Catto, “Religious Change under Henry V.”
303. De Blasphemia, 197; see too 200.
304. So I reject the arguments of Aers in Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), 59–60, but develop some strands found on 61.
305. On this aspect of the later Ockham, see the fine commentary in McGrade, Political Thought of William of Ockham, 68–71, 72–74; with Annabel Brett’s introduction to her translation of Ockham’s On the Power of Emperors and Popes, 28. Shogimen’s account of Ockham’s “ecclesiastical republicanism” is intriguing but seems to me an imposition of alien political structures and institutions on Ockham’s theology of evangelical liberty.
306. McGrade, Political Thought of William of Ockham, 141; and see 140–49. See also Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, chap. 6.
307. On some of the ironies here, Lester Little is particularly illuminating in Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy.
308. Aquinas, In Orationem Dominicam Videlicet “Pater Noster” Expositio, par. 1066, in Opuscula Theologica, ed. Verardo, Spiazzi, and Calcaterra, 2:228.
309. Milton, “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” in Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, line 20—a characteristic piece of Miltonic wordplay rather congruent with one of Langland’s pleasures. On formalism and antiformalism in the revolution, see J.C. Davis, “Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1993): 265–88. Still helpful is William Lamont’s account of shifts in the understanding of liberty, “Pamphleteering, the Protestant Consensus, and the English Revolution,” in Freedom and the English Revolution, ed. R.C. Richardson and G.M. Ridden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 72–92.
310. Dymmok’s Liber was edited by H.S. Cronin for the Wyclif Society (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1922); page references to this edition are cited in the text.
311. For a good account of medieval appeals to the early church, see Leff, “Apostolic Ideal in Later Medieval Ecclesiology.”
312. The Supremacy Act of 1559 is reprinted in G.R. Elton, ed., Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), document 184; and in Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 329–30. For Milton’s comments on the Donation of Constantine, see, e.g., Of Reformation (1641), in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:615; on the Constantinianism of the Reformation, 1:535, 554–55. The central place of Constantinianism in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is illustrated throughout William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Cape, 1963), also published as The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). William Lamont has some sharply relevant observations on how “the saints” of the 1640s and 1650s “had to destroy Foxe and his idols—the martyr-bishops, the Godly Prince, Constantine, Elizabeth”—in “Puritanism as History and Historiography,” Past & Present 44 (1969): 133–46, here 139.
313. Still indispensable is Margaret Aston’s “Lollardy and Sedition, 1381–1431,” Past & Present 17 (1960): 1–44, reprinted in her Lollards and Reformers, 1–47; also H.G. Richardson, “Heresy and the Lay Power under Richard II,” English Historical Review 51 (1936): 1–28.
314. Catto, “Religious Change under Henry V,” esp. 115; on this nexus, see A.H. McHardy, “Liturgy and Propaganda in the Diocese of Lincoln during the Hundred Years War,” Studies in Church History 20 (1983): 171–78; Harriss, Shaping the Nation, chaps. 3, 15.
315. From different motives, grand narratologists tend to stress discontinuities and ignore continuities. One can readily witness this in works referred to in the preface to this book, such as Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution; Gregory, Unintended Reformation; Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity.
316. A good example of Constantinian modes is displayed in the statute of 1401 legitimizing the burning to death of English Wycliffites, in Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 251–55; here heresy is explicitly identified with “sedition and insurrection” (252). Aston, “Lollardy and Sedition,” is extremely informative on this period, as is Peter McNiven’s Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987). On the magisterial reform of the sixteenth century and Langland, I concur with James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 343–45, albeit for different reasons.
317. I refer to Ockham, On the Power of Emperors and Popes, chap. 27 (p. 168).
318. Aers, Sanctifying Signs, 99–156.
319. See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 334, quoting Netter, Fasciculi Zizaniorum, 279 (item IX): “Item quod post Urbanum sextum non est aliquis recipiendus in papam, sed vivendum est, more Graecorum sub legibus propriis.” Hudson notes that this view “appeared several times around 1395 in English writing concerning the Schism” (334). This should surely be seen as among the many continuities between the later fourteenth/early fifteenth century and the theological resources of the sixteenth-century Reformation, as should the line taken at the Council of Constance to subordinate the papacy to general council. On Wyclif and Antichrist, see Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2:536–41.
