Chapter 5 considers the ways in which Piers Plowman attempts to translate a Franciscan form-of-life into vernacular, worldly terms. While the Franciscan forma vitae details the way of living for each brother, from his clothing to his daily activities to the correction of his faults, Piers Plowman details the means of making a living in an inappropriable world. I argue that the poem asks these questions by way of its sustained meditation on the meaning and nature of labour as the continual payment of an unpayable debt. Langland explores the value and meaning of labour most explicitly in and through the three figures in the poem who are most closely linked with Franciscanism, and who court most dangerously the charges of idleness and default: Rechelesnesse, Nede, and the Dreamer himself. As this chapter shows, the irreducibly ambiguous nature of these three figures, who mix truth with half-truth and misunderstanding, who aspire to the ideals taught by Holy Church, Patience, Kynde, and Conscience, but who embody an all-too-human failure to attain them, encapsulates the poem’s interpretive inappropriability.

Although it is a truism of understanding Messiaen to assert that Roman Catholicism was profoundly important to him and his music, it can be difficult to understand what this actually means in the face of two millennia of the church’s unfolding history with its countless controversies between theological schools, monastic orders, and religious politics. This chapter explores how Messiaen’s musical theology was colored by the remarkable legacy of St. Francis of Assisi. While attending to ways that Messiaen’s towering achievement, the opera Saint François d’Assise, expresses the Franciscan spirit, it also asserts that the Franciscan influence can also be discerned in Messiaen’s representational subject matter (particularly his bird style and his several works on the Nativity of Jesus), as well as in his focus on color, joy, and an unsettling inclusivity.