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William Langland's Biblical Hermeneutic

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William Langland's Biblical Hermeneutic THE GLOSS AND GLOSSING: WILLIAM LANGLAND’S BIBLICAL HERMENEUTIC by DAVID JOHN YOUNG A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham March 2011 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the use to which William Langland puts the Glossa Ordinaria to authorize his vision of ethical, social and ecclesiastical reform in Piers Plowman. There was much in late fourteenth-century England to arouse the ire of the reformer and satirist and among Langland’s targets was glossing the Bible. Yet the Bible was only available in glossed editions; so why and how did he differentiate between the Glossa Ordinaria and contemporary glossing? The answer seems to lie in the exploitative and dishonest use to which glossing was often put. Langland sees beyond that, however, recognizing the ethical perils of linguistic diversity and more serious still, the lack of ethical content in, and even the antinomian tendencies of, conventional (mostly Augustinian) understandings of some major Christian doctrines, such as predestination and free will, original sin, grace, the image of God in man, the Incarnation of Christ and the relationship between wisdom, knowledge and love. The thesis examines the extent to which Langland deviates from these conventional understandings and revisits older understandings with more ethical productivity and a greater motivation for the laity to live ethically. He finds in the Gloss a source of such understandings. CONTENTS Abbreviations i Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 1. The Gloss and Glossing 9 2. The Languages of Piers Plowman: Quotations and Translations 25 3. Langland as Ethicist 72 4. Predestination and Free Will 103 5. Original Sin 146 6. Grace, Conversion and Restitution 187 7. The Image of God 223 8. The Image of Man and the Incarnation of Christ 257 9. Scientia and Sapientia 306 Conclusion 341 Bibliography 345 ABBREVIATIONS BL British Library CUP Cambridge University Press EETS Early English Text Society JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology MÆ Medium Ævum MED Middle English Dictionary OUP Oxford University Press PBA Proceedings of the British Academy PL Patrologia Latina PQ Philological Quarterly RES Review of English Studies ST Summa Theologica YLS Yearbook of Langland Studies. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have received so much interest and support during the writing of this thesis. Though it might be considered invidious to mention individuals by name, I am going to do just that. First of all, for help on specific points of detail, I would like to thank Professors Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler, Drs Hugh Houghton and Lesley A. Smith, Mr Duncan Cloud (who got me launched on Latin for the first time in forty years!) and Frs Euan Marley and Fabian Radcliffe OP. Secondly, thanks to my supervisor, Professor Wendy Scase. The journey of supervision can be a rocky one for many, but that hasn’t been true for me; on the contrary, her academic and professional guidance has always been available and prompt. Thirdly, thanks to Mary, my daughters, my wider family and colleagues and friends in the English Department at the University of Birmingham, who have cheered me on from the very beginning. Apart from the latter, there isn’t a single medievalist among them, but all have taken a keen and intelligent interest. Without them, this thesis would have been poorer and may not have existed at all. John Young Leicester, February 2011. i INTRODUCTION There was a time when scholars were unobservant of the degree of learning shown by William Langland in his great poem Piers Plowman. For example, J. M. Manly writes: “as he exhibits no special theological knowledge or interests, he may have been a layman”.1 Similarly, it is unheard-of now to find any scholar writing like G. R. Owst, who denies that Langland gained access to theology through reading: M. Jusserand knows well enough that both Langland and Dante are heirs to the same body of Catholic doctrine; but he cannot explain how the comparatively simple English poet obtained his special knowledge without crediting him with a knowledge he certainly never possessed.2 For Owst, the pulpit is the only possible mediator between the body of Catholic doctrine and Piers Plowman, but he neglects to consider how Langland, while relying solely on the spoken word, could have cited so many Biblical and theological texts, in the main, so accurately. Perhaps in those days, the spell of the Whig view of history was still potent, relegating pre-Enlightenment writing to a lower division of achievement. It seems strange that what appears now so self-evident has not always been recognised. How has this happier situation come about? Even before the Second 1 J. M. Manly, ‘Piers Plowman and its Sequence’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. 2, ed. by Sir A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 1932), p. 35. 1 World War, a different perspective was emerging, one which gave Langland some credit for learning and literacy. Greta Hort, for example, showed that some of his Biblical quotations have come by way of the Breviary and the Missal. But she was then an isolated figure.3 Since then, much scholarly attention has been devoted to the question of Langland’s reading; what he read, and in what form, for example by D. W. Robertson and Bernard Huppé,4 David Aers5 and John Alford.6 Robertson and Huppé comment: “Although it is impossible … to determine what commentaries the author of Piers Plowman used, it is not difficult to find his interpretations in printed commentaries which may be regarded as standard”.7 Leaving aside the obvious fact that Langland had no access to printed commentaries, the question of what commentaries were available to him still remains. Many of these would have been in the form of a gloss, a commentary on the Bible, written in the margins or between the lines of the Biblical text. An interlinear gloss is of necessity brief, and may include vernacular translations, explanations of rhetorical figures and etymologies. The marginal has fewer constraints on the amount of content and therefore includes more exegetical material. The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which Langland is indebted to the Glossa Ordinaria (“the Gloss”), the most authoritative of all glosses, whose origin 2 Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 57-8. 3 Piers Plowman and Contemporary Religious Thought (London: SPCK, 1938). 4 Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). 5 Piers Plowman and Christian Allegory (London: Edward Arnold, 1975). 6 ‘The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman’, Speculum 52, (1977), 80-99, and Piers Plowman: A Guide to the Quotations, (Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992). 7 p. 4. 2 and development will be dealt with in the next chapter. The title is not found until the fourteenth century; previously, the word glosa was used, as Ker’s catalogue bears witness.8 The Gloss is composed of excerpts from the commentaries of the Fathers, overwhelmingly from the western tradition, chiefly SS Augustine (d. 435), Jerome (d. 420), Gregory (d. 604) and Bede (d. 735), and Cassiodorus (d. 583). Langland would have been aware of the content of the Gloss, since glossed Bibles were almost the only ones available. The mise-en-page, usually with the Biblical text at or near the top centre of the page, and the gloss surrounding it in smaller letters, would have made it inescapable. So far, no-one has attempted to investigate the extent of Langland’s indebtedness to the Gloss, though nothing will ever prove that he is always quoting directly from the Gloss. Although he is not exclusively dependent on the Gloss for his knowledge of the Fathers, nevertheless it was for him and his contemporaries an accessible and authoritative codification of patristic and early medieval Biblical exegesis. Further work on the use to which Langland put his reading, in particular his theological stance, has been done by Denise N. Baker,9 Janet Coleman10 and Robert Adams.11 Adams is of particular interest in this study, because, while he stops short of attributing to Langland anti-Augustinian polemical motives, he notes that the poem challenges the teachings of St Augustine on a number of fronts, beginning with the basic question of how people are saved, taking in predestination, free will and the 8 Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (London: Royal Historical Society, 2nd edition, 1964). 9 ‘From Plowing to Penitence: Piers Plowman and Fourteenth-Century Theology’, Speculum 55, (1980), 715-25. 10 Piers Plowman and the Moderni (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1981). 11 ‘Piers’ Pardon and Langland’s Semi-Pelagianism’, Traditio 39, (1983), 367-418. 3 nature of divine grace; the nature and significance of the pardon in Passus vii; and the social and political issue of bribery, centred on Lady Mede. Adams also gives an overview of Langland’s theology and a review of scholarly work on it, though it is now dated.12 From the work of these scholars, as well as the poem itself, it is clear that Langland was more than capable of handling theological themes and debates and casting them into poetic form.
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