That law can feature significantly in works of literature is clear simply from considering Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens to take three well-known English authors from different centuries and genres. Conversely, literary techniques and imagined realizations of the human condition and significant concepts can influence lawyers. At the most fundamental level, law and literature share a concern with language and its uses. In terms of religion, the sacrament of penance is an apt testing ground for how law and linguistics might relate because the penitent is obliged to speak a narrative and to dialogue with the confessor. In addition, for a sacrament involving such concepts as sin, guilt, repentance, and forgiveness, there are illuminating literary works, as well as canonical and theological texts.
In this closely-argued, innovative, and challenging book, Dr Arvind Thomas considers what kind of relationship Langland's Piers Plowman, another English literary masterpiece, had to canon law. It turns out to be a surprisingly close and to some extent reciprocal relationship. The key to the whole enterprise, stated in the title, is ‘reinvention’. The term certainly needs explanation, and it is supplied and illustrated throughout this volume. The focus is on the Church's penitential discipline, and we might even say that both the poem as a whole and the relevant canonical material share a pressing, detailed concern for repentance and salvation.
To study the different versions of Piers Plowman alongside canon law and its commentaries, as well as the closely related penitential and pastoral literature, is to discover the reinvention of canon law within and beyond the poem. By ‘reinvention’ Thomas means both ‘finding’ (‘inventio’ in classical Latin rhetoric) and ‘founding’ (‘invention’ in contemporary English usage). It should be noted that Thomas also claims that the C text, as presented in its modern editions, exhibits a sharper or more substantial engagement and enrichment of canon law than does B. For Thomas the A-B-C paradigm remains a useful tool, and he underscores the significance of variations in the handling of ecclesiastical norms within and across the poem's versions.
It seems fair to say that Thomas assumes his readers will know a good deal about Piers Plowman, including the attendant problems about authorship and text, and less about canon law. In the opening page of his Introduction he even explains twice that the term canon law means church law, and whilst quotations from Piers Plowman are generally left in Middle English, the Latin of canon law is usually given in the original and translated. That Thomas considers so extensively canon law rather than the Common Law in relation to Piers Plowman corrects a widespread modern distortion in presenting law as it was in medieval England. Thomas's list of primary sources is substantial. Incidentally, the complete quotation from F.W. Maitland that Thomas says he is unable to locate must be: ‘It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future’. It is from Maitland's introduction to his 1893 edition of Records of the Parliament Holden at Westminster [A.D. 1305], p. lxxxiii.
Thomas goes further than simply identifying canonical and related sources in Piers Plowman, thereby making the poem more creative and less passive. He also correctly underlines the degree of creativity present in the evolving canonical and penitential systems. The intersections sought by Thomas include the practice of a shared hermeneutic and the pursuit of a common end. He proposes a ‘community of concepts’, and through its lens will uncover evidence for the co-production of canon law and literature. This is evidence for a history that lies hidden behind the proximity of Piers Plowman to the Decretum, the Decretales, the Oculus sacerdotis, and other closely related penitential and pastoral literature. It is characteristic of Thomas's approach, for example, that he finds in the vividly demonstrative aspects of the poem's confessional scenes not so much parody as the performance of canon law. At moments when penitents and even confessors act like players – especially bad ones – they stage the canon law pertaining to contrition.
Thomas is aware both of how the poem is replete with scenes of litigious debates over the interpretations of sententiae that frame cases at hand, and the wide variety of canonical topics treated in Piers Plowman. His focus, though, is on the sacrament of penance, and he highlights the key components of contrition, confession, restitution, and satisfaction. He does not neglect the socio-political questions of distributive justice and economic ethics, thereby mutually illuminating both the poem and the related canonical texts. A good idea of Thomas's achievement can be gained from how he concludes the chapter on the requirement of contritio cordis, cast as the laughter of Mede and the lack of tears of Contricion. The chapter also makes more general points about the reinvention of canon law. This is neither a matter of promulgating norms to govern the penitential forum nor a contribution to the doctrine of contrition as found in the confessional manuals. Versions B and C reinvent by means of a poetic mimesis, that is, by having the confessor and penitent act in ways that recall and reinforce the evolving canon law. Although we might think it was for the poet to take a strong interest in appearances, it was an interest mirrored graphically in the confessional treatises.
Usury and related issues feature strongly, and they receive detailed study including the canonical aspects. Discarding any claim to finding an acknowledgment of poetic reinvention in legal records, Thomas does say that even though Conscience's model of ‘relacioun rect’ was at the time of its inception yet to be realized by someone else, it was nevertheless available for readers to think through the canon law governing restitutive justice and, thereby, to envision change for the future. It is at this point that the quotation from Maitland (identified above) is deployed. The chapter on ‘satisfaction’ (satisfactio operis), like the one on restitution, shows among other things the poet as robust critic. It also contains a fascinating discussion of the maxim ‘nullum malum impunitum, nullum bonum irremuneratum’, and the varying uses to which it could be put. To illustrate this, Thomas moves effectively from Paul of Hungary OP, Hostiensis, Cardinal Robert Courçon, and others, on the medieval juridical side, to Paul Ricoeur. The last chapter is a very thought-provoking contrast between Christ's penitential ‘patente’ in B and the Church's penitential ‘chartre’ in C. For Thomas, the C passages discussed offer a most radical re-envisioning of the institution of private sacramental penance. Perhaps a discussion was needed on the distinction between the particular judgment immediately after an individual's death and the Last Judgment, with special reference to Benedict XII's constitution Benedictus Deus (1336).
Early on, Thomas describes his project as to show that poet and canonist – even if the latter did not know or care about the former – as being engaged in a common approach to writing, revising, and thereby co-producing the law. On the last page, Thomas refers to the sixteenth-century Protestant receptions of the poem, and how a particular configuration of theology, ecclesiology and politics seen in Piers Plowman had become impossible after the 1530s. To the components of this configuration Thomas would add such books of canon law as were burned by Luther in 1520, and are now used by Thomas to study Piers Plowman. For Thomas the poem's innovations within the terms of canon law became increasingly strange and unintelligible to readers for whom the Church's legal institution no longer represented an open dialectical process.
This is a brilliant book, as complex and multi-layered as the medieval poem it deals with.
