The politics of Middle English parables: Fiction, theology, and social practice 9781526131188

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T H E P O L I Tand ICS O F MIDDLE sanctity pornography E N G L I S H P A R A B L ES in medieval culture

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This series and is broadessay in scope collections and receptive to innovation, bringing toge Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs approaches. It is intended to include monographs, collections of commi comprising new research informed by current ­critical methodologies on the ofliterary and editions and/or translations texts, with a focus on English and literature and culture. It embraces medieval writings of many different kind cultures of the Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods,historical, from political, the early Middle scientific, religious)Ages as well as post-medieval treatme material. Anwith important aim of the series is that contributions to it should through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements and representastyle which is accessible to a wide range of readers. tions of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ is taken in a broad sense, to already published include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific, Language and imagination in the Gawain-poems religious. While we welcome contributions on the diverse cultures J. J. Anderson of medieval Britain and fire: The myth of theCeltic Flood in Anglo-Saxon and are happy to receive submissions on Anglo-Norman, Water Anglo-Latin and writ- England Daniel Anlezark ings, we are also open to work on the Middle Ages in Europe more widely, and beyond. The Parlement of Foulys (by Geoffrey Chaucer) D. S. Brewer (ed.) Greenery: Ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature Titles Available in the Series Gillian Rudd   9. Transporting Chaucer Helen Barr 10. Sanctity as literature in late medieval Britain Eva von Contzen and Anke Bernau (eds) 11. Reading Robin Hood: Content, form and reception in the outlaw myth Stephen Knight 12. Annotated Chaucer bibliography: 1997–2010 Mark Allen and Stephanie Amsel 13. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, medieval roads Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (eds) 14. Love, history and emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida Andrew James Johnston, Russell West-Pavlov and Elisabeth Kempf (eds) 15. The Scottish Legendary: Towards a poetics of hagiographic narration Eva von Contzen 16. Nonhuman voices in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture James Paz 17. The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture Laura Varnam 18. Aspects of knowledge: Preserving and reinventing traditions of learning in the Middle Ages Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis (eds) 19. Visions and ruins: Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages Joshua Davies 20. Participatory reading in late-medieval England Heather Blatt 21. Affective medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg 22. Performing women: Gender, self, and representation in late-medieval Metz Susannah Crowder 23. The politics of Middle English parables: Fiction, theology, and social practice Mary Raschko

The politics of Middle English parables Fiction, theology, and social practice MARY RASCHKO

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Mary Raschko 2019 The right of Mary Raschko to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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To Fr. Michael Raschko

Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction 1 1 Teaching unreasonable tales: the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard 27 2 Stories for revising the self: the parable of the Prodigal Son 64 3 Examinations of social conscience: the parable of Dives and Lazarus 105 4 Ethical allegories: the parable of the Good Samaritan 142 5 Paradox formed into story: the parables of the Wedding Feast and Great Supper 177 Epilogue: Writing parabolic fiction: Langland’s pardon episode 216 Bibliography 228 Index 245

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The politics of Middle English parables

Acknowledgements

This book would not have come to fruition without the support and collaboration of a number of mentors, colleagues, and friends. First and foremost, I wish to thank Fiona Somerset for introducing me to Wycliffite texts and manuscript studies, for modelling energetic and collaborative scholarship, and for being extremely generous with her time as a reader and mentor. With equal gratitude, I thank Joseph Wittig for accompanying me through my first readings of Piers Plowman and for feedback on the earliest versions of this book. Often through his own example, Joe taught me to have patience and humility when reading medieval texts, to respect and enjoy the smallest details. My thanks also go out to Peter Kaufman, E. Donald Kennedy, Patrick O’Neill, Ian Johnson, and Alastair Minnis, who all provided valued guidance and encouragement in different stages of this project. I am extremely fortunate to work within a vibrant and supportive community of medieval scholars who inspire me to push my work and myself. I am especially grateful to Rebecca Davis, Shannon Gayk, Elizabeth Harper, J. Patrick Hornbeck, Michael Johnston, Sarah Lindsay, Ryan McDermott, Robyn Malo, Paul Patterson, and Lawrence Warner for their direct feedback on chapters and for generative conversations that helped shape this work. While writing the book, I have also benefited tremendously from the encouragement and perspectives of colleagues in other fields, including Sharon Alker, Julie Beier, Natalie Bourdon, Wallace Daniel, Gordon Johnston, Chris Leise, Chris Macklin, Gary Richardson, and Deneen Senasi. I wish to thank the editorial team at Manchester University Press, especially Meredith Carroll, who have been wonderfully responsive and professional, as well as the anonymous readers who provided timely and formative feedback. In its early stages, the Medieval Academy and Richard III Society provided crucial

Acknowledgements

ix

financial support for this project. Funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as from Mercer University and Whitman College played a pivotal role in its completion. Finally, I am incredibly appreciative of how my family, especially Tim and Nancy Raschko and Anne Bruce, have encouraged and supported me throughout this project. And I cannot thank Stephen Michael enough for all the love, moral support, and logistical help he has given me as the book neared publication. This book is dedicated to my uncle, Michael Raschko, who bears more responsibility than he knows for my academic vocation and the joy I feel when wrestling with Gospel stories.

Introduction

Parables are among the most dynamic, yet routinely neglected, literary forms in the corpus of Middle English texts. Despite their ubiquity in late medieval literature and the many essays that discuss a related history of biblical interpretation, the poetics and particularities of these vernacular narratives remain largely unexplored. Because of their scriptural roots, retold parables are often approached as static texts, stories with narrative arcs already familiar to many readers, whose meanings derive from their biblical ‘original’ and the scholarly exegesis of preceding generations.1 Instead of asking how a retelling makes meaning in its specific vernacular context, most studies ask what the biblical parable meant to other writers, especially those who wrote in Latin. In doing so, they imply that a narrative’s meanings are constant, despite its different formulations, and easily transferable among varied times and settings. This book argues that in the later Middle Ages, parables were lively, unstable narratives undergoing continual reinvention by writers eager to discern, or declare, their significance to contemporary English culture. As such, it advocates a mode of reading parables that seeks out and explores the implications of difference. Instead of assuming that writers imported authoritative doctrines into their larger works by means of translated parables, it asks what theological and social questions individual Gospel parables provoked, with what ongoing debates they intersected, and, in relation to these two factors, what claims translators made in their reconfiguration of the stories. Simultaneously ordinary and enigmatic stories, grounded in the world but purporting to reveal divine truths, Gospel parables combine poetics, politics, and theology in disruptive and fertile ways that generated both interpretive debates and the construction of new stories. Those stories emerged not from a linear tradition

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The politics of Middle English parables

of patristic, monastic, and scholastic exegesis but from a far more complex nexus of parable retellings and exegesis, known in Latin, French, and English, from written and oral sources, composed for diverse secular and spiritual purposes. Given this rhizomatic network of texts,2 discussion of past and contemporary exegesis valuably illuminates the conversations in which a parable retelling participates, but such exegesis – no matter how prominent – does not provide an interpretive key to any other version of a given parable. In our collective reliance on Latin exegetical texts, as well as our deference to scholastic theories of scriptural interpretation, we have overlooked a dynamic vernacular discourse about the nature of God, the coherence of scripture, and the forms of living consistent with Christian faith. This book uncovers and examines that discourse, demonstrating that Middle English parables are distinct poetic creations that diversely reconfigured not only sacred stories but also Christian belief and practice. For an instructive example of our tendency to read past Middle English parables, we can briefly turn to a very short narrative in Piers Plowman – one that garnered considerable attention in a recent discussion of Langland’s poetics. In passus 11 of the B text (and 12 of C), Langland rewrites what most editors identify as the Wedding Feast parable from Matthew’s Gospel (22:1–14).3 His rendition consists of only three lines that the character Scripture narrates to the Dreamer: ‘Multi to a mangerie and to þe mete were sompned, / And whan þe peple was plener comen þe porter vnpynned þe yate / And plukked in Pauci pryueliche and leet þe remenaunt go rome’ (11.112–14).4 The figures Multi (many) and Pauci (few) recall the Vulgate text of Matthew 22:14, where Jesus concludes the Wedding Feast parable with an aphorism: many are called, but few are chosen.5 Yet what happens to Multi and Pauci in this succinct story differs considerably from Matthew’s parable. The Gospel story opens with a comparison of the kingdom of heaven to a king who organised a wedding for his son. When the king sends his servants to gather guests, they repeatedly refuse to attend, and some potential guests kill the servants. In an act of vengeance, the king destroys the murderers and their cities. He then orders more servants to bring everyone they can find to the wedding. When the tables are full, the king apprehends one man who came without a wedding garment and expels him to outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Langland’s story lacks most of these narrative details, with no mention of rejected invitations or of violence from host or guests.

Introduction

3

Even more significantly, key features of the retelling do not appear in the Gospel story. Matthew’s parable mentions neither a porter nor a gate for him to unpin, and in the Gospel version, only one is left outside the feast, not the many implied by ‘þe remenaunt [rest]’ left to roam. Despite the obvious discordance between Matthew’s narrative of a single expulsion and Langland’s story of collective exclusion, scholars tend to equate Langland’s story with Matthew’s. In Piers Plowman: An Introduction, James Simpson writes that ‘the parable Scripture chooses as her text (Matt. 22.1–14) is one that stresses both the openness of God’s invitation, and the austerity of His judgment’. After briefly summarising the Gospel parable, Simpson describes and even quotes the Wedding Feast retelling in the late fourteenth-century poem Cleanness.6 Without analysing Langland’s brief narrative, he interprets the scene in passus 11 in light of the Gospel story and the interpretation provided in another poem, as if Matthew’s parable, the Cleanness rendition, and Langland’s story of Multi and Pauci all relay the same narrative and project the same meanings. The Multi and Pauci story receives sparse attention in Piers Plowman criticism, overshadowed as it is by the controversial Trajan episode that follows.7 The only extensive discussion of the passage I have found teaches readers much about earlier exegesis but engages very little with Langland’s actual narrative. After identifying the Multi and Pauci tale as a reference to Matthew’s parable, Thomas Ryan asserts that its (singular) theme ‘is diametrically opposed to the Dreamer’s superstitious faith in his baptism’.8 To show how the parable answers the Dreamer’s misconception about the sufficiency of baptism for salvation, he cites Hugh of St Cher’s commentary on the wedding garment – what the expelled guest lacks in Matthew’s parable – that associates it with works and faith; he also cites Augustine’s interpretation of the garment as faith with love. Ryan’s reading, grounded in patristic and medieval exegesis, then compellingly links the concept of Lewte (loyalty or faith) that features so prominently in the Trajan episode with Augustine’s commentary on the wedding garment. One nagging problem with this alluringly thematic reading is that Langland’s story has no wedding garment. The reading depends upon a standard rendition and interpretation of a Gospel parable that Langland aggressively rewrites. As is so common in analyses of Middle English parables, the Gospel story and its history of exegesis receive critical attention, and the retold story – itself a creative and provocative comment on scripture – goes unexamined.9

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The politics of Middle English parables

Some might argue that in readings like Ryan’s, we simply see the remnants of Robertsonian exegetical criticism, a mode of engagement with medieval literature that we have moved beyond as a field. And indeed, that claim is largely true: the article extends an interpretation from Robertson and Huppé,10 as it employs allegorical modes of reading that are now primarily relegated to the study of explicitly biblical texts.11 If, however, we find this mode of reading out-of-sync with the wider study of Middle English poetics, how might we read B.11.12–14 without deferring to the surrounding tradition of allegorical exegesis? One alternative approach emerged when the parable became the subject of stimulating discussion at the 2015 meeting of the International Piers Plowman Society. In a roundtable on ‘Langland’s poetics’, speakers had been given a number of optional passages to discuss, but most were drawn to the provocative parable. With generative analysis of its syntax, lexis, alliteration, and imagery, the speakers illuminated the complexity of Langland’s verse and its integrity to the substance of his narrative.12 Yet despite their close engagement with the tale, none of the speakers noted in their initial remarks how severely it differs from the biblical Wedding Feast, nor did they characterise the reimagining of that narrative as an aspect of Langland’s poetics.13 In contrast with those who regard the story as equivalent to Matthew’s Wedding Feast, this group moved away from biblical interpretation entirely, approaching Langland’s Multi and Pauci story as a new narrative that effectively displaces the Gospel parable to which it alludes.14 This book advocates a mode of reading between these two poles, arguing that writers neither wholly imported nor displaced Gospel narratives when they retold parables. Rather, they engaged in a dynamic interpretive dialogue about the substance and meaning of a sacred story. In the case of Multi and Pauci, Langland’s inscription of difference prompts audiences to consider a lack of logic in Matthew’s Gospel. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate in far more detail, the Wedding Feast parable contains a number of jarring, even frightening, contradictions. And within passus 11, Langland highlights how unsuited the Gospel parable’s famous aphorism is for the tale that precedes it. Matthew’s parable makes clear that guests gained entry to the banquet, since it describes the feast as ‘fulfillid with men sittynge at the mete’ (22:10).15 Seemingly, the many were called and settle in for a festive meal, while only one suffers exclusion. Langland, in contrast, crafts a narrative that better corresponds to Matthew’s conclusion: Multi are called but

Introduction

5

never breach the king’s gate; only Pauci, secretly plucked out of the crowd, is chosen for admission to the feast. By retelling the parable in this way, Langland draws attention to the lack of clarity about salvation in this part of Matthew’s Gospel. Why, his retelling prompts us to ask, would a story featuring the welcome of many and the expulsion of one suggest that few are chosen? If scripture really holds that only a few are chosen for salvation, it should narrate a tale like that of Multi and Pauci. When Langland posits an alternative parable in the place where readers expect a more familiar biblical story, he characterises the Wedding Feast as both an unsettling and unsettled passage of scripture, one whose meanings remain unclear and need to be discerned through further acts of storytelling. Because Langland wrote (and rewrote) such a singular poem, it may be tempting to regard his reconfiguration of the Wedding Feast as atypical, the imaginative work of an exceptionally creative and recursive poet. But in fact, his parable illustrates a phenomenon that occurs across a wide range of vernacular texts: as writers translated parables into Middle English, whether in poems, sermons, Gospel harmonies, or devotional treatises, they reconfigured and newly interpreted the narratives. Like Langland’s larger poem, Middle English parables combine the social and the spiritual, the artistic and the political in varied attempts to reconcile the divine word with the lived experience of late medieval culture. Rather than seek to preserve the precise Gospel narratives in the Vulgate,16 writers not only reshaped the stories with accompanying commentary but often also adapted their plot, setting, style, and tone to convey the truths they discerned within these fictions.17 Engaging in the same acts of interpretatio we associate with translators of non-biblical stories, writers of parables in Middle English created ‘an original version of the same subject matter’, revivifying the tales for contemporary audiences and repurposing them for new rhetorical contexts.18 Indeed, comparative study of Middle English parables reveals a striking lack of consensus about their respective meanings, illustrating Jocelyn Wogan–Browne’s claim that vernacular translation exposes ‘the gaps in supposedly united communities by demonstrating the crucial nonunitary meaning of texts now opened up to diverse constituencies’.19 Such interpretive diversity emerges, in part, from acts of cultural translation – efforts to determine what a sacred story means for a specific group of people in a specific place and time.20 Moreover, embedded in these culturally specific

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The politics of Middle English parables

translations we find variation that stems from tensions within the Gospel stories themselves (why would those who work least receive equal pay to those who worked most?) and with contemporary religious structures (why does the sacrament of penance require confession when the Prodigal Son receives forgiveness on the basis of contrition alone?). The divergent ways that writers navigate such tensions reveals contesting opinions about the central beliefs and practices of late medieval Christianity and exposes fault lines in arguments related to the virtue of poverty, the practice of charity, and the possibility of salvation. If we return one final time to the Wedding Feast parable and widen the horizon of our analysis beyond Langland’s retelling, we find the parable intersected with late medieval debates about whether salvation was possible for all or restricted to an elite few. Interpretations of the expulsion scene, therefore, may promote a particular salvation theology or downplay the story’s relevance to salvation altogether. In the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle, a writer interprets the guest’s expulsion as a figure for the separation of holy church from the church of the fiend at final judgement. According to this reading, the parable supports a doctrine of election that attributes salvation to grace and restricts it to a select group.21 Within a penitential treatise, however, another writer supports a strenuous works-based soteriology with reference to the parable.22 Interpreting the wedding garment as charity, he warns that if it is imperfect or unreliable (‘nat parfit ne verrey’), then an individual will be rebuked and delivered to the jailers, or fiends of hell, without delay.23 The Cleanness-poet, in contrast, insists that salvation must be more widely available than the parable’s expulsion scene implies. Despite the often frightening tone of the larger poem, he asserts that ‘fele arn to called [many are called]’ but notably omits the claim that few are chosen.24 These varied accounts demonstrate that, far from conveying a stable teaching, Middle English renditions of the Wedding Feast illuminate the competing perspectives of late medieval salvation theologies. The interpretive diversity characteristic of Middle English parables requires a new paradigm of reading in which we expect such stories to reveal the problems that excited late medieval Christians, not normative doctrine handed down by tradition. In other words, it requires us to read parables as socially and spiritually engaged poetry. Like all works of fiction, parables generate multiple meanings and perplexing ambiguities. But because these fictions are attributed to a divine speaker, the literary activities of interpreting

Introduction

7

and retelling such stories take on a fundamentally theological character that is at once intellectual and practical, with translators attempting to discern and express both the nature of God and the forms of living that would lead to salvation. In Middle English parables, we find a distillation of the complex social and religious landscape of late medieval England, a reflection of its varied ideologies, power structures, anxieties, and ambitions, not right belief or normative exegesis. Parabolic fiction Among the many stories employed in teaching and preaching in the Middle Ages, parables are especially vexing and, therefore, especially generative tales. Like all narratives, they are fundamentally incomplete, leaving their readers to navigate gaps in information and mull over questions raised implicitly but left unanswered.25 And like all instructional stories, their ethical implications depend upon the literary context in which they appear (the stories’ relationships to accompanying morals or their functions within larger texts) as well as their readers’ subjective interpretations, informed by their particular experience of living.26 Indeed, parables have much in common with the moral exempla that populate medieval catechetical literature: at once general and particular, transhistorical and grounded in specific circumstance, exempla prompt the examination of moral principles even as they encourage actions that in some way imitate (or avoid) the models presented in the narratives. While parables may similarly prompt moral reflection and action, they have distinct formal qualities that set them apart from exempla as well. Although the narratives pertain to everyday life, their portrayals of that life frequently subvert readers’ expectations. Moreover, parables are often explicitly metaphoric. As I will explain in more depth below, parables’ strange rendering of events and figurative discourse foster reflection that is not only ethical but theological, leading audiences to wrestle with Christianity’s most enigmatic and paradoxical teachings. While modern biblical scholarship has produced a robust body of literature analysing the poetics and sociocultural dynamics of Gospel parables,27 medieval sources do not often engage in sustained discussions of their form, despite the fact that considerable ambiguity surrounded the genre.28 In the Middle Ages, the two most authoritative sources of information on parables offered competing characterisations. According to the classical rhetoric in

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The politics of Middle English parables

which late medieval writers were well schooled, parables are a type of exemplum whose function was persuasive or pedagogical.29 Yet in the Gospels, the only theoretical statement about the genre characterises them as a means of concealing, not conveying, meaning. In Mark 4:11–12, after reciting the parable of the Sower, Jesus asserts that he speaks in parables to outsiders so that they might see, but not perceive, and hear, but not understand. Like many of the parables themselves, this characterisation is richly paradoxical, describing speech-acts that should obstruct communication and obscure meaning, at least for select groups. Since Jesus goes on to interpret the parable of the Sower allegorically (Mark 4:15–20), some medieval exegetes regarded parables as allegorical, pedagogical narratives whose figurative meanings would be misunderstood by outsiders.30 Yet even this conception of parables was problematic on two fronts. First, an allegorical model of storytelling is far too narrow to encompass all of the Gospels’ references to and instances of parables. While this study focuses on narrative, in Christian scriptures, the Greek term parabole¯ refers to a wider range of poetic speech, including comparison, symbol, proverb, riddle, and rule.31 Second, even when we narrow our focus to Jesus’ stories, some defy the idea that parables, in the words of Andrew of St Victor, work toward ‘the concealment rather than the manifestation of truth’.32 For example, both the parables of the Good Samaritan and of Dives and Lazarus resemble moral exempla that tell readers how to live. And Jesus narrates these stories, as well as the parable of the Great Supper, to sceptical opponents, seemingly with the expectation that they should comprehend his instruction.33 Such conflicting portrayals of the genre, both within scripture and between scripture and the classical tradition, cast parables as a potentially confusing but flexible literary form, one that writers would reinvent as they translated the stories into varied vernacular settings. Even amidst this ambiguity, we can identify three common characteristics in Jesus’ stories that likely influenced Middle English retellings. While such characteristics do not govern the structure or function of the translated stories, they can help us understand why Gospel parables generated so many divergent retellings. The primary point of consensus between modern and medieval accounts of parables is that they are fundamentally metaphoric. The word parable itself, coming from the Hebrew term mashal via the Septuagint’s parabole¯, denotes likeness or similitude.34 That this definition persisted throughout the Middle Ages is evident

Introduction

9

from John Wyclif’s description of parables in De veritate sacrae scripturae:35 Furthermore, concerning the matter of parables, one should consider that according to Januensis, ‘Parables are called proverbs insofar as even images of the truth are demonstrated within them under the comparative similitude belonging to the figure of the words.’ Hence he describes a parable as a comparison of things which belong to different genera. And according to Hugh [of St Victor], the word derives from para i.e., ‘beside’, and bola, i.e., ‘meaning’: ‘a meaning which is placed beside’, as it were. For it is not the meaning itself which indicates, but the meaning insofar as it set beside another. This agrees with Augustine, as he comments on Ps. 68 (69:12): I became a parable for them, ‘it is called a parable when similitude is granted of something’.36

The equation of parable with similitude best fits those stories from Matthew’s Gospel commonly known as ‘parables of the kingdom’, stories that Jesus introduces with a direct comparison: the kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed, like a grain of mustard seed, like a merchant in search of fine pearls, like a vineyard owner who went out to hire workers. Even these explicit comparisons, however, generated varied interpretations of both the kingdom of heaven and the person, object, or action said to signify it. And many Gospel parables, including four of the six discussed in this study, are narrated without an overt signal that they should be read metaphorically. The parables of the Good Samaritan and of Dives and Lazarus, we recall, both resemble exempla in their basic storylines; while the Samaritan parable was extensively allegorised across the Middle Ages, Dives and Lazarus mostly received historical and moral interpretations. Although later medieval exegetes commonly characterised parables as a form of figurative speech, they included such narratives in scripture’s literal sense, because their meanings were said to derive from the signification of words rather than the signification of things.37 The inclusion of parables among the literal sense of scripture did not, of course, contradict their classification as similitude or limit their meaning to a basic narrative. As Aquinas clarifies with regard to the genre, ‘the literal sense is not the figure of speech itself, but the object it figures’.38 Instead, the classification of parables as literal discourse signals that they were regarded as both poetic – the literary product of human authors – and theological.39 Much like secular fables, parables evoked meanings far beyond their basic narratives and could teach audiences how to live. Yet

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The politics of Middle English parables

these scriptural fictions employed such figurative language to explore the nature of God and human salvation.40 Modern analyses of Gospel parables continue to emphasise their metaphoricity, despite the emphatic rejection of medieval allegorical interpretation in twentieth-century exegesis. Working from a simplistic notion of allegory, modern scholars often clarify that parables do not signify something other than their basic narrative. Instead, as metaphor, they signify more. According to Robert Funk, because parables are metaphors, they cannot be reduced to their historical narratives or limited to one basic meaning. A parable ‘intends more, much more than it says’, conveying as much meaning as possible from minimal text.41 The author of the Northern Homily Cycle makes a similar assertion when introducing the Prodigal Son story, differentiating between Jesus’ plain speech and his parables, through which he spoke ‘mistily / And mened mekil more þarby’.42 Whereas medieval exegetes would commonly identify multiple layers of meaning in a single image or phrase, modern readers more often attribute parables’ expansive meaning to the interplay of text and context, what Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘world of the text’ coming into contact with a real world that differs according to time and place.43 Thus, as Funk asserts, parables take on new meaning as they are ‘refracted in the changing light of the historical situation’.44 Whereas existing scholarship on Middle English parables often presents allegorical readings as if they transcend historical context, the chapters of this book pay special attention to how historical contexts engender new levels of meaning and reshape traditional allegories. While medieval exegetes especially emphasised metaphor, they sometimes addressed a second prominent characteristic of the genre: engagement with everyday life. Parables feature familiar, sometimes banal worldly scenarios: a son moving away from a father’s house, travel between two cities, the routines of planting and harvest, or hospitality at a feast. In scholastic discussions of the genre, this occupation with everyday life crucially separated parable from fable and the accompanying charge of falsehood that some levied at such explicitly fictional forms. In his thirteenthcentury guide to preaching, Thomas of Chobham articulates a Ciceronian schema differentiating three types of narrative: fable, realistic fiction, and history.45 Unlike fantastical fables with talking animals, parables belong to realistic fiction, or argumentum, that ‘recounts events which might have taken place, even though they did not’.46 It is with such a schema in mind that we should interpret

Introduction

11

Wyclif’s distinction between fanciful, unrealistic fables (like the talking trees of Judg 9) and the events of the Prodigal Son story that he describes as ‘sufficiently possible’. Rather than showing a hesitance ‘to admit that spiritual truths can be communicated by means of “fictions”’, as Kantik Ghosh has suggested,47 Wyclif’s comments participate in a larger scholastic discourse identifying a unique dynamic of parables – that they communicate expansive figurative meanings via historically believable narratives.48 Although scholastic exegetes did not frame parables’ historical relevance as an interpretive problem, writers of Middle English parables certainly grappled with the social and cultural implications of these worldly stories. When reading Gospel parables in light of their first-century sociopolitical context, modern scholars note that the narratives presented everyday life in provocative, even subversive ways. William Herzog, for example, describes parables as ‘social analysis’ that highlights injustice and transgression of norms. In doing so, he claims, Gospel parables ‘explored how human beings could respond to break the spiral of violence and cycle of poverty created by exploitation and oppression’.49 Charles Hedrick agrees that a certain subset of Gospel parables highlight injustice;50 however, he describes the subversive potential of parables more broadly as a ‘clash of fictions’ between normative narratives that construct and affirm cultural practices and counternarratives that present an alternatively composed world.51 In this study, Middle English retellings of the Labourers in the Vineyard clearly display such a clash of fictions: some translators adapted the story to affirm contemporary socio-economic structures while others heightened disjunction between late medieval employment practices and those in the metaphorical vineyard. Similarly, in retelling the story of Dives and Lazarus (a narrative in which a rich man suffers damnation), some writers sought inventive ways to reduce conflicts between the Gospel story and contemporary modes of living, crafting narratives that assured wealthy readers they could live comfortably and devoutly. The application of these realistic stories to actual medieval forms of living was troubled by a third characteristic of Gospel parables: their tendency to render the familiar unfamiliar. While this quality resists succinct, uniform description, modern scholars have long recognised that parables pull audiences into an interpretive puzzle. C. H. Dodd, a foundational figure in twentieth-century parable scholarship, indicates as much in his basic definition: ‘at its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature

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The politics of Middle English parables

or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought’.52 Gospel parables, he suggests, unsettle audiences and thereby usher them into active interpretation. More recent exegetes often explain parables’ tendency to render the familiar unfamiliar in structural terms. Funk attributes to the stories a mysterious riddling or puzzle-like quality, comparing their dynamics to ‘Alice’s looking glass, through which one peers upon a strangely familiar world, where strangeness is suggested by the dislocation or rearrangement of the familiar’.53 Rather than straightforwardly affirming or condemning modes of living, for Funk, parables refract life in disorienting ways. The most extensive studies of how parables render the familiar unfamiliar come from John Dominic Crossan, who argues that Gospel parables are fundamentally paradoxical. At a basic level, paradox appears in the form of maxims like ‘the last shall be first’ or plot reversals like the exclusion of the long-sought wedding guest. But according to Crossan, the paradoxicality of parables goes beyond just one central inversion: he asserts that their ‘entire pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics’ are paradoxical and relates this to what he describes as the paradoxicality of Jesus’ teaching, which ‘both generates and undermines successive interpretations and applications just as it both generates and undermines moral imperatives, ecclesiastical structures, and political programs’.54 While literary scholars often expect Middle English retellings to straightforwardly impart religious doctrine, modern studies of Gospel parables emphasise their tendency to build conflict and ambiguity, and in so doing to prompt audiences to confront the often uncomfortable, inscrutable distance between the human and the divine. As Crossan argues, parables present an especially distilled form of the defamiliarisation and paradoxicality characteristic of Christian scriptures and dogma more broadly. Although medieval commentators do not describe parables as fundamentally strange, the first and last chapters of this study will feature a Middle English writer whose translated parables explore how Christian scriptures defy or exceed human logic: the author of Pearl and Cleanness integrates long retellings of parables into each poem, with renditions that make each story both more historically believable and more fraught with tensions than the versions in the Gospels. Those parables, the chapters will show, point beyond the discrete stories to encourage reflection on central Christian mysteries. While

Introduction

13

the Pearl-poet foregrounds paradoxicality, most writers featured in this study wrestle with translating narrative ambiguities and contradictions into embodied forms of living or worldly structures thought to manifest a divine order. Consequently, we will often observe writers softening points of tension within the Gospel stories, attempting to mould provocative, potentially disruptive parables into the persuasive teaching tools that classical rhetoric described parables to be. The degree to which writers reduce narrative tensions often correlates with the generic aims and conventions of the larger works in which they retold parables, suggesting that the retold stories’ characteristics and purposes largely depended upon their surrounding context. If Gospel parables are typically metaphoric, worldly, and strange, Middle English retellings may manifest one or all of these dynamics. They almost always remain grounded in everyday life, with writers often altering small elements of the stories to resonate with their present culture. While many are explicitly allegorical stories, some writers promote only moral interpretations based on their basic narratives. And while some writers create subversive stories, many ameliorate the provocative strangeness of the Gospel parables, translating them into narratives that affirm medieval social, economic, and religious systems. The surviving corpus of Middle English parables makes clear that not only the meanings of particular stories but also the perceived function of Gospel parables remained unsettled throughout the later Middle Ages. While medieval writers had many ideas of what parables could do, there was no single defining idea of what parables should do. Although we might expect a given parable’s scriptural context to clarify the function of each particular story, parables often travelled independently of the Gospel text: most prominently, when parishioners heard such stories within the liturgy, they often heard only a narrative without a framing conversation.55 In addition to their respective liturgical settings, the stories featured in this book are subsumed into larger narratives, paired with stories from other biblical books, interpolated with exegesis, presented as illustrations of vice, and cited as models of true penance or charity. Even if the stories themselves were pedantically straightforward, multiplicity of meaning would still emerge from the recreation of those stories within such varied settings. This book, consequently, will not only uncover cultural and theological debates manifest in parable translations but will also outline a series of competing assumptions about the parable genre.

