In memory of Conrad Pepler OP (1908-1993)
Sixty years ago, Conrad Pepler wrote “The Spirituality of William Langland,” a short study of the fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman (Blackfriars 20 (1939): 846-854). This book-length medieval religious poem, by a Londoner usually called William Langland, narrates the life story of a commoner, Will, in a series of ten dream-visions which give him insight into life, the community, evil and sin, and the search for God. In this poem, Father Pepler found “a truly English and liturgical type of spirituality that must have been characteristic of the devout members of the Church, both ecclesiastical and lay” ("Spirituality” 846). In his Blackfriars essay and in a chapter of his 1958 book, The English Religious Heritage, Father Pepler saw Piers Plowman as “delineating the beginning and growth of the spiritual life in the common man” {ERH 56). He defined the spirituality of Piers Plowman as “objective,” reflecting “the restrained, austere and majestic treatment of the liturgy” in sharp contrast to the subjective, “realistic and emotional devotion to the humanity of Christ, so typical of fourteenth century piety” ("Spirituality” 853). He noted the centrality in the poem of the idea of relationship: “from the very fact of the Incarnation all mankind has become related to God in common brotherhood, even those outside the Church” (ERH 56; cf. “Spirituality” 850).
Father Pepler's article was written at a time of great scholarly interest in Piers Plowman as a religious work. It was preceded by the work of such giants as R. W. Chambers (1924, 1939) who compared Piers to the Divine Comedy.