320. Consult Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 89.
321. I discuss the theology, compassion, and rhetorical brilliance of this speech in Salvation and Sin, 115–19.
322. Skeat, Piers the Plowman, 2:285.
323. De heretico comburendo, in Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 252–53.
324. See the still unsurpassed essay on this passus by Elizabeth Salter, “Piers Plowman and the Pilgrimage to Truth,” together with her Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 84–90, 100–102.
325. Elizabeth Salter, “Introduction,” in Salter and Pearsall, Piers Plowman, 31, 32; original emphasis. Her quotation from Hilton comes from The Scale of Perfection, II.29, ed. Evelyn Underhill (London: J.M. Watkins, 1923; repr. 1948), 355; in the reprint of the essay as chap. 5 in her English and International, this quotation is at 134.
326. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Soliloquies, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 68.3.
327. Salter, “Piers Plowman and the Pilgrimage to Truth,” 126–27 (original emphasis), reprinted in Blanch, ed., Style and Symbolism, chap. 6; Middleton, “Langland’s Lives: Reflections on Late-Medieval Religious and Literary Vocabulary,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature, ed. James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 227–42, here at 233.
328. Wilks, Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages; W. Ullmann, Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists (London: Methuen, 1949). Of course, I am aware that here, as in much of my reading of Piers Plowman, I would encounter responses such as that offered to Crowley by the seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Andrew Bostock, as he opposed the editor’s marginalia: Langland, insists Bostock, “must not be understood to scorn the Authority of the Chief Pastor, as the Heretical margin, wold suggest” (from Bostock’s own marginalia on Crowley’s marginalia, printed by Charlotte Brewer in Editing Piers Plowman, 18–19). Brewer herself is sure that Bostock’s reading of Langland’s work is correct and Crowley’s wrong since Langland’s reformation is “always in terms that implicitly or explicitly reinforce traditional social and religious structures” (7–8). This represents the dominant view in scholarship on Piers Plowman and was nicely expressed by my own teacher assessing Crowley’s editorial comments: “it comes about, ironically, that a work so fundamentally Catholic and orthodox was used as a support for the Reformation” (Salter, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 12). It is worth juxtaposing Langland’s treatment of the relations between the absent Piers and the very present pope in the lines just quoted from Passus XXII with Dante’s Paradiso 27.19–66. There Dante hears St. Peter describe the modern popes as usurpers of his own place in the church. They have turned this into a foul place of blood in the service of Satan, turning the church into an institution whose teleology is the acquisition of earthly gold instead of beatitude. They have betrayed the papal office by turning its keys into signs under which the papacy promotes wars between Christians. Everywhere he looks, complains St. Peter, he sees rapacious wolves dressed as sheep (“In vesta di pastor lupi rapaci”). I have used the text of the Divine Comedy with translation by Geoffrey L. Bickersteth (Oxford: Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1965). Given the quotation from Milton’s Ready and Easy Way in section XIII above, I also wish to recall Milton’s own brilliant attack on the papacy and his own reformed church in Lycidas, lines 109–31: the links with Dante are made in the edition by Barbara K. Lewalski and Estelle Haan, The Complete Works of John Milton, vol. 3, The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 54–55, 388; on Paradiso 29.103–8 in Lycidas 126, see p. 389.
329. Brewer, Editing Piers Plowman, chap. 1 (on Crowley); and see note 222 in this essay.
330. John Paul II, The Splendor of Truth (Veritatis Splendor), 88 and 106 (pp. 110 and 128); original emphasis.
331. I refer to Augustine, City of God, XIX.15 and XIX.17.
332. William of Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings, 13; he alludes to 3 Kings 19:10 and 18. Most famously, of course, the Virgin Mary alone remained true during the crucifixion of Christ; Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse, 238.