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The politics of Middle English parables

The chapters that follow contribute to the study of what Nicolette Zeeman has called ‘imaginative literary theory’, insofar as they investigate late medieval understandings of parables through renditions of the stories themselves.56 Moreover, by calling attention to the interplay of narrative and the larger literary forms in which they appear, the chapters add credence to Ingrid Nelson and Shannon Gayk’s claim that ‘medieval genre is fundamentally recombinative’ in ways that are both ‘responsive to and generative of cultural practice’.57 In other words, the forms of retold parables are informed by a nexus of known renditions and by the larger texts (sermon, conduct book, devotional guide, etc.) in which they are inscribed, texts whose own structures encode cultural assumptions and ambitions that affect how parables make meaning. Translating parables in context The chapters that follow focus on the five most commonly retold parables in Middle English. With the exception of the Prodigal Son story, each appears in a well-known literary work as well as in a range of more pragmatic genres. Rather than attempt to survey all Middle English retellings of a given story, chapters will juxtapose the retelling from a widely read poem with renditions of the parable in one or a small number of select genres. In this way, the study as a whole explores a wide variety of settings in which writers reinvented parables and their functions, while still offering sustained analysis of select texts. The first chapter brings together the rendition of the Labourers in the Vineyard parable from Pearl – a poem that is both deeply theological and ornately aesthetic – with renderings and explications of the same story in Middle English sermons. The pairing is apt both because scholars have described the Pearl-maiden’s narration as a homiletic speech and because renditions in the two genres so sharply contrast one another. In sermons, preachers translated parables into a discourse that aimed to teach audiences how to live. As Alan Fletcher describes, in their efforts to demonstrate the applicability of scriptural stories to contemporary life, preachers attempted ‘to settle popular audiences in a position from which they could recognize with unobstructed view how the landscape of their lives was in fact a morally charged landscape’.58 Preachers’ explications, in other words, assigned spiritual values to sociopolitical structures and events. In sermons on the Labourers in the Vineyard, writers integrated scripture with contemporary

Introduction

15

life by claiming that the events of the parable endorsed traditional social hierarchies and post-plague labour practices. These conservative readings of a potentially disruptive parable may derive not only from sermons’ broad tendency to foster social stability but also from the specific liturgical occasion on which the parable would be read. According to the Sarum Rite, Matthew 20:1–14 was read on Septuagesima Sunday, a celebration that marked seventy days before Easter and that ushered in the season of Lent. On this liturgical occasion preachers sought to foster diligent piety and penitential acts; John Mirk, for example, admonishes his audience to more busily, meekly, and devoutly serve God.59 Yet these ecclesiastical priorities could be undermined by a Gospel text that celebrates and rewards those who worked the least. The chapter argues that the particular emphases of Septuagesima, together with the general sociopolitical function of sermons, inspired retellings that more clearly promoted labour as a form of obedience to God. And it portrays the Pearl-maiden’s speech as a counter-discourse arguing against the widespread tendency to equate the contemporary material economy with salvation economy. The second chapter features retellings of the Prodigal Son parable in a wider array of genres that teach right living and devotion. Like the Labourers in the Vineyard, this story could call into question the necessity of spiritual work: much to his brother’s chagrin, the prodigal son receives an honoured welcome when he returns home after wasting his inheritance in a life of sin. More poignantly, however, the narrative could clash with doctrines surrounding sacramental penance, since the son seems to be forgiven before confessing or doing acts of satisfaction. Because the parable does not appear in any major works of Middle English poetry (not even Gower’s quasi-penitential collection of tales), the chapter highlights a retelling in the late medieval ‘form of living’ known as Book to a Mother – a work that has received increasing attention in recent scholarship on vernacular theology and Lollardy. Like many vernacular sermons, Book to a Mother presents basic elements of the faith, translations of scripture, and explications applying those texts to daily life, but it does so while outlining an ambitious programme for pursuing spiritual perfection. Because its author claims that the book fulfils the aims of three genres – mirror, remedy, and rule – the chapter explores retellings in three corresponding categories of texts: lives of Christ, sermons, and forms of living. In doing so, it demonstrates that the degree to which writers integrate a threefold process of penance (including contrition, confession,

16

The politics of Middle English parables

and satisfaction) into the Prodigal Son narrative correlates with the respective genres’ conventions. Texts devoted to showing who God is show the least concern about the son’s particular actions before he reconciles with his father, while sermons more commonly emphasise and even revise the son’s act of confession. Book to a Mother, a form of living or rule, stands alone in its integration of a complete threefold process of penance into the parable. What complicates this seemingly straightforward schema is Book to a Mother’s ideological affiliations: this potentially Lollard work that critiques the clergy and encourages lay people to teach the Gospel contains the most ‘orthodox’ depiction of sacramental penance. Therefore, the chapter’s examination of how writers reconciled the parable with penitential doctrine prompts us to reconsider common assumptions about the sacrament’s power dynamics and reveals a discourse in which penance empowers the individual subject rather than priests. The subject of penance remains prominent in the third chapter, where I examine translations of Dives and Lazarus within confessional and conduct treatises that teach readers about the seven deadly sins. Like Book to a Mother, such treatises can be catechetical in nature: Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, the earliest of the three works featured in the chapter, includes instruction in the ten commandments as well as the seven deadly sins and is often cited as a text that brings elements of Pecham’s syllabus into Middle English. Yet the chapter also features retellings in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which playfully applies the form of the confessional treatise to the secular problem of unrequited love, as well as in Peter Idley’s Instructions to His Son, which pairs penitential instruction with pragmatic conduct advice for a fifteenth-century gentleman. The three writers use the confessional framework to differing ends, but they nonetheless share a literary form that sets up a common interpretive question: what does the parable of Dives and Lazarus teach readers about the sin of gluttony? The chapter both examines how the parable and moral framework mutually influence one another and inquires into the implications of not sorting the story under the more predictable category of greed. In Dives and Lazarus, a rich man refuses to share food with the poor, sick man at his gate. And after death, he can see that same man resting in the bosom of Abraham while he suffers in Hell. Both the Gospel and the Glossa ordinaria associate the story with avarice.60 Middle English works consistently sort the story under the sin of consuming rich foods (the branch of gluttony known as

Introduction

17

delicacy), potentially making the story less jarring for the writers’ wealthy audiences. Yet at the same time, by discussing greed obliquely, they make varied claims about the social implications of gluttony and prompt readers to reconsider the public dimensions of an interior process – examination of conscience. Building on these discussions of Christian community, Chapter 4 examines the ethical imperatives associated with the Good Samaritan parable, especially as expressed in lives of Christ and Piers Plowman. Vitae Christi texts present the Gospels in a single narrative, rendering the different events and speeches in the four Gospels more coherent and thereby more imitable, so that Christ’s life may serve as the ultimate exemplar for charitable living. This genre’s exemplary mode pairs well with the Samaritan parable in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus concludes his story by telling his audience to go and do likewise. Yet in the Middle Ages, that injunction to imitation had been complicated by a long tradition of christological interpretation. The Samaritan, according to such allegories, represented Christ, while ordinary Christians should see themselves in the figure of the wounded man whom Christ heals. The chapter uncovers two distinct but not unrelated tensions across Middle English retellings. The first pertains to moral interpretations that function at the basic level of the story. If audiences should behave like the Samaritan, what type and extent of charitable action did that injunction require? Writers sometimes came to sharply contrasting conclusions: according to the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, the parable urges audiences to love everyone, but the South English Ministry and Passion asserts that the story teaches Christians to act charitably toward those who love them in return. A second tension derives from the singularity of the Samaritan’s actions. If they represent Christ’s passion, how should one imitate the uniquely divine action of redemption effected in the crucifixion? Piers Plowman brings together both of these questions in his vita Christi narrative in B.17. Langland vividly animates a Christological allegory, merging the Samaritan with Jesus-theJouster, who heals a wounded man while en route to Jerusalem where he will be crucified. Yet rather than overshadowing the basic narrative and its moral injunction, Langland’s allegorical retelling participates in late medieval debates about what it means to love your neighbour. While still enjoining indiscriminate charity, Langland rejects exemplarity as a reliable means of manifesting Christ’s love and instead advocates participation with God through a variety of social actions befitting one’s particular station.

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The politics of Middle English parables

The fifth chapter returns to the parable of the Wedding Feast – a story that raises questions about the nature of God and the veracity of scripture, questions that the Pearl-poet brings to the fore while retelling the parable in the late fourteenth-century poem Cleanness. Like the poem, the larger chapter brings together the Wedding Feast parable from Matthew’s Gospel with Luke’s parable of the Great Supper (14:16–24), since the latter closely resembles the first half of the Wedding Feast story. It argues that reading the two stories together prompts audiences to reflect not only on their conduct (whether they are worthy guests) but also on the nature of God and the consistency of scriptural revelation. Despite their common plotlines featuring invitation, rejection of that invitation, and the summoning of new guests, the two stories present radically different host figures: the Wedding Feast host engages in acts of violence and unforgivingly expels a guest from his gathering, while the Great Supper host simply welcomes people from all walks of life, including the most marginalised. The chapter, therefore, asks how writers made sense of two similar parables suggesting that God is both gracious and severe, that the kingdom of heaven is both democratic and exclusive. Given the speculative, intellectual nature of this question, the chapter also highlights a Middle English version of a scholastic genre: the commentary collection. The Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, modelled on Aquinas’s Catena aurea, present readers with a brief history of accumulated interpretation and, in doing so, they show that polysemic variety was a defining characteristic of medieval exegesis. Insofar as the glosses reveal discord within the interpretation of a single parable and between the two parables’ interpretive traditions, they offer a model for understanding the Cleanness-poet’s composition that so often foregrounds paradox. Although the poet harmonises disparate biblical passages, he maintains and sometimes sharpens the contradictions that emerge between the two parables and between the two testaments of scripture. By highlighting narrative disparity, I argue, he asserts that God transcends human understanding. Together with the diverse readings in the Glossed Gospels, such retellings of the Wedding Feast and Great Supper parables reveal a common willingness among Wycliffites and mainstream writers to embrace discord and ambiguity in the search for divine truth. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate that the project of retelling parables was rife with contradictions – some integral to the basic Gospel narratives, some that appear between those narratives and prominent cultural practices, and others that emerge from dif-

Introduction

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ferent writers’ interpretations inscribed in their translations. The epilogue, therefore, argues that we can observe a parabolic mode in Middle English literature beyond retellings, when writers created perplexing, potentially counter-cultural narratives that generate a wide range of divergent interpretations or new narratives. A prime example of this mode is Piers Plowman’s pardon episode. Langland constructs this narrative around a paradox – the notion that a works-based soteriology is itself a form of pardon – that sharply contradicts audience expectations. In doing so, he engages readers in the interpretation of a seemingly unreasonable but spiritually and socially formative tale that does not clarify doctrine but instead incites the search for truth. Notes  1 I place original in quotation marks to remind readers that scripture is never static text untouched by writerly interventions. The canon of Judeo-Christian scriptures authoritative in the later Middle Ages was composed across centuries (often by transforming older oral traditions into written form), copied by innumerable scribes, translated from Hebrew to Greek and from Greek into Latin, arranged and divided in innovative ways, and interpreted and employed by readers in varying cultures and social positions. For an introduction to the gradual, collaborative composition of scripture, see Mark McEntire, Struggling with God (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), pp. 11–23. On the material history of the Bible, including translation from Hebrew and Greek to Latin as well as innovations in textual arrangement, see Christopher de Hamel, The Book. A History of the Bible (London: Phaidon Press, 2001).  2 Eleanor Johnson describes a rhizomatic network as one in which ‘complex, intersecting, and shallowly buried lines of relationality run among a set of related literary works. Each work is recognisably related to others in the system, and all can be linked to one progenitor, but the various branchings of the buried network make the direct ascription of exclusionary filiation or linear hierarchy both impossible and misleading. The patterns of growth within this rhizomatic literary tradition are gnarled and recursive, rather than clean and linear.’ See Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 10–11, as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, in Brian Massumi (trans.), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 3–25.  3 Most editors emphasise the aphorism in Matthew 22:14 but also refer readers to the fuller Wedding Feast story. For example, Skeat’s ­parallel

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The politics of Middle English parables

text edition states that ‘the Vulgate version has: Multi enim sunt uocati, pauci uero electi; Mat. xxii. 1–13’. The most recent Norton Critical edition provides similar information, suggesting that the single line invokes the full parable: ‘Multi (line 112): “many.” Pauci: “few”: Matt. 22:1–14; the Latin words occur in verse 14, “Many are called, but few are chosen.”’ Pearsall’s Middle English edition of the C text calls the three lines ‘a summary of the parable of the marriage-feast, which in Matt. 22:14 concludes: “Many (multi) are called, but few (pauci) are chosen.”’ See Walter W. Skeat (ed.), The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886), 2:168; Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (eds), Piers Plowman (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 169; and Derek Pearsall (ed.), Piers Plowman the C-text (reprint, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), p. 212.  4 George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (eds), Piers Plowman: The B Version, revised edition (London: Athlone Press, 1988). The same lines appear in C.12.47–9, with only one difference: ‘plukked’ in the B text appears as ‘plihte’ in the Athlone version of the C text.  5 ‘Multi enim sunt vocati pauci vero electi.’ All quotations of the Vulgate come from Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado (eds), Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgata Clementinam, 5th edition (Madrid: Biblioteca Autores Cristianos, 1977).  6 James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, revised edition (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), pp. 107–8.  7 In his rich analysis of the Trajan episode, Joseph Wittig invokes the Mutli and Pauci passage multiple times in relation to the importance of works, but he does not explicitly mention the parable or analyse the specific lines. His references to the passage, therefore, imply that the particular verse of scripture or the parable should carry a self-evident meaning. See ‘Piers Plowman B, Passus IX–XII: Elements in the Design of the Inward Journey’, Traditio, 28 (1972), 242, 244, and 257.  8 Thomas Ryan, ‘Scripture and the Prudent Ymaginatif’, Viator, 23 (1992), 219. Although Ryan never directly articulates the singular theme to which he refers, his analysis ties the parable to a discourse about the necessity of works for salvation. In contrast, in his edition of the C text, Derek Pearsall associates Langland’s rendition with salvation by election. In a highly interpretive note, he emphasises Langland’s omission of the refused invitations from Matthew’s story: ‘the version presented here eliminates altogether the suggestion of the early part of the parable (22:3–6) that the wicked, in refusing the invitation, choose to show themselves unworthy; it stresses therefore the idea of pre-election to God’s grace, and raises again (cf. XI 208), more acutely, the problem of predestination’. See Pearsall (ed.), Piers Plowman the C-text, p. 212.  9 The only book-length study of medieval parables, Stephen Wailes,

Introduction

21

Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), facilitates this type of study. Since it catalogues interpretations extracted from their rhetorical contexts, it suggests that a parable can carry a set of meanings independent of its surrounding literary and cultural contexts. 10 With his integration of Augustine, Ryan gives a more nuanced version of Robertson and Huppé’s claim that ‘Augustine’s sermon on the parable makes clear [the parable’s] use in the poem … Will must learn to wear the marriage robes of charity, of humility, and of faith.’ D. W. Robertson and Bernard F. Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 134–5. 11 For a positive account of Robertsonian criticism that attempts to locate afterlives of his work, see Alan T. Gaylord, ‘Reflections on D. W. Robertson and Exegetical Criticism’, Chaucer Review, 40:3 (2006), 311–33. For an ambitious effort to revitalise and redirect exegetical criticism, see Ryan McDermott, Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). 12 One speaker, for example, analysed Langland’s linguistic innovation as he deployed a cluster of new words, a second argued that Langland used an ‘inclusive’ poetics, incorporating Latin, French, and English vocabulary, to project an image of exclusivity, and a third noted how Langland extended a pattern of alliteration beyond a single line to unite the narrative’s central events. 13 At least implicitly, speakers seemed to agree with D. Vance Smith, who intriguingly claimed that Langland often invokes texts in order to set them aside. 14 On the Ciceronian idea of translation as displacement, see Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 30–6. 15 Unless otherwise indicated, all biblical quotations come from J. Forshall and F. Madden (eds), The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions, made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, 4 vols (Oxford, 1850; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1982). I quote from the Wycliffite Bible, rather than the Vulgate or the Douay–Rheims translation, for a number of reasons – to highlight the varied forms of vernacular scripture produced in late medieval England, to increase our familiarity with this much-discussed but little-read translation, to avoid reifying the Vulgate as the authoritative form of scripture in the later Middle Ages, and to ensure that the Vulgate does not appear to be the source for retellings that respond to a variety of earlier texts, written and oral, known and unknown. On the Wycliffite Bible translations, see Mary Dove, The First English

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The politics of Middle English parables

Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 137–88. 16 The assumption that serious translators should endeavour to preserve their source text pervades much of the scholarship on Middle English scripture, giving rise to an artificial division between ‘translation’ and ‘adaptation’ rarely invoked with reference to non-scriptural texts. Copeland traces the preservation-model of translation to Jerome and Augustine, who promoted close translation as a mode of continuity by which an original meaning could be transferred across languages and time without being obscured by or appropriated for the purposes of particular human cultures. That model contrasts with a classical disjunctive model that inscribes difference and reinvents a text in light of its exegetical history and its present context. See Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, pp. 44–5. 17 Later medieval exegetes commonly described parables as fictitious and truthful. Among others, Alastair Minnis quotes Ulrich of Strassburg’s description of parables as ‘truth under fictional garments’. See Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edition (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 140. 18 On interpretatio, see Douglas Kelly, ‘The Fidus interpres: Aid or Impediment to Medieval Translation and Translatio?’ in Jeanette Beer (ed.), Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI: the Medieval Institute, 1997), pp. 57–8. 19 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 115. 20 As Lawrence Venuti has convincingly argued, cultural interventions occur even when translators aim to avoid them with a transparent rendering of their source texts. Translation, he writes, necessarily involves ‘the reconstitution of the foreign text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations that preexist it in the target language, always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality, always determining the production, circulation, and reception of texts’. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 18. 21 Anne Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1:303. On Wycliffite ecclesiology, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 314–27. On the diversity of Wycliffite views about salvation and the importance writers place on human action, see Fiona Somerset, Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings After Wyclif (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 30–1 and J. Patrick Hornbeck, What is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 25–67.

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22 The treatise appears in Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 2125. For an edition, see Mayumi Taguchi, ‘A Middle English Penitential Treatise on Job 10:20–22, Dimitte me, Domine … ’, Mediaeval Studies, 67 (2005), 157–217. 23 Taguchi, ‘A Middle English Penitential Treatise’, 199. 24 Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (eds), ‘Cleanness’, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 4th edition (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), p. 162. 25 Patrick O’Neill, Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994), p. 19. 26 On the reception dynamics of exemplary narratives, see J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004); Elizabeth Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 27 Twentieth-century parable scholarship credits Adolf Jülicher with initiating the study of parables’ poetics, due to his firm rejection of medieval allegorical interpretation (which drew meaning from individual parts of the narrative) and his contention that the full narrative projected a metaphoric meaning. Other influential figures in the first half of the twentieth century include C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremiah, who both followed Jülicher in asserting that parables projected one primary meaning but tried to interpret them in light of their Sitz im Leben. Later scholars, as I will outline below, attributed to parables more expansive meanings. 28 In the later Middle Ages, brief statements about Gospel parables typically appear in discourses about the truth of scripture and articulations of its figurative modes (see pp. 9–10). On the tendency of medieval texts to discuss what a genre does, as opposed to defining what a genre is, see Ingrid Nelson and Shannon Gayk, ‘Introduction: Genre as Form-of-Life’, Exemplaria, 27:1 (2015), 5. With regard to instructional narrative specifically, see Larry Scanlon’s assertion that ‘medieval culture was keenly interested in using narrative, but it was less interested in discussing it’. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 27. 29 Stephen Wailes discusses Aristotelian and Ciceronian theories and concludes that ‘this rhetorical tradition made all scholars in the period of our interest aware that the parabola or similitudo – terms that alternate in the Latin Bible as they do in related exegetical writings – was a figurative device to facilitate, not to impede, communication and persuasion. The parable’s essence was clarity in the figurative demonstration of truth.’ See ‘Why Did Jesus Use Parables? The Medieval

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The politics of Middle English parables

Discussion’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 13 (1985), 49. For Aristotle’s characterisation of parables as a type of example, see ‘Rhetoric’, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 11: Rhetorica; De rhetorica ad Alexandrum; De poetica, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 2:20. 30 On the citation of the Sower parable to justify allegorical reading, see Wailes, ‘Why Did Jesus Use Parables?’ 54. 31 On the use of the term parable in the Gospels, see Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, revised edition (London: SCM Press, 1972), p. 20. 32 Frans van Liere (trans.), ‘Andrew of Saint Victor: Prologues to Select Commentaries’, in Franklin T. Harkins and Frans van Liere (eds), Interpretation of Scripture: Theory (Turhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 280–1. According to Minnis, Nicholas of Trevet and Thomas Ringstead make similar claims that parables ‘taught in an apparently fictional manner and through a sort of concealment’. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 131. 33 Jesus narrates the Samaritan parable to a lawyer ‘temptynge hym’ (Luke 10:25), and he recites both the parables of Dives and Lazarus and the Great Supper to Pharisees. See Luke 16:14 and Luke 14:1, respectively. 34 On the meaning of mashal in midrashic texts, see Daniel Boyarin, ‘Take the Bible, for Example: Midrash as Literary Theory’, in Alexander Gelley (ed.), Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 27–47. 35 Both the Vulgate and the Wycliffite Bible sometimes use the term similitude, rather than parable, to introduce a story. For example, in Matt 13 and Mark 4 in the Vulgate, the parable of the Sower is introduced as an example of Jesus speaking in parabolis, but the Vulgate version of Luke introduces the same story as Jesus speaking per similitudinem (8:4). In the early version of the Wycliffite Bible, the relevant term in Luke 8:4 is rendered ‘liknesse’ and often accompanied by the gloss ‘or ensaumple’. The later version, however, returns to the Vulgate’s term ‘symylitude’. 36 John Wyclif, On the Truth of Holy Scripture, ed. Ian Levy (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), p. 78. 37 On the signification of things, or the distinction between spiritual senses and metaphor, see, Christopher Ocker, Biblical Poetics Before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 34–7. 38 See Summa Theologiae 1a. 1.10. In the fourteenth century, some exegetes began to refer to a double literal sense of scripture, with the second level encompassing figurative speech. For William of Nottingham and Nicholas of Lyra on the duplex sensus litteralis, see A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott (eds), Medieval Literary Theory and

Introduction

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Criticism c.1100–c.1375, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 205–6. 39 Their classification as literal discourse belonged to a broader movement of recognising different literary modes within scripture and attributing greater intentionality to scripture’s human authors. See, for example, the discussion and excerpts of Alexander’s Sum of Theology in Minnis and Scott (eds), Medieval Literary Theory, especially pages 200–3 and 219. Also relevant is Ocker’s discussion of whether late medieval exegetes considered the parabolic sense univocal, following Lyra, or polyvocal. See Biblical Poetics, pp. 142–9. 40 See Ocker, Biblical Poetics, pp. 21, 144–5. 41 Robert Funk, ‘Parable as Metaphor’, in Bernard Brandon Scott (ed.), Funk on Parables (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2006), p. 35. 42 Saara Nevanlinna (ed.), The Northern Homily Cycle, vol. 2: From Septuagesima to the Fifth Sunday after Trinity, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 41 (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1973), p. 54/7266–7. 43 Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 6. Discussing medieval scriptural exegesis more broadly, Ocker has argued that commentators often tried to reconcile scripture with their particular historical moment, whether explicitly or as reflected in their ‘unique theological interests’. See Biblical Poetics, pp. 52–65. 44 Funk, ‘Parable as Metaphor’, p. 36. 45 Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter call this threefold categorisation ‘the oldest and most constant generic taxonomy in the Middle Ages’. On its Ciceronian roots and its common articulation in medieval texts, see Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 42–3. 46 Thomas of Chobham, ‘Summa de arte praedicandi’, in Copeland and Sluiter (eds), Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, p. 617. 47 Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 33–5. 48 Minnis notes that the English Carmelite John Baconthorpe also ‘carefully distinguished between a fabula, which is a falsehood, and a parable, which is an example signifying truth’. See Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 144. 49 William Herzog, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1994), p. 3. For another socio-historical reading of parables, see Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006). 50 John Dominic Crossan similarly describes a group of Jesus’ parables as ‘challenge parables’ but does not apply this description to all. See Charles Hedrick, Many Things in Parables: Jesus and His Modern

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Critics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), pp. 75–6 and Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus (New York: Harper Collins, 2012), p. 47. 51 Hedrick’s assertion that all cultures define themselves by means of normative fictions is based on the writings of Frank Kermode. See Charles Hedrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions: The Creative Voice of Jesus (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), pp. 73–89. 52 C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Scribner, 1961), p. 5. 53 Funk, ‘Parable as Metaphor’, p. 38. 54 John Dominic Crossan, Cliffs of Fall: Paradox and Polyvalence in the Parables of Jesus (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), pp. 19, 23. 55 For example, although the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard is narrated within an extended discourse that starts in Matthew 19, the reading for Septuagesima Sunday according to the Sarum Rite begins with the comparison to the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 20. Biblical cues about the story’s meanings and rhetorical function are absent and effectively replaced by the context of other liturgical readings and the emphases of that occasion. 56 Nicolette Zeeman, ‘Imaginative Theory’, in Paul Strohm (ed.), Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 222–40. 57 Nelson and Gayk, ‘Introduction’, 8. 58 Alan Fletcher, Late-Medieval Popular Preaching in Britain and Ireland (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), p. 307. In this way, their aims overlap with other genres of religious instruction featured in this study, from confessional manuals to guides to right living. On sermons’ catechetical aims, see Helen Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 33. 59 Theodore Erbe (ed.), Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies, by Johannes Mirkus (EETS ES 96, 1905), p. 65. 60 In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus narrates Dives and Lazarus to Pharisees described as lovers of money (Luke 16:14), and in the Glossa ordinaria, marginal glosses begin ‘Contra derisores auaros’. See Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson (eds), Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps Adolph Rusch of Strassburg 1480/81 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), 4:198.

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1 Teaching unreasonable tales: the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard

Me þynk þy tale vnresounable; Goddez ryȝt is redy and euermore rert, Oþer holy wryt is bot a fable. In sauter is sayd a verce ouerte Þat spekez a poynt determynable: ‘Þou quytez vchon as hys desserte, Þou hyȝe Kyng ay pertermynable.’ (Pearl 590–6)1

When the maiden in the Middle English poem Pearl concludes her rendition of the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1–16), the Dreamer quickly denounces it as an ‘vnresounable’ tale. His reaction reflects not just the particular dispute he has with the maiden about salvation, but also the problematic nature of Gospel parables as a form of spiritual discourse. These fictional stories, that purport to reveal divine truths, often subvert conventional values and modes of living. For the Dreamer, a figure whose limited spiritual understanding is quintessentially and sympathetically human,2 greater authority lies in straightforward discursive texts from which one may logically deduce moral or theological precepts. Psalm 61:12, he counters, is a ‘verce ouerte’ with a ‘poynt determynable’, and it asserts that God rewards all according to their merit.3 If a story can call this precept into question, he worries, it stands to challenge Christian belief more broadly, rendering scripture ‘bot a fable.’ The retelling that inspires such anxiety is based on one of the socalled ‘parables of the Kingdom’ that populate Matthew’s Gospel. With the Vineyard story, Jesus likens heavenly reward to payment for agricultural work, endowing the ordinary, earthly situation of harvest with extraordinary, divine significance. The parable begins with the statement that the kingdom of heaven is like a vineyard owner who goes out in the morning to find workers and makes a covenant to pay them one denarius (or penny in Middle

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The politics of Middle English parables

English versions) for a day’s work. Again at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, he does the same. At the eleventh hour, the vineyard owner finds men still standing in the marketplace, and despite the late hour, he sends them to the vineyard as well. In the evening, the owner instructs his steward to pay all workers the same wage, beginning with those who came last. Disgruntled at being made equal, the labourers who came first protest that those who worked only a short time should not receive the same amount as they who laboured through the heat of the day. Yet the owner appears unsympathetic to their complaint: he instructs them to take what is theirs and leave, insisting he did them no harm. The parable then ends with two aphorisms: the last shall be first and the first last, for many are called but few are chosen. The parable in Matthew’s Gospel highlights incongruity between the human and divine realms: as an illustration of the kingdom of heaven, it juxtaposes God’s mercy with conventional notions of just reward, defined by rendering each his due, and inverts worldly order with the idea that the last shall be first. Such inversions are the culmination of a longer discourse, beginning in Matthew 19, in which Jesus repeatedly describes God in opposition to the world: he asserts how difficult it will be for the rich to come to heaven and promises the disciples they will be rewarded for abandoning their families and their homes. Following these counter-cultural claims, the Gospel narrative vividly asserts God’s indifference to, or even disdain for, human convention. In the later Middle Ages, however, audiences would commonly encounter the parable not while reading through Matthew’s Gospel but as a part of the liturgy on Septuagesima Sunday.4 Excerpted from this Gospel setting, the liturgical reading includes only the opening comparison, the narrative itself, and the concluding aphorisms. The parable, then, gains a new context, consisting of neighbouring liturgical readings, the ritual performance of the mass, the devotional emphases of the church calendar, and the social aims of preaching.5 This chapter asks how the writers of Middle English sermons made sense of a seemingly unreasonable tale. And it reveals that in these vernacularisations, many writers not only rendered scripture in Middle English but also translated subversive paradox into practical conduct advice that would uphold, rather than upend, contemporary economic theories and structures. Indeed, this translation practice was so prominent that it transcended ideology: even Wycliffite writers, famous for their adherence to the

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plain text of scripture and sometimes characterised as advocates for the poor,6 represented the parable in ways that elide worldly and spiritual economies. Whether through strategic changes to the base text or through their explications, authors of Middle English sermons created distinct versions of the Vineyard parable that often depict salvation as dependent upon human actions, especially actions that adhere to contemporary social norms. While these accounts of the Vineyard parable would be familiar to many medieval English Christians, modern readers of Middle English literature are far more likely to encounter the rendition in Pearl. This singular poem, which survives in only one manuscript and boasts uniquely ornate aesthetics, embeds richly intellectual, theological discourses in an emotional tale of loss and mourning.7 Some have described the maiden’s speech featuring the parable as homiletic, but I argue that the poet does not so much represent as refute sermon discourse in this portion of the poem. The parable appears in an intensely personal dialogue between the Dreamer and his deceased daughter, but their voices invoke a larger cultural conversation with an institutional dimension.8 More specifically, the Dreamer articulates both the frustrations of an average reader attempting to find logic or comfort in an illogical tale and the socio-economic interests commonly affirmed by preachers in Septuagesima sermons. Scholars generally agree that the maiden emphasises the inscrutability of God and promotes a theology of grace with the parable.9 This chapter goes further to situate those theological claims amidst related social and liturgical discourses, revealing how the poet challenges the assimilation of social and scriptural teachings through which religious doctrine may justify contemporary socio-economic structures. In the maiden’s retelling, the poet attempts to extricate the parable from its liturgical setting and to resituate it in the Gospel. As he reinvents Matthew’s rhetorical context, he insists upon disjunction between the conventions of the metaphorical vineyard and those of fourteenth-century England. In doing so, the poet counters not just popular worksbased salvation theologies but also the worldly interests that may motivate them. Due labour, undue reward The parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard poignantly relates to medieval theological and economic debates. In arguments about the salvific efficacy of works, theologians sometimes cited the parable

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The politics of Middle English parables

directly. Augustine, for example, refers to it repeatedly in his writings against the Pelagians as a means of showing the gratuitousness of grace. He discusses the parable at length to show that God may bestow grace on one person without doing any injustice to another: ‘one is honoured freely in such wise as that another is not defrauded of what is due to him’.10 Similarly, Aquinas refers to the parable at the conclusion of his Summa article on whether foreknowledge of merit causes predestination. Referring to the workers’ complaint and the vineyard owner’s response thereto, he states that both grace and punishment are demonstrations of God’s goodness, such that ‘He who grants by grace can give freely as he wills, be it more be it less, without prejudice to justice, provided he deprives no one of what is owing.’11 Both defend the action of the vineyard owner and argue that salvation depends on God’s will, not human actions. While an Augustinian view of salvation remained prominent throughout the Middle Ages, controversy arose among theologians in fourteenth-century England over the role of free will in salvation. Both William of Ockham and Robert Holcot, for example, claimed that human actions could positively dispose one to receive God’s grace. More specifically, both advanced a pactum theology that characterised human effort as meritorious but ultimately insufficient for salvation.12 According to this theology, Peter Halverson explains, God rewards ‘positive preparation for grace’ based on a freely entered covenant that God maintains the power to dissolve.13 Although neither Ockham nor Holcot argued that people could earn salvation, Thomas Bradwardine responded to such views as a revival of Pelagianism and, in De causa Dei, attacked soteriologies that allowed a positive role for human free will.14 In the context of these theological arguments, the parable may seem well poised to support a Bradwardinian position that only God’s agency is decisive for salvation. Yet to read the parable only in light of these academic debates would neglect important differences in how more popular discourses, oriented to the laity, addressed salvation. Vernacular poetry, sermons, and works of religious instruction frequently characterised salvation as dependent upon particular human actions, whether by describing the complex system of indulgences and intercessory prayers associated with Purgatory or by offering more general injunctions to acts of charity and participation in the sacraments.15 It is these discourses connecting salvation to human actions that we will find in many Middle English sermons on the Vineyard parable and that the Dreamer seems to expect from the maiden.

