Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

This volume is the second of its kind. A Companion to “Piers Plowman”, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley,

1988), marked a high point of sophistication and diversification in study of this challenging Middle

English poem. Following in the tradition of Alford’s volume and capitalizing on research progress

since 1988, Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway’s Companion offers a panoptic view of major issues

in the historical and literary interpretation of Piers Plowman.

The contributions are organized into three parts: “The poem and its traditions” (Helen Barr,

Ralph Hanna, Steven Justice, and Jill Mann), “Historical and intellectual contexts” (Robert Adams,

James Simpson, Matthew Giancarlo, Cole and Galloway, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari), and

“Readers and responses” (Simon Horobin, Lawrence Warner, and Nicolette Zeeman). The volume’s

tripartite arrangement (for a medieval poem obsessed with trios and trinities) invites linear reading,

leading, in a familiar critical arc, from the poem qua literature to its wider historical contexts and

finally to its importance for subsequent histories. At the same time, each essay is designed as a self-

contained introduction to the poem.

In the Introduction, “Studying Piers Plowman in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,”

Cole and Galloway track the growth of “something that could be called ‘Langland studies’” (5) from

1968 to the present, situating the chapters to follow as heirs of this intellectual history. In “Major

episodes and moments in Piers Plowman B,” Barr summarizes the central themes and synthesizes the

action of the poem. In “The versions and revisions of Piers Plowman,” Hanna presents perplexities in

the circulation, textual transmission, and versional development of the poem, concluding that line-

by-line comparison between versions misses the “projective horizontality” (49) of Langland’s poetic

thought. In “Literary history and Piers Plowman,” Justice traces the precursors and inheritors of

Langland’s achievement of “the effect of art shipwrecked on reality” (53), especially Deguileville,
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Chaucer, and Richard the Redeless. In “Allegory and Piers Plowman,” Mann highlights moments in the

development of medieval allegory from Prudentius to Dante in order to frame readings of three

allegorical set-pieces in Piers Plowman. In “The Rokeles: an index for a ‘Langland’ family history,”

Adams presents an annotated checklist of eleventh- through fifteenth-century historical Rokeles,

some of whom were probably directly related to the author of Piers Plowman. In “Religious forms and

institutions in Piers Plowman,” Simpson provides a historical overview of the pre-Reformation church

and contrasts the dialectical relationship between institutions and the self in Langland’s ecclesiastical

satire with sixteenth-century revolutionary ideology. In “Political forms and institutions in Piers

Plowman,” Giancarlo makes a sequential exposition of uses of political discourse in the B-text,

connecting and historicizing representations of political structures across the poem. In “Christian

philosophy in Piers Plowman,” Cole and Galloway consider Langland’s thought as philosophy through

comparisons to Aristotle, Augustine, and late medieval Oxford thinkers. In “The non-Christians of

Piers Plowman,” Akbari situates Langland’s representations of Muhammad, Trajan, and Jews in

soteriological context, with comparisons to Dante, The Book of John Mandeville, and Walter Hilton’s

Scale of Perfection, among others. In “Manuscripts and readers of Piers Plowman,” Horobin gathers

evidence for the poem’s manuscript circulation and reception from identifiable owners and scribes,

scribal dialect, co-occurrence with other texts, and marginal annotations. In “Plowman traditions in

late medieval and early modern writing,” Warner finds Piers the Plowman in early English poetry, a

manuscript excerpt from Piers Plowman, Thomas Pynchon’s novels, and beyond, suggesting that Piers

“had a robust existence as a folk figure before and apart from Langland’s work” (212). In “Piers

Plowman in theory,” Zeeman discusses some prominent modern theorizations of Piers Plowman within

critical paradigms such as cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and gender theory, measuring the criticism

against the poem’s persistently staged self-theorizations.

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Like other Cambridge Companions, this book attempts to enact an intervention in a field of

study while extending its scholarly address to beginning students. The Cambridge Companion to “Piers

Plowman” succeeds in this dual aim. The essays typically manage to introduce a significant research

area while also making a contribution to it.

