Piers Plowman and Its Manuscript Tradition by Sarah Wood;

Author:Sarah Wood; [Wood;, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914049071
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2022-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

John But, Alexander and the ‘regime of sympathy’

While the material presentation in E suggests various possible points of connection between Piers Plowman and The Wars of Alexander as episodic life histories, the two texts are in fact separated today, as I noted earlier, by a gap. Vaughan’s recent proposal that the now lost second quire once contained the full Passus 12 continuation composed by one ‘John But’ opens up, however, yet further possible answers to the question of how Langland’s work might have been understood alongside Alexander romances. John But interprets Piers Plowman as spiritual romance, and his reading of Langland’s work chimes, as I will show, with the La scribe’s response to Kyng Alisaunder. Together these two scribal conclusions suggest that medieval readers were similarly emotionally engaged by the two protagonists of The Wars of Alexander/Kyng Alisaunder and of Piers Plowman A. They imply that readers brought sensibilities trained in romance reading to bear on their experience of Piers. John But’s conclusion indicates that while the Wars poet and the author of Piers Plowman each depict ‘will-ful’ heroes, those figures nevertheless inspired an affective identification in the reader.

John But treats Piers Plowman, as Anne Middleton has argued, as authentic spiritual adventure rather than literary dream vision. Interpreting Langland’s work as the record of a life (and the text’s apparently incomplete state as the sign of the poet’s death), he seeks to bring the departed Will to a safe spiritual harbour. In Middleton’s account, John But reinterprets Piers Plowman as a penitential act that he, as a sympathetic reader, must complete on the dead poet’s behalf:

And whan þis werk was wrouȝt, ere wille myȝte aspie,

Deþ delt him a dent and drof him to þe erþe

And is closed vnder clom, crist haue his soule.

And so bad Iohan but busily wel ofte

When he saw þes sawes busyly alegged

By Iames and by Ierom, by Iop and by oþere,

And for he medleþ of makyng he made þis ende

(A.12.103–9).49

In interpreting Piers Plowman as a spiritual journey in which the sympathetic reader plays an active role, John But’s conclusion helps to indicate how Piers and The Wars of Alexander made sense as manuscript companions. One detail is particularly relevant in this respect: very strangely, John But suggests that Will must be baptised. Early in Passus 12, Scripture (‘Skornfully’ (l. 12), as in B.11.1) warns Clergy not to offer the dreamer more instruction until he can be ‘cristned in a font’ (A.12.15). As Middleton observes, this development fails the test of basic continuity with the literal sense of the preceding plot, in which Will is already a baptised Christian.50 The odd blunder marks these lines (and, I think, the whole of Passus 12) as inauthentic, scribal pastiche rather than authorial composition.51

But according to an emotional, rather than intellectual logic, But’s error about Will’s baptism makes a certain kind of sense. His suggestion that the dreamer might be unbaptised is a slip produced by his desire to perform not just a poetic imitation, but a spiritually efficacious labour on Will’s behalf.

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