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The parable relates to salvation debates when read as an allegory of judgement, but the basic storyline resonates with contemporary socio-economic realities. In post-plague England, a story featuring agricultural labour and charges of idleness likely would be read in light of the current labour shortage and corresponding labour laws, like the 1388 Statute of Labourers, that required all ablebodied people to work. According to Christopher Given-Wilson, the definition of vagrancy expanded to such an extent in the fifteenth century that, by 1446, if non-landowners did not accept a contract for a year’s work they would be classified as vagabonds.16 In a climate of labour shortage and mandated work, the vineyard owner’s full payment to those who worked only a small fraction of the day appears even more radical: this employer enables and rewards those who operate outside of the law. From a labourer’s perspective, conversely, the parable may draw attention to artificially low wages. With the contract of one penny for a day’s labour, the vineyard owner provides the legally mandated compensation set by the 1351 Statute of Labourers.17 Although the vineyard owner appears compliant with legal standards, the wage is considerably lower than what contemporary labourers actually received, since day labourers typically earned four times that during harvest season and in some counties as much as six times that rate.18 From this perspective, the parable raises questions about possible exploitation and potentially aligns the kingdom of heaven with the interests of the landowners.19 Two prominent allegorical readings of the parable potentially alleviated tensions related to soteriology or to contemporary labour debates. One reading, articulated as early as the third century by Origen, aligns the times of day that the vineyard owner goes out to find workers with five ages of the world: the first from Adam to Noah, the second from Noah to Abraham, the third from Abraham to Moses, the fourth from Moses to Christ, and the fifth from Christ to the present. Seemingly, this allegory renders the central problem of unequal payment less vexing to a contemporary audience, since it characterises all Christians as recipients of the final call, the last made first, who benefit from God’s generosity. Yet a second, equally prominent allegory focused on the ages of a human life essentially negates the reassurance afforded by the first. According to this interpretation, also articulated by Origen, the hours at which the vineyard owner searches for workers correspond with life stages like childhood, adolescence, and old age. It suggests, in other words, that every person must heed the call to

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work in the vineyard, but it defines that work in figurative terms related to penance and pious living.20 These two allegories appear frequently across Middle English explications of the parable, but they rarely constitute the full extent or even the majority of a sermon’s contents.21 More commonly, the allegorical readings sit alongside explanations of how the parable relates to the contemporary labour context or to the penitential and devotional rituals central to late medieval teachings on salvation. In other words, the allegorical readings show a sermon writer’s familiarity with a historical interpretive tradition, but they do not replace efforts to reconcile the Vineyard parable with contemporary socio-economic and religious structures. Physical and spiritual work Many Middle English sermons on the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard reconcile soteriological and economic themes by characterising worldly work as a means to salvation.22 In doing so, they tend to define righteous behaviour in terms favourable to the socio-economic interests of those who benefit from, rather than participate in, agricultural work, so that this spiritual discourse upholds a dominant social ideology.23 The sermons’ emphasis on work corresponds to both the parable’s content and the specific liturgical occasion for this Gospel reading. Septuagesima Sunday marked the beginning of a seventy-day period before Easter.24 In these sermons, therefore, the conventional aim to cultivate virtue took a more specific form of encouraging disciplines associated with the Lenten period, such as fasting, prayer, and performing works of mercy.25 In this liturgical context, a parable about physical work becomes a means of urging spiritual work as well.26 Since Matthew’s Vineyard parable shows those who exert comparatively little effort receiving the same reward as those who labour throughout the day, it is far from the ideal vehicle for urging early and persistent spiritual discipline throughout Lent. In fact, discordance with contemporary demands to work and notions of just compensation – those dynamics in the parable that the Pearl Dreamer denounces as unreasonable – seem to have inspired some sermon writers to concentrate on the activity of the first workers and avoid the subject of the vineyard owner’s generosity to the last. In doing so, a number of writers present the parable not as an illustration of God’s generosity to those who worked very little but as evidence that salvation depends upon right living.

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In nearly every extant Middle English sermon on the parable, including those attributed to Wycliffites, statements can be found that describe a reciprocal relationship between doing good works and receiving heavenly reward.27 Some writers simply describe those in heaven as people who worked well in the vineyard, without explicitly stating that the reward results from the work performed. For example, the Septuagesima sermon from the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle (EWS 37) states that ‘all þese men þat comen to heuene worche wel in þis chyrche’.28 Many describe a more direct connection between work and reward. In the Septuagesima sermon from Gloria Cigman’s Lollard Sermons collection (Lollard Sermon 8), explication of the parable begins with the statement that it ‘techeþ vs to wirche faste and be not idel while we been here wandrynge in þis wei’ because of the payment of bliss that God has promised.29 The author of the relevant sermon in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 806 also stresses that God does not reward the idle and later identifies the necessary work as following the ten commandments specifically, which ‘eche Cristen man is charged bisily to kepe ȝif he wole entre into heuene and haue þere þe blessid peny’.30 The strongest statements of reciprocity between work performed in the vineyard and reward received in heaven appear in Wimbledon’s Sermon and the Septuagesima sermon in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 180, which borrows extensively from Wimbledon. Both cite 1 Corinthians 3:8 as evidence that every person must work according to his station in preparation for evening, or judgement day, at which time ‘euery man shal take reward, good oþer euyl, aftir þat he haþ trauayled here’.31 Both texts subsequently connect the evening in the vineyard with the moment at which each person will have to ‘ȝilde rekenynge of þy bailie’,32 creating an image of God as a scrupulous accountant carefully measuring the merit of each person’s life rather than granting mercy out of abundant grace. Read in comparison with Pearl, this account corroborates the Dreamer’s appeal to the Psalter, that God ‘quytez vchon as hys desserte’ (595). In order to depict the parable as an injunction to work, some writers omit from their narratives the moment in which the vineyard owner pays the last the same as the first, as well as the workers’ subsequent complaint against this method of payment. John Mirk provides an extreme example of such omission, ending the narrative after the summons to work. In his Septuagesima sermon, Mirk refers to the parable only briefly to show the necessity of working busily. Concentrating on the liturgical occasion of Septuagesima

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The politics of Middle English parables

Sunday, Mirk condemns sinful behaviour typical of the Christmas season and recommends three salves for spiritual healing during Lent: thinking of death, labouring busily, and chastising the body. A retelling of the Vineyard parable appears in his elaboration of the second salve. Before rehearsing the tale, he enjoins each person to labour within his own estate: ‘Men of holy chyrche schuld labour bysily prayng and studiyng forto teche Godys pepull; lordys and oþer rented men schuld labur bysyly, to kepe holy chirch yn pees and rest, and all othyr comyn pepull; the comyns schuld labour bysyly, forto gete lyflode to homselfe and to all oþir.’33 Against this backdrop of a nostalgic social model, Mirk tells a story about a vineyard owner going out to hire workers at all hours of the day: Then, for no man ne no woman schuld excuse hym of þys labour, God yn þe gospell of þys day ȝeueþe an ensampull, sayyng þus: ‘A husband-man ȝede yn þe morow at pryme, and eftsones at vndyr, and efte at mydday, and eftsonys at none of þe day, and at euensong, and hyryd men to his vyneȝorde for labour.’ Soo by all þe tydes of þe day, all þe ages and degres ben vndyrstonden, and ben hyred by Good, forto labour whyll þay ben yn þis world.34

According to Mirk, the varied times at which labourers were hired indicates the comprehensiveness of God’s call to work. Because his story concludes before any labourer receives payment, the resulting parable deemphasises both material reward and grace, instead characterising work as a means to avoid sin. Wimbledon’s Sermon differs from Mirk’s in that it is not a Septuagesima sermon, but Wimbledon similarly abbreviates the parable to concentrate on the injunction to work well in the vineyard. Although the sermon opens with a version of the Vineyard parable, Wimbledon employs it in support of a thema from Luke 16:2: ‘ȝilde rekenynge of þy bailie [stewardship]’.35 To make a Gospel story in which everyone receives equal reward, regardless of hours worked, correspond to the idea of giving an account of one’s stewardship, Wimbledon abbreviates the parable to exclude both the act of payment and complaint. His narrative ends with the vineyard owner’s instruction to pay each person a penny in exchange for his labour.36 Thus, the parable illustrates the call to work and the promise of payment without exploring the transgression of earthly norms or the generosity expressed to those who came last. The sermon in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 180 applies the same ideas to the liturgical context of Septuagesima.37 Taking his thema from Matthew 20:8, ‘Calle

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þe werkmen and ȝelde them there hyre’, the writer encourages his audience to work virtuously to become ‘worþi to haue owre wagys’ and describes Christ’s action on judgement day as giving ‘mede to the werkemen of his vyneȝarde, or þer peyne to hem þat kepe not þe ordyr after there degreis’.38 Both writers caution their audiences that failure to work well in the vineyard can lead to punishment in hell, so that a parable featuring the generosity of a vineyard owner becomes a story about accountability at judgement. Authors of Middle English sermons not only explicate the narrative as an injunction to work and thereby to merit the bliss of heaven, but they commonly insist on this work occurring within a traditional social role, correlating virtue with particular social conventions and sin with their transgression.39 As illustrated in Mirk’s sermon above, writers frequently connected a three-estates model with the Vineyard parable, so that the story promotes distinct work for different social groups. This essentially feudal model divides a community according to function – those who pray, those who fight, and those who labour – in a manner that reflects not the reality of late medieval society but a conservative theory of social relations. Georges Duby notes that the model first appears in English texts in times of turbulent social change, which could help to explain the prominence of the three-estates model in texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, when labour shortages had given workers new leverage to command higher wages.40 The threefold model, according to Andrew Cole, advocated a simplistic social structure while dispelling conflict between labourers and landowners by attributing equal spiritual value to the duties of clergy, lords, and labourers and by defining social problems that disturb this balance in religious terms so that sins are understood as their causes.41 When sermon writers associate this division of labour with the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard, they direct the ecclesiastical authority of sermons to the maintenance of a social structure in which labourers serve the material interests of more elite classes: seeking more prosperity in the world or innovating new social roles, the sermons suggest, may compromise eternal reward. Among Middle English sermons on the Vineyard parable, the most prominent use of the estates model appears in Wimbledon’s Sermon. Here the three estates, initially discussed with reference to the parable, provide the division for the remainder of the sermon in which Wimbledon enumerates three questions each estate will have to answer at judgement. Just as there are different roles in

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The politics of Middle English parables

tilling the material vine (pruning branches, railing the vines, and fertilising), there are different offices in the church: ‘presthod, knyȝthod, and laboreris’. To priests, Wimbledon assigns the task of pruning, whereby they cut away branches destroyed by sin through preaching ‘wiþ þe swerd of here tonge’. Railing, assigned to knights, involves a greater variety of tasks for protecting both the institutional church and the realm, including preventing theft, maintaining God’s law and those who teach it, and protecting the land from foreign enemies. Finally, labourers should work in a way that recalls the physical labour in the vineyard, as ‘wiþ here sore swet [labourers] geten out of þe erþe bodily liflode for hem and for oþer parties’.42 Wimbledon characterises working within one’s station as necessary for both prosperity in this world and salvation in the next. While the parable shows all labourers receiving reward, Wimbledon depicts reward as conditional and emphasises the eschatological stakes of labouring in a defined social role: And o þyng y dar wel seye: þat he þat is neiþer traueylynge in þis world on prayeris and prechynge for helpe of þe puple, as it falliþ to prestis; neiþer in fyȝtinge aȝenis tyrauntis and enemyes, as it falliþ to knyȝtis; neiþer trauaylynge on þe erþe, as it falliþ to laboreris – whanne þe day of his rekenyng comeþ þat is þe ende of þis lif, ryȝt as he lyuede here wiþoutyn trauayle, so he shal þere lacke þe reward of þe peny, þat is þe endeles ioye of heuene.43

A number of sermons similarly warn that one must work diligently in the vineyard to receive the penny; yet Wimbledon’s text stands out for the suggestion that in addition to idleness, transgression of traditional social roles could forfeit reward. For disturbing harmonised order in the world, he warns that people will find themselves ‘“in þat place þat noon ordre is inne, but euerelastynge horrour” and sorwe þat is in helle’.44 Essentially, if social structures are divinely ordained, to work outside them – whether as clerics joining governmental bureaucracy, landowners acquiring the property of the poor, or merchants earning interest – is to disobey God. Two Wycliffite sermons, EWS 37 and Lollard Sermon 8, differ from the sermons described thus far in that they narrate the full text of Matthew’s parable;45 even without strategic omissions, however, they still characterise the parable as an injunction to work in a prescribed social role.46 Although the Septuagesima sermon from the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle emphasises grace more than any other Middle English sermon,47 defining the work of the

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vineyard as a cooperative effort between humans and God, it still advocates certain types of work for particular estates in relation to the parable. Like Wimbledon, the writer defines the three tasks of the vineyard as fertilising, pruning, and railing, but he differs from Wimbledon by assigning these roles only to the first and second estates. Instead of labourers, preachers fertilise the vine’s roots. While this task does not necessarily exclude lay people, the writer does not address those who perform physical labour as Wimbledon and other writers do.48 Digging and fertilising are entirely figurative, as preachers ‘deluen abowte byleue’ and fertilise ‘wiþ fyue wordis þat seynte Powle wolde teche þe peple’.49 Whereas Wimbledon assigns preachers to the task of pruning, the author of EWS 37 gives this role to powerful laymen. Instead of cutting branches of sin, laymen should prune the vines by removing cursed men from the church and by removing worldly goods from clerics.50 While the laity protects the church from corruption through disendowment, the sermon explicitly suggests that clergy should maintain social order. The writer assigns the job of railing to ‘prelatis and oþre vykerus of God’, who perform the task by ensuring that the various estates remain in the roles God ordained for them.51 This definition of railing endorses a conservative social structure without movement among classes and identifies the need for sermons like Wimbledon’s that urge labourers to work diligently in their given role for the good of the whole vineyard. In other words, it explicitly advocates using the mechanisms of the church to achieve social objectives because, the writer contends, the three estates model reflects the will of God. What the author of EWS 37 commends in his description of railing, the author of Lollard Sermon 8 achieves in his explication of the Vineyard parable.52 Like Wimbledon, the Wycliffite writer defines the three main tasks in the vineyard as fertilising, railing, and pruning, and he figuratively interprets each task in ways similar to Wimbledon as well. Although he presents the comprehensive text of the parable, the writer nevertheless downplays the vineyard owner’s unconventional system of payment and attributes tension between the vineyard owner and the labourers to insufficient work on the part of the labourers. Instead of showing that God’s grace defies worldly conventions of justice, the sermon aligns divine justice with social norms. Perhaps following Wimbledon’s example, the writer describes the well-being of the vineyard as dependent upon the pious, humble labour of each individual. When he instructs each person

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to labour in his proper estate ‘to þe worschipe of God and profite of his peple’, the writer depicts the social and spiritual realms as complementary, implying that adherence to the estates model will yield both material and spiritual reward.53 In contrast to EWS 37, the author of Lollard Sermon 8 pays considerably more attention to the duties of labourers than to those of priests and knights. He assigns the task of fertilising to the third estate, which he describes as the ‘lowist estaat of holi chirche, þat is: þe comyne peple’. The first interpretation of their role in the vineyard is literal: this estate labours in the earth ‘as in erynge, and dungynge, and sowynge, and harwynge’.54 Through such physical labour, the common people act as the roots of society, bearing up and sustaining the other two parts of the church.55 Society’s dependence upon labourers heightens the urgency of their compliance with their role, and the writer sharply criticises the third estate for their failure in this regard.56 He instructs labourers to work ‘wiþoute feyntise, or falsede, or grucchynge of hire estaat’, with the word ‘grucchynge’ recalling the complaining workers of the parable.57 Although the parable shows such ‘grucchers’ receiving reward, the writer insists that envy or indignation puts one out of charity and would prohibit one from numbering among the saved.58 The third estate must act better than the first labourers from the parable by performing physical labour without complaint. In addition to urging work, Lollard Sermon 8 emphasises the uncertainty of heavenly reward. Combining Wimbledon’s instruction for how to work in the vineyard with a harsh indictment of the work currently performed, the writer constructs an opposing threefold schema based on three enemies to the Christian: ‘þe world, þe flesch, and þe fende’.59 These threats flourish in the vineyard, while the three estates described earlier remain ‘so idel also in hire labour, eche in his degre, þat it [the vineyard] is al awyldid’.60 Whereas the first workers begrudge their wage in Matthew’s parable, the writer suggests that it is the vineyard owner who has a right to complain, uttering, in the words of Isaiah, ‘I haue abide þat it schulde make grapes; forsoþe it made wylde grapes þat beþ not able to man.’61 The sermon contains no reassurances of God’s mercy but instead characterises the audience as a people mired in sin, utterly failing in the tasks set before them. Just as worldly work can earn salvation, the writer emphasises at his conclusion, idleness or social discord can jeopardise it.

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Reorienting scripture Rather than highlight a discrepancy between worldly and divine logic – as an aphorism like ‘the last shall be first’ suggests – Middle English sermons commonly depict the worldly and other-worldly as analogous, some going so far as to characterise the estates model as a divinely sanctioned structure for work in the world upon which heavenly bliss depends. Both the rhetorical occasion of these vernacular sermons and the salvation theology they promote differ fundamentally from the maiden’s discourse on the Vineyard parable in Pearl. Although scholars frequently characterise the maiden’s speech as homiletic,62 this is only true in the broad sense that she speaks from a position of religious authority (her location in heaven) and explicates scripture for a lay audience. Her mode of instruction contravenes norms of sermon discourse by leaving the story’s paradoxical tension intact and by declining to articulate a path to righteous living in the world. Instead of using the parable to promote virtuous living or penitential devotion, the Pearl-maiden seeks to explain the rightness of her place in heaven and, by extension, the paradoxical justice of grace. She treats the payment given to the last workers as the crux of the parable and aligns the Dreamer with the complaining last workers who contumaciously accuse the vineyard owner of injustice. By emphasising reward rather than work, the maiden characterises the vineyard owner as the parable’s primary focus and his rejection of strictly merit-based compensation as its primary aim. With this orientation, I argue, the Pearl-poet counters the pragmatic, pastoral discourse with which lay audiences would ­ likely be familiar and aligns the narrative with its rhetorical context in the Gospels. In doing so, he suggests that parables configure scenes of ordinary life not to endorse the social structures they feature but to destabilise them with reference to a counter-cultural transcendent reality. Within the Pearl-maiden’s speech, the poet recreates not only the parable itself but also the wider discursive context from Matthew’s Gospel left out of the standard liturgical reading. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the story of the Labourers in the Vineyard belongs to a larger conversation about salvation begun in Matthew 19 – a discourse that Petri Luomanen describes as ‘scholarly’ in the way that it challenges deeply rooted human notions of justice, virtue, and love.63 Immediately before the parable, Jesus promises great reward for those who sever familial ties (Matt

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19:29), and earlier in the discourse he insists that none will come to heaven except in a state of childlike innocence (Matt 19:14). In between these two statements, he teaches that whoever wants to be perfect should sell all his things because it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven (Matt 19:24). When the disciples react with bewilderment at the seeming impossibility of salvation, Jesus responds that ‘Anentis men this thing is impossible; but anentis God alle thingis ben possible’ (Matt 19:26). He then concludes the discourse with the statement that the last shall be first, followed by the Vineyard parable. The entire passage emphasises that God is not of the world and human convention does not approximate divine justice. Parallels to this Matthean discourse abound in Pearl: the maiden has severed familial ties to her father and has come to heaven in a state of childlike innocence. In her explication, she advocates that the Dreamer should forsake the world and insists on the paradoxical notion that the last shall be first. Whereas sermons extract the parable from its surroundings, the poet recontextualises the parable in a storyline akin to its Gospel setting.64 The Dreamer and the readers, then, become like the disciples, forced to confront a discrepancy between divine justice and human logic. Within the narrative of the larger poem, the maiden tells the Vineyard parable in response to the same works-oriented spirituality that populates the Middle English sermons discussed above. Having learned that the maiden is a queen, the Dreamer objects to the notion that all may enjoy equal rank in heaven. Because he conceives of reward in heaven as proportional to spiritual work on earth, the Dreamer reasons that she who ‘lyfed not two ȝer in oure þede’ and did not know such basic elements of the faith as the Pater Noster and Creed could not possibly merit the honour of being a queen of heaven (483–5). These lines focus on the brevity of her life and her infancy in the faith; therefore some readers, focusing on her youth, interpret the parable as a defence of the salvation of innocents.65 But I would argue that it is not so much the maiden’s position that concerns the poet as the economic reasoning behind the Dreamer’s objection. Shortly before these observations about the maiden’s deficit of works, the Dreamer more generally critiques the idea that varying degrees of righteousness on earth would not translate to varying states of honour in heaven. If she may be a queen, he asks, What more honour moȝte he acheue Þat hade endured in worlde stronge,

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And lyued in penaunce hys lyuez longe With bodyly bale hym blysse to byye? What more worschyp moȝt he fonge Þen corounde be kyng by cortaysé? (475–80)

Here, the Dreamer outlines a salvation theology in which God directly rewards each according to the effort they expend. Through spiritual work (living ‘in penaunce’), as well as physical work (‘bodyly bale’), the Dreamer asserts that people purchase, or ‘byye’, heavenly bliss. In other words, according to this mercantile language, following the church’s teachings does not simply dispose one to receiving God’s gift but secures its bestowal. The narration and explication of the parable counter this salvation theology that reflects contemporary economic and religious structures and, as the sermons show above, that can protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Imagining that heaven contains social hierarchies similar to the structures of late medieval England, the Dreamer suggests that the maiden may be a countess in heaven, but to reach the rank of queen, he objects, ‘hit is to dere a date’ (489–92). As Helen Barr aptly paraphrases this line, the Dreamer objects that ‘her reward is more expensive than she has earned from her work’.66 Whereas the Dreamer uses the term ‘date’ with reference to the height of her honour, the maiden plays on the word in her retort, employing it with the meaning ‘limit’. Thus, like Jesus’ declaration that nothing is impossible to God (Matt 19:26), she prefaces the parable with the assertion that ‘þer is no date of Hys godnesse’ (493). The maiden, in turn, characterises her retelling as a corrective to both the Dreamer’s assumptions and the larger discourse in which he participates by introducing the parable with reference to both its biblical and liturgical contexts. When she refers to the parable that ‘Mathew melez in your messe’ (498), she reminds the Dreamer that he should already know the story, since it serves as the Gospel reading for Septuagesima Sunday. By designating the liturgy as ‘your messe’, however, the maiden reiterates the gulf that separates the Dreamer, and other Christians in the world, from her: he experiences God mediated through the ritual and sacrament of the mass, while she dwells with God directly. Likewise, he encounters scripture mediated by the explication of a preacher whose aims and assumptions may translate divine revelation into more worldly teachings. Despite recognising mass as the familiar context of the story for the Dreamer, the maiden does not tailor

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her rendition and explication to fit the liturgical, Lenten context of Septuagesima. Instead, she remediates the text, showing how ‘your messe’ has misconstrued the theological lessons projected by the story. Her rendition will not tell the Dreamer how to live; rather, it will illustrate that the rules, or limits, of a worldly economy have no relevance to the rewards of heaven.67 Enhancing labour conflicts To show that all things are possible for God, regardless of what human effort earns, the poet enhances the central conflict between the vineyard owner and the workers. God is just, not because his actions as a vineyard owner are fair but because they transcend worldly notions of just reward. The poet builds tension within the story by simultaneously praising the vineyard owner and inducing sympathy for the labourers. As a result, critics have just as frequently read the parable as an illustration of fourteenth-century labour politics as of an Augustinian theology of grace.68 Statements associating the vineyard owner with God surround the narrative. As in Matthew’s Gospel, the maiden introduces the parable as a simile for the kingdom of heaven.69 Yet the so-called parables of the kingdom, beginning with ‘the kyngdam of heuenes is lijc’, resist simple one-to-one correspondence in their basic grammar. Heaven is not like a worldly place – a vineyard – but like a person carrying out a series of actions depicted in the parable.70 The Pearlpoet changes this construction slightly to emphasise the association between the vineyard owner and God: ‘“My regne”, [God] saytz, “is lyk on hyȝt / To a lorde þat hade a uyne, I wate”’ (501–2). Possession, rather than action, becomes the main focus of the comparison. The kingdom of heaven becomes ‘my regne’, and that reign is like a man who owns a vineyard, rather than like a man who does something in that vineyard. That the owner has dominion over the vineyard, like God has dominion over the kingdom of heaven, emphasises his authority and prepares an audience to blame those who question or contradict him. The aphorisms at the close of the parable similarly invest the vineyard owner with spiritual authority. The maiden directly attributes the concluding words to Christ, who affirms the owner’s method of payment as representative of his own: ‘“Þus schal I”, quoþ Kryste, “hit skyfte [apportion]: / Þe laste schal be þe fyrst þat strykez, / And þe fyrst þe laste, be he neuer so swyft, / For mony ben called, þaȝ fewe be mykez”’ (569–72). According to this translation, the payment rightly subverts worldly

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norms because the vineyard owner rewards as God rewards: his generosity is unconventional but beyond reproach. Yet within this frame that emphasises the owner’s authority, the poet portrays the labourers positively as individuals who are eager to work, whether they are active throughout the day or only find employment near the day’s end. In this way, the social conditions depicted in the Pearl retelling differ fundamentally from those assumed by the sermon authors. Whereas Mirk, for example, transforms his parable into an injunction to work, these labourers need no urging. The poet begins his narrative by emphasising the demand for manual labour during harvest: Of tyme of ȝere þe terme watz tyȝt, To labour vyne watz dere þe date. Þat date of ȝere wel knawe þys hyne [labourers]. Þe lorde ful erly vp he ros To hyre werkmen to hys vyne, And fyndez þer summe to hys porpos. (503–8)

Depicting the time of year as one anticipated by owners and labourers alike, the poet creates an image of day labourers gathering in the morning, awaiting enlistment in employment. As John Bowers has shown, at harvest, labourers held a strategic bargaining position and could demand higher wages from employers.71 Yet the vineyard owner finds labourers each time he seeks them, and the story reflects no difficulty getting the workers to agree to his terms. Rather, they agree to the wage of ‘a pené on a day’ (510), which historians describe as the legal wage that fell well below the practical norm.72 Moreover, while many commentators criticised the labourers hired later for their reluctance to work,73 the Pearl-poet counters the portrayal of these workers as idle. Matthew’s parable refers to workers as ‘idle’ twice, once with reference to the men found standing at the third hour and again when the vineyard owner inquires of those whom he found at the eleventh hour why they stood idle all day (Matt 20:3, 6). Discrepancies in the Pearl version of the parable differentiate these workers from those targeted by fourteenth-century labour laws and the context of the parable from a situation of a labour shortage. Instead, the poem suggests a situation of unemployment, in which surplus labourers wait for work and defend themselves from the charge of idleness. Conversing with potential employees before hiring them, the vineyard owner inquires why they sit idly and reminds them of the

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urgency of harvest.74 In response to this question, the men insist upon their desire to work: ‘We haf standen her syn ros þe sunne, / And no mon byddez vus do ryȝt noȝt’ (519–20). Similarly, even those hired in the last hour, whom the poet describes as idle and ‘ful stronge’, explain that they stood waiting all day because no one hired them (531–4).75 The poet features the charge of idleness, as in Matthew, but he makes clear that unemployment results from the ample supply of labourers rather than an unwillingness to join the harvest. In addition to showing the labourers’ readiness to work, the poet calls attention to the effort they exert. The Gospel parable focuses on the gathering of workers and subsequent payment; the only mention of the toils of labour comes in the midst of complaint, when the workers protest that they have ‘born the charge of the dai, and heete’ (Matt 20:12). The Pearl-poet, augmenting the description of events before payment, articulates the manner of work done for the harvest and the strain involved: ‘and forth þay gotz, / Wryþen and worchen and don gret pyne, / Keruen and caggen and man hit clos’ (510–12). The vivid description of agricultural work – cutting and tying the crop – certainly validates the workers’ later claim that they struggled throughout the day. But it also figures forth the communal labour to which all contributed, regardless of when they arrived at the vineyard. Like the initial declaration that all knew the harvest day and the response to accusations of idleness, this augmentation shows the labourers’ dedication to their employment. Since both the owner and the workers affirm the importance of the harvest labour, the tension in the parable becomes concentrated in the moment of payment where the authority of the owner meets the good will and earnest effort of the labourers. Despite cultivating sympathy for the workers, the poet favours the owner from the beginning of the payment scene. He emphasises that the owner intended to act fairly when he describes the method of payment – arranging the labourers in a line, paying all equally, and beginning with the last first – as an effort to avoid reproach (544).76 The stated expectation that ‘non me may reprené’ implies not only that the owner believes himself to act justly but also that he expects his employees should agree with his conception of justice. For the vineyard owner, justice is effected by giving the reward promised and ensuring all receive, whereas for the complaining workers, just payment compensates each person according to the amount of work done and gives workers the ability, through continued labour, to merit greater reward. The labourers’ com-

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plaint, which the poet describes more extensively than Matthew, manifests the tension between these different notions: And þenne þe fyrst bygonne to pleny And sayden þat þay hade trauayled sore: ‘Þese bot on oure hem con streny; Vus þynk vus oȝe to take more. More haf we serued, vus þynk so, Þat suffred han þe dayez hete, Þenn þyse þat wroȝt not hourez two, And þou dotz hem vus to counterfete.’ (549–56)

Whereas in the Gospel, the workers state once that they bore the charge and heat of the day, in Pearl, the workers insist that they travailed, served, and suffered, as compared to the brief strain of those who came late. The amplification makes explicit the assumption that payment should be proportional to work: the Pearl workers insist that if the late workers’ deeds merited a penny, their labours surely merited more.77 By adding the complaint that the vineyard owner ‘dotz hem vus to counterfete’, the poet specifies that the workers take issue with being made equal, not with the owner’s generosity to the later workers as such. Their frustration results from the apparent uselessness of their longer labours that could not command greater reward. The vineyard owner in Pearl rejects the labourers’ complaint on two grounds, both of which contradict the economic model envisioned by the labourers and endorsed in the Middle English sermons. He first denies their petition on the grounds of covenant, reminding the workers that they agreed to a penny and their agreement was not subject to revision (562–3).78 In the context of a medieval economy, the owner’s response reflects a conflict between what Helen Barr calls ‘merchant’s time’, which measures work in terms of hours, and ‘feudal time’, which measures work according to days.79 The interjection of the specific term ‘covenant’, however, redefines just reward as fidelity to a promise, like the justice manifested in God’s relationship to the Israelites.80 Thus, the poet implies that the vineyard owner – specifically as a figure for God – rejects mercantile measurements of labour. When addressing his payment to the last workers, the owner defends his actions in a different way, this time in terms of gift-giving. In language that may gesture toward his divine identity,81 the vineyard owner inquires of the representative of the protesting labourers, ‘weþer louyly is me my gyfte, / To do wyth myn quatso me lykez?’ (565–6). Among

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Middle English renditions of the parable, the explicit language of gift appears to be unique to Pearl.82 In the Gospel text, the owner simply asks the labourers if he is not allowed to do what he wants.83 While the language of covenant casts the labourer as an active party entering into an agreement, the concept of gift renders the worker dependent on the employer’s generosity; his efforts cannot independently guarantee reward.84 At a soteriological level, the language of gift underscores God’s freedom to extend or withhold grace, even in a covenantal relationship. With the vineyard owner’s insistence that he may bestow his gift as he wishes, the poet suggests that even pactum theologies, which hold that God will reward those who do their best, are predicated on a promise, not an ­obligation to which God is bound. It is this ultimate dependence on God’s will, and the powerlessness of the righteous to secure reward from God, that will become the primary focus of the Pearl-maiden’s speech. Her explication, like her introduction to the parable itself, begins with an assertion of God’s limitless goodness, here referring to the power of grace that exceeds human convention and human logic. Prompted by the Dreamer’s objection that those who work less cannot receive more, the maiden repeatedly insists that ‘þe grace of God is gret inoghe’.85 This positive formulation of grace’s sufficiency asserts that while people may not earn salvation, they also cannot constrict the scope of God’s generosity with structures of devotion or requirements of compliance with social roles. Challenging the very foundation of a merit-based economy, she explains that concepts like less and more are irrelevant in God’s kingdom, where people are rewarded the same [inlyche] regardless of ‘wheþer lyttel oþer much be hys rewarde’ (601–4).86 The maiden then pairs her defence of grace with images of its abundance. God is not a ‘chyche’, or cheapskate, with his reward; rather, he lavishes grace on its recipients like water from a river that will never stop flowing (605–8). This abundant grace transcends human understanding and therefore defies all human efforts to ascribe to it rules and limits. Countering sermon discourse In addition to her emphasis on grace, the maiden’s explication of the parable stands apart from the Middle English sermons discussed above in that the maiden’s defence of her own place in heaven takes precedence over guiding the Dreamer to salvation. That this is not mere difference but a refutation of sermon

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discourses on the Vineyard parable is evident from the fact that, even when defending her position as a holy innocent, the maiden counters the Dreamer’s works-based theology. Immediately following the narrative, the maiden aligns herself with the workers who came to the vineyard in the eleventh hour: More haf I of joye and blysse hereinne, Of ladyschyp gret and lyuez blom, Þen alle þe wyȝez in the worlde myȝt wynne By the way of ryȝt to aske dome. Wheþer welnygh now I con bygynne— In euentyde into the vyne I come— Fyrst of my hyre my Lorde con mynne: I watz payed anon of al and sum. (577–84)