As a report from the field, this Companion to “Piers Plowman” compares favorably with its still-

valuable predecessor. Alford’s Companion featured no essays corresponding to those by Adams,

Akbari, Horobin, and Zeeman here. Akbari’s contribution adumbrates the centrality of non-

Christians to Langland’s poetic project, while setting that project in ideological context. Horobin’s

essay reports on research progress in Middle English paleography and codicology, most of which

occurred after 2000. The essays by Adams and Warner sparkle with the excitement of the discovery

of new historical archives; both summarize recent monographs by their authors: Adams, Langland

and the Rokele Family (Dublin, 2013), and Warner, The Myth of “Piers Plowman” (Cambridge, 2014).

The editors’ chapter stands out for its depth and polemical density. Where other

contributors gravitate toward the opening passūs and final passūs of Piers Plowman, in which

traditional expectations about literary genre, characterization, and theme are less thoroughly

disrupted, Cole and Galloway address at length the thought-thicket at the center of the poem (B 8-

18). This essay, like Piers Plowman, attains an attractively direct rhetorical style precisely where it

traverses the most difficult conceptual terrain: “Surely Langland can extract a straightforward

formulation of Trinitarian doctrine from the Athanasian Creed? Think again” (147).

One area of study underserved by this volume is poetics. Abundantly recognized here as a

social satire, a political treatise, a theological/philosophical agon, a late medieval bestseller, and a

textual-critical swamp, Piers Plowman is, at the same time, an alliterative poem. The contributors rarely

ask whether or how Langland’s poetic practice over thousands of lines of verse reinforces,

recontextualizes, or troubles these other categorizations (but I note Hanna’s remark on Langland’s
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meter, 42; Justice’s discussion of alliteration’s afterlives, 58-61; and Warner’s notice of a ‘Piers

Plowman tradition’ of alliterative poetry, 200). As the editors acknowledge in the Introduction, this

Companion contains no essay corresponding to David Lawton’s “Alliterative Style” in Alford’s

Companion. Cole and Galloway report that “excellent overviews of current understandings of the

poet’s meter have recently appeared” (9), citing essays by Stephen Barney and Hoyt Duggan. Yet

both essays come to primarily negative conclusions about the meter of Piers Plowman, asserting the

methodological inadequacy of prior studies (Barney) or the uniqueness of Langland’s metrical

practice (Duggan). Moreover, these two essays, though excellent, represent only a sliver of the post-

1988 work on alliterative meter by, inter alia, John Burrow, Thomas Cable, Kristin Lynn Cole, Judith

Jefferson, Ad Putter, Myra Stokes, and Nicolay Yakovlev. The inclusion of an essay on alliterative

meter or poetics would have vaulted more of these names into the bibliography.

Ironically, the absence of such an essay is attributable in part to Langland’s subtle use of

alliterative style. Piers Plowman is an alliterative poem that works hard to fly under the radar of the

alliterative tradition. For this reason, however, to look beyond verse form in responding to Piers

Plowman is already to acquiesce to a culturally charged poetic maneuver. Meter cannot quite be one

of the literary horizons of expectation that Justice sensitively reads Langland invoking and

disclaiming throughout the poem (51-6). Digressions into Latin and French literary forms in Piers

Plowman challenge but never break the expectation of alliterative metrical patterning. Since 1988,

many researchers have successfully resisted the temptation to hold to one side the poetic form of

Piers Plowman, but almost always, as in Duggan’s study, by isolating the poem as a special case. The

absence of an essay like Lawton’s in this Companion serves as a timely reminder that Langland’s status

as an alliterative poet is a research question in need of further attention.

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This collection distills expansive critical inquiry on an equally expansive medieval text into

twelve readable essays, providing a definitive snapshot of a developing field of study. Beginning and

advanced students will turn to this guide to Langland’s poem for many years to come.