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This chapter turns to another pair struggling with the Problem of Paganism: William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. For Langland, the Problem is an issue addressed directly, with the focus on the salvation of virtuous pagans. But, despite the explicit doctrinal discussion, Langland is not simply doing the same thing in vernacular verse as the university theologians: the complex form of his poem makes the positions he takes less clearly defined, but allows him to adumbrate daring ideas outside the range of the scholastic discussions. By contrast, Chaucer avoids the theological problems almost entirely; more perhaps than any other medieval writer, he explores the Problem of Paganism by imagining himself within a pagan world, whilst aware, as his readers too would be, that there is an external Christian perspective on it, which is only partly accessible from his viewpoint on the inside.

This chapter analyzes how the rebarbative and difficult poem Piers Plowman stages participatory contemplation through poetic language. Focusing on the poetic forms of likeness that stud the poem—similes, alliterations, and code-switching in particular—the chapter demonstrates that the poem is designed to move readers in and out of experiences of likeness between themselves and the divine. The chapter reimagines how the macaronics or bilingualism of the text work contemplatively—that is, they work aesthetically, sensorily, and feelably. Like Julian's Revelations, Piers Plowman’s contemplative theology centers on Trinitarianism, but it also points away from the relationship between the individual soul and God to suggest how contemplation can—and indeed must—always also be a social act, a political act, and an interpersonal act. For Piers, contemplation is action, and action is contemplation; there is no divide between the soul’s relationship with God and its relationship with its own social context. This turn toward the social as an element of contemplative participation will prove fundamental to the plays studied in the second half of the book. And, indeed, the third chapter suggests a mutually constitutive relationship between Piers and Middle English drama.

This essay begins with Piers Plowman's use of the adage “Do well and have well,” a phrase that elegantly interweaves poetics and social practice. It prescribes practice within a form that reveals the relationship of Langland's poetics to other figural and didactic realms. In “Dowel, the Proverbial and the Vernacular: Some Versions of Pastoralia,” Anne Middleton argues that by looking at other occurrences of the phrase “do well and have well,” we discern how the register of the proverbial and popular provides Langland with a way to think about pastoral didacticism in relation to his own work. Middleton surveys different occurrences of this phrase, focusing, for instance, on its appearance in the Similitudinarium of William de Montibus (d. 1213). This work provided an important source for the summae confessorum that influenced Piers Plowman. Rather than simply pinpointing in William's text another possible origin for a Langlandian formulation, however, Middleton suggests instead that we read such texts as “illuminating commentary avant la lettre on the poet's pivotal deployment” of the “Dowel” dictum. Investigating the implications of the proverbial, Middleton shows how “ordinary and extraordinary language declare their interdependence in the ‘arts’ of both pastors and poets.”

This chapter reads Kynde as the consequence of Langland’s conception of the Christian deity as a “ful God” (B.17.168). Complicating the poem’s frequent association of kynde and need, it draws attention instead to Kynde’s representation of God’s plenitude, a fullness from which the created world issues—and to which human beings have access in creation. Langland’s analysis of the Trinitarian basis of divine creativity recuperates the traditional mediatory and generative functions of the goddess Natura and her sister theophanies. Moreover, looking to contextual discourses beyond the Natura tradition, this chapter suggests that Langland’s representation of God’s immanence in creation shares a particular affinity with Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century poem Le Château d’amour, which describes God in scholastic terminology as natura naturans. Through a multidimensionality that recasts the theophanies populating earlier creation allegories, in Piers Plowman God’s triune constitution provides the instruments of divine experiment and impact in the material world.

Chapter 4 argues that Langland associates kynde with the tradition of natural law described by Alan of Lille as the innate desire to love God and neighbor and codified by Gratian’s Decretum in terms equivalent to the “golden rule” of Matthew 7: 12, which solicits a personal response from judges and law-givers, stipulating that they do unto others as they would have others do unto them. In the speeches of Hunger and Trajan, Langland envisions the “lawe of kynde,” and its related formulation as the “lawe of loue,” as an improvisational jurisprudence that resembles the emerging concept of equity. Like the biblical golden rule, Langland’s “lawe of kynde” appropriates the structure of justice as reciprocity—a balanced exchange of outcome for action—to turn judgment on its head by bringing the claims of the one to be judged to bear upon the decision of the one who judges.