The gift she received as one of the last made first directly contradicts the mercantile economy advocated by the Dreamer, suggesting that those who attempt to ‘win’ bliss by virtue of righteousness will never receive an ‘al and sum’ payment by that means. In contrast with the equal pay shown in the parable, she goes on to assert that some workers – those who toiled for years – still receive no payment and may not for some time: ȝet oþer þer werne þat toke more tom Þat swange and swat for longe ȝore, Þat ȝet of hyre noþynk þay nom Paraunter noȝt schal to-ȝere more. (585–8)

The contrasting situations she describes underscore the inability of work to command reward and ultimately demonstrate the fundamental irrelevance of the worldly economy to salvation: since grace exists outside the mercantile economy, those who labour to earn salvation, as the sermons encourage, will only produce social and material gains.87 To further convince the Dreamer that he may not earn salvation, the maiden explains that only the innocent, defined as those who die shortly after baptism, may expect salvation on account of their merit (625–8). The security of their place in heaven becomes the theme of the poem’s twelfth section, in which each stanza ends with some variation of the line ‘þe innosent is ay saf by ryȝt’ (684).88 In addition to justifying her position as a queen in heaven, this emphasis on the ‘right’ of the innocent counters the Dreamer’s faith in the power of human righteousness. While the Dreamer cites the Psalter to insist that God renders each his due, the maiden also turns to the Psalter in her response, arguing that if God rewarded

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according to merit, only the innocent would be saved. In the first instance, she paraphrases a question from Psalm 23, ‘Lorde, quo schal klymbe Þy hyȝ hylle, / Oþer rest withinne Þy holy place?’ (678–9).89 The response that only those who do no wrong may live with God exposes the flawed logic of the initial question: ascending to God through human effort is basically impossible. The next reference to the Psalter affirms this impossibility: in Psalm 142, David implores God to never draw him to justice, ‘For non lyuyande to Þe is justyfyet’ (698–700). David’s declaration that none is worthy before God answers a rhetorical question that the maiden has asked the Dreamer some lines earlier: does he know anyone so holy that he never forfeited the heavenly reward? Assuming a negative answer, she counters that, in fact, people deviate from righteousness and become further engulfed in sin ‘ay þe ofter þe alder þay were’ (617–22). She argues, in other words, that to urge people to work for their salvation is to give them a fundamentally unattainable goal. If only sinlessness may ‘win’ salvation and humans inevitably sin, it is this works-based theology, not the parable, that the Dreamer should consider absurd. Penance and good living still have an important place in Christian life, according to the maiden, since they bring one closer to God (685–8). She refuses to overstate, however, what those behaviours in the world can mean for the afterlife. Instead, her juxtaposition of righteous living and penance with her innocence highlights the precariousness of the former path. The opening stanza of section twelve appears homiletic, describing specific behaviours as conditions for receiving grace: Grace innogh þe mon may haue Þat synnez þenne new, ȝif hym repente, Bot with sorȝ and syt he mot hit craue, And byde þe payne þerto is bent. Bot Resoun, of ryȝt þat con not raue, Sauez euermore þe innossent; … Þe gyltyf may contryssyoun hente And be þurȝ mercy to grace þryȝt, Bot he to gyle that never glente As inoscente is saf and ryȝte. (661–72)

Twice the maiden describes contrition as essential for the sinner to receive grace, and twice she asserts that the innocent must be saved. While she describes the latter as fact, necessitated by reason and justice, grace remains only a possibility for the penitent. The

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sinner may have grace if he repents; the guilty may, with contrition, experience mercy. The insecurity of these conditions comes from their free offering: God, like the vineyard owner, may do whatever he wants with his gift. Likewise, the pursuit of righteousness, she claims, is a similarly precarious path to God, since human actions cannot guarantee the free gift of grace. With reference to Wisdom 10:10, she grants that a just life may allow one to see the kingdom of God (689–92). That vision beckons the virtuous, much like the New Jerusalem will beckon the Dreamer from across the river, with the same alluring promise the sermons issue: ‘Þou may hit wynne if þou be wyȝte [mighty]’ (694). The very next lines remind the reader, however, that while such reward comes ‘hardyly, withoute peryle, / Þe innosent is ay saue by ryȝte’ (695–6). In contrast with her own situation, most Christians’ journeys are difficult and dangerously insecure. The only escape from such peril is not individual strength but grace. The contrasts of section twelve culminate in a single, definitive image that returns the parable’s explication to its context in the Gospels. Whoever can read the Bible, the maiden asserts, may see how Jesus welcomed children to him and described them as those for whom ‘heuenryche [is] arayed’ (719).90 The episode to which she refers appears in Matthew 19, directly before the long discussion of salvation that includes the parable. Here, as in the poet’s paraphrase of that later discourse, the Dreamer occupies the same position as the misunderstanding disciples who ‘with blame “Let be!” hym bede / And wyth her resounez ful fele restayed’ (715–16). When Jesus corrects them, insisting that only the childlike will come to heaven,91 he aligns salvation with the inversion of worldly norms. The disciples attempt to distance the unworthy from Jesus, much like the Dreamer reasons that his daughter is unworthy to be the bride of Christ. In response, Jesus redefines worthiness, and the poet, paraphrasing this scene, warns that those who equate social convention with God’s will may, in fact, be working against God. The Pearl discourse on the Labourers in the Vineyard ends with a retelling of a second parable from Matthew’s Gospel: the Pearl of Great Price (Matt 13:45–6). It stands in for and makes a similar point to Jesus’ warning against wealth in Matthew 19, where he tells an unnamed man that it is easier for a rich man to pass through ‘a needlis iȝe’ than to enter the kingdom of heaven (19:24). When he introduces the Pearl of Great Price into his redaction of Matthew 19, the poet not only connects the discourse with the

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poem’s governing image but also phrases his condemnation of wealth in more actionable terms. In the most pastoral comments of the maiden’s speech, she recommends that the Dreamer overcome the divide between the worldly and the divine by forsaking the former. After a series of lines articulating the common qualities of the pearl and heaven (737–9), the maiden advises the Dreamer to ‘forsake þe worlde wode / And porchace þy perle maskelles’ (743–4). Following the example of the jeweller in the parable, the proper way for the Dreamer to live in the world is to abandon it. The same instruction comes from Jesus in Matthew 19 with one key difference. When the unnamed man asks Jesus, ‘Good maister, what good schal Y do, that Y haue euerlastynge lijf?’ (Matt 19:16), Jesus distinguishes between two paths to salvation. Initially, he recommends that the man keep the commandments.92 Only when the man asks to do something more does Jesus recommend selling all his goods as a means to achieve not salvation, but perfection: ‘If thou wolt be perfite, go, and sille alle thingis that thou hast, and ȝyue to pore men, and thou schalt haue tresoure in heuene’ (Matt 19:21).93 When the Pearl maiden offers the Dreamer overt, actionable instruction, she bypasses more basic forms of devotion that guide right living in the world. Advocating spiritual perfection, she instead suggests the full rejection of the worldly economy in which he participates. True righteousness, the poet thus implies, is not diligently following the commandments, regularly participating in the sacrament of penance, or dutifully fulfilling a given social role. Rather, the righteousness that brings one closest to God consists of forsaking the world – both its material goods and the social conventions that distribute and protect those goods. The tension the poet heightens in the parable, along with the contrasts the maiden enumerates between the innocent and those who struggle with sin, foreground disjunction between heaven and the world. The vineyard only appears analogous to the world if readers disregard the social inversion at the close of the parable – like sermon writers commonly did in adapting the parable to the aims of Septuagesima Sunday. The Pearl-poet’s translation does not follow this pattern of aligning the story with contemporary social and devotional practices but instead reminds readers of (or perhaps, introduces them to) the parable’s biblical context, reconstituting it for an audience accustomed to sermon discourse. Like Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, the poet retells the story to challenge worldly notions of justice and the material reward those notions protected, showing that while

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human conventions cannot guarantee salvation neither can they constrain the gratuitous gift of grace.94 Notes  1 All Pearl quotations are from Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (eds), The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 4th edition (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002).  2 Although many readers criticise the Dreamer for his obtuseness, A. C. Spearing compellingly argues that audiences should see themselves in this character, not in the maiden who speaks from heaven. He writes that even though ‘the I is rebuked and sometimes mocked by the maiden for his misunderstanding … the effect is of first-person humility, not of the triumphalism accompanying mockery of a third person.’ See ‘What is a Narrator? Narrator Theory and Medieval Narratives’, Digital Philology, 4:1 (2015), 91.  3 Ps. 61:13 reads ‘that power is of God is, and, thou Lord, mercy is to thee; for thou schalt ȝelde to ech man bi hise werkis.’  4 Matt 20:1–16 was the reading for Septuagesima according to the Sarum rite, followed in most English sermon collections. See Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 22. For a discussion of the late medieval mass, especially an aristocratic experience of it, and its relevance to Pearl, see Jennifer Garrison, ‘Liturgy and Loss: Pearl and the Ritual Reform of the Aristocratic Subject’, Chaucer Review, 44:3 (2010), 294–322.  5 On late medieval sermons serving political as well as devotional purposes, among them the promotion of a specific social order, see Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry, pp. 11–16 and Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Introduction’, in Muzzarelli (ed.), From Words to Deeds: The Effectiveness of Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 5–8.  6 On Wycliffite claims to value the plain text of scripture, see Hudson, The Premature Reformation, p. 228. For an examination of how such claims correspond with the substance of their exegesis, see Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, pp. 112–46. With regard to Lollard discourses about poverty, see Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), pp. 95–132; Helen Barr, ‘Wycliffite Representations of the Third Estate’, in Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (eds), Lollards and Their Influence (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 197–216; and two chapters on Wycliffite texts in Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).  7 On the poem’s survival in a single manuscript, and the interpretive possibilities opened up by this condition, see Arthur Bahr, ‘The Manifold Singularity of Pearl’, ELH, 82:3 (2015), 729–58. For a

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c­ ompelling discussion of the interplay of aesthetics and affect in the poem, see Sarah McNamer, ‘The Literariness of Literature and the History of Emotion’, PMLA, 130:5 (2015), 1433–42.  8 I agree with Jim Rhodes’s description of the dialogue on two important points: the Dreamer gives voice to ideas about salvation common in the fourteenth century, and he does not separate theology from social, political, and economic concerns. Yet I disagree with the idea that the poet juxtaposes an external, authoritative discourse, voiced by the maiden, with an ‘internally persuasive discourse’, voiced by the Dreamer. Both speakers advance positions routinely articulated by church authorities, whether university-based theologians or secular priests. Through this scene, the poet extols one authoritative discourse and disparages another. For Rhodes’s argument, see Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-poet (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), pp. 126–30.  9 On the poet’s emphasis of grace, see Lawrence Beaston, ‘The PearlPoet and the Pelagians’, Religion and Literature, 36:1 (2004), 15–38; Jill Mann, ‘Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 5 (1983), 20–30; and more broadly, Claude Willan, ‘Pearl and the Flawed Mediation of Grace’, Modern Philology, 112:1 (2014), 56–75. On God’s inscrutability, see Jessica Barr, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press 2010), p. 123, and J. Allan Mitchell, ‘The Middle English Pearl: Figuring the Unfigurable’, Chaucer Review, 35:1 (2000), 86–111. Similarly, J. J. Anderson identifies the distance between the human and the divine as a prominent theme in Pearl. See Anderson, Language and Imagination in the Gawain Poems (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 77. 10 Augustine, ‘Against Two Letters of the Pelagians’, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, vol. 5: Saint Augustine: Anti-Pelagian Writings, revised trans. Benjamin B. Warfield (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, reprinted 1980), p. 397. Augustine also discusses the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard in ‘On Forgiveness of Sins, and Baptism’ and ‘On the Gift of Perseverance’, both of which are responses to the Pelagians. See Saint Augustine: Anti-Pelagian Writings, pp. 57 and 531. 11 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Prima Pars, vol. 5, ed. Thomas Gilby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), p. 129. 12 Ockham and Holcot maintained that human actions may constitute a half-merit or meritum de congruo, such that the infusion of grace remains necessary for salvation. See Ian Christopher Levy, ‘Grace and Freedom in the Soteriology of John Wyclif’, Traditio, 60 (2005), 300–302, and James L. Halverson, Peter Aureol on Predestination: A Challenge to Late Medieval Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 121, 128–9.

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13 Halverson, Peter Aureol on Predestination, p. 129. 14 Halverson, Peter Aureol on Predestination, pp. 129–31. 15 On actions associated with avoiding or shortening time in Purgatory, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 342–3. On works-based theologies in vernacular religious texts, including Wycliffite writings, see J. Patrick Hornbeck, What is a Lollard? pp. 35–40. 16 Christopher Given-Wilson, ‘The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, c. 1350–1450’, in James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. Mark Ormrod (eds), The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 88–9. Christopher Dyer expresses scepticism that the actual problem of idleness was as large as the complaints against it might suggest. Instead, he thinks the fervent complaints against idleness reflect the importance of labourers given the scarcity of workers. See Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 222. 17 The Statute of Labourers mandated that wages remain at their 1346 level. According to examples given within the text of the statute, the wage of one penny per day corresponds to the limit mandated for those working ‘at the time of weeding or hay-making’. Other examples describe compensation by the bushel or acre, not the hour. See R. B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: MacMillan Press, 1970), pp. 63–8. 18 For the average of four cents a day, see Nora Kenyon, ‘Labour Conditions in Essex in the Reign of Richard II’, Economic History Review, 4 (1934), 438, 444. For the claim that some labourers in Suffolk received 6d per day during harvest, see Simon Penn and Christopher Dyer, ‘Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labour Laws’, Economic History Review, 2nd Series, 43:3 (1990), 369. 19 Analysing the Gospel parable in light of its contemporary economic context, William Herzog argues that Jesus told the parable to expose oppression of workers. See Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1994), pp. 79–97. 20 For a summary of patristic and medieval Latin writings recording these allegories, see Wailes, Medieval Allegories, pp. 138–43. For a brief recitation of both allegories in a Middle English text, see Nevanlinna (ed.), The Northern Homily Cycle, 2:11–12/5817–5830 and 2:14/5892–5922. 21 The Septuagesima sermon in the Middle English translation of Robert de Gretham’s Miroir is a prominent exception that almost exclusively enumerates these two allegorical readings. See Duncan and Connolly

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(eds), The Middle English Mirror: Sermons from Advent to Sexagesima (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003), pp. 121–7. 22 I have consulted all relevant Middle English sermons on the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard available in print and four others available only in manuscript (those are from London, British Library, MS Harley 2276, and MS Harley 5085 as well as Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 806, and MS Greaves 54). A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, ed. Veronica M. O’Mara and Suzanne Paul (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007) provided summaries for a remaining ten unpublished Septuagesima sermons, seven of which do not address the parable. 23 I do not wish to argue that spiritual discourse should be separate from worldly discourse. Because the two inevitably intertwine, we should pay more attention to the political implications and even motivations of religious teachings. 24 Although Septuagesima Sunday is sixty-four days before Easter, medieval clerics described Septuagesima as marking a seventy-day period, which was associated with both the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity and the seven thousand years from the beginning of the world to the ascension. See Edward H. Weatherly (ed.), Speculum Sacerdotale (EETS OS 200, 1936), pp. 48, 51. 25 On the duty of preachers to provide moral instruction and move an audience to repentance, see Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 336–7. This specific list of Lenten virtues comes from the Speculum Sacerdotale, p. 51. 26 The preachers’ emphasis on working well in the vineyard aligns with a strand of Latin commentary that characterises the vineyard as a place to cultivate righteousness. Wailes names the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum, an anonymous fifth-century text, as an early iteration of this interpretation. See Wailes, Medieval Allegories, p. 139 and James A. Kellerman (trans.) and Thomas C. Oden (ed.), Incomplete Commentary on Matthew, vol. 2 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), pp. 272–4. 27 That Wycliffite sermons would describe salvation as dependent upon works may surprise some readers, since Wyclif espoused a doctrine of predestination. However, as J. Patrick Hornbeck’s analysis of the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle shows, Wycliffite writings reflect a range of different soteriologies. See Hornbeck, What is a Lollard? pp. 41–8. On Wyclif’s notion of predestination, see Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 314–27. 28 Anne Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 1:378. 29 Gloria Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons (EETS OS 294, 1989), p. 80. As the discussion below will show, Lollard Sermon 8 addresses labour at some length. But even sermons that only present allegorical readings

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related to the ages of the world or the ages of a human life assert that payment rewards spiritual work. For example, the Septuagesima sermon in the Middle English Mirror equates the payment of the penny with heavenly bliss and then clarifies ‘deserue we it her þurth gode dedes so þat we mai amenden our trespas’. See Duncan and Connolly (eds), The Middle English Mirror, p. 127. 30 See fol. 33v. Spencer notes that the Septuagesima sermon is the first of a ten-sermon series in Bodley 806, stretching through Easter, that all have a commentary on one of the ten commandments appended to them. She dates the manuscript to c.1400. See Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 289. Multiple Latin commentaries, including the Glossa ordinaria and Zacharias Chrysopolitanus’s De concordia evangelistarum, also associate the labour in the vineyard with following or teaching the ten commandments. See Froehlich and Gibson (eds), Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria, 4:63 and Patrologia Latina 186 col. 345BC, respectively. 31 See Ione Kemp Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon: Redde Rationem Villicationis Tue; A Middle English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967), p. 68. The language of e Museo 180 differs only slightly: ‘Every cristen creature schall take his owne mede after that he haþe travelyd.’ See Stephen Morrison (ed.), A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle (EETS OS 337, 2012), p. 81. The later version Wycliffite Bible text of 1 Cor. 3:8 reads, ‘and ech schal take his owne mede, aftir his trauel’. 32 See Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, p. 68. ‘Redde racionem villicacionis tue’ is the thema for Wimbledon’s Sermon. 33 Erbe (ed.), Mirk’s Festial, p. 65. 34 Erbe (ed.), Mirk’s Festial, p. 65–6. 35 The thema, Luke 16:2, corresponds to the Gospel reading for the Wednesday after the first Sunday of the Trinity, but marginalia in two manuscripts (Cambridge, Sidney Sussex MS 74 and Cambridge, Trinity College MS 322) associate Wimbledon’s Sermon with Quinquagesima Sunday. Since John Mirk associates Quinquagesima Sunday with judgement day, Knight argues that Wimbledon’s Sermon could fit that occasion as well. See Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, pp. 48–9. 36 The parable text reads, ‘Lik is þe kyngdom of heuene to an hous­ holdynge man þat wente out first on þe morwe to hire werkemen into his vine. Also aboute þe þridde, sixte, nyenþe, and eleuene houris he wente out and fond men stondynge ydel and sey to hem: Go ȝee into my vyne and þat riȝt is I wole ȝeue ȝow. Whanne þe day was ago, he clepid his styward and heet to ȝeue eche man a peny.’ Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, p. 61. 37 The writer copies and occasionally expands the first 120 lines of Wimbledon’s Sermon. The sermon in e Museo 180 also appears in

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Lincoln Cathedral 50, and Gloucester Cathedral Library 22. On the manuscripts, their relationships, and the sermon cycle’s ‘concern for the harmonious ordering of society based on the model of the Three Estates’, see Morrison (ed.), A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, 1: xxi–xli and xliv. 38 Morrison (ed.), A Late Fifteenth-Century Dominical Sermon Cycle, 1:82. Like Wimbledon, this writer only recites the parable through the vineyard owner’s instruction to pay the workers. 39 In addition to the references to the three estates model explained below, the author of the relevant sermon in Bodley 806 advocates working in a God-given role with reference to Paul’s notion of the body of Christ. He writes that each member of the body has its own office, and ‘so hit is in þis worlde eche to holde his degre and do þe office þat longeþ þerto for to haue þis peny on þe day, þat is þe ioye of heuenne to medee’. See fol. 32r. 40 The model appears in texts in England as early as the late ninth-­ century Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and several early eleventh-century writings by Aelfric. See Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 100–4. Enthusiasm for the estates model in England may also be a response to diversifying occupations in towns. On the rapid growth of towns, especially in the thirteenth century, see Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 187–96. 41 Andrew Cole, ‘Trifunctionality and the Tree of Charity: Literary and Social Practices in Piers Plowman’, ELH, 62 (1995), 7. 42 Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, p. 63. 43 Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, p. 66. 44 Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, p. 66. 45 Some have questioned the classification of the sermons in Cigman’s edition as ‘Lollard’, but reading Lollard Sermon 8 alongside the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle reveals important connections between the two texts. For more extensive discussion of their interrelation, see Raschko, ‘“To þe Worschipe of God”’, pp. 175–92. For criticism of Cigman’s title, see John Frankis, Review of Lollard Sermons, Review of English Studies, 42 (1991), 437–8 and A. S. G. Edwards, Review of Lollard Sermons, Speculum, 67 (1992), 124–6. In support of the designation, Cigman describes Lollardy as a diverse movement characterised by dissent and advocacy of reform and urges readers not to measure dissenting texts against an inventory of particular beliefs. See Gloria Cigman, ‘Luceat Lux Vestra: The Lollard Preacher as Truth and Light’, Review of English Studies, 40 (1989), 482. Likewise, in a more recent examination of the sermons’ soteriology, Patrick Hornbeck similarly emphasises the changing and varied nature of

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47

48

49 50 51 52

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Lollardy (or Wycliffism) and concludes that the sermons provide evidence of different salvation theologies within English dissent. See J. Patrick Hornbeck, ‘Lollard Sermons? Soteriology and Latemedieval Dissent’, Notes and Queries, 53 (2006), 26–30. Wimbledon’s Sermon may have directly influenced Wycliffite writings on the parable, since it circulated widely and even appears in manuscripts with other Wycliffite texts. Wimbledon’s Sermon was preached at St Paul’s Cross as early as 1387 and perhaps again in 1388 and 1389, while the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle was likely composed in the 1380s and Lollard Sermon 8 c.1400. Wimbledon’s Sermon survives in 19 manuscripts. It appears alongside Wycliffite devotional and polemical texts in London, British Library MS Harley 2398, MS Additional 24202, and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Eng. th. f. 39 (formerly Helmingham Hall MS LJ II 9). It appears with sermons from the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle in Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College MS 74, Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.38, and London, British Library MS Additional 37677. For more on these manuscripts, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Inventing the Lollard Past: The Afterlife of a Medieval Sermon in Early Modern England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58:4 (2007), 638–9. For a complete list of manuscripts with Wimbledon’s Sermon, see Patrick J. Horner, ‘Later Middle English Sermons and Homilies’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 11, ed. Peter G. Beidler (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2005), p. 4296. On the dating of Wimbledon’s Sermon, see Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, pp. 41–3. For the dating of the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle, see Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 277 and 474, n. 32, and for Lollard Sermon 8, see Gloria Cigman, ‘Luceat Lux Vestra’, 482. In this cooperative effort, ‘God ȝyueþ þe growyng, al ȝif men planten and watren’. Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:380. Overall, the optimistic tone of this text sharply contrasts Wimbledon’s Sermon: it neither urges sinners to repentance or reform, nor does it mention consequences for failing to do the work of the vineyard. On lay preaching, see Simon Forde, ‘Lay Preaching and the Lollards of Norwich Diocese, 1428–1431’, Leeds Studies in English, 29 (1998), 109–26. Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:380. Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:380. Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:380–1. The Septuagesima sermon in Cigman’s collection appears in London, British Library, Add. MS 41321 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS C. 751. Jeremy Griffiths dates the two hands of Add. 41321 to the middle of the first half of the fifteenth century and the hand of Rawlinson C. 751 to the beginning of the fifteenth century. See Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, pp. xii, xxv. Cigman suggests that the

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sermons were likely composed twenty to thirty years before the date of the manuscripts. See ‘Luceat Lux Vestra’, 482. 53 Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, p. 88. 54 Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, p. 86. 55 Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, p. 86. Wimbledon’s text similarly emphasises the rest of society’s dependence on the third estate, as he urges labourers to work so that the earth may yield ‘bodily liflode for hem and for oþer parties’ and warns that without labourers, priests and knights would be forced to work as plowmen and herdsmen or else die of starvation. See Knight (ed.), Wimbledon’s Sermon, p. 63. 56 Helen Barr characterises the sermon as a celebration of the third estate and uses that claim to support a larger argument that Wycliffite writings about labourers could resonate with the claims behind the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. See ‘Wycliffite Representations of the Third Estate’, 200, 215. To view Lollard Sermon 8 as exalting labourers, however, neglects a series of lines that associate the third estate with earthly and bodily filth (227–34), as well as the writer’s assertion that all three classes neglect their work in the vineyard. 57 Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, p. 86. 58 Wailes describes the workers’ complaint as a point of controversy in commentaries on the parable (see Medieval Allegories, p. 140). Gregory, for example, interprets murmuring as an expression of suffering while waiting for heaven, since ‘no one who murmurs receives the kingdom of heaven, and no one who receives it can murmur’. See Gregory, Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), p. 81. For a Middle English rendering of Gregory’s interpretation of the workers’ ‘grucchynge’, see the Glossed Gospels commentary in British Library, MS Add. 41175, fol. 67ra. 59 After equating these enemies with three threats to the vine of Egypt named in Psalm 79, the writer warns against passersby who pluck its fruit, the boar from the woods, and the singular wild beast. Passersby are particularly responsible for the corrupt state of the clergy: the writer identifies them with covetous men who break God’s commandments, practice simony, and place unholy men in the role of priest. The remaining two enemies embody six of the seven deadly sins to which members of any estate are susceptible. The boar signifies the glutton who smites with cursed words while drunk, the slothful who do not labour in their office, and the lecherous who stink with sin. The singular wild beast gnaws the vine with pride, wrath, and envy. See Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, pp. 88–92. 60 Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, p. 92. 61 Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, p. 92. Compare Isa. 5:4: ‘What is that Y ouȝt to do more to my vyner, and Y dide not to it? Whether that Y abood, that it schulde bere grapis, and it bare wielde grapis?’

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62 A number of scholars have pointed to similarities between the Pearlmaiden’s discourse and sermons, both throughout poem as a whole and in the employment of the parable in particular. Jane Chance has argued that the poem is ‘in part an example of the preaching art’ structured around the moral, allegorical, and anagogical senses of interpretation, while J. J. Anderson has charted a progression of descending complexity from allegorical, to scholastic, to homiletic modes of instruction throughout the poem, all of which he associates with preaching. Within the explication of the parable in particular, Anderson identifies the movement from addressing humanity in general to addressing the individual dreamer as a preaching technique and calls the Dreamer ‘the target of a sermon’. See Jane Chance, ‘Allegory and Structure in Pearl: The Four Senses of the Ars Praedicandi and FourteenthCentury Homiletic Poetry’, in Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (eds), Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1991), pp. 31–60, and Anderson, Language and Imagination, pp. 31, 35. Even those who doubt the efficacy of the maiden’s speech sometimes refer to the maiden’s discourse as homiletic. For example, when David Aers describes the maiden’s failure to change the Dreamer’s will, he observes ‘no homily, however forceful, can bend the will of another’. See Aers, ‘The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl’, Speculum, 68:1 (1993), 64. 63 Petri Luomanen, Entering the Kingdom of Heaven: A Study on the Structure of Matthew’s View of Salvation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), pp. 145, 148. 64 The Pearl-poet is not alone among medieval authors in his effort to unify this discourse. Although both the liturgy and the chapter divisions in the Gospel separate the parable from the preceding discussion, the Middle English Gospel harmony Oon of Foure, based on a popular Latin harmony by Clement of Llanthony, presents the parable within the same textual unit as the material in Matthew 19. In this work, the parable begins directly after Matthew 19:30 without any division in the text and concludes this textual unit (section 9:10 starts immediately after the parable). See, for example, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 481 fols 63v–64r. 65 Marie Borroff, for example, characterises the maiden’s speech as a means of educating the Dreamer about her identity and comments that what may seem like a ‘dry discourse … rises to eloquence in justifying the salvation of “innocents” such as herself, whose lives on earth amounted to little’. See Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Beyond (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 132. John Bowers thinks that the poet belabours the ‘theological commonplace’ of infant baptism in his explication of the parable, suggesting that he does so in response to potentially ­heretical views on

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baptism from Wycliffites. See ‘The Politics of Pearl’, Exemplaria, 7:2 (1995), 427–30. 66 Helen Barr, ‘Pearl – or “the Jeweler’s Tale”’, Medium Aevum, 69:1 (2000), 66. 67 Jennifer Garrison similarly argues that the parable teaches its aristocratic readers that God’s rules ‘do not correspond to those of the socioeconomic hierarchies of medieval England’. Our readings of the poem differ, however, with regard to the role of the mass. Based on the poet’s representation of this liturgical reading, I see considerable ambivalence about how the mass can promote worldly values, an ambivalence that could be reinforced by Garrison’s own discussion of how ‘aristocrats used their wealth in order to mark out their individual social status within their churches’. She concludes, however, that ‘Pearl invokes the Mass to further the dreamer’s individual spiritual reform’. See ‘Liturgy and Loss’, 317, 296, and 321. 68 For examples of readings related to labour politics, see Barr, ‘Pearl – or “the Jeweler’s Tale”’; John Bowers, ‘The Politics of Pearl’; and John Watkins, ‘“Sengely in Synglere”: Pearl and Late Medieval Individualism’, Chaucer Yearbook, 2 (1995), 117–36. For readings focusing on salvation theology, see Beaston, ‘The Pearl-poet and the Pelagians’ and Rhodes, Poetry Does Theology, pp. 125–45. Rhodes reads the poet’s integration of the parable as a Bakhtinian dialogue that features two different theological discourses, but he associates the maiden’s explication of the parable with an Augustinian salvation theology. See p. 126. 69 She first refers to the parable as a ‘sample’ and then asserts that God ‘lyknez hit to heuen lyȝte’ (499–500). 70 Matthew 20:1 reads, ‘The kyngdom of heuenes is lijc to an housbonde man, that wente out first bi the morewe, to hire werk men in to his vyneȝerd.’ Commentary in the Glossa ordinaria discourages readers from simply equating the kingdom of heaven with the vineyard or vineyard owner, insisting that the kingdom is not simply like the man but the whole matter conducted by him: ‘Non homini solum: sed toti negotio ab homine gesto et in similibus similiter.’ See Froehlich and Gibson (eds), Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria, 4:63. 71 See Bowers, ‘The Politics of Pearl’, 425. 72 On historical wages, see note 18 above. As in Matthew’s Gospel, the vineyard owner in Pearl defines the workers’ wage two times in two different manners. The second time, the vineyard owner names no particular wage but instead promises ‘what resonabele hyre be naȝt be runne / I yow pay in dede and þoȝte’ (523–4). Andrew and Waldron describe ‘in dede and þoȝte’ as a legalistic formula indicating the workers will be paid in full, but in a study of English labour practices, Christopher Dyer has suggested that ‘reasonable’ could serve as code for low wages. See Andrew and Waldron, 78 and Dyer, An Age of

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Transition? p. 225. Scholars disagree on the generosity of the vineyard owner in relation to the wage. Bowers characterises the vineyard owner as careful to abide by the Statute of Labourers but calls that legally mandated wage ‘entirely unrealistic’. See ‘The Politics of Pearl’, 425. Many do not question the amount, however, and focus instead on the symbolism of the penny. Robert Ackerman, for example, interprets the penny as a symbol of the Eucharist, following the example of late medieval devotional texts like the Book of Vices and Virtues. See ‘The Pearl-Maiden and the Penny’, Romance Philology, 17 (1964), 620–3. For a more recent example of this association, see Garrison, ‘Liturgy and Loss’, 316. 73 Following pseudo-Chrysostom, some vernacular commentaries warn against idleness and explain the difference between states of idleness and sinfulness. In both Lollard Sermon 8 and the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, the writers explain that whereas sinners actively commit offences, such as theft, idle people fail to do good works. While they do not steal, they also do not give. Thus, they warn against a spiritual apathy in which simply avoiding sin is perceived to be sufficient. See Cigman (ed.), Lollard Sermons, p. 82. For the Glossed Gospels, see British Library MS Add 28026 fol. 113r. 74 ‘“Why stande ȝe ydel?” he sayde to þos, “Ne knawe ȝe of þis day no date?”’ (515–16). 75 Watkins cites the description of the men as ‘ydel and ful stronge’ as an example of the Pearl-poet potentially critiquing contemporary labourers, who would refuse work in order to receive higher wages from another employer. See Watkins, ‘Sengely in Synglere’, 124. Although the individual phrase may recall this practice, the labourers in the story act in an opposite manner. 76 The text reads ‘Gyf hem þe hyre þat I hem owe, / And fyrre, þat non me may reprené’ (543–4). 77 In the Gospel version, the first workers do not explicitly argue for more pay. It reads ‘These laste wrouȝten oon our, and thou hast maad hem euen to vs, that han born the charge of the dai and heete’ (Matt 20:12). 78 The specific language of covenant is not in the Gospel parable. In Matthew’s story, the owner simply asks one of the first labourers ‘whether thou hast not acordid with me for a peny?’ (Matt 20:13). 79 In addition to merchant time and feudal time, Barr also refers to ‘Church time’, which one borrows from God and cannot measure. Barr suggests that the original parable pertains to feudal time and Church time, while the Pearl-poet’s particular diction inserts a merchant perspective into the story. See Barr, ‘Pearl – or “the Jeweler’s Tale”’, 71–2. 80 On defining justice in terms of fidelity instead of due reward, see A. D. Horgan, ‘Justice in the Pearl’, Review of English Studies, 32:126

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(1981), 174–5. This may also resonate with the pactum-theologies of the moderni, who argued that God freely entered an agreement to reward people who did their best. See page 30 above. 81 In addition to defining gift as something given freely or generously, two of the seven entries for the word ‘yift’ in the Middle English Dictionary (MED) pertain to something given by or for God, such as charitable contributions, spiritual gifts, or divine dispensation. See MED definitions 4, 5a, and 5b. 82 Some Middle English retellings justify the owner’s autonomy in a way that focuses on the rights of ownership. Sermon 8 in Ross’s Middle English Sermons phrases the question as ‘Is it not lefull to me to do with my goode what me liste?’ The Northern Homily Cycle text reads ‘May I noght do my liking / Of þat es mine awin(g) thing?’ See Woodburn O. Ross (ed.), Middle English Sermons, Edited from British Museum MS Royal 18 B. xxiii (EETS OS 209, 1940), p. 40 and Nevanlinna (ed.), Northern Homily Cycle, 2:9/5747–8. 83 In Matthew 20:15, the owner asks, ‘Whether it is not leueful to me to do that that Y wole?’ 84 On how gift economies simultaneously reinforce hierarchical relations and create communal relationship based on gratitude, see Elizabeth Harper, ‘Pearl in the Context of Fourteenth-Century Gift Economies’, Chaucer Review, 44:4 (2010), 438. 85 This refrain appears as the last line of five consecutive stanzas: see lines 612, 624, 636, 648, and 660. 86 Jill Mann argues that all are equally paid (603) because all are equally satisfied. That meaning of pay resonates with enough and makes the request for more satisfaction look absurd. See ‘Satisfaction and Payment’, 25. 87 For a broader discussion of ‘the poem’s emphasis on the radicalism of Christianity’s (or at any rate Jesus’s) challenge to traditional social and economic categories’, see Bahr, ‘The Manifold Singularity of Pearl’, 731–6 (quotation on p. 735). 88 See also lines 672, 696, 708, and 720. 89 Andrew and Waldron suggest that these lines may paraphrase Psalm 14 or Psalm 23, but the only similarity to Psalm 14 are the words ‘rest withinne’ instead of ‘stonde in’ in line 679. 90 Compare Matt 19:13–5. 91 ‘Bot he come þyder ryȝt as a chylde, / Oþer ellez neuermore com þerinne’ (723–4). 92 This is the same advice that the writer of Bodley 806 offers for how to work well in the vineyard and thereby earn one’s reward. See page 33. 93 The man who asked ‘wente awey sorwful’ because he had many possessions. Jesus then explains to his disciples how hard it is for the rich to enter heaven (Matt 19:22–4). 94 An earlier version of the sermon analysis featured in this chapter may

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be found in M. Raschko, ‘“To þe Worschipe of God and Profite of his Peple”: Lollard Sermons on the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard’, in Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck (eds), Wycliffite Controversies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011), pp. 175–92.

