8 - William Langland Reads Robert Grosseteste

Summary

William Langland wrote his masterpiece, Piers Plowman, in English, in a distinctly Germanic four-stress unrhymed alliterative metre and developed much of his ethical and political analysis out of a social model proudly conscious of its origins in Anglo-Saxon England. When his poem quotes the auctoritates around which many of its arguments circulate, most often verses from the Bible or wellknown apothegms from the Fathers, it follows a citational practice standard in vernacular texts, acknowledging its merely local claims to truth by recording them first in carefully rubricated Latin.

As a work of allegorical satire and narrative theology, however, Piers Plowman is mainly a French poem. French texts, written on both sides of the Channel, offer most of the best analogues for the poem's satirical allegories, such as the winding story of Lady Mede and her marriage told in its first vision; for its didactic allegories, such as the pilgrimage to Saint Truth that inaugurates its second vision; and for its picture allegories, such as the Castle of Caro that we encounter in its third vision. Like his most highly educated first readers, Langland may have known one or more of the difficult Latin prosimetra of the twelfth century by Alain de Lisle or Bernardus Sylvestris, and likely did know their great progenitor, Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae. But the assumptions about the resources of allegorical narrative that informed both his own craft as a poet and the horizon of expectations of his first audience were for the most part learned from a sophisticated, diverse and consistently unexpected genre of French allegories that extended from the turn of the thirteenth century down to Langland's day: from works, that is, such as Raoul de Houdenc's Songe d’enfer, Huon de Meri's Torneiment Anticrist and Voie de paradis, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose, Nicholas Bozon's Char d’orgueil and Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de l’âme.