Middle English poetry was grammaticalized because it sometimes took the form of basic exercises of literacy training. This is apparent in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, which can look at times–which was at times–a sequence of translation exercises joined together by an overarching grammatical metaphor. The movement from Latin to English verse in Piers Plowman also makes clear how these basic exercises trained the schoolboy to write his own English poetry. Although we often describe the “birth of Middle English poetry” as the function of some large-scale development in language or cultural history, that birth necessarily occurred again and again, in the exercises of an individual schoolboy who responded to a Latin prompt with English verse of his own. The frequent translation of English into Latin in Piers Plowman also makes clear that many of the “quotations” in this poem previously impossible to source were written by Langland himself.

This chapter reads the narrator’s quest for “kynde knowynge” in the context of contemporary discourses on the value of the natural world as a site for knowledge. In his efforts to discover truth through accumulated experiences and observations, the poem’s narrator represents an encyclopedic impulse, the desire to collect, compile, and anatomize observations of the phenomenal world. While Langland’s characterization of God as Kynde seems to suggest confidence in the created world as a place where human beings might successfully discover divine truths, the Vision of Kynde in B.11 and both Imaginatif’s and Anima’s ensuing commentaries cast doubt upon the value of the narrator’s encyclopedic ambitions and, more generally, the exemplarist or symbolic view of nature as a site for spiritually useful knowledge. Langland not only borrows and sometimes reshapes encyclopedic lore, but also actively, and skeptically, engages the mode of thought that produced encyclopedic texts.

Developing the previous chapter’s concerns with judgment and burden-bearing, Chapter 5 examines the poem’s associations of evangelism and the obligations of kynde. In B.15 Anima contends that Christians must distribute not only physical necessities to the materially poor, but also spiritual goods to those who lack knowledge of Christ. Anima portrays non-Christians as figures of undeveloped nature, comparing them to rough cloth and barren fields. Accordingly, he enjoins the Christian clergy to teach or “cultivate” non-Christians so that the bareness of their natures might be clothed with grace and brought to salvation. This chapter concludes by examining an important episode in which Langland uses the versatile notion of kynde to negotiate nature’s gaps and deficiencies: because nature alone does not suffice to salvation Langland presents his most forceful argument for the necessity of human action—and here especially clerical action—to fulfill the created order established by God.

By tracing Natura’s appearances in Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s De planctu naturae and Anticlaudianus, and in the vernacular contributions of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose, Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, this chapter reveals how traditional allegories of nature lay the groundwork for Langland’s simultaneously innovative and recuperative model of kynde. Natura’s once cosmic influence is steadily circumscribed in these narratives as she becomes increasingly confined to an earthly realm, her powers often implicated in human carnality and moral failure. This chapter argues that Langland’s poetics of kynde attempts to revalue the terrestrial and the contingent by closing the gap between God and creation that the Natura tradition had opened.

The B Text of Piers Plowman contains a surprisingly conventional repertoire of tropes about death. But by placing "Death" at the edge of the field the C Text suggests that death is a more fundamental problem throughout the poem. The salvation of the just pagan Trajan demonstrates the permeability of the boundaries of death; Trajan's famous disavowal of books is a figure of the cryptic presence of death in the poem itself.

This chapter discusses Churchyard’s first publication, the contentious broadside poem Davy Dycars Dreame, which appeared in the summer of 1551. It proposes that this poem and the contention it initiates helped establish Churchyard’s name as a published author. The chapter places the Dreame in the context of mid-Tudor commonwealth complaint literature and the textual responses to the economic crises of Somerset’s protectorate. Attention focuses on the controversy that the poem initiates following an attack in print from one Thomas Camell and traces arguments between Churchyard and William Baldwin, William Elderton, and Richard Beeard. It discusses how the contention raises questions about the role of poetry in public, political debate and proposes that Churchyard as an author becomes an object of discourse and debate, which was a significant, formative moment in his nascent literary career.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, the last will and testament was not just a legal document; it was also a kind of literature. A range of poems and prose that engaged with the conventions of the legal last will became a feature of writing in English from the fourteenth century onwards. Sometimes fictional testaments exist as free-standing pieces of writing; often they are found embedded within larger literary texts. They focus on a range of imaginary testators, ranging from figures from myth and history, through notorious contemporaries, and animals, to the devil himself. Bequests were similarly various, including curses, farts, abstract qualities such as peace, and even the body of the testator. This chapter discusses fictional testaments by (amongst others) Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Robert Henryson, George Gascoigne, and Isabella Whitney.