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2 Stories for revising the self: the parable of the Prodigal Son

Þerfore, modur, turne aȝeyn into þeself as þulke ȝonger broþer dide, and sei wiþ him ‘Hou many seruauntis in Crist, my Fadres, hous hauen plente of loues … and I perische for hunger. I shal arise’ wiþ sorwe of herte and schrift of mouþe and satisfaccioun of dede, and so ‘I shal go to my Fadur Crist.’ (Book to a Mother, p. 101)1

Like the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal Son story (Luke 15:11–32) could call into question the necessity of worldly and spiritual work. In this parable, once again, one who labours diligently appears slighted by an authority figure who represents God. Even more provocatively, however, the one who receives seemingly undue reward not only works less than others but also wastes material wealth while pursuing bodily pleasures. This story, in other words, celebrates a sinner. The easy forgiveness presented in the parable both challenges the notion that one must work diligently in the world to receive heavenly reward, as the Septuagesima sermons in the last chapter suggest, and contravenes the complex routines of penance promoted by the church in the later Middle Ages. The Gospel story begins with the younger of two sons asking his father for his share of their inheritance, which he then wastes in a distant country, living in debauchery.2 When a famine arises and the son needs food, he seeks out a local citizen who puts him to work feeding swine. Yet even with this employment, he hungers to such an extent that he desires to eat what the swine consume. Remembering how well the hired servants eat in his father’s house, the son resolves to return home and to say to his father, ‘Y haue synned in to heuene, and bifor thee; and now Y am not worthi to be clepid thi sone, make me as oon of thin hirid men’ (Luke 15:18–19). When the son still approaches at a distance, the father runs to him and welcomes him with embraces and kisses. Only then, notably,

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does the son tell his father of his remorse in the terms he previously rehearsed. In celebration of his return, the father orders his servants to clothe the son with his best robe, a ring, and shoes, and to slaughter the fattened calf. When the older son comes home from working in the fields, he reacts angrily to the perceived injustice of his brother’s reception, protesting that despite serving his father faithfully for many years, he never received so much as a goat to celebrate with his friends. The parable concludes with the father’s assurance that everything he has belongs to the older son as well; however, they should rejoice because ‘this thi brother was deed, and lyuede aȝen; he perischide, and is foundun’ (Luke 15:32). The context for the parable in Luke’s Gospel emphasises the father’s, or God’s, readiness to forgive. Jesus narrates it, along with the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, to an audience of tax collectors and ‘synful men’ (Luke 15:1), as well as to the Pharisees and scribes who complain that Jesus socialises with such degenerates. Together, the three parables make up an extended rebuke of the latter audience, illustrating that there will be more joy in heaven over ‘o synful man doynge penaunce … than on nynti and nyne iuste, that han no nede to penaunce’ (Luke 15:7).3 Although this maxim clearly encourages repentance, the Gospel parable shows far simpler action than the threefold process of contrition, confession, and satisfaction typically associated with the late medieval sacrament. The son may be contrite, but the father welcomes him home before he verbally expresses wrongdoing, and the story offers no evidence of restitution for his misdeeds. Although the parable raises issues related to justice (more specifically, to the efficacy and rewards of devout action), patterns of revision in Middle English retellings suggest that the portrayal of divine mercy generated the most interest and concern in the later Middle Ages.4 Following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which instituted a requirement of annual penance, forgiveness of sin was both sacramental and ritualistic.5 The catechetical literature that grew out of the council and its emphasis on lay piety guided the faithful in proper performance of a three-part sacrament:6 such works led audiences through an exhaustive examination of conscience, taught the proper dispositions to ­ assume while confessing, and extolled the virtues one should foster to stave off or make restitution for particular sins.7 Reconciliation with God, these materials suggested, was an extended and intricate process. The Gospel parable, in contrast, includes neither the vocabulary typical of penitential literature nor the ecclesiastical

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structures through which late medieval Christians sought to atone for their sins. We might expect that for some, such as the Wycliffite writers who insisted that scripture should be the foundation of all Christian living, sacramental rituals may appear extra-scriptural, unnecessary, or even corrupt when compared to the story.8 Certainly the powerful role of a priest in confession has no correlative in Jesus’ parable. Yet rather than read the Prodigal Son story as a narrative that competes with or contradicts contemporary church teachings, many writers revised the story so that it better resembled catechetical literature: if scripture provides the foundation for the church and the church teaches the sacrament of penance, they would show how the sacrament could be manifest in the story. Given these efforts to align scriptural text and ecclesiastical structures, we might be tempted to conclude that translations subordinated biblical text to institutional ideologies or to describe retellings as manipulations of sacred text in the service of clerical authority.9 Such conclusions would certainly fit the predominant Foucauldian narrative that describes medieval penance as a site of invasive ecclesiastical power.10 Yet I will argue that retellings of the Prodigal Son story unfold a more complicated and diversified account of penitential power dynamics. They direct our attention away from clerical authority to reflect on the divine power to forgive, on the efficacy of ritual, and on the empowerment of lay Christians to pursue spiritual perfection. Whether by offering hope for forgiveness or modelling penitential actions, the revised parables are arguably more transformative stories that encourage readers to translate the son’s return into their own reunion with God. The most ambitious Middle English rendition, one that characterises the Prodigal Son figure as a model of Christ-like living, appears in the late fourteenth-century devotional work Book to a Mother.11 This text that characterises the ‘book of Christ’ as the fundamental guide to Christian conduct makes bold arguments for ecclesiastical reform: the author both advocates for and produces vernacular scripture, he argues that the most authoritative form of preaching, by clerics and lay people alike, is living like Christ, and he repeatedly censures clerics for failing to follow their own teachings.12 A prime example of the ‘extraclergial’ writing generated by Wycliffites and others in the late fourteenth century,13 scholars have often struggled to explain how Book to a Mother could advance such provocative ideas and still be orthodox. In response, Fiona Somerset has convincingly argued that the book

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appears heterodox precisely because it is lollard.14 Based on its ideology, then, we might expect Book to a Mother to criticise or at least sidestep the subject of sacramental penance. But, in fact, the writer integrates penitential doctrine into the Prodigal Son story more extensively than any other Middle English translator. To my knowledge, it is the only Middle English retelling to articulate a full threefold process of penance in relation to the parable. The retelling, therefore, raises at least two provocative questions whose answers may expand our conception of penitential power dynamics: why would an author who criticises the clergy and attempts to extend their power to the laity promote ecclesial structures for penance? And how does the integration of penitential doctrine into biblical narrative correspond with or even facilitate the author’s stated aim that his readers embody scripture and become living exemplars of Christ? This unexpected account of the Prodigal Son story invites us to look more closely at late medieval penitential instruction, both within the instructional literature that emerged from Lateran IV and in other imaginative recreations of the parable. Collectively, these writings will show a more variegated and flexible discourse than we usually associate with medieval penance, marked by an emphasis on penitents’ selftransformation and a striking disinterest in the power of priests. Sacramental penance: getting beyond orthodoxy Scholars studying the later Middle Ages and especially the years preceding the Reformation commonly describe two competing views about penance: mainstream clerics taught that three-stage penance, including confession to a priest, was necessary for the forgiveness of sins, while dissenters like Wycliffites insisted that contrition alone sufficed. Yet this binary account of the controversies surrounding penance misrepresents a far more nuanced theological discourse and potentially creates false expectations for how translators of the Prodigal Son parable might represent the sacrament. According to Joseph Goering, views of penance commonly thought of as competing in the later Middle Ages co-existed in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century schools. Those studying Gratian’s Decretals learned that some authoritative doctors insisted that forgiveness comes from contrition in the heart (internal penance) and other equally authoritative doctors held that confession and satisfaction (external penance) are necessary for remediation of

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sin.15 Gratian’s text, Goering argues, presented both points of view as valid and ‘underscored the fruitful balance between the interior freedom of contrition and the external order of confession and satisfaction’.16 Although Peter Lombard, one of the most influential theologians in the same period, ultimately argued that contrition alone suffices for forgiveness,17 he acknowledged the same diversity of opinion as did Gratian and still promoted confession and satisfaction as integral elements of sacramental penance.18 Lombard’s Sentences even goes so far as to say that the truly contrite intend to confess,19 but it limits the priest’s role to setting punishment and declaring, not bringing about, the forgiveness of sin that ultimately comes from God.20 By the later Middle Ages, differences of opinion over what elements of penance effected forgiveness and what power priests exercised in the sacrament had very practical consequences: confession to a priest seemed to invest secular clerics and friars with the power to grant forgiveness, while the doctrine of satisfaction helped to fuel the business of almsgiving, pilgrimage, and indulgences.21 Controversy derived largely from these institutional and material effects, with Wyclif and others objecting not to the practices of confession and satisfaction per se but to the implication that priests could grant forgiveness, the annual requirement of confession, or the simony that resulted from considering donations as a form of satisfaction.22 If we read accounts of medieval penance through a lens of controversy, it becomes easy to neglect variations within penitential discourse and to caricature the sacrament as only an instrument of clerical power. Although penance had become a more formal and contested ritual by the later Middle Ages, vernacular penitential literature was neither univocal nor rigidly prescriptive. First and foremost, such literature aimed to facilitate as effective a process as possible for identifying, comprehending, and remediating sin. Most descriptions of penance within instructional texts include both internal and external forms: contrition for one’s sins, auricular confession, and restitution for sins through satisfaction. And often, authors described these three facets as integrally connected and interdependent. For example, after invoking a threefold process, the author of Memoriale Credencium, a text that J. H. L. Kengen calls a ‘manual of theology for lay people’, goes on to specify that contrition should include the intention to confess one’s sins, while the declaration of sins in confession should likewise be done contritely ‘with sorow of hert and wille fort forsak his synnus’.23 Finally, the author describes satisfaction as an effective antidote to

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the three sins that are the sources of all others – pride, lechery, and greed – and asserts that actions such as ‘bedus biddyng. fastyng: and almes dede doyng’ not only make restitution for previous sins but also diminish the likelihood of sinning in the future.24 Yet vernacular treatises also reflect flexibility within a threefold structure. The author of Jacob’s Well qualifies his statement about the necessity of confession and satisfaction to account for sickness or imminent death: ‘for þi contricyoun avayleth þe noȝt but schryfte & satysfaccyoun be don, ȝif þou haue power, tyme, & space’. The will to complete those acts can be sufficient when the means is lacking.25 Similarly, some texts indicate that confession specifically to a priest is not always necessary. For example, the penitential treatise The Clensyng of Mannes Soule states that if one cannot find a priest in a time of need, it is still beneficial to one’s soul to confess to ‘a lewid man’.26 Likewise, if the only priest available is a heretic or schismatic, the author recommends that rather than confess ‘he schal sorewe in his herte for his synnes … and þis suffisiþ as to sauacion and forȝeuenesse of his synne’.27 This instruction recalls an even more flexible passage in the Sentences, where Lombard writes that ‘a priest is to be sought who is wise and discreet, who has both power and judgement; and if perhaps such a one should not be available, the sinner should confess to his friend’.28 Wycliffite texts, on the other hand, betray far more interest in and encouragement of sacramental penance than common invocations of their opposition would suggest. The primary point of contention in such works pertains to forgiveness: Wycliffite writers insist, almost univocally, that only God forgives sin.29 Yet they avidly encourage contrition, and some texts even extol the virtues of confessing to worthy priests.30 An extended treatise on penance embedded in the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels provides an instructive example of such claims. It denounces the annual requirement of confession to a priest because it makes commandment out of counsel and argues that forgiveness comes from internal penance (‘contricioun of herte, not bi knowlecching of mouþ’).31 Yet the treatise does not dismiss the value of penitential actions. Rather, it encourages contrition at length, after the model of David and Mary Magdalene, and it repeatedly urges readers to confess their sins, whether directly to God or to another person. While much of the treatise’s instruction pertains to internal penance, even describing a mode of internal satisfaction, it also outlines how to properly render external satisfaction, whether by returning stolen goods or speaking kind words in recompense for harmful speech. The

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author names these acts as satisfaction and suggests they have the power not to secure forgiveness but to unbind from sin.32 Late medieval writings on penance describe a complex, extended, and recursive process that encompassed variation and took into account the practical exigencies of Christian life. Although writers made competing claims about who had the power to forgive and about the necessity and nature of confession, that debate cannot be reduced to blanket support for or opposition to the sacrament. And while the role of priests in confession and the material facets of satisfaction certainly allowed for the abuses so frequently critiqued in Middle English literature, vernacular writings (including those by Wycliffites) still reflect the belief that properly performed penance can transform both the individual subject and the broader community. Telling God’s story: the prodigal son in lives of Christ In the remainder of this chapter, I analyse how Prodigal Son stories variously represent the power dynamics and processes of penance in Middle English works belonging to three genres: lives of Christ, sermons, and a form of living. While those three genres contain most Middle English translations of the story, they also merit our attention because of their relevance to Book to a Mother. Specifically, its author commends the book of Christ, as well as his own work, as three types of writing in one: mirror, remedy, and rule.33 Lives of Christ are mirrors that narratively project God’s image.34 Sermons are one form of remedy that commonly instruct audiences how to rectify their sins.35 And a form of living provides a rule for lay readers who wish to transcend ordinary life in the world, or pursue spiritual perfection, through religious discipline.36 Within these respective genres, Prodigal Son stories tend to share common emphases: lives of Christ (or mirrors) primarily focus on God’s power to forgive, while sermons (or remedies) emphasise proper confession. Attempting to encompass all three genres, Book to a Mother integrates a threefold process of penance so that the parable facilitates in miniature what the writer aspires to achieve with the whole of his work: as a mirror, remedy, and rule, it will not only show the life of Christ and draw readers away from sin but also outline a path toward spiritual perfection. As Jennifer Bryan has shown, references to the life of Christ as a mirror draw on an Augustinian notion of self-reform that seeks to locate the image of God within the sinful human life.37 Initiating

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a process of scriptural and self-study, these narratives had both a devotional and exemplary function, as they show who God is and who humans might be.38 Like the related genre of saints’ lives, vitae Christi posit both affiliation and distance between the narrated life and the lives of their readers.39 Christ is the ultimate model to which Christians should aspire, the quintessential image of God in human form, but he stands apart from humanity in his perfection. A life of Christ, therefore, may inspire both intimacy and awe, as it weaves together and often reimagines a series of images and statements from the Gospels that, for a given author and occasion, communicate the relationship between humanity and God.40 Within lives of Christ, retellings of the Prodigal Son story betray a greater interest in God’s mercy than in the son’s penitential behaviour. This focus comes across especially clearly in the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, a work that integrates, yet typically abbreviates all episodes from the four Gospels to create one cohesive story.41 In this concise account of Christ’s life, the writer’s truncations suggest what he considers the essence of a given event or narrative. After a rubric announcing ‘Hou Jhesus ansuered hem þat gruccheden for þe synful men’, the harmony represents all of Luke 15 as follows: And Jesus þo tolde hem [tax collectors and sinful men] þre tales, and tolde hem hou hij schulden done. ‘Forwhi’, he seide, ‘þe schepehirde haþ more ioye of a beste þat he haþ forlorn, whan he it haþ yfounde, þan of an hundreþ oþer bestes. And more ioye haþ a womman of a peny þat sche haþ forlorne, whan sche it haþ yfounde, þan of ten oþere pens þat sche haþ in hire cofre. And also’, he seide, ‘haþ þe fader more ioye of his sone þat haþ trepased & mys done, þouȝ he al bare fote & naked come hom and wil come to amendement, þan he haþ of alle his oþer sones þat neuere duden þing aȝeins her fader comaundement. And also’, seide Jesus, ‘more joyful ben þe angels of a synful man þat repenteþ hym by an hundreþ part, þan of a þousande oþer riȝth þat ne habben no nede to done penaunce.’42

The author summarises each story with reference to the principle articulated in Luke 15:7: one derives greater joy from the recovery of something lost than from maintaining what one has. Thus, the three stories tell of the shepherd’s greater joy, the woman’s greater joy, and the father’s greater joy. Small details in this Prodigal Son story emphasise how profoundly God loves the contrite. This father has more joy over one who sinned against him and returned than over ‘alle his oþer sones’; by altering the number of sons from two to many, the degree of love devoted to the profligate sinner

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appears more remarkable. Moreover, the short retelling implies that remorse shown from the penitent might be scant or incomplete: even if he only ‘repenteþ hym by an hundreþ part’, there will still be more joy in heaven than over those with no need to repent.43 For the author of the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, the parable holds up an image of extraordinary, unconditional, divine love. Other lives of Christ emphasise God’s capacious love in longer Prodigal Son narratives. Like the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, The South English Ministry and Passion (SEMP) streamlines the four Gospels into one, more coherent life,44 but this text includes only select events and explicates those stories with introductory or concluding comments. Narrated in what Pickering calls a ‘simple informative-devotional style’, this vita Christi accompanies the larger collection of saints’ lives in the South English Legendary.45 Although we remain unsure who wrote the lives and for what audience, Pickering suggests that, initially, they may have had a pedagogical function, being read aloud to a group of religious novices or nuns.46 Whereas the Pepysian Gospel Harmony writer summarises all three parables about recovering something lost, the SEMP author reduces Jesus’ preaching in Luke 15 to the Prodigal Son story. Moreover, he attributes to the parable a new projected audience, stating that Jesus ‘prechede to synful men to letyn here synful dede / & com to amendement without wanhope’ (lines 1255–6).47 Gone are the scribes and Pharisees who objected to Jesus interacting with sinners. Instead of issuing a corrective to these religious leaders, Jesus speaks directly to those who might wish to repent and, by extension, to those medieval audiences of the SEMP who would more readily identify with generic sinners than with scribes and Pharisees. Although the injunction to ‘com to amendement without wanhope’ clearly encourages penance, the author seems especially interested in allaying fear. To discourage despair, he draws attention to the depravity of the son and the ease with which the father, or God, nonetheless welcomes this egregious sinner home. As a result, the possibility of penance, rather than the process of it, becomes the focus of the story. Throughout the retelling, discrepancies from the Gospel parable that disparage the son are subtle but frequent. At the outset, the author characterises the son’s inheritance as a gift the father gives out of pity to a son who had no rightful claim to it. While the son asks for his inheritance in Luke,48 the father in the SEMP story anticipates his son’s need without his asking: ‘Of þe ȝunger þat had non erytage he gan hym vnderstond, / And ȝaf hym of

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his tresore anowȝ into anoþer contre to fare, / To lyue þere with marchaundyse in richesse withouttyn care’ (1258–60). Reference to inheritance in this passage conveys its abundance and value: the writer renders what is mere ‘catel’ in the Wycliffite Bible and substantium in the Vulgate as ‘tresore’, a term that evokes precious possessions, especially valued by their owner or bestower, that was often used in reference to spiritual as well as material goods.49 Fittingly, after wasting such goods, the son becomes financially and morally destitute: he is a ‘wrecche & beggare atte ende’ (1263–4). With this account of the son’s prodigality, the author heightens the contrast between the compassionate father and his callously wasteful son. But he also asserts that the father intended for his son to live luxuriously.50 The son’s transgression, therefore, is not enjoying his wealth but putting it in the service of physical desire. A lifestyle that the Wycliffite Bible vaguely describes as ‘lyuynge lecherously’ is represented here more specifically as spending his time with ‘strumpetys & tauernerys’ (1262). Anticipating the son’s eventual hunger, this language characterises his transgression as a gluttonous carnality, a mix of gustatory and sexual appetite commonly manifested in the ‘tavern sins’.51 The SEMP translation goes on to underscore the son’s responsibility for his subsequently humbled state. While the son suffers because of a general famine in the Gospel parable (Luke 15:14), the author of the SEMP portrays his profligate living as the sole cause of his need. The author omits both the event of famine and the son’s potentially admirable, humble employment feeding swine. Yet despite his more egregious sin, in this retelling, the son does not express contrition in advance of his return. The two factors that motivate his going home are need and the thought that parents are naturally inclined to treat their children kindly: He wiste þat his fader ryche was but he durst not to hym wende; For he hadde so folyly do he wolde hym al toschende. Neþeles he beþouȝt hym of kyndehed þat man haþ to his child, & þat kynde blood it wil ȝeue þat he were to hym mylde. Nede hym drof also narwe, þat he hadde nouȝt to spende, So þat he auentured hym & hom to his fader gan wende. (1265–70)

In this passage, the author describes the son’s return as a calculated risk that weighed a perceived threat of violent punishment (literally, dismemberment) against his current poverty.52 The desperate son takes his chances (‘auentured hym’) that familial love – not his own repentance – will motivate mercy. When he meets his father,

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the son humbles himself, professing ‘for wurþi am I nouȝt / More to be clepyd þi sone, for to nouȝt I am brouȝt’ (1273–4). But unlike in Luke’s Gospel, the son never uses the term ‘sin’ to describe his deeds.53 Instead, he characterises his shortcoming as material: he took his father’s money and brought himself into poverty. Contrition for his sinful appetite is absent.54 Despite the son’s direct responsibility for his suffering and his shallow understanding of his offences, he receives unconditional love. Before the son offers his tepid confession, the father ‘ran aȝens hym with gret ioyȝe, beclippid hym and kyste’ (1272). Later, when the father justifies his celebration to the older son, he describes the return as a resurrection from the dead that merits the highest joy: But for þi ȝungere broþer haþ longe ded be & now he is come to lyue, as we moun alle se, Leue sone, for þi broþeris lyf þou make ioyȝe & song, For it is þe moste ioyȝe þat euere cam vs among. (1285–8)

Confirming the son’s hope that ties of kinship will inspire mercy, the father’s love derives simply from his son being alive. This familial affection, the author suggests, represents God’s love for those living in deadly sin. He applies the conclusion of the parable of the Lost Sheep to the Prodigal Son story and concludes that ‘more ioyȝe he wil make & blys qwan ȝe wil to hym te [draw near], / þan with suyche many goode men þat euere han nyȝ hym be’ (1291–2). With this paraphrase, the author deemphasises penance and asserts how intensely God yearns to be with every human being.55 Rather than despair at one’s failure to live righteously, readers should likewise rejoice at the extent of God’s love. Another Middle English life of Christ, the Mirour of Mans Saluacioun, similarly shows far more interest in God’s actions – specifically, how God calls sinners and grants forgiveness through grace – than in the ritual of penance. A Middle English translation of the Latin Speculum humanae salvationis,56 the Mirour of Mans Saluacioun narrates select events related to the life of Christ, including the birth and early life of Mary, and interprets them typologically,57 explicating each with reference to three Old Testament narratives.58 In a work that primarily recounts events related to the Passion, the Prodigal Son parable appears in the one chapter featuring Jesus’ active ministry.59 Focusing on the episode in which Mary Magdalene washes Jesus’ feet with tears (Luke 7:37–50),60 this chapter deviates from the Mirour’s normal pattern: instead of explicating the Gospel narrative with reference to three

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episodes from the Old Testament, the author combines two Old Testament stories with the parable of the Prodigal Son. Effectively, King Manasseh serves as a figure of Mary Magdalene, while David confessing to Nathan prefigures God’s reception of the contrite, also represented in the Prodigal Son parable.61 With these paired stories, the Mirour summarises Christ’s ministry as an effort to draw people to repentance. When introducing Mary Magdalene’s story, the author asserts that Christ taught people to repent because the kingdom of heaven is near.62 And like the author of the SEMP, he characterises the possibility of penance as a reason for hope: Be penaunce taght he of heven liberale apercioune; Tofore his commyng herd nevere man swilk a swete sermoune. Trewe is this Lordis sermoune ouere alle accepcioune digne; Be penaunce commes vntil heven synnere vile & maligne. (1613–16)63

To underscore the efficacy of penance, the author concludes the brief chapter with a list of twenty-six repentant sinners, including Ruth, Paul, and the thief on the cross, whose stories offer evidence of God’s mercy.64 For the writer of the Mirour, the Gospels reveal the accessibility of heaven to even the vilest sinners. Correspondingly, his rendition of the Prodigal Son story emphasises the younger son’s depravity even more emphatically than the SEMP. The writer introduces him as a ‘fole-wastour’ and later, in a more aggressive instance of name-calling, refers to him as a ‘lewed daffe [idiot]’ (1656, 1669). Resembling the SEMP, the author makes no mention of famine, instead attributing the son’s hunger entirely to his own foolish immorality, ‘consumyng his substaunce thare lyving luxouriously’ (1658). Yet he more explicitly identifies the son’s acts as sinful. In the midst of the parable, the author asserts that the son commits deadly sins and describes the citizen to whom he turned for help as a servant of Lucifer.65 In this dire state, physical need draws the son to repent: Than, til himself turnyng, he thoght to do penaunce, Als nede makes naked man rynne the qwhippe, to fikke and daunce; And in this may we wele note the Salueours miseracioune, Þat wille synners compelle thus to contricioune. (1671–4)

Notably, the first step in this penitential process is not initiated by the son alone. Instead, the impetus for reconciliation comes from

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God, who uses physical suffering, like a whip, to compel sinners to contrition. Out of love, the author asserts, God seeks reconciliation through any means necessary, whether inspiration, preaching, or scourging.66 With this characterisation of need, even the son’s act of returning home, an instance in which he exercises agency, primarily teaches readers about God’s desire to forgive. The author’s abridgment of the story further attests to his interest in how God brings about penance. Whereas the author of the SEMP eliminates the word sin from the son’s confession, the author of the Mirour parable eliminates the act of confession entirely. He narrates that the son was ‘be penaunce ledde, and til his fadere conuertid’ (1682), but he refrains from describing any penitential actions. Even the phrase’s passive construction, being lead by penance, diminishes the son’s agency in his reconciliation. To conclude the story, the author eliminates the episode in which the son learns of his brother’s return and simply describes how eagerly the father receives the lost son: And his fadere, hym oferre seyng, ranne hym agayne Hym for till hals and kisse, this gude man, for ouer fayne. Thus rynnes Godde to the contrite, with his grace prevenant, Thaym to receyue, and alle thaire trespasse relessant. (1683–6)

This emphasis on prevenient grace does not necessarily devalue or challenge the sacrament of penance, but it does suggest that the son’s particular actions are relatively unimportant to the story’s function in this literary setting. If, as the Mirour author claims, Jesus’ ministry declared the availability of salvation to all, the Prodigal Son story shows just how eagerly and effectively God calls sinners to repent. Remediating sins: two Prodigal Son sermons While these lives of Christ show little interest in the process of repentance, two Middle English sermons carefully align the son’s reconciliation with elements of contemporary penitential doctrine.67 In contrast with the preceding works’ focus on the father’s power to forgive, these retellings highlight the transformative power of authentically performed ritual. Effectively, in these two instances, the parable takes on a catechetical function, urging and illustrating participation in sacramental penance. One retelling that especially emphasises contrition and confession appears in the expanded version of the Northern Homily Cycle (NHC), a col-

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lection of verse sermons that was composed in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century and continued to be copied into the fifteenth century.68 Spanning nearly 20,000 lines, the NHC presents translations of Gospel pericopes, commentary from patristic exegetes, and often exempla, for each Sunday in the liturgical year – all in octosyllabic couplets.69 Its prologue suggests that the sermons have more actionable aims than lives of Christ. In terms recalling vitae Christi, the author first notes that the four Gospels all tell one story, as they show Christ’s deeds and sayings. The NHC, however, presents translations only of those excerpts read in church on Sundays for the benefit of lay audiences: For [thi] wil Ic on Inglis schau, And ger our laued brether knawe, Quat alle tha godspelles saies, That falles tille the Sunnendayes, That thai mai her and hald in hert, Thinge that thaim til God mai ert [urge]. (Prologue 109–14)70

More specifically, the author recites and explicates such texts so that lay people may learn how to live righteously, to reflect on those thoughts and deeds that will lead them to salvation.71 The sermons, in other words, draw out from the Gospels not just images of God but also of who Christians should be before God. Within the Prodigal Son retelling, the writer begins to teach righteous living by making the son’s departure more relatable. While the renditions in lives of Christ intensify the son’s depravity, they make both God’s generosity and the son’s sin exceptional. The NHC describes the son’s offences in more ordinary terms that may pertain to a wider audience. The author creates a positive picture of domestic life before the son’s departure: both sons, described as beautiful (‘semly’), lived ‘with þe fader in fere [together]’ (7274–6). The son’s desire to leave, repeatedly associated with wilfulness, seems more romantic than pernicious, when he is said to go to a distant country ‘aventurs for to seke and se’ (7297).72 In an expansion of the Gospel narrative, we learn that the son went around town gathering and selling his goods, placed the proceeds in his purse, prepared his horse, and then told his friends of his adventurous plan.73 Like a questing knight, he found ‘wemen faire and fre’, and like a good courtly lover, he depleted his resources in his attempts to gain their attention (7300–3).74 The author does eventually name this behaviour as lechery and folly (7304–5), but he first neutrally describes such actions in terms that underscore

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their conventionality and resonance with certain social ideals. It is easy to see how an ambitious young Englishman could become a prodigal son. Once the story progresses to the son’s suffering and eventual conversion, he becomes a model for other penitents. In contrast with the SEMP parable, in which poverty motivates the son’s return, the NHC emphasises the son’s regret and genuine sorrow. Seeking friendship rather than paternal pity (‘[I will] fraist if he will be my frend’), the son suggests that whatever benevolence he receives would be a free expression of kindness, not care owed to him based on a familial bond (7333). And he subordinates his own will to his father’s, planning to confess that ‘I haue done ogaines þi will, / And sined ogains þe greuosly’ (7335–6). In addition to rehearsing his offences in advance of his confession, the son also shows physical signs of contrition. After the son resolved to return, the parable specifies that ‘furth he went / With wepeing and with mekill wa’ (7343–4). By adding that the son wept, the NHC author brings the son’s penance into accord with contemporary teachings on contrition that characterised tears as an external sign of an authentic internal condition.75 For example, the author of Jacob’s Well calls contrite tears a sign of salvation, while the author of Memoriale Credencium attributes healing properties to the tears themselves, claiming that they cleanse a person in God’s sight.76 This affective amplification provides a tangible manifestation of the least physical part of penance, so that readers have a means to recognise true remorse in the son and in themselves. Similarly rendering the son as a model penitent, this retelling emphasises the humility of his confession and depicts that act as instrumental to forgiveness. As in Luke’s Gospel, the father receives the son warmly upon his approach, but the bestowal of gifts only follows the son’s confession of his sins: Þe sun fell till his fader fete And for his sin ful sare gan grete; And said als he bifore had thoght, For he so vnwisely had wroght, ‘Fader, I haue sined ogains þe, Grace of forgifnes grante þou me.’ (7354–9)

Whereas the father falls on the son in Luke’s version (15:20), this retelling inverts the gesture so that the son falls to his father’s feet. From this position of supplication, he both acknowledges his sin and explicitly asks for grace. In doing so, he manifests the

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disposition and behaviour advocated in Robert Mannyng’s early fourteenth-century penitential guide Handlyng Synne. In his third point of shrift, related to meekness, Mannyng both commends Mary’s humility and characterises the leper who knelt before Jesus in Mark 1:40 as a model penitent. As spiritual lepers, Mannyng writes, those confessing should assume a meek posture before their priests.77 In the NHC story, the humble performance of auricular confession appears to bring about the son’s forgiveness. Following the son’s speech, the author writes, Þe fader þan was ful wele paide And till his seruandes sune he said, ‘Biliue bifor me here ȝe bring Riche aray of gude clething, And cleth my sun, þat I may se, For he es dere welcum to me.’ (7362–7)

With the statement that ‘þe fader þan was ful wele paide’, the text implies that the father bestowed his gifts upon his son in response to the confession. Moreover, the past participle ‘paide’ could indicate both that the confession pleased the father and that the son rectified a debt through open acknowledgment of his sin.78 These promotions of confession within the narrative are made more explicit in the short commentary that follows the parable. The author concludes that ‘If we will knaw oure wikkedhede / And ask mercy for oure misdede, / To resayue vs ful redy es he’ (7438–40).79 Whereas the SEMP and the Mirour suggest that the father, or God, stands always ready to forgive, the NHC uses conditional language while depicting the key roles that sincere contrition and articulation of one’s misdeeds play in the process of forgiveness. The retelling ensures that audiences do not take God’s mercy for granted and, by emphasising the form and efficacy of the son’s actions, shows readers how to remediate sin. Turning to the relevant prose sermon in Woodburn O. Ross’s Middle English Sermons collection (MES 32), we find even more explicit suggestion that the son was forgiven on account of his penitential actions.80 MES 32 explicates the thema ‘Hic recipit peccatores’ from Luke 15:2, first with a series of reflections on the sins of Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene, and then with a lengthy explanation of how deadly sin brings a person to nothing. The parable appears as an exemplum at the sermon’s conclusion, where the author offers it as evidence that forgiveness becomes available

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with the act of confession: he promises, ‘For and þou wilt, be shryven of þi trespace and aske God forȝeuenes and knowe well þat God is full of mercy and is euer redy to take þe to is grace. In likenes and figure here-of I rede in þe gospell of Seynt Luke, Luce xv, þat þer was vppon a tyme a man þat had too sonnes.’81 The author then presents a relatively close translation of the Gospel parable up to the point where the son remembers the prosperity of his father’s house and resolves to return home.82 But once the son has come to his state of suffering, the writer creatively renders the content, order, and in one instance, the form of the narrative so that the parable illustrates the necessity and nature of confession. In the longer sermon, the author gives two alternative translations of Luke 15:2: ‘“he resceyveþ synneful men”; or els “Here arn resceyved synners”.’ The retelling seems oriented to the latter translation, since its revisions focus audiences on the moment – or the process – in which the sinner becomes forgiven. As in that passive grammatical construction, God is no longer the main subject; instead, the narrative primarily conveys the power of confession. When planning his return home, the son describes the process by which he will confess, modelling for audiences how they should approach their spiritual fathers in the practice of the sacrament: ‘“I will rise”, he seid, “and goy to my fadur and be a-know of all my trespasse and put me hooly in ys grace, preyinge hym to haue mercy on me”’ (p. 168) By omitting the request that the father will treat him as a hired servant, the author downplays the worldly, domestic situation of the parable and instead encourages identification of the son with a penitent and the father with God (or possibly a priest), whose mercy is an expression of grace. The declaration that the son will make known all of his trespasses brings his actions into accord with common instructions in penitential manuals. Memoriale Credencium, for example, names comprehensiveness as one of the necessary qualities of confession and recommends that penitents confess each sin separately.83 Similarly, in his twelfth and final point of shrift, Mannyng instructs penitent sinners that ‘Al holy oweþ þy shryfte be doun. / No poynt þou shalt wyþholde, / For al holy hyt oweþ to be tolde.’84 By emphasising the comprehensiveness of the son’s confession, the author both promotes sacramental penance and suggests that its proper performance affects its efficacy. In addition to aligning the son’s confession with contemporary doctrine, the author positions it in a way that characterises confession as necessary for forgiveness. In the Gospel parable, the father

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runs to and embraces his son as soon as he sees him approach (Luke 15:20), potentially suggesting that God forgives, or at least is ready to forgive, the contrite. In MES 32, however, the father only embraces the son after he confesses: And when þat he com to þe place where þat is fadur was, he fell downe lowly, seþhynge and vepynge, seyinge þise wordes, ‘Pater, peccaui in celum et coram te. Iam non sum dignus vocari filius tuus’ et cetera … He ne had fully seid þise wordes but is fadur hade pite on hym and ranne to hym and toke hym vp and kyssed hym and welcomd hym with a glad chere. (pp. 168–9)85

As in the NHC rendition, the son takes a submissive posture before his father. While the father eventually embraces him with the same good cheer as in the Gospel, he does not offer mercy unconditionally. Rather, forgiveness comes as a response to genuine contrition (seþhynge and vepynge) accompanied by verbal acknowledgement of his sin.86 Shifts in language and style draw special attention to the act of confession. Initially, the author switches to Vulgate Latin for the confessional speech, creating a break in the narrative that both punctuates the speech act and gives this particular event greater authority. Such foregrounding becomes even more pronounced when the author returns to English but extends the speech in verse: For my synne þat I haue wrouthe I am not worthye to be þi sonne, For I haue synned in will and thowthe; Þer-fore I make full drery mone. I to þe knalage my trespasse With lowlynes of herte; þis may þou see. There-fore, fadur, graunte me þi grace And all my synnes forȝeue þou me. (p. 168)

Both visually and aurally, the shift to verse marks the words of confession as the most significant and memorable element of the story.87 Rather than articulate specific sins, the son gives a generic, easily transferable speech that demonstrates the ideal disposition for and approach to confession. Following two of Mannyng’s twelve points of shrift,88 he demonstrates his sorrow with the words ‘þer-fore I make full drery mone’ and models meekness when he states his trespasses ‘with lowlynes of herte’. As the author brings the moment of reconciliation into accord with contemporary sacramental teaching, he draws attention to key aspects of that ritual in which sinners ‘arn resceyved’, specifically to actions and

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words that should effect forgiveness. The parable’s transformative power, according to this rendition, resides in its modelling of the confessional act. A ruling exemplar: translation as transformation In keeping with its author’s assertion that his text is both mirror and remedy, in Book to a Mother, we find a rendition of the Prodigal Son parable that highlights God’s mercy and characterises contrition and confession as instrumental to remediating sin. But just as he suggests that his book goes beyond these two genres, also functioning as a rule, his retelling goes a step further than the texts discussed thus far by presenting satisfaction as a means to live more like Christ. The author of Book to a Mother endeavours to teach a mode of living grounded in Christ’s exemplary life, to translate the image of God into Christian practice. In a text that is both catechetical and spiritually ambitious, he promotes what Watson calls a ‘radical holiness’ that rejects the distinction between the professionally religious and those living in the world.89 The life of Christ, in other words, provides the blueprint for all lives. Yet whereas Watson claims that following Christ’s rule often requires readers ‘to step outside the practices that make up most contemporary religion’,90 with the Prodigal Son parable, we find, the author integrates standard elements of sacramental penance precisely to make the parable function more effectively as a guide to Christian living. According to this text, sacrament and scripture mutually affirm the transformative power of penance. In Book to a Mother, the Prodigal Son parable contributes to a larger discourse that endows all devout Christians with clerical authority. Throughout the work, the author recommends to a lay audience – normally estranged from the clerical and scribal processes of textual composition, correction, and dissemination – that they should read, interpret, and rewrite scripture. The author, who was likely a country priest,91 directly addresses his mother as his immediate audience, joining his text to a larger corpus of religious literature at least nominally addressed to a single female reader.92 Referring to his mother specifically, the author invokes an intimate, familial environment typical of late medieval female reading practices.93 While Book to a Mother’s spiritual instruction extends to those furthest from a clerical vocation (lay, married women), it applies to any individual regardless of gender94 and takes on a fundamentally democratic character when the author

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goes on to say that ‘I desire euerych man and womman and child to be my moder.’95 With this metaphor, the author inverts normal ecclesiastical hierarchies, since he characterises himself as the child of, rather than the spiritual father to, his audience.96 From this humbled position, he conveys pastoralia, like the Pater Noster, the ten commandments, and the works of mercy, and then turns to extensive translation of the Gospels and New Testament epistles. Both the biblical contents of Book to a Mother and the manner in which the author presents them directly challenge the notion that scripture should be the exclusive purview of, or even carefully mediated by, the clergy. In the translation debates of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, conservative English clerics argued that only the simplest doctrines could be comprehended by the laity, some making an analogy to milk and solid food to argue that many complex ideas in scripture could only be digested by clerics.97 In a 1401 Oxford determinatio against biblical translation, the Franciscan William Butler commends light doctrine, such as miracles, for lay audiences because, like milk, these teachings require little chewing and digestion.98 Much scriptural doctrine, however, is more like bread that requires teeth to labour in rumination.99 According to Butler, the clergy should digest those teachings for the laity.100 Nicholas Love echoes these sentiments in his prologue to the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, describing the audience of his work as ‘symple creatures þe whiche as childryn hauen nede to be fedde with mylke of lyȝte doctryne & not with sadde mete of grete clargye & of hye contemplacion’.101 Accordingly, Love’s life of Christ focuses on the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection, those events that show the ‘monhede of cryste’, because the contemplation thereof is more advantageous and more secure for simple audiences than the contemplation of Christ’s divinity.102 In contrast, Book to a Mother primarily recounts events and teachings from Jesus’ ministry,103 those parts of the Gospels that David Aers has associated with the ‘dangerous memory’ of Christ that may challenge ecclesiastic, economic, and political institutions.104 In fact, in McCarthy’s edition, only two of more than two hundred pages pertain to the Passion. Whereas Butler argues that a simple lay audience does not have sufficiently developed teeth to ruminate on the meat of scripture, the author of Book to a Mother recommends that the reader consume Christ’s teachings in the Gospels, just as she ingests Christ in the Eucharist. She should chew scripture often and digest it with burning love, ‘so þat alle þe uertues of þi soule and of þi bodi be turned fro fleshliche

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liuinge into Cristes liuinge, as bodiliche mete þat is chewed and defied norschiþ alle þe parties of a mannes bodi’ (p. 32). Employing this language of rumination that was common to monastic reading habits,105 the author suggests that the reader may incorporate that life into her own and become a book that tells a similar story.106 Comprehension, according to this model, means not simply intellectual understanding but transformation: digestion yields actions reflective of the life of Christ.107 Throughout Book to a Mother, the author employs the term ‘book’ as a flexible, multivalent metaphor that takes on varied forms and purposes, all of which point to what he regards as the ultimate text: the book of Christ. The author wishes for his mother to read the particular text he composes, which teaches her about Christ through his translations of holy scripture.108 Likewise, ‘book’ refers to each Christian’s soul and, especially, the exemplar of the Liber Christi that the mother may compose herself through right living. It is Christ himself that the author describes as the most necessary book for his mother to comprehend: ‘to speke more opunliche to þe of þe bok þat I ches bifore alle oþire, for þe moste nedful, most spedful and most medful: þis bok is Crist, Godis Sone of heuene, wiþ his conuersacioun þre and þrytti wyntur’ (p. 31). This reference to Christ as book recalls Wyclif’s identification of Christ with the Liber vitae – a concept that points beyond human language and the material codex to a transcendent truth.109 From this perspective, Latin scripture, vernacular scripture, and any individuals who manifest the Gospel in their form of living are all physical attestations of an incarnate God and exemplars of the divine Word. By explaining the substance and aims of his text in this way, the author transforms the ordinary, domestic context of familial reading into a site for developing spiritual authority. Central to his empowerment of lay readers is an effort to redefine what makes someone a Christian cleric. Commonly, the term ‘clerk’ referred to a member of the clergy, a scholar, or an educated person who had taken on a secretarial vocation.110 The author argues, however, that neither education nor office makes one a clerk; instead, a person is a clerk on account of his, or her, likeness to God: ‘as seintes techen, a clerk is as muche to seie as he þat is of þe sort of God’ (p. 79). Since this vocation depends not on knowledge of Latin but on living well, he claims that many contemporary scholars are not clerks at all. In fact, ‘þe more þei lernen, þe lasse clerkes þei ben’ (p. 79). While busy reading and writing, such clerics neglect the most fundamental textual work for Christians: aligning one’s ­individual

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exemplar with the book of Christ. Since deeds, not rhetoric, spread the gospel, the author argues that a lay woman may preach more effectively than a popular friar or a high-ranking prelate. Even though she spoke few words, the author writes, the Virgin Mary was ‘þe beste prechour þat euer was, saue Crist’ (p. 61). When recommending that his mother (and every other reader) be like Mary, the author combines the traditionally male habits of reading and writing with a specifically female form of embodiment: childbearing. If she attempts to translate all she learns about Christ into her own thoughts and deeds, she may ‘conceyue þe same Crist and bere him not onlich nine monþes but wiþoute ende’ (p. 44). By converting scriptural text into action, all Christians can incarnate Christ and thereby authoritatively preach the faith.111 Within this conception of biblical exemplarity, penance plays a decisive role. Amidst the author’s description of how to read the book of Christ, and particularly in his injunctions for the audience to rewrite their life stories, he frequently fuses the activities of reading and writing with elements of the sacrament. He equates the first step one takes towards literacy, learning the ABCs, with the act of contrition: ‘And þus bigynne we to lerne oure a.b.c., eiþer of vs seyinge: “Cros Crist me spede”, and hauyng lamentaciouns for oure synnes’ (pp. 23–4). Comprehension of the book of Christ, he asserts, begins with admitting one’s own sinfulness. While this first step facilitates understanding, becoming an exemplar of Christ requires a more extensive penitential process. Describing scripture, rather than penitential manuals, as a guide to examination of conscience, he instructs his mother to collate her life story with Christ’s exemplar. Where the two do not correspond, she should modify her text with contrition, confession, and satisfaction: ‘Scrape it out wiþ sorew of herte and schrift of mouþe and satisfaccioun: þat is, furst þat þou cese of synne and of purpos to do synne, and fle occasioun þerof and do goode werkes, hauynge as muche sorew as þou hast had likinge in synne. And þat þat þe lackeþ þat þou most nedis haue to holde Goddis hestis, writ in þi soule’ (p. 38). Within this clerical metaphor, the author describes penance as an interim stage on an ambitious path to spiritual perfection. Whereas penance clears the page, a reformed life of virtue writes the new text with a pen that becomes sharper the more that the writer’s will conforms to God’s will: Þy penne to write wiþ schal be þi loue and þi wil ymad scharp wiþ drede of sharp peyne of helle; and þis is a kene knyf ynow to make

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þi penne scharp, cordinge holliche wiþ Cristes liuinge, and ȝif þou scaue þi penne and make hure feir and loueliche, noþing larger wilnynge in þouȝt, word and dede þan God wol þat þou wilne. And it mai not be þat God faile of ȝeuynge enke, þat is grace, to suche a penne. (pp. 38–9)

In a cooperative effort with God, whereby grace marks the letters on the page, repentant sinners continually amend their lives so that they become one with Christ. The more accurately they reproduce the divine exemplar, the more authoritatively they spread the gospel to others through word and deed. As a story that facilitates penitential revision, the Prodigal Son parable in Book to a Mother encourages readers to abandon permanently the patterns of vice that estrange one from God. While commending the parable to his mother, the author describes the story’s impact in two different ways depending upon the disposition and behaviour of its audience: For those who will wholly forsake their sins, it is ‘a ioiful ensample of comfort’, but it is ‘orribel and dredful to alle men þat wollen not forsake here synnes’ (p. 100). Embodied within the same central figure of the son, he claims, the parable contains both a negative and a positive example. If readers feel remorse for their sins and convert themselves to virtue, then the parable promises reunion with God, their father. Yet without the abandonment of sin, suffering and sorrow will only recur, leading one repeatedly to a foreign land devoid of Christ’s nourishment. For the author of Book to a Mother, the primary obstacle inhibiting penance is not fear that one might be beyond the scope of God’s forgiveness but rather insincere participation in the sacrament, marked by a prompt return to sin. In the chapter directly preceding the parable, he raises the problem of superficial penance without reform, censuring those who commit sins of the flesh and referring to Mark 5:1–13 as evidence that such individuals are ruled by the devil. Like the hogs who hurl themselves into the sea, the unchaste exercise restraint during the Lenten season but eagerly follow their lust soon after Easter.112 It is this temporary and therefore ineffective penance that the author targets with the Prodigal Son story, introducing it as ‘anoþer ensample aȝenus fleshliche men, feders of hogges’ (p. 99).113 After the parable, he warns against ineffective penance with a slight adaptation of the aphorism that follows the Lost Sheep parable, asserting that God has more joy over one sinner ‘þat doþ worþiliche penaunce’ than over ninety-nine who have no need to repent (p. 102).114 While offering hope to sinners,

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this conclusion signals to readers that penance is a process, and one completed with varying degrees of effectiveness. Structurally, the Book to a Mother translation of the Prodigal Son parable differs from the retellings I highlighted from lives of Christ and sermons: whereas those authors freely adapt the text of the narrative itself, the author of Book to a Mother closely translates the Gospel parable when he first recites the text and then more actively rewrites the story in the commentary that follows.115 In keeping with the book’s larger penitential discourse, this presentation facilitates readers’ search for discrepancies between their lives and Christ’s exemplar. For example, in words nearly identical to the early version of the Wycliffite Bible, the author first states that the son ‘wente in pilgrimage into a fer contre, and wastede al his substaunce, liuinge lecherousliche’ (p. 99).116 In commentary following the parable, however, he explains that the younger son represents all who are in deadly sin, who through those deeds ‘gon a pilgrimage fro Crist’ (p. 100). According to this reading, the prodigal son’s journey inverts the classic Christian pilgrimage that Augustine describes as the effort to return to union with God;117 instead, sin brings him to a ‘fer contre of unliknesse’, where difference from Christ in lifestyle is equivalent to spiritual distance from God (p. 100).118 Even those late medieval readers who do not identify with the son’s specific sins may find themselves similarly remote from their spiritual home. Further emphasising the son and other sinners’ estrangement from Christ, the author describes the son’s employment by the local citizen as a covenant with the devil.119 Once again, Book to a Mother connects the son in the parable to the fleshly sinners symbolised by the swine of Mark 5.120 Rather than simply joining their ranks, the younger son is said to feed the fellow residents of the devil’s city, described as hogs on account of their uncleanness.121 Feeding the hogs and longing to share their food, the son seeks to feast upon ‘fleshli lustis and likinges, rychesse and worshupes’ (p. 100). While the Gospel story describes this employment as a consequence of famine, Book to a Mother characterises it as an occupation that perpetuates famine as well. The more the son pursues worldly pleasures, the more he starves spiritually: ‘þe more he coueiteþ, þe more nedi he is: and so, gret hunger is in þat fer contre, of gostli mete of Crist’ (p. 100). In contrast to the SEMP, in which physical need is one means by which God brings people to repent, Book to a Mother describes this hunger exclusively in spiritual terms. The son lacks the same sustenance that the author urges his audience to

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digest: the ‘mete of Crist’. Echoing a theme prominent in the book as a whole, the author connects consumption to action and implies that actions become food for others as well. He attributes this idea to Augustine and asserts ‘ȝif þou liue wel, þou ert Cristis mete; ȝif þou liue yuele, þou ert mete of þe dragon’ (p. 100). In the devil’s city, the son corrupts himself and others, in large part by filling them with the same empty pleasures he covets. By returning home, the son will not only satisfy his own hunger but also, through good living, become more nourishing meat for others. If this scene of desperate famine is the horrible news given to sinners, the remainder of the parable describes the joy that awaits the truly repentant who reform themselves to the life of Christ. Just as the author describes the son’s journey as a movement away from Christ, penance makes one Christ-like. In fact, earlier in Book to a Mother the author locates penance within the life of Christ, suggesting that the sacrament can be a part of imitatio Christi.122 With reference to the nativity, he asserts that Jesus chose to be born in a stable in winter and that in this, a reader may observe ‘meknes and pouert and penaunce’ (pp. 33–4). Likewise, the author describes Jesus’ circumcision as an ‘ensample to do penaunce for oure sinnes’ and recommends that his readers cut away lust and sin as a form of compassion, suffering with the circumcised child (pp. 50–1). The term ‘penaunce’ may have a different meaning in each instance: the first, in which the circumstances of Jesus’ birth manifest penance, may simply indicate austerity or suffering, while the second, based on a figurative reading of circumcision, seems to advocate participation in the sacrament.123 But together, they suggest that penance can be a mode of living that requires continued spiritual discipline beyond contrition and confession. In addition to these examples from Jesus’ life, the author commends other figures’ repentance – like David, Mary Magdalene, and the prodigal son – as models by which the reader may begin to reform herself to fit the ultimate Christian exemplar. In imitation of the son’s return home, the author implores his mother to ‘turne aȝeyn into þeself as þulke ȝonger broþer dide, and sei wiþ him, “Hou many seruauntis in Crist, my Fadres, hous hauen plente of loues”’ (p. 101). At this point in the explication, the servants signify angels and saints ‘hauinge gret plente of þe knowinge of þe Fadur and þe Sone and þe Holi Gost’ (p. 101). These are the Christians whose ranks the author urges his mother to join: those who are more godlike than human by nature and those who lived exemplary Christian lives. To be like these servants requires more

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than remorse: he attributes to the son participation in the full late medieval sacrament of penance and encourages his mother to say with him, ‘“I shal arise” wiþ sorwe of herte and schrift of mouþe and satisfaccioun of dede, and so “I shal go to my Fadur Crist”’ (p. 101). The church, the retelling implies, has already taught the reader how to emulate the son in the parable, since the threefold process of penance is the way to turn home, admit wrong, and join the father’s servants. In a further parallel to contemporary penitential practices, the author describes the son’s model penance as a ritual his audience should habitually enact, much like annual confession. The parable portrays the son’s return in a single episode, but the author instructs his mother to ‘sei ofte to Crist as I seide er; ȝe, alwey hennesforeward, “Fadur, I haue synned in heuene and bifore þe”’ (p. 101, italics added). The process of reform is both extensive – consisting of reflective, verbal, and restitutive acts – and cyclical. Only by continually participating in the sacrament of penance will the individual Christian’s life be corrected to align with its exemplar. As the author moves on to explicate the gifts the father bestows upon the lost son, he even more thoroughly embeds the parable in the life of the medieval church. When the father sends his servants to bring clothing, the author describes them not as angels and saints but as ‘ministres of Holi Chirche’. The items of clothing they provide are the sacraments and teachings that foster virtuous Christian living.124 With the robe, the servants give innocence at baptism, a gift the author insists is communicated by God even if the priests who deliver it fail to live virtuously.125 The ring encompasses scriptural teachings, like the ten commandments, as well as basic elements of the faith, like the works of mercy, since that object symbolises ‘a trewe bileue worchinge goode workes in charite, holdinge his hestis euerelastinge wiþoute ende, as a ringe haþ non ende’ (p. 102). Shoes represent the example of the saints: following in their footsteps, the son will travel the right path to heaven.126 Finally, the fattened calf at the feast signifies Christ ‘þat his Fadur sende into þis world to be slawe on þe cros of þe Iewes to make þe a feste, þe whuche þou receyuest whanne þou ert worþiliche huslid’ (p. 102). Although exegetes commonly associated the slaughtered calf with Christ’s Passion, the author of Book to a Mother extends that interpretation to include the sacramental feast of the Eucharist and preparation for that feast through penance.127 At the same time the writer aligns the celebration with Church teachings and practices, he continues to depict Christ as a model of

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right living. Christ is not just a fattened calf but ‘þe fattest calf þat mai be in uertues and in graces’ (p. 102). The readers of Book to a Mother may not atone for others’ sins, as Jesus did, but if Christ is the fullness of virtue and grace, it follows that good living and the experience of grace through the sacraments of the church will fatten them with the meat of Christ. In this way, they offer their exemplary lives to save others.128 According to Book to a Mother, the ritual life of the church – initiated in baptism, guided by the commandments, and renewed in penance – fosters a life unified with Christ. While the author attempts to outline a path to spiritual perfection, he remains acutely aware of the pervasiveness of sin and eschews the idea that anyone could follow Christ’s rule without continued penitential revision. A major omission in his rendition of the Prodigal Son story accentuates the transformative work of penance. Although the author closely translates the Vulgate, he does not include the full text of the parable. The older son, who faithfully works for his father in Luke’s Gospel, only appears in the opening statement that ‘a man hadde two sones’ (p. 99). The final episode of the story, in which the older son returns from the fields and begrudges the celebration, is missing. Instead of contrasting persistent good living with a sinner’s repentance, the author of Book to a Mother concentrates sin, penance, and righteousness in a single character. In doing so, he suggests that even those who most fully embody the life of Christ are repentant sinners. To varying degrees, Middle English Prodigal Son stories translate the parable’s puzzling image of reconciliation into penitential action, so that their revisions might reform their audiences. Their divergent retellings explore different aspects of a complex process that the Gospel story represents as surprisingly, even unbelievably, simple: they explain why the father would not harbour resentment; they locate sincere contrition in the actions and words of a seemingly callous son; and they suggest that what appears as a single event in the narrative will recur throughout the lives of even the most devout Christians. For these writers, provocative sacred fiction does not necessarily challenge or endorse a contested sacrament; rather, it moves readers to become closer to God. In their efforts to inspire self-revision, they remind audiences of God’s powerful love and their ability to peel back the layers of sin to unearth their own divine likeness.

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Notes 1 Adrian James McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 92 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1981). 2 Whether this debauchery pertains to elaborate spending alone or sexual license differs according to translation. In Luke 15:13, the Vulgate reads ‘ibi dissipavit substantiam suam vivendo luxuriose’. The Wycliffite Bible translates ‘vivendo luxuriose’ as ‘lyuynge lecherously’. 3 On the Gospel setting for all three stories, see Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, pp. 124–36. 4 Although patristic exegetes often interpreted the story as an allegory pertaining to the Jewish people (represented by the older son) and gentiles (represented by the younger), Middle English renditions typically do not integrate this interpretive tradition. Yet their focus on the son as a paradigmatic sinner has precedent in patristic commentary as well, most prominently in Ambrose’s reading that describes the son’s journey as separation from Christ and his repentant speech to his father as ‘the first confession before the Creator of nature, the Patron of mercy, the Judge of guilt’. See Wailes, Medieval Allegories, pp. 238–44 and Ambrose, Exposition of the Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke, trans. Theodosia Tomkinson, 2nd edition (Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1998), pp. 322 and 326–7. 5 On Canon 21 that required annual confession and its enactment in a parochial setting, see Ellen K. Rentz, Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2015), pp. 35–45. 6 The Latin and vernacular literature that grew out of the Fourth Lateran Council both educated readers about basic elements of the faith and facilitated examination of conscience. Some of these vernacular treatises, like Handlyng Synne and Jacob’s Well, not only enumerate sins and virtues but also illustrate them through exemplary stories. For a catalogue of such texts, see Robert Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 7, ed. Albert E. Hartung (Hamden, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences,1986), pp. 2270–2312. 7 For example, Robert Mannyng articulates twelve points of confession, including that one should confess meekly, hastily, and completely. See Handlyng Synne, ed. Idelle Sullens (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983), pp. 282–96. 8 Wycliffites are frequently described as opponents of confession who object to the use of penitential structures to enforce, and even profit,

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from normative religious practices. See, for example, Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 17–47. On Wyclif’s scriptural hermeneutics that informed Wycliffite claims about scripture’s primacy, see Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, pp. 22–66, and Ian Christopher Levy, Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 54–91. 9 James Simpson, for example, makes the general claim that ‘the coherence of the biblical text was compromised by its subordination to institutional demands in many discursive forms. And in many cases this accretive form of biblical reception was also closely policed by ecclesiastical authority’. See Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 461–3. While I certainly agree that late medieval writers actively shaped scripture, Simpson’s reference to scriptural coherence implies the existence of an unadulterated sacred text that makes sense without any reconciliation of that text with lived experience and worldly institutions. There is, however, no unmediated scripture and no interpretation or translation free of subjective and institutional interests. Finally, the suggestion that biblical texts were ‘closely policed’ is not supported by the manuscript record. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton on the impact of Arundel’s Constitutions in Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 397–401. 10 Michel Foucault describes the priestly confessor as ‘not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile’. See The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 1:61–2. Karma Lochrie both critiques Foucault’s depiction of medieval confession and extends his claims about ecclesiastical power in Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 12–42. For the claim that exempla used within sermons and confessional manuals were tools for the church ‘to establish its ideological authority among subordinate classes’, see Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, p. 58. 11 Book to a Mother survives in four fifteenth-century manuscripts. For descriptions, see McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, pp. iii–xvii. 12 Nicole Rice, for example, characterises the spiritual disciplines outlined in the text as an imitatio clerici that combines textual, intellectual activity with embodied love, but she insists that the imitative acts advocated by the author are thoroughly orthodox and ‘circumscribed’ by priestly authority. Nicholas Watson describes the author’s outlook as ‘reformist’ and claims that he attempts to

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undo ‘the hierarchic relationship … between Latinate clerical writer and vernacular reader’. See Rice, ‘Devotional Literature and Lay Spiritual Authority: Imitatio Clerici in Book to a Mother’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35:2 (2005), 193–9, and Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God’, New Medieval Literatures, 1 (1997), 112. 13 Fiona Somerset employs the term ‘extraclergial’ to refer to the stance taken by authors who characterise themselves as outside the institutional Church while employing academic arguments and often spreading clerical texts to lay audiences. Somerset’s analysis includes Langland and Trevisa as extraclergial writers, but she calls Wycliffites its ‘most prominent and most extreme proponents’. See Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 17–18. 14 Somerset uses the term lollard to refer to texts ‘influenced by the writings of John Wyclif, often in ways that attention to questions asked in heresy trials and lists of condemned propositions may have obscured’ and to writings that ‘exhibit strong similarities’ to that corpus. Her argument about Book to a Mother includes extensive refutation of McCarthy’s evidence for dating the text to the 1370s, a date which has lead Watson, Rice, and others to assume that the text predates Wycliffism. See Feeling Like Saints, pp. 5–6 and 253–72. 15 See Joseph Goering, ‘The Scholastic Turn (1100–1500): Penitential Theology and Law in the Schools’, in Abigail Firey (ed.), A New History of Penance (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 219–20. 16 Goering, ‘The Scholastic Turn’, p. 226. 17 The relevant text reads, ‘What, then, is to be felt concerning this? What to be held? Surely, that sins are blotted out by contrition and humility of heart, even without confession by the mouth and payment of outward punishment. For from the moment when one proposes, with compunction of mind, that one will confess, God remits.’ Lombard, The Sentences, p. 96. 18 Thomas Finn describes the perspective of Gratian and other ‘canonists’ more rigidly than Goering, claiming that they ‘championed the opinion that confession together with priestly absolution was the moment of remission and reconciliation’, but he notes that ‘confessionists’ and ‘contritionists’ alike addressed ‘the often serious difficulty of access to a priest’ and described all three elements of penance as integral to the sacrament. See ‘The Sacramental World in the Sentences of Peter Lombard’, Theological Studies, 69 (2008), 573–4. 19 ‘For just as inward penance is enjoined upon us, so also are outward satisfaction and confession by the mouth, if they are possible; and so he is not truly penitent, who does not have the intention to confess.’ See Lombard, The Sentences, p. 97.

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20 ‘It is plainly shown here that God does not follow the church’s judgement, for sometimes the latter judges through deception and ignorance; but God always judges according to truth. And in remitting and retaining faults, the priests of the Gospel have the same rights and office which formerly the priests of the Law had in curing lepers. And so they remit or retain sins when they judge and show that God has remitted or retained them.’ Lombard, The Sentences, p. 111. 21 Goering, ‘The Scholastic Turn’, p. 234. 22 See Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 294–301. 23 J. H. L. Kengen (ed.), ‘Memoriale Credencium: A Late Middle English Manual of Theology for Lay People’ (PhD thesis, Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen, 1979), pp. 156–7. 24 Kengen (ed.), ‘Memoriale Credencium’, p. 170. The author of the Latin preachers’ handbook Fasciculus Morum similarly describes satisfaction as both restitution and prevention of future sin: ‘satisfaction means to shut out the causes of sins and their suggestions and not to repeat sin any more but to make satisfaction for what we have committed as much as it lies in our power’. See Siegfried Wenzel (ed.), Fasciulus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1989), p. 507. 25 Arthur Brandeis (ed.), Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience (EETS OS 115, 1900), pp. 173–4. 26 Raymo describes The Clensyng of Mannes Soule as a prose treatise on contrition, confession, and satisfaction, initially composed for a nunnery but probably later read by a lay audience as well. It was likely written in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century and survives in seven manuscripts dating from c.1400 to the late fifteenth century. See Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, pp. 2299 and 2523–4. 27 Walter K. Everett (ed.), ‘A Critical Edition of the Confession Section of the Clensyng of Mannes Soule’ (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974), p. 19. Fasciculus Morum is stricter on this matter. The author states that confession may only be made to one’s parish priest specifically, but it does list exceptional circumstances in which one may seek out a different priest. See Wenzel, Fasciulus Morum, p. 469. 28 Lombard, The Sentences, p. 103. 29 Somerset, Feeling Like Saints, p. 53. 30 Based on her analysis of a Wycliffite sermon collection, the reference work known as the Rosarium, and the polemical tract ‘Of Confession’, Somerset concludes that for Wycliffites ‘oral confession is not necessary, but where a reliable confessor is available, it can be helpful’. See Feeling Like Saints, pp. 46–54. 31 On internal penance, see the short edition of this commentary in Anne Hudson, Doctors in English: A Study of the Wycliffite

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Gospel Commentaries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), p. 68. Against the Lateran IV requirement, the text first states that ‘Innocent þe þridde made a decretal comaundyng þat eche of euer eþer kynde knowlecche alle his synnes onys in þe ȝeer to his propir prest.’ Extended polemic follows, warning against false Christians and disparaging Innocent for placing England under interdict. See Hudson, Doctors in English, p. 70. 32 For example, the text reads ‘If þou hast offendid þi broþer bi wordis, go and make satisfaccioun to hym by wordis of al þyn hert, and þou has do penaunce. Þat þe synne of wordis is vnboundun by satisfaccioun of wordis, Aaron is witnesse.’ Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.2.9 fol. 205ra. (Hudson starts her edition on folio 206.) 33 ‘He [Christ] wiþ his conuersacioun is to alle þat wollen be saued þe beste remedie and þe beste rule and þe beste mirour þat mai be to ouercome synne.’ McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, p. 31. Nicholas Watson equates these forms with encyclopedic accounts of the faith or Christ’s life, didactic writings condemning sin, and rules for members of religious orders. Watson, ‘Fashioning the Puritan Gentry-Woman: Devotion and Dissent in Book to a Mother’, in Jocelyn WoganBrowne et al. (eds), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 176–7. 34 Many such texts include the term mirror in their title, including The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Speculum vitae Christi, and The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun. 35 MED ‘remedie’ 3a and 3b seem closest to the author’s employment of this term: ‘(a) A means of counteracting sin or evil; a remedy for a specific vice, temptation, etc.; (b) deliverance from sin or damnation, salvation; also, a means of hope or redemption.’ 36 Somerset defines a form of living as ‘any text that lays out a structure or daily routine or set of guidelines for living a life of exceptional virtue in this world in preparation for attaining salvation’. Feeling Like Saints, p. 240. 37 Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 64–83. 38 On the analogous processes of scriptural and self-study, see Bryan, Looking Inward, pp. 80–1. For discussion of the varied forms of vitae Christi and their use ‘as a structuring principle for Christian conduct and a focus of devotion’, see Ian Johnson, The Middle English Life of Christ: Academic Discourse, Translation, and Vernacular Theology (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 1–17 (p. 7). 39 On exemplarity and difference in saints’ lives, see Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 1–23.

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40 Johnson emphasises that translators crafted lives of Christ with the needs of their intended audiences in mind. See The Middle English Life of Christ, p. 9. 41 A translation of Anglo-Norman prose, the Gospel harmony is the first item in Pepys 2498, a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript full of biblical prose that Ralph Hanna describes as a rejoinder to books of romance. He places the manuscript in London and surmises that the Pepys manuscript served a comparable audience to that of the Auchinleck manuscript. See London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 153–5. 42 Goates (ed.), Pepysian Gospel Harmony, p. 63. 43 Goates (ed.), Pepysian Gospel Harmony, p. 63. 44 SEMP is an approximately 3,000 line poem that narrates Christ’s life from the preaching of John the Baptist to the early acts of the apostles (up through Acts 4). The poem survives in whole or part in three manuscripts: a late thirteenth-century manuscript that is the earliest known copy of the South English Legendary (SEL) and two SEL manuscripts from the early fifteenth century. See O. S. Pickering (ed.), The South English Ministry and Passion, Middle English Texts 16 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1984), pp. 8–10. The SEMP is one branch of the life of Christ text known as The Long Life of Christ. In addition to the three SEMP manuscripts, four additional copies of The Long Life of Christ contain the lines relating the Prodigal Son parable. For a list of relevant manuscripts, see James H. Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp. 235–7 and 247–9. For an edition of The Long Life of Christ, see Carl Horstmann (ed.), Leben Jesu: Ein Fragment (Münster: Druck und Verlag von Friedrich Regensberg, 1873). Differences between the two versions of the parable are very minor. I quote from the SEMP instead of the Long Life of Christ because of the quality of the edition. 45 O. S. Pickering, ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching or Preaching?’ Poetica, 45 (1996), 6. According to Pickering, the SEMP joined the SEL in the second of four stages in which this collection was extended and revised by different writers. See p. 2. For the contents of SEL manuscripts that include the SEMP, see Thomas R. Liszka, ‘The South English Legendaries’, in Heather Blurton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 44, 45, and 47. Although no edition of the SEL includes the Old Testament histories, lives of Christ, or Mary narratives, Liszka criticises this practice and argues that, based on manuscript evidence, ‘the medieval reader appears to have accepted the temporale texts as much the same kind of thing as the sanctorale texts’. See p. 29.

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46 Pickering notes that most surviving copies were created considerably later than the ‘stage 2’ composition in which the SEMP joined the cycle. Those later manuscripts seem oriented to private reading. ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching or Preaching?’ pp. 6 and 10. 47 Pickering (ed.), South English Ministry, p. 127. 48 ‘Fadir, ȝyue me the porcioun of catel, that fallith to me. And he departide to hem the catel’ (15:12). 49 See MED definitions 1 and 2 for ‘tresour’. 50 Here, I deliberately paraphrase the two-word phrase for the son’s offence in the Vulgate, vivendo luxuriose. 51 The best-known description of the tavern sins appears in the opening scene of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. See Larry Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), pp. 196–7/463–660. 52 As he approaches his father’s home, the narrator states ‘Sore he dredde to comyn hym nyȝ.’ Pickering (ed.), South English Ministry, p. 128/1270–1. 53 Compare Luke 15:21: ‘And the sone seide to hym, Fadir, Y haue synned in to heuene, and bifor thee; and now Y am not worthi to be clepid thi sone.’ 54 ‘Folyly’ in line 1266 could mean wickedly or sinfully, but its primary meaning was associated with ignorance and error. As a third definition, the MED lists ‘wantonly, lasciviously’. See MED ‘folili’ (adv.) definitions a–c. 55 Compare Luke 15:7: ‘And Y seie to ȝou, so ioye schal be in heuene on o synful man doynge penaunce, more than on nynti and nyne iuste, that han no nede to penaunce.’ 56 The author and place of composition of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis are unknown. Although there is only one extant copy in Middle English, which Avril Henry dates to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, the text survives in at least 394 fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. Most of these copies are in Latin, but the text was translated into German, French, Dutch, and Czech as well. See Henry (ed.), The Mirour of Mans Saluacioune: A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 10 and 19. 57 Latin manuscripts often projected images of Christ’s life both narratively and pictorially. For an analysis of five, seemingly related, illustrated English copies, see Kathleen L. Scott, ‘Four Early Fifteenth-century English Manuscripts of the Speculum humanae salvationis and a Fourteenth-century Exemplar’, in English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, vol. 10, Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (London: The British Library, 2002), pp. 177–203. Illustrations of the Prodigal Son in four of these manuscripts all emphasise his youth, depicting a boy

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considerably shorter than both the father and his servants. See Scott, ‘Four Early Fifteenth-century English Manuscripts’, p. 189. 58 Throughout the book, my use of the term Old Testament, rather than Hebrew Bible, reflects the relevant medieval writers’ language and perspective of scripture. 59 Of the nearly forty chapters featuring events from the life of Christ, only six feature episodes related to the period in between Christ’s birth and death. The first three of these address Jesus’ presentation in the temple, his entry to Egypt, and baptism. The next three highlight the temptation of Christ, the penitence of Mary Magdalene, and Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. The four parables the author includes in the Mirour all serve as types of another theme, with the parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14–30) and the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matt 25:1–13) illustrating final judgement and the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) illustrating the Incarnation. 60 In Luke’s Gospel, this woman remains anonymous, but medieval writers commonly elided her with Mary Magdalene. For example, Gregory names her as Mary Magdalene in a homily on Luke 7:36–50. See Forty Gospel Homilies, p. 269. 61 See 2 Chr 33:10–17 and 2 Sam 12:13. 62 ‘This swete sovne alder-first shewed Crist in his preching: / “Dose penaunce, for the regne of heven is negh commyng.”’ Henry (ed.), Mirour, p. 95/1611–12. On the common depiction of Mary Magdalene as a model penitent, see Katherine L. Jansen, ‘Mary Magdalen and the Mendicants: The Preaching of Penance in the Late Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 21 (1995), 1–25. 63 Henry (ed.), Mirour, p. 95. 64 Henry (ed.), Mirour, p. 97/1695–1700. 65 ‘Than til a burgeys he fallis, of Lucifere, his syne to feede, / Plesyng the devils of helle ilkone with his mysdede.’ Henry (ed.), Mirour, p. 97/1667–8. Compare Jerome’s interpretation of the citizen as the devil in ‘Epistola XXI’, Patrologia Latina 22, col. 384. 66 Henry (ed.), Mirour, p. 97/1675–80. 67 The generic term ‘remedie’ is the vaguest of the three named by the author of Book to a Mother, and Nicholas Watson describes it in slightly varying ways in two relevant essays. In ‘Fashioning the Puritan Gentry’, Watson argues that texts propagating Pecham’s syllabus would fall under the term ‘remedie’. See p. 179. Elsewhere, however, Watson paraphrases the author’s description of his text as ‘at once “rule”, homily, and vita Christi’, wherein homily seemingly substitutes for remedy. See ‘Conceptions of the Word’, p. 111. 68 Saara Nevanlinna (ed.), The Northern Homily Cycle: The Expanded Version in MSS Harley 4196 and Cotton Tiberius E vii, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 38, 41, 43 (Helsinki: Société

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Néophilologique, 1972–84). The collection of sermons survives in three recensions in a total of twenty manuscripts, including the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts, most of which date from the late fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries. The sermon that includes the Prodigal Son story only appears in the expanded version in the northern dialect. See Nevanlinna (ed.), The Northern Homily Cycle, 1:1–4. On the three recensions, see Thomas J. Heffernan, ‘Orthodoxies’ Redux: The Northern Homily Cycle in the Vernon Manuscript and its Textual Affiliations’, in Derek Pearsall (ed.), Studies in the Vernon Manuscript (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 75–87. 69 Thomas J. Heffernan suggests it was written by Austin canons in the late thirteenth century. See ‘The Authorship of the “Northern Homily Cycle”: The Liturgical Affiliation of the Sunday Gospel Pericopes as a Test’, Traditio, 41 (1985), 292. 70 The prologue does not appear in the later, expanded version of the cycle. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. suggest the omission may relate to the text’s advocacy of translating scripture into English, which ‘by the fifteenth century might have seemed to align the text with Lollardy’. See ‘Northern Homily Cycle: Prologue’, in The Idea of the Vernacular, pp. 126 and 128. 71 In contrast with the lives of Christ’s portrayals of a gracious God, this writer suggests that salvation depends on human action, writing that lay people (as well as learned) share in Christ’s atonement and will come to heaven ‘yef thai lef her rihtwislie’. See lines 103–8. 72 The son tells his father ‘my will es to wende ȝow fra’, and the narrator states that his father ‘lete him wende at his awin will’. See lines 7283 and 7287. 73 Lines 7290–97 read: Þis child ful fast obout he ȝode Till he had gederd all his gude. He sald it al on diuers wise And in his purse he put þe prise. Þan hors and hernes þan he hent And said his frendes þat he went In pilgrimage to fer cuntre And aventurs for to seke and se. See Nevanlinna (ed.), The Northern Homily Cycle, 2:54. 74 For portrayals of the importance of money in medieval courtship, see the depiction of Wealth and Largesse in the Roman de la Rose (lines 1017–1226) or the portrait of Venus in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, where Richesse is named as her porter (Riverside Chaucer, line 261). 75 On the role of tears in early and late medieval teachings on contrition, see Christopher Swift, ‘A Penitent Prepares: Affect, Contrition, and

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Tears’, in Elina Gertsman (ed.), Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 79–101. 76 See Brandeis (ed.), Jacob’s Well, pp. 171–2 and Kengen (ed.), Memoriale Credencium, p. 158. 77 Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, p. 285/11465–76. 78 For satisfied or content, see ‘paien’ definition 2 in the MED. Definition 3f lists the past participle as ‘paid’ in the sense of receiving money or discharging a debt. This vocabulary resembles Mannyng’s basic description of the sacrament, in which he calls penance ‘aquytaunce’, or payment for sin. See Handlyng Synne, p. 269/10820. 79 In addition to awareness, ‘knaw’ could refer to acknowledgment or confession. See MED ‘knouen’ definition 9. 80 The Prodigal Son story is not retold in as many Middle English sermon collections as the Labourers in the Vineyard due to its place in the liturgical calendar. According to the Sarum and the York rites, the parable was read on the Saturday of the second week of lent. Many late medieval sermon manuscripts include only sermons for the dominical readings. 81 Ross (ed.), Middle English Sermons, pp. 167–8. 82 Revisions in the first section give the story a more conversational style. For example, the translator renders the first half of verse 13 in the form of a question: ‘What dud þis ȝonge man but vent and drew hym to a gret cyte, þer-as muche murth and riott was?’ See Ross (ed.), Middle English Sermons, p. 168. 83 Kengen (ed.), ‘Memoriale Credencium’, pp. 159, 163. 84 Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, p. 294/11826–8. 85 Ross (ed.), Middle English Sermons, pp. 168–9. 86 Erick Kelemen notes this change in an article highlighting the performative potential of this sermon. He comments that it goes against traditional exegesis that explains the father’s reception of the son as God’s gift of grace to a repentant sinner, yet he attributes the change to the homilist’s desire to create more action. See ‘Drama in Sermons: Quotation, Performativity, and Conversion in a Middle English Sermon on the Prodigal Son and in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’, ELH, 69 (2002), 7. I would argue that it not only creates more dramatic tension in the story but also endeavours to elicit specific actions from its audience. 87 Kelemen suggests that the writer did not compose these lines himself but remembered them from oral performances of the parable. See ‘Drama in Sermons’, pp. 5–6. 88 The sixth point of shrift is sorrow of heart, best illustrated through Mary Magdalene’s weeping. See Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, pp. 287–8/11565–80. 89 Watson, ‘Fashioning the Gentry’, p. 180. 90 Watson, ‘Fashioning the Gentry’, p. 181.

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91 McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, p. 127. Watson has suggested that the author could be a friar as well, but Rice argues that since the author refers to presiding at marriage and baptism, he was more likely a secular priest. See Watson, ‘Fashioning the Gentry’, p. 173 and Rice, ‘Devotional Literature and Lay Spiritual Authority’, 193–4. 92 On the tradition of addressing a specific woman but intending a wider audience, see C. Annette Grisé, ‘Women’s Devotional Reading in Late-Medieval England and the Gendered Reader’, Medium Aevum, 71:2 (2002), 215. 93 According to Rebecca Krug, familial relationships influenced female reading habits more than interest in particular types of texts or subject matters. See Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 13. 94 In this regard, my reading of Book to a Mother differs considerably from Nancy Bradley Warren’s. She describes the text as ‘an instructional, devotional text directed toward women’ and claims that it aims to regulate women’s ‘material and spiritual practices’. See ‘Pregnancy and Productivity: The Imagery of Female Monasticism within and beyond the Cloister Walls’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28:3 (1998), 535. It is true that the author occasionally addresses the specific situation of his mother: Elisabeth Dutton, for example, cites two instances from the author’s rendering of the ten commandments that phrase them for a female audience, including a change of the instruction not to covet your neighbour’s wife (Ex. 20:17) to ‘no wommans husbond’. Yet such specificity about his direct audience does not restrict the book’s wider relevance. I agree with Rice’s claim that the author commends a form of lay clericalism that is gender neutral. See Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Christ the Codex: Compilation as Literary Device in Book to a Mother’, Leeds Studies in English, 35 (2004), 86, and Rice, ‘Devotional Literature and Lay Spiritual Authority’, 191–2. 95 McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, p. 1. For an account of the textual clues that indicate his mother was likely a widow and a laywoman, see Watson, ‘Fashioning the Puritan Gentry-Woman’, p. 172. 96 On Wycliffite use of familial terms to describe fellow Christians, see Krug, Reading Families, pp. 131–2. 97 The topos derives from Hebrews 5:13–14: ‘For ech that is parcenere of mylk, is with out part of the word of riȝtwisnesse, for he is a litil child. But of perfit men is sad mete, of hem that for custom han wittis exercisid to discrecioun of good and of yuel.’ See also 1 Cor 3:2 and 1 Pet 2:2. 98 For modern English translations of select portions of Butler’s text, see Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, pp. 98–9. For the Latin text, see Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical

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Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), pp. 399–418. 99 ‘Panis est perfectionis doctrina et iustitiae, quam accipere non possunt nisi sensus excitati fuerint circa spiritualia; quoniam qui audit necesse habet se tractantibus discutere et meditari, [et] de quibusdam spiritualibus dentibus molere, unde et lex ruminantia animalia munda vult esse.’ Deanesly, The Lollard Bible, pp. 416–17. 100 ‘Sicut, inquit, stomachus recipiens cibum coquit eum in seipso et per totum corpus dispergit, sic sacerdotes accipiant [sic] scientiam per scripturas de Deo, et meditantes apud se toto populo subministrant.’ Deanesly, The Lollard Bible, p. 416. 101 Michael G. Sargent (ed.), Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, Garland Medieval Texts 18 (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 10. For other Middle English texts that advocate different spiritual nourishment for the clergy and the laity, see Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’, pp. 94–7. 102 Love cites Bernard of Clairvaux as the authority behind this distinction, but Sargent clarifies that the source is actually William of St Theirry’s Golden Epistle. Nicholas Love’s Mirror, p. 10. 103 See McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, pp. 147–8. 104 Aers points to Langland and Wycliffites, in particular, as authors who challenge the tendency to equate the life of Christ with the Nativity and the Passion. Although, as this book illustrates, interest in Jesus’ ministry has far wider reach than Aers indicates, this only affirms his argument that interest in the Passion did not eclipse other aspects of the life of Christ in the later Middle Ages. See David Aers, ‘The Humanity of Christ: Representations in Wycliffite Texts and Piers Plowman’, in David Aers and Lynn Staley (eds), The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996), pp. 49, 75. 105 On the tradition of likening textual rumination to digestion, especially within monastic contexts, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 207–8. 106 The author refers to Christ as ‘Holy Writ’, sent into the world by God so ‘þat men schulde amende here false bokis bi him’. See McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, p. 38. 107 The author’s advocacy that the reader incorporate the text resembles what Carruthers describes as meditatio, as opposed to lectio. With reference to Hugh of St Victor and Petrarch, Carruthers describes meditatio as a process through which a reader familiarises a text to his or her own experience, digesting it so that it becomes part of one’s own moral life. See The Book of Memory, pp. 202–12. 108 The author also employs the term ‘book’ to refer to the kingdom of

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heaven itself, the book with seven seals in Revelation, and the harp and Psalter of David. See McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, pp. 22, 24, and 27–8. 109 As Levy explains, ‘Wyclif equates the law of Christ with Holy Scripture inasmuch as scripture principally signifies Jesus Christ who is himself the Book of Life – the one in whom all truth is eternally inscribed.’ See Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority, p. 62. 110 See MED ‘clerk.’ 111 For the idea that action is a form of preaching, see Alan of Lille’s division of preaching into three modes: spoken word, written word, and deed. The Art of Preaching, trans. Gillian R. Evans (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981), p. 20. 112 McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, p. 97. 113 This introduction recalls a brief comparison that Ambrose makes between the swine who cast themselves into the sea and the swine fed in the parable. Explicating Luke 15:15, Ambrose writes, ‘he feeds the swine, those, indeed, into which the Devil sought to enter, which He cast into the sea of the world as they lived in filth and foulness’. See Exposition of the Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke, p. 323. 114 Compare Luke 15:10: ‘So Y seie to ȝou, ioye schal be bifor aungels of God on o synful man doynge penaunce.’ 115 While the similarities among the texts may simply result from close translation of the Vulgate, the common agreement among the Wycliffite Bible and the text of Book to a Mother merits further investigation. 116 The line differs from the Early Version of the Wycliffite Bible in very minor ways: the Wycliffite Bible states ‘there he’ before wasted, does not include the word ‘al’, and has the word ‘in’ before living lecherously. 117 In City of God, for example, Augustine describes citizens of the City of God as ‘on pilgrimage in this world’. See Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 45. 118 According to the MED, a place of ‘unliknes’ can refer to a foreign land or to this world, as opposed to the next world. See definition 1a. 119 Although identification of the citizen with the devil is fairly common, this particular interpretation aligns the Book to a Mother retelling with the Mirour retelling and the relevant sermon in the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle as well. See p. 75 and Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 3:103. 120 The Wycliffite Glossed Gospels include a similar reference when explicating the swine. The short gloss on Luke states, ‘Þes ben þo hoggis in to whiche lyuynge in filþis and stynk þe deuel axiþ for to entre and whiche he castiþ doun in to þe see of þis world. Ambrose here.’ See Bodley 243 fol. 75rb. 121 ‘For such a man is his toun, þat haþ sold himself to þe deuel, and

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so with his fleshli lustus and likingus fedeþ þulke burgeis and oþer wickede spiritus, þat Holi Writ for here unclennesse clepiþ hogges’ (p. 100). 122 He does not suggest that Jesus himself sins and performs penance. Rather, he identifies signs of penance in Jesus’ actions. 123 For ‘penaunce’ denoting austerity and suffering, see MED 4e and 5a. 124 Patristic commentators commonly, yet variously, interpreted the gifts allegorically. Augustine, for example, interprets the robe as the worthiness that Adam squandered. Jerome similarly comments on Adam’s loss of the robe and goes on to name it as the ‘vestem Spiritus Sancti’, without which a person is not able to enter the king’s banquet. See Augustine, ‘Quaestionum evangeliorum libri duo’, Patrologia Latina 35, col. 1346 and Jerome, ‘Epistola 21’, Patrologia Latina 22, col. 387. 125 Within the explication of the stole, the author condemns the corruption of many contemporary priests: ‘And þouȝ ministres of Cristes sacrementis failen of due manere doinge – as manye don now and fewe oþere, God amende hem – I am certein Crist mai not faile of ȝeuinge þat stole where-euere þou be.’ McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, pp. 101–2. 126 ‘Þe schon of þi fet, þat Crist wol ȝeue þe, ben ensamples of seintes þat wisseþ us to heuene.’ McCarthy (ed.), Book to a Mother, p. 102. 127 See, for example, Jerome’s reading of the fattened calf in ‘Epistola XXI’, Patrologia Latina 22, col. 388. Wailes notes that Ambrose interprets the calf as the Eucharist. See Medieval Allegories, p. 243. 128 For an account of how late medieval women’s penitential acts could have an exemplary function, see Rabia Gregory, ‘Penitence, Confession, and the Power of Submission in Late Medieval Women’s Religious Communities’, Religions, 3 (2012), 646–61.

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3 Examinations of social conscience: the parable of Dives and Lazarus

And in as mychel as her state was diuers her in þis werlde, by als mychel is it dyuers in þat oþer werlde. (Pepysian Gospel Harmony, p. 64)1

While Middle English renditions of the Prodigal Son parable broadly encouraged penitential actions, the retellings highlighted in this chapter make more specific claims about the sins for which people should repent. The parable of the Rich Man (Dives) and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) features an alarming inversion of rich and poor after death, an inversion that the writer of the Pepysian Gospel Harmony matter-of-factly reiterates at the conclusion of his retelling: just as rich and poor occupy different positions in the world, so will they be in different places after death. Although the social subversion manifest in Dives and Lazarus is typical of the parable genre, this instance is unusually severe, given the explicit depiction of the rich in hell. And unlike those stories that Jesus introduces as metaphors for the kingdom of heaven, this parable, both in Luke’s Gospel and in most of the medieval commentary tradition, operates primarily at a historical and moral level.2 Its poetics, in other words, are simpler than many other parables’, but its potential to frighten audiences and disrupt social structures is profound. Recited in Luke’s Gospel as a rebuke of the Pharisees’ greed (16:14–15), the parable of Dives and Lazarus opens with the introduction of a wealthy man who dresses finely in purple and linen and eats lavishly every day. Jesus then explains that a beggar named Lazarus lies at the rich man’s gate, covered in sores and hoping to receive the crumbs from his table. Yet no one gives to the man in need: he remains hungry at the gate where dogs lick his wounds. The story then shifts to the afterlife, explaining that when Lazarus died, angels carried him to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man, in contrast, is tormented in hell where he can see Lazarus seated in

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Abraham’s lap. Asking charity of the one he refused to help, the rich man requests that Lazarus be sent to dip his finger in water to cool his tongue. Abraham refuses and draws attention to the two men’s contrasting conditions: the rich man received good things in his earthly life and now suffers, while Lazarus suffered in the earthly life and is now comforted. The rebuffed rich man then asks Abraham if Lazarus could at least warn his family so that his brothers do not suffer as he does after death. But Abraham again refuses, insisting that they should heed the warnings of Moses and the prophets. In her analysis of the parable as a recurrent intertext in Piers Plowman, Kate Crassons calls it ‘a haunting story about the failures of charity, the invisibility of the poor, and the divisions that fracture community’.3 Dives and Lazarus, she claims, not only encourages almsgiving but urges a greater respect for the humanity of those in need.4 While Crassons’s compelling description indeed resonates with the articulation of the parable in Luke’s Gospel and may well describe its function in Piers Plowman, we should be cautious not to assume that the parable maintained such meanings across time and literary contexts. More prominently and persistently than concern for the poor, Middle English retellings betray anxieties about how socio-economic status could affect salvation, and they often push back against the Gospel parable’s blunt equation of prosperity and sinfulness.5 What unifies many retellings is not a concern for the poor but reassurance of the rich that wealth does not necessarily endanger their souls. Among the many Middle English translations of Dives and Lazarus, this chapter analyses a prominent strand that asks readers to consider economic inequality only secondarily; instead, these retellings introduce the parable as a warning against sins of the body. Three Middle English penitential or quasi-penitential texts – Robert Mannyng’s early fourteenth-century treatise Handlyng Synne, Peter Idley’s fifteenth-century translation of Mannyng’s work in Instructions to His Son, and John Gower’s late fourteenthcentury collection of tales Confessio Amantis – all present Dives and Lazarus within a schema of the seven deadly sins. While we might expect the parable to appear under avarice, given that it follows a condemnation of the Pharisees’ greed in Luke’s Gospel,6 in all three works, the story appears under the rubric of gluttony.7 Instead of articulating how greed exacerbates the economic gulf between the rich and the poor, these writers suggest that the parable illustrates a different moral problem, understood broadly as the desire to consume.

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This particular strand of retellings merits our attention for at least three reasons. For each, we can identify a fairly specific prosperous audience, which allows analysis of how writers crafted a socially subversive story, one that could easily vilify wealth, for a late medieval elite. Additionally, these three retellings offer insight into how parables functioned within late medieval collections of moral stories. Given the frequent use of storytelling in the care of souls,8 we may expect to find that parables – what many regard as Jesus’ instructional stories – would appear regularly in such collections. But in fact, among the Middle English pastoral works that compile a large number of stories, parables are notably absent.9 Their rarity in such contexts suggests a perceived distinction between the form and utility of the stories that Jesus told and those told by preachers and confessors to the late medieval laity. Likewise, the inclusion of Dives and Lazarus in penitential story collections suggests that it stood out among parables for its resemblance to illustrative moral tales.10 Finally, the parable’s appearance within confessional treatises invites exploration of the relationship between ethically charged narrative and an accompanying moral precept. When retelling the parable of Dives and Lazarus within a seven deadly sins schema, Mannyng, Idley, and Gower took up an interpretive puzzle with specific parameters: they needed to determine how their conceptions of gluttony – shaped by their particular cultural contexts – were manifest in the parable and, likewise, how the parable might reveal dimensions of the sin they did not normally consider. These translators, like other readers of moral stories, engaged in what J. Allan Mitchell describes as an improvisatory, game-like act of interpretation.11 Their ethical response took the form of a new story and presented a newly reconfigured puzzle for their readers to navigate. In the analysis that follows, I will characterise the relationship between instructional narrative and moral precept as generative, not restrictive, and will argue that the oblique sorting of the parable under gluttony spurred inventive revisions that advanced competing ethical models. While all three writers featured in this chapter protect the privileged status of wealthy readers, Mannyng and Idley articulate an interpersonal ethics as they promote greater care for the wider social body. Gower, in contrast, promotes an interior ethics in relation to the parable that seeks order within the individual soul; in doing so, he pays strikingly little attention to the poor, even as he translates a parable that warns of damnation for their neglect.12

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From precept to productive ambiguity If we take a simplistic view of penitential story collections, assuming that a moral frame should govern a story’s meaning and a reader’s response, gluttony seems like a frustratingly limited or ineffective heading for a parable that so prominently features economic inequality: either this heading narrows the story’s significance to Dives’ elaborate feasting, or the story corresponds poorly to its moral category. Yet recent scholarship on later medieval moral storytelling has convincingly argued that exempla are not rigidly instrumental.13 Like other narratives, they are affective, ambiguous, and multivalent, even at the level of their moral application. Although exemplary texts commonly project the ‘aspiration toward exact alignment among authorial purpose, narrative form, and audience response’, that ‘fantasy of alignment’, as Elizabeth Allen phrases it, belies far more complex dynamics that writers exploit in their moral discourse.14 At the same time that a moral precept ostensibly declares the ethical significance of a story, the narrative pulls readers into the particularities of human experience that complicate, exceed, and call into question that general rule.15 Together, poetic affect and ambiguity inspire examination of abstract morals and motivate actions as diverse as the readers themselves.16 For evidence that penitential manuals fostered moral reflection in order to move penitents to ethical action, we need look no further than Handlyng Synne, a paradigmatic Middle English penitential text. When describing his French source, Robert Mannyng riffs on the term ‘handlyng’ (from the French noun ‘le manuel’) to connect reflection to action. People handle, or commit, sin daily through word and deed, he explains, but they can also handle sin in a recuperative way: in thought about what one has done, in fear of its punishment, in clear perception of its presence, and in straightening out or allaying such behaviours.17 These multiple meanings of ‘handling’ indicate Mannyng’s intention not simply to issue moral injunctions but to initiate a range of internal and external activities that reconcile penitents to God. In other words, Mannyng purports to help readers develop the ‘skyle’ of continually perceiving and cleansing themselves of sin (lines 113–14).18 The employment of narrative in Handlyng Synne suggests that an ambiguous relationship between story and moral can be especially productive for the examination of conscience: for as Christopher Cannon observes, Mannyng’s own narratives are

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among those least obviously connected to the moral they should illustrate.19 Cannon describes the seeming misalignment of stories and moral as integral to the work’s form and aims: he concludes that ‘the bold and extraordinary achievement of these narratives is to unfold doctrine in ways so difficult and complex – requiring such efforts on the reader’s part – that their very apprehension makes them a part of lived experience’.20 According to Mannyng’s model, narratives within penitential collections are neither blunt tools of persuasion nor mere condescension to the laity’s desire for entertainment.21 Rather, they initiate reflection about both the ethical situations they present and their relevance to an individual reader’s or listener’s experience. Instead of governing a story’s interpretation, the attachment of a general moral precept to a necessarily ambiguous and particular narrative prompts readers to reconsider the meaning of each.22 In the case of Dives and Lazarus, Mannyng, Idley, and Gower all present the parable as an illustration of delicacy – a specific form of gluttony characterised by indulgence in costly foods. In doing so, they prompt audiences to consider how the socio-economic status of the title characters and their interactions with one another relate to this sin of the flesh. In other words, the ordinatio of the larger text begs the question, how is indulgence in costly foods a misuse of wealth or an offence against the poor? How do an individual’s habits of consumption affect the social body? Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Idley worked directly from Handlyng Synne, Mannyng and Idley both suggest that the parable encourages a greater social consciousness among the rich. Mannyng characterises feasting as an occasion to care for the social body and depicts gluttony not as overconsumption but as a refusal to nourish the poor. Idley excises Mannyng’s most communally focused passages, but he still asserts that gluttony affects more than the individual sinner. Describing Dives’ consumption as an abuse of wealth, he argues through the parable that one man’s excesses can cause another’s need. Together, these translations attest to the social function of penance: moral stories like Dives and Lazarus help the penitential subject see within and beyond the self, identifying how one’s actions help or harm one’s neighbour. Gower, in contrast, offers a radically individualistic version of the parable that does not remedy but rather reinforces what Crassons refers to as the invisibility of the poor. Characterising each man as responsible for his own prosperity and salvation, Gower refers to Lazarus’s poverty and sickness as a sign of his sinfulness, invoking

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a discourse of blame not uncommon in exegesis of the parable.23 While he certainly urges moral reflection, he steers such reflection to the subject of uncontrolled desire. Far from haunting a wealthy audience with the spectre of human need, this prominent retelling defines temperance as the key to living well in community and asks its powerful audience to consider how they may have become subject to their bodies.24 The virtue of excess in Handlyng Synne Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne is a quintessential example of the pastoral literature produced in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council.25 Based on the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Manuel des Péchés,26 this early fourteenth-century story collection offers instruction on the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments, and proper penance, in over 12,000 lines of rhyming couplets.27 Although Mannyng addresses his work to ‘lewed men’ generally and his local community in Sempringham specifically (43, 57–60), recent scholarship suggests his audience may have included regular clergy and non-local lay people as well. Scott describes the immediate audience of Sempringham that Mannyng invokes as Gilbertine nuns, canons, and lay brothers, but she argues that he clearly writes for a wider audience that includes ‘the common people’.28 Joyce Coleman defines that audience more specifically, arguing that Mannyng was likely a hospitarius who wrote for male pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Saint Gilbert.29 Such an audience, which would range from middle- to upper-class pilgrims, includes those well-to-do householders Mannyng seems to target with his rendition of Dives and Lazarus. Within the overall section on gluttony, as well as in his particular retelling of Dives and Lazarus, Mannyng encourages the wealthy to care for the whole community. Under this moral heading, he narrates three stories, yet only that of Dives and Lazarus illustrates the actual sin. The other two narratives provide examples of a corrective virtue: giving alms.30 While some penitential guides describe abstinence or temperance as the antidote to gluttony,31 Mannyng eschews this theme, suggesting that the proper counterbalance to overconsumption is not moderation but wider distribution: ‘Of mete glotonye wyl bygynne; / Almes þer of fordoþ þat synne’ (7079–80). By commending almsgiving instead of abstinence, Mannyng encourages his readers to think beyond the desires

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of their own flesh to the bodily needs of the larger community. Since abstinence looks inward rather than outward, it may inhibit overconsumption, but it will not necessarily result in more food for the poor. Mannyng’s advice to feed others, especially when feeding oneself, nourishes the whole social body. At the same time that he encourages social consciousness, Mannyng accommodates the social position and material pleasures enjoyed by the rich. As he introduces readers to the specific sin of delicacy, Mannyng invokes a situation that should resonate with the late medieval gentry. After punningly describing delicacy as one ‘spyce’ of gluttony,32 he then identifies the meals at a late medieval manor as a likely setting for this sin, referring to lords who sit at the high table, or dais, eating multiple courses (6617–20). Mannyng offers practical advice to such lords, claiming: Wlde þey of eury a mese ȝyue To helpe þe pore wyþ for to lyue, Þe boldlyere þey myghte hem self fede Ȝyf þey deden þat almes dede. (6621–4)

Notably, Mannyng does not condemn luxurious eating; instead, he offers instruction on how to do so without sin, while explicitly connecting the upcoming parable with contemporary social practice. If lords follow the custom of reserving a loaf of bread or a portion of each dish for the almoner to share with the poor,33 they may feast grandly and live virtuously. In large medieval houses, the very ritual of eating in the hall was an act of feeding the social body, since in this setting the lord and lady dined along with the lower members of their household.34 The reservation of a portion of the meal for the poor ensured, at least symbolically, that those on the social margins could share in the feast, even though they remained outside the household structure. Mannyng’s recommendation that the wealthy regularly share their food with the poor endorses this convention as a guard against gluttony and a mechanism for Christian charity. The opening of the parable conveys its relevance to such contemporary dining practices. Directly preceding the narrative, Mannyng insists that many, distracted by ‘lust and lykyng’ of the food they eat, neglect to feed the poor (6626). Dives’ story, he asserts, will show what awaits such selfish consumers (6627–36). He then weaves the moral frame into the text of the parable, stating that for Dives, ‘eury day nobly was led, / And wyþ delycyus metes fed’ (6639–40).35 Lazarus, in contrast, starves at his gate:

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He ȝerned moche to ete hys fylle Of þe crummes þat þe ryche man dede spylle. But no man ȝaf hym on to byte, Þogh þat askede he so lyte. (6645–8)

The content of these lines closely parallels the description of Lazarus in Luke’s Gospel,36 but Mannyng’s versification emphasises the men’s contrasting conditions as well as Dives’ disregard for charitable social convention. Lazarus’s yearning to eat his ‘fylle’ brings to mind the excessive consumption of rich men – a sin which he is materially prevented from committing. The crumbs that ‘spylle’ at the end of the couplet invoke a wasteful negligence: not only does Dives fail to reserve a portion for the poor, he treats his excess as refuse, viewing food as an abundant good that he either consumes or discards. The next couplet, with its end rhymes invoking a small bite, communicates how easily Dives or others with means could remedy Lazarus’s suffering. Along with this emphasis on consumption, Mannyng continually reiterates the disparity between wealth and poverty. He introduces Lazarus not as a beggar but as a ‘pore man’, so that the story begins with an opposition of basic economic categories (6629). Likewise, when the rich man looks up after death and sees Lazarus in heaven, Mannyng adds ‘the pore man’ after naming him, highlighting the distance between their socio-economic and spiritual states. Mannyng deepens this contrast when Abraham justifies their respective locations. In Luke’s Gospel, Abraham generically contrasts their states in the world and their experiences in the afterlife: ‘For thou hast resseyued good thingis in thi lijf, and Lazarus also yuel thingis; but he is now coumfortid, and thou art turmentid’ (Luke 16:25). In Handlyng Synne, however, Mannyng articulates their gifts and deprivation in more explicitly economic terms: Þou receyuedest þe wrldes blys And laȝare pouert and peyne ywys. Þou ete & drunke & were ful blythe And laȝare hungrede & ful wo sythe. And now shal he for hys desert Haue welþe ynogh for hys pouert, And þou for welþe to peyne shalt go And for þy ryches þou shalt haue wo. (6677–84)37

References to Dives’ happy feasting and Lazarus’s hunger draw on the surrounding discussion of delicacy, yet most of Abraham’s

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rebuke addresses riches and poverty. Instead of the Gospel’s vague invocation of ‘yuel thingis’, Lazarus is said to have experienced poverty and pain – conditions that contrast Dives’ worldly pleasure enabled by riches. Likewise, Mannyng expresses the men’s inverse positions after death in economic terms: Lazarus experiences not just solace but wealth. As he integrates discourses related to gluttony and economic inequality, Mannyng effectively elides wealth and comfort, in a move that prompts audiences to consider the contrasting physical and psychological implications of riches and poverty. Dives’ plea for Abraham to warn his family similarly integrates socio-economic discourses into counsel against gluttony. In this second request, Dives articulates for three potential audiences – Abraham, his family, and those reading or hearing the parable – the fruits of his moral reflection. Describing the faults that he hopes his family will avoid, he names both gluttony and avarice as his primary sins. He desires that: … þey loke hem so yn here lyue Fro auaryce and fro glotonye, And ȝyue to pore men blethlye, Þat þey neure hyder be sent Wyþ me yn þys hete to be brent. (6698–6702)

Dives’ two sins sit alongside each other equally, suggesting that the parable still warns against amassing or hoarding wealth, even when employed as an illustration of gluttony. Named as the counter-­ virtue to both sins, almsgiving wards off the sinful impulse that unites excessive appetite and material greed: a desire to seek good(s) for oneself without any regard for the good of one’s neighbour. The reiteration of socio-economic categories throughout the narrative reminds readers that the routine, domestic activity of dining always depends upon one’s material prosperity. What Mannyng will go on to emphasise in his explication is that material deprivation derives not only from an individual’s social station but also from how well others fulfil their expected social roles. At the parable’s conclusion, Mannyng states explicitly that he narrates the story for the benefit of ‘ryche men’ (6724). In keeping with the prefatory statement that people may enjoy luxurious meals if they share with the poor, the explication does not encourage abstinence or condemn the kind of feasts in which Dives indulges. Instead, it advocates mindful eating.38 First, Mannyng writes, eating should call to mind the fundamental human needs

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that the wealthy share with the rest of their households as well as those on the margins of society. Directly addressing ‘ȝe lordynges’, Mannyng advises them to ‘beþ ful ware … And þe pore noght forgete, / whan ȝe sytte at ȝour mete’ (6751–4). Urging readers to remember the poor, Mannyng implies that Dives did not necessarily scorn the poor man at his gate; thinking only of himself or his peers, he remained blissfully unaware of Lazarus’s condition. Second, eating mindfully means remembering the fallen nature of the body. Mannyng warns against overconsumption of rich foods by reminding audiences of their physical corruption after death: And þou þat fedest þe so rychely, Ouer mesure yn glotony, Þenk þat þou shalt stynke & rote And wrmes shul fylle þy þrote, And þe fouler shal þy body stynke For þy ryche mete & þy drynke. Eury man ȝyue tent to þys And se how vyle hys body ys. (6755–62)

Such visceral imagery emphasises the impermanence of physical pleasure and the inevitable degradation of what was once refined, since the body that took in the costliest substances itself becomes the fodder for worms. More sumptuous food, Mannyng suggests, quite literally leads to more decay. This portion of the parable’s explication participates in a broader convention of using the grotesque to discourage gluttony. As Elena Levy-Nevarro has argued with reference to Piers Plowman, images of physical corruption often point beyond the individual body to show how ‘those who give themselves over to gluttony make themselves an abomination to society at large’.39 According to Mannyng, Dives’ lavish eating exposes a fallen nature or vile ‘kynde’ (6770). Suggesting both a natural condition and moral feeling, the term ‘kynde’ simultaneously points back to the description of the decaying body and forward to an enumeration of the multiple sins Dives commits against Lazarus.40 Mannyng states in the next line that Dives went to hell not only because he corrupted his flesh with rich foods but also because of his avarice and his high bearing (6771–8). Moreover, he claims that Dives went to hell because he refused to give to Lazarus and ‘dede hys houndes out late / To byte þe laȝare at þe ȝate’ (6781–2). In Luke’s Gospel, it remains unclear to whom the dogs belong,41 leading some exegetes to interpret the licking of Lazarus’s wounds as an act of charity and

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to contrast the dogs’ compassion with Dives’ unfeeling greed.42 Mannyng, in contrast, states that the dogs belong to Dives and describes them aggressively biting the poor man at his behest. More vividly than simple neglect, this offence indicates that Dives suffers because he was unkind.43 He degraded his nature, bodily and spiritually, by consuming what Lazarus needed to survive and by subjecting him to what Mannyng interprets as cruelty inflicted by his dogs. The grotesque physical corruption that comes from gluttony functions as an outward sign of the spiritual corruption endemic to neglecting and inflicting suffering on the poor. After advocating mindful eating, Mannyng castigates more grievous sins not featured in the parable, expanding the range of behaviours that Dives’ example should discourage. In anticipation of his audience’s surprise that Dives would suffer damnation for a failure to give, Mannyng both suggests that Dives actively harmed Lazarus by setting his dogs on him and warns that many rich men act far more violently toward the poor.44 He concedes that the parable shows only a single extended offence, since Dives was ‘but to o man vncurteys’ (6800). What is more typical of the rich, he claims, is systemic harm of the poor enabled by position and perpetuated by disregard for the very law that lords are entrusted to uphold: Lord, how shul þese robburs fare Þat þe pore pepyl pelyn [plunder] ful bare? Erles, knyghtes, and barouns, And ouþer lordynges of touns, Iustyses, shereues, and baylyues, Þat þe lawes al to ryues [rip apart], And þe pore men al to pyle, To ryche men do þey but as þey wyle. (6791–8)

As he names particular vocations, Mannyng expands the contrast between rich and poor from a simple financial distinction to one that includes differences of power as well. Lazarus suffers, he suggests, because he lacks recourse to justice in a society where men of means use the law to maximise their own gain. Instead of fulfilling their traditional role as protectors, knights join other officers of justice in essentially robbing the people.45 Dives’ sin, according to this reading, is typical of the rich but comparatively small in scale. To suggest that robbing the poor, not simple neglect, is the more pertinent offence for his audience, Mannyng switches to direct address:

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By þys skyle þan mow ȝe se Þat ȝe are wers þan was he: He dede but lete an hound hym to. Ȝe ryche men weyl wers ȝe do: … He ne dede but wernede hym of hys mete, And ȝe robbe al þat ȝe mowe gete. Ȝe are as dyues þat wyl noght ȝyue And wers, for ȝe robbe þat þey shuld by lyue. (6811–20)

Not only do rich men fail to remember the social body when they feed themselves, but they feast lavishly by consuming what rightly belongs to the poor. Here, the explication goes beyond the subject of overconsumption of food and drink to address possession of property more generally, something that may enable gluttony but more readily calls to mind avarice and wrath. The lords’ greed motivates violence against those they have a communal duty to protect, perversely subverting the obligation to give alms. In light of these broader criticisms of the rich, gluttony appears to be one symptom of a larger social disorder in which the rich seek pleasure by means of another’s pain. Overall, Mannyng’s parable characterises consumption as a social action, an interrelation of rich and poor, in which food may be shared or hoarded, honestly acquired or bought with exploitation and theft. Gluttony, according to this portrayal, is not simply succumbing to physical desires – the triumph of the flesh over the spirit – but a form of unkindness in which the individual fails to see himself in relation to others. From this perspective, the parable shows wealthy readers how to bridge the gulf that separates Dives and Lazarus, to live in a more just community, so that they do not become separated from the virtuous poor by an ‘endles ende’ after death (6687). At the same time that the story expands readers’ conception of gluttony from a sin of the individual body to one that can corrupt the social corpus, it expands readers’ understanding of charity as well. By presenting the parable within the frame of gluttony, Mannyng characterises almsgiving as a natural impulse dictated by a common physical need. Kindness, he suggests, is a basic, nourishing act – especially incumbent upon lords – because it sustains and protects the wider community.

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Serving God in Instructions to His Son Working from Handlyng Synne, Idley similarly draws attention to the poor, but he crafts a distinct retelling that directs readers’ attention away from food to the power dynamics of Dives’ feast. Notably, he rejects Mannyng’s endorsement of lavish feasting and instead portrays Dives’ costly dining as an abuse of wealth that sinfully indulges his fleshly appetites. More subtly but even more significantly, he attempts to change his readers’ thinking about the poor by confronting the ideological discourses that justify their suffering. Slothful and unmoved by another’s need, Idley’s Dives stands in for contemporary lords who scorn the poor as lazy beggars. Although such rich men consume (and even steal) goods produced by others, they nevertheless accuse the needy of failing to work for their food. Beyond encouraging almsgiving out of compassion, Idley promotes respect for the poor based on their vocation: he characterises Lazarus and other poor people as labourers employed by God, so that his parable teaches the wealthy to honourably serve the servants of God. Idley’s Instructions to His Son is an advice text with two distinct parts: Book One, based on a pair of treatises by Albertanus of Brescia, addresses what Charlotte D’Evelyn describes as ‘counsels of the world’, while Book Two, which combines the ten commandments and seven deadly sins sections of Handlyng Synne with forty-six stanzas from John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, addresses ‘exhortations of the church’.46 Idley writes at a later time than Mannyng, c.1445–50,47 and from a very different social position: based on Idley’s employments and land holdings, Matthew Sullivan describes him as a ‘financially and politically prosperous nobleman’.48 In keeping with this position, Idley reworks Handlyng Synne to fit the aesthetic preferences and social context of a wealthy fifteenth-century layman rather than a fourteenth-century priest. To create secular reading material from pastoralia,49 Idley formally and substantively changes Handlyng Synne. While often using similar vocabulary to Mannyng, he shapes his source’s rhyming couplets into the more ornate and prestigious form of rhyme royal stanzas. As D’Evelyn notes, he also abbreviates Handlyng Synne by excising whole stories: in the section on gluttony, for example, Idley reduces the number of narratives from three to two.50 Within a single story, like Dives and Lazarus, significant changes are apparent as well: Idley amplifies different elements of the parable than Mannyng does; he also

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omits exegetical commentary from his source and adds some of his own explications. Although Idley will sharply critique abuses of wealth, his larger text confidently asserts that the rich may come to heaven. Book One of the Instructions directly answers the question of whether wealth necessarily endangers the soul. In a section headed ‘De diuicijs et paupertate’, Idley asserts ‘richesse in hymsilf y wote is no synne’ (1.666). Instead, characterising poverty as a cause of corruption, he claims that need ‘of alle synnes is chieff modre and Queene’: poverty forces people to shamelessly beg and ask help of their enemies, sometimes even driving them to theft and murder (1.708–24).51 Worldly goods, in contrast, are fundamentally positive, since they are necessary to live and also allow the maintenance of ‘honour, worship, and frendship’ (1.675–6). In a line that aptly describes the initial circumstances of Dives and Lazarus, Idley asserts that wealth allows one ‘to purchase blisse and voyde payn’ (1.692). Yet he cautions that enjoyment of bliss will only persist in the afterlife if the wealthy avoid pride and refrain from harming their neighbours (1.694–7). Unlike need, riches do not directly cause sin, but they enable the proclivities of the person possessing them. Functioning as a neutral tool, worldly goods are good ‘if they be in the possession of a good man’ (1.703).52 For Idley, correspondingly, the parable of Dives and Lazarus demonstrates what happens when the wicked have wealth. Matthew Giancarlo has suggested that Idley’s parable softens, or covers up, Mannyng’s strident condemnations of the rich, but such a reading places too much emphasis on one omission.53 In fact, from the beginning, Idley proscribes aristocratic privilege, often deviating from his source text to do so. While Mannyng offers a model for feasting in a more communally conscious way, Idley characterises lavish eating as the telltale sin that marks Dives as an abuser of wealth.54 He omits Mannyng’s prefatory advice that rich men may eat delicately as long as they share with the poor and bluntly declares that sumptuous dining on a daily basis is a damnable offence: Anothir grete spice is of glotonye ffor to be serued with many diuers messe And of sotell metis over delicately; If it be daily vsed, y sey then expresse, It is damnpnable—the gospell berith witenesse Of Diues that was richelie daily serued, And for poore Lazare nothyng reserued. (2.B.2087–93)55

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Reducing nineteen prefatory lines from his source into one stanza, Idley attributes Dives’ punishment in hell to the specific form of gluttony named in his penitential frame. He then expands the initial description of Dives’ feasting, stretching Mannyng’s four lines into a full rhyme royal stanza and creating a more vivid image of the meal within the narrative itself, where Dives sits ‘Roiallie serued with many a deynte messe / At his table dailie in the fresshest wyse / Ther was no man erthlie cowde better deuyse’ (2.B.2098–2100). Whereas Mannyng invoked a familiar scene of lords eating in a late medieval manor, Idley’s Dives manifests extreme behaviour, being served like a king and eating the best imaginable foods. Instead of a familiar occurrence, Dives’ meal is the stuff of fantasy to which audiences may aspire. We should note that in this description, Idley specifies not only what Dives eats but how: Dives occupies a position of power, and others are employed to serve his appetites. While he fails to bestow gifts upon the poor, he receives both costly foods and the labour of those who feed him. An emphasis on Dives’ power persists throughout the translated parable. When Abraham describes why Dives will experience no mercy, he speaks in terms of wealth and position rather than physical pleasure. In an expansion of Mannyng’s statement that Dives had received ‘þe wurldys blys’ (6675), Idley’s Abraham declares that ‘Thow were in erthe like a lorde and a soueraigne / With all worldlie welthe that cowde be thought’ (2.B.2152–3). As in the earlier reference to Dives being served royally, Idley compares Dives to a ruler – one who could pursue his every desire and control others by means of his seemingly limitless wealth. Although Abraham will go on to condemn Dives’ ‘pompes feedyng’ (2.B.2161), invoking the specific sin of gluttony, Idley characterises Dives’ larger offence as an abuse of wealth. He lives ‘like a lord’ in the wealth and privilege he enjoys, while he neglects the social obligations incumbent upon those in positions of power. In language reminiscent of the assertion in Book One that wealth is beneficial in the hands of the good and damning in the hands of the wicked, Abraham attributes Dives’ suffering to ‘thy grete riches whiche was abused’ (2.B.2158). Not only did Dives waste his riches in lavish feasting, spending on bodily pleasures at the expense of his soul, he simultaneously used his wealth to elevate himself above others, deriving power from his unequal share of material goods. Dives’ own statement of wrongdoing underscores this sharp inequality between his easy enjoyment of luxury and the painful toils of the poor. When he asks that Lazarus return to the world to

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warn his brothers, Dives only names gluttony as a sin to avoid and leaves out Mannyng’s reference to avarice. Yet he still identifies two moral lessons in the example of his life that he wishes to pass on to his brothers: … to excyt hem fro Glotonye, that orrible synne, And hir desirous appetitis in mete and drynke – In the whiche mysilf daily delited ynne, And vppon the pouere people they hertely thynke, That for her lievyng daily laboure and swynke. (2.B.2185–9)

In addition to cautioning against delicacy, Idley’s Dives condemns a mental neglect of the poor, a failure to see the labour required for his and others’ survival. Rather than encouraging almsgiving at this point in the parable, Idley urges readers to acknowledge the basic injustice of poverty. Dives consumed his wealth while exerting minimal effort: both in the foods he ate and the service he received at those meals, he enjoyed the fruits of others’ work. The poor, in contrast, exert themselves but accumulate nothing. As Dives pursued pleasure, they painfully laboured and nonetheless painfully starved. Idley’s explication further addresses how the rich view the poor and argues that the rich should serve those in need rather than seek to be served. Immediately following the parable, Idley warns against three behaviours: eating delicacies, giving few alms, and telling beggars to work to satisfy their own needs (2.B.2220–6). The third is an addition to his source that receives the most vivid description of the group. Rich men scorn the poor, he writes, ‘And with thretyng wordes they woll atwyte / And sey, “Thow art a boolde begger and a sturdie syre; / Thow may laboure for thy lieuyng and gete somme hire”’ (2.B.2224–6). The notion of illegitimate begging – a phenomenon portrayed as a moral quandary in Piers Plowman – is a rhetorical weapon of the rich, according to Idley.56 Instead of giving joyfully to the poor, the rich disdainfully blame or even taunt (atwyte) the poor for their inability to provide for themselves.57 Idley locates an example of such scorn within the parable, when he follows Mannyng in associating the dogs with harm: Diues, richely fedde, hadde pouerte in hate – Comaunded his doggis be loosed fro there cheyne In rebuk of Lazar beyng in woo and payne; And for his grete and vnkyndely offence God gave vppon hym his infernall sentence. (2.B.2299–2303)

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Whereas Mannyng describes Dives as hating the poor man, Idley writes that Dives despised poverty itself and rebuked Lazarus on account of the suffering that follows from his socio-economic status. In his distorted view, wealth confers dignity, and poverty is rightly shamed. Yet, according to Idley, the poverty Dives and other rich men scorn is a product of their own actions. Following Mannyng’s statement that contemporary lords harm the poor far more than Dives did, Idley writes that ‘ye bereve the pouere of lande, catall, and goolde, / And stuffe youre cofris with penyes and poundis’ (2.B.2319–20). While the rich convince themselves that need derives from others’ moral failings, in fact, the material excess and social privilege the wealthy enjoy comes at the expense of the poor whom they rob of sustenance. After condemning the wealthy for fleecing the poor, Idley advocates a shift in worldview that should motivate generosity. His argument starts from but then subverts social convention. Casting the poor as servants, Idley points out the respect given to those employed by the wealthy: ‘But and ther com to you a messager fro a kyng or a duke, / ffro on Erle or a knyght or a symple squyere, / In youre best wyse ye woll make hym chiere’ (2.B.2231–3). The rich regularly extend hospitality to those who live more humbly than themselves, offering to servants the same respect due to those they serve. Yet the poor whom they scorn serve the highest authority and wealthiest lord: according to Idley, Lazarus is ‘Goddis man’ or ‘the messager of God’ (2.B.2229, 2234). Since the poor are special servants of God, they should be served with the same honour and generosity as one would devote to the highest secular authority: Ye riche men, God yeveth you a grete charge, To vesit the pouere that nede hath oppressed, And to refresshe hem plentevous and large; … And that with gentill wordis mekely and feire, As to Goddis messager that to you is sent, With comfortabil wordis curteis and deboneire, Depart freely with suche as God hath you sent, And not with frownyng visage and browes bent. (2.B.2332–43)

In some renditions of the parable, encouragement to give alms stresses the benefits for the giver and focuses on how that action sanctifies the rich.58 Idley, in contrast, insists on graciously feeding the poor on account of their own worthy estate. Both rich and poor have ‘a grete charge’ from God, the latter to serve God directly and the former to serve those servants.

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Within Idley’s seven deadly sins frame, the parable’s image of lavish consumption becomes an injunction to greater hospitality and an aide to better perceiving one’s contemporary community. Providing a rationale for why Dives and other rich men would neglect the poor, whose health they could so effortlessly foster, Idley condemns not only overconsumption but the discourses that justify material inequality. While neither Mannyng nor Idley fundamentally threatens the upper classes’ social position or privilege, only Idley uses the parable to question the lens through which the wealthy perceive the poor. Governing appetites in Confessio Amantis Based on the retellings featured thus far, it appears that translating Dives and Lazarus as an illustration of gluttony does not distract from the parable’s socio-economic themes; rather, these retellings show how pairing the story with warnings against delicacy can illuminate gluttony’s social dimensions. When we bring Confessio Amantis into our discussion, however, we see that the social consciousness promoted by Mannyng’s and Idley’s parables reflects their particular aims and interests, not ideas inherent to the parable or to this particular juxtaposition of narrative and moral. Gower’s rendition agrees with Mannyng’s and Idley’s insofar as it affirms the basic social position of the wealthy. Yet crafting this parable within a quasi-penitential treatise for the remediation of a myopic lover, Gower constructs a story that advocates better self-­ perception, not better perception of and response to neighbours in need. Like the others, Gower translates Dives and Lazarus within a ‘seven deadly sins’ frame as an illustration of delicacy. But within this common setting, he pays remarkably little attention to the needs of Lazarus and the late medieval poor. In response to the situation of his fictional penitent specifically and his courtly audience more generally, Gower’s parable encourages self-regulation, rather than greater awareness of and care for those in need, as a means of individual and even societal reform. Like the lords that Mannyng directly addresses yet censures, Gower writes for an audience who would identify with Dives.59 At least nominally, this includes Richard II and the future Henry IV, to whom he dedicates the first and second recensions of his poem respectively, as well as a wider courtly audience.60 In his overall consideration of gluttony and his translation of the parable specifically, Gower inquires into

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the consequences of unbridled desire for those with the means to have whatever they want: how should the individual with power over others still impose limitations on himself? In contrast with Mannyng and Idley, whose parables address the physical needs of the social body, Gower restricts the parable’s moral scope to the individual subject and suggests that rich men can be virtuous even when neglecting the poor. Gower’s Confessio Amantis, of course, is a self-consciously literary work of fiction, not a pragmatic guide for priests in the care of souls or for lay people seeking to live as pious Christians. Nonetheless, Gower’s parable does not stand out as any more imaginative or poetic than those by Mannyng and Idley. Additionally, it shares with the other works some doctrinal function, since Gower famously professes to write ‘somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore’ (Prologue 19).61 Among penitential story collections, what primarily separates Confessio Amantis from Handlyng Synne and Instructions for his Son is Gower’s dramatisation of the interaction between confessor and penitent. Although Genius is a priest of Venus, not God, he guides Amans through a reflective process of locating and remediating sin, much like that described by Mannyng in the beginning of Handlyng Synne.62 Seeming mismatches between Genius’s stories and Amans’s personal situation elicit protests from the penitent, but Genius persistently describes sin in more capacious ways than Amans easily recognises within himself, asking the fictional penitent and Gower’s audience to imagine their ethical position in new ways.63 Much like Langland’s Will represents interior faculties in the activities of a fictional character, Amans also figures forth the human psyche. As James Simpson explains, beyond representing a frustrated courtly lover, Amans invokes the will’s subjection to desire.64 Thus, Gower’s fictional penitent is subject, both in the sense of the thinking, conscious being who should make confession and as one under the control of a governing power.65 Within this literary frame, Gower’s rendition of Dives and Lazarus addresses what Peck has called ‘the general psychology of willfulness’.66 Rather than advocating eating less or giving more, this version of the parable teaches audiences not to feast on, and in turn be consumed by, unbridled desire. Ostensibly, all of Book Six of Confessio Amantis addresses gluttony, but very little of this text pertains to overconsumption of food and drink. Genius first suggests that he will focus on precisely these issues, declaring that he will discuss only two of gluttony’s many branches: drunkenness and delicacy (6.10–14). But both his

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approach to these sins and the expansion of gluttony to include witchcraft and sorcery in the second half of the book point to an interest in power.67 While addressing drunkenness and delicacy, Genius quickly shifts from these familiar bodily sins to analogous mental conditions in lovers, warning against the inebriating effects of passion and condemning the hunger for ever more exotic love (6.85–7, 6.67–72). In each section, literal consumption of alcohol (as in the tale of Galba’s and Vitellius’s drink-induced tyranny) or costly foods (as in Dives’ sumptuous feasting) stands in for the lover’s condition, made crazy with desire and immoderately seeking pleasure. Yet the lore of Book Six’s stories transcends sensuality, whether that takes the form of sexual or culinary pleasure, and teaches Amans how to rule his passion. Throughout Book Six, discourse predominates over narrative in what Matthew Irvin describes as a visible expansion ‘of Amans and Genius speaking to each other about the sins rather than the narratives’.68 Consequently, framing related to gluttony generally and delicacy specifically shapes the parable more than the subsequent explication. As he introduces the sin of gluttony, Genius first describes it as the great original sin (6.1–7), casting it as an act of disobedience in which desire overcomes reason to defy God’s law. After describing gluttony as a vice ‘out of rule’ (6.9), Gower litters his speech with references to governing authority. The drunk imagines himself a judge who ‘can al the lawe deme, / And given every juggement’ (6.20–21), when in fact, wine holds him in subjection as ‘his bonde thral’ (6.74). Amans, in response, describes himself as ‘overcome’ and his brain ‘overthrowe’ (6.118, 164); drunk on love, his reason has been conquered and enslaved.69 With his insistence that resisting the ‘drunkeschipe of love … stant