333. See Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, in Church Dogmatics, 4 pts. in 12 vols., trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1962), vol. 4, pt. 3.2; and Augustine’s second exposition on Psalm 29:6 in Expositions of the Psalms, trans. Boulding, WSA, pt. 3, vol. 15, 305.
334. I depend on the illuminating and detailed study by Beryl Smalley, “John Baconthorpe’s Postill on St. Matthew,” in her Studies in Medieval Thought and Learning: From Abelard to Wyclif (London: Hambledon, 1981), 289–343; I quote from 321 and draw on 319–33. However, the most thorough expression of papalist absolutism, a papalist version of Constantinian Christianity, known to me is Giles of Rome, On Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. and trans. Dyson. This edition contains a helpful introduction on the historical contexts of Giles and this work.
335. De heretico comburendo quoted here from Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 251–55.
336. Prologue to Ockham, On the Power of Emperors and Popes, 71–72.
337. Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, II.529. For a pertinent discussion of “sect” and Lollards, see Hudson, Premature Reformation, 168–73, 347–51; and there is a characteristically eloquent and ruminative essay by Patrick Collinson on such issues: “Night Schools, Conventicles, and Churches: Continuities and Discontinuities in Early Protestant Ecclesiology,” in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 209–35.
338. For the 1593 act, see Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church, 340–42.
339. Tanner, Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 138–44; further references are given in the text. See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 33–34, 38–41, 162–63, 168–73, 180–200.
340. For the punishments with which these East Anglian Christians were afflicted, see Tanner’s summary in Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 22–25, 29–30.
341. On women in Lollardy, compare Margaret Aston, “Lollard Women Priests?,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 441–61, reprinted in her Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 49–70; Clare Cross, “‘Great Reasoners in Scripture’: The Activities of Women Lollards, 1380–1530,” Studies in Church History Subsidia 1 (1978): 359–80; Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
342. See Hudson, Premature Reformation, chap. 3 and also 450–51, 456–72; see too Wyclif, De Eucharistia, ed. Loserth, 119, on Christians breaking bread in their homes.
343. Wyclif, De Blasphemia, 62.
344. Ibid., 72.
345. Here I think of René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (London: Athlone, 1977).
346. For this language and its unfolding, see Henry Jacob, A Collection of Sundry Matters (1616) with A Confession and Protestation of the Faith of Certaine Christians (1616), bound together in Cambridge University Library, Rare Books Room, shelfmark Bb*.12.47.
347. For introduction to these, see Rollo-Koster and Izbicki, Companion to the Great Western Schism; and I have found especially helpful Anderson, Discernment of Spirits; with Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries.
348. I am aware of J. Patrick Hornbeck’s denial that any Wycliffite held to “the principles of congregationalism in church governance, at least not as those concepts were later articulated by the reformers of the sixteenth century”; see What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 172. I have no problems with a denial couched in such terms. No Wycliffite in Earsham or Loddon in the 1420s would formulate the same ecclesiastic polity as ones being worked out by Brownists and later separatists in Elizabethan and Jacobean England or in the very different contexts of the 1650s. My quotation from Henry Jacob does not indicate that I equate Jacob or Thomas Helwys or John Goodwin with Langland or Hawisia Mone. But nor do I think of “congregationalism” as having determinate “principles” articulated in sixteenth-century Europe. Rather “congregationalism” gestures toward complex, fascinating processes of reformation as groups of Protestants came to resist the ecclesiology and theology of the magisterial Reformation to which the Church of England belonged. Still extremely useful here is Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London, 1616–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Here I should acknowledge the complexity and important nuances of the terminology used to think about different aspects of reformation, restitution, renewal, and regeneration within the traditions of Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is nicely exemplified in Peter Wilcox’s essay on an aspect of Calvin’s writing, “‘The Restoration of the Church’ in Calvin’s ‘Commentaries in Isaiah the Prophet,’” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 85 (1994): 68–95. Hornbeck’s approach to change and continuity within Christian traditions does not seem a productive one, since it is unlikely that many concepts are articulated in precisely the same way across the centuries even within a strand that seeks continuity with what its adherents recognize as their predecessors. In this area we address implications and potentialities, not univocal concepts and practices. In fact, Hornbeck himself ascribes what he says “might seem to imply almost a congregationalist understanding of authority” to the Lollard sermon Of Mynystris in the Chirche (185). The grammar Hornbeck uses here seems to me thoroughly appropriate to such texts and their places in histories of reformation. I concur with him on this particular reading. In the present contexts I want to remember the shrewd reflections by St. Thomas More related to a term I use very tentatively: congregationalism. In his often brilliant Dialogue concerning Heresies, More discusses Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament and explains why it deserves to be burned. He says it should not be called the New Testament but “Tyndals testament or Luthers testament.” This is because the “holsom doctryne of Cryste” is displaced in Tyndale’s translation which time and again substitutes “deuylysh heresyes” (285). Among the symptomatic choices illustrated by More is the substitution of “chyrch” by “congregacyon” (286). More himself had earlier used “chyrche” and “congregacyon of Cryste” as synonymous (e.g., 190, 192–93). Indeed, in principle, he saw no problem in naming a gathering of Christians as a “chyrche or congregacyon of Cryste” (190). He had earlier said that Christ intended to “gather a flocke and congregacyon of people that should serue god and be hus specyall people” (173). The problem arose when a Lutheranizing author refused any use of “chyrche” and always translates “ecclesia” as “congregacyon.” This Tyndale did: “he calleth the chyrche alwway the congregacyon.” But More points out that although “the chyrche” is indeed “a congregacyon,” not every “congregacyon” is “the chyrche.” Only “a congregacyon of crysten people” is “the chyrche.” And in common English “a congregacyon of crysten people hath ben in Englande always called and knowen by the name of chyrche.” So to exclude “chyrche” completely from his translation and only use the term congregacyon represents an ideological decision, a Lutheran polemic embodied in remaking the New Testament. References and text from A Dialogue concerning Heresies are to the edition by Thomas M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc’Hadour, and Richard C. Marius in vol. 6 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Louis Martz et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). There is a fine essay on More’s work by Eamon Duffy, “‘The comen knowen multytude of crysten men’: A Dialogue concerning Heresies and the Defence of Christendom,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More, ed. George M. Logan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 191–215; on Tyndale’s translation and More’s criticisms, see 206–7. I should also note here that my visit to the church in Corinth in conjunction with a discussion of Langland’s “fools” would hardly surprise many medieval exegetes of scripture. Take the commentary on the Bible by the distinguished theologian Peter Auriol: thinking about Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he observes that the word of the cross (“verbum crucis”) is the word of folly among the worldly wise and prudent. But, he says, God did not choose to save people through such wisdom but through the foolishness of preaching accepted in faith, faith perceived as folly (“stulta & fatua”) by the world’s common sense. See Petri Aureoli Franciscani . . . Compendiosa in vniversam sacram scripturam commentaria (Paris, 1585), 141. There is one further question that should be addressed: how do the “fools” of Passus XXII relate to those beggars who are called “lunatyk lollares and lepares about” in Passus IX.105–40? Following Derek Pearsall, I discussed the latter at some length in Sanctifying Signs (110–15) in a chapter on Langland’s exploration of forms and ideologies of poverty. As I showed there, Langland makes very clear that these male and female mendicants “wanteth wyt” (i.e., lack wit, or the capacity to reason): they are driven by “the mone [moon’s phases],” “meuynge aftur the mone.” Lacking the power of intellect, “they preche nat.” Nevertheless, in their vulnerable and “moneyeles” witlessness they present a challenge to the community’s charity and openness: as such, they are as God’s “postles” and his “priue,” or secret, disciples (IX.105–20a). In all these features they are as significantly different from the “fools” of Passus XXII as they are from St. Paul preaching and teaching in Corinth. But they do foreshadow the fools of Passus XXII, and Langland stresses this by linking them to Paul’s comment that if anyone in the church seems (“videtur”) to be wise in the present world let him become a fool (“stultus,” 1 Cor. 3:18; see Passus IX.127a). But foreshadowing is not identification. The “lunatyk” and witless beggars of Passus IX offer a typological anticipation of the fools of Passus XXII who will challenge the modern church as it follows “Antichrist” (XXII.56–75). For Pearsall’s “‘Lunatyk Lollares’ in Piers Plowman,” see Religion in the Poetry and Drama of the Late Middle Ages in England, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988), 163–78.
349. For Margery Kempe on noli me tangere, see Book I.81. I use The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (London: Longman, 2000).
350. I quote from and allude to The Book, 352–57.
351. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, 121.3–5.
352. For relevant material and arguments, see David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), chaps. 1–3. Consult John P. Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions (New York: Routledge, 2005).
353. See Aers, Sanctifying Signs, chap. 1, “The Sacrament of the Altar in the Making of Orthodox Christianity.”
354. Dymmok, Liber, 94–101.
355. See Wyclif, De Eucharistia, 11–13, 16–17; I outlined Wyclif’s teaching on the Eucharist in Sanctifying Signs, chap. 3; see too Ian C. Levy, “Christus Qui Mentiri Non Potest: John Wyclif’s Rejection of Transubstantiation,” Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévales 66 (1999): 316–34; Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2:249–57. But perhaps, as one considers Langland’s Piers and the blocks the poet has placed against those seeking affinities between Piers and the church’s papal institution, the Wycliffite text most pertinent is De Potestate Pape; see Tractatus de Potestate Pape, ed. Johann Loserth and F.D. Matthew (London: Trübner and Co. for the Wyclif Society, 1907).
356. ST III.76.1, resp. and ad 2.
357. Dymmok, Liber, 100–101: “Cum Christus ex hoc mundo transiturus esset ad Patrem, ne sponsam suam sanctam, scilicet ecclesiam, solacio sue corporalis presencie destitueret in cena hoc sacramentum instituit” (100).
358. Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland, 1992), 152, 153; see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 91–102.
359. Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, chaps. 1–2.
360. For a contrasting account of iconoclasm and of Milton (who has been in the margins of the present essay), see James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
361. See Pearsall’s note to I.3; Galloway has many words on this subject in Barney and Galloway, The Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman,” 1:147–53 with 147–218 passim.
362. Smith, Traditional Imagery of Charity in “Piers Plowman,” 21–34. See too the eloquent discussion in Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 115–17.
363. I quote from Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 255.
364. Pearsall glosses on my knees: “a more humble act of obeisance than kneeling on one knee, as to a secular lord” (I.76 note).
365. For my attempt to explore this dialectic in Langland’s treatment of the Eucharist, see Sanctifying Signs, chap. 2.
366. I quote from The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. Kerrigan, Rumrich, and Fallon.
367. I have already drawn attention to the immense differences between Wyclif’s ecclesiology and Langland’s, observing the central role of predestinarian dogmatics in Wyclif’s account; once again see Gradon, “Langland and the Ideology of Dissent,” 197–201; and Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2:516–46. For Langland on predestination, see XII.41–74a.
368. Pearsall’s notes to Prol. 1–4.
369. On Langland’s relations to contemplative traditions concerning the love of God and the reformation of the image of God within people, Elizabeth Salter’s work has not been superseded: “Piers Plowman and the Pilgrimage to Truth”; Piers Plowman: An Introduction, chap. 3; “Piers Plowman: An Introduction,” in her English and International, 131–49. Edward Vasta attempted to develop connections made by Salter in The Spiritual Basis of “Piers Plowman.” Pearsall provides helpful annotations for the loci I have been discussing at I.86 note (Piers Plowman, 60) and VII, notes at 269 and 270 (153); as does Bennett, Piers Plowman, 108.
370. Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 4, pt. 3, 668.
371. “Dictamen conscientiae plus obligat quam obligat praeceptum praelati,” in Robert Holcot, In Librum Sapientiae Regis Salomonis Praelectiones, 387. The Lectio from which this comes, Lectio 115 (Sapientia 8.16, misprinted as 8.26 on p. 385) includes a characteristically engaging account of the house of Conscience.
372. The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise N. Baker (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), chap. 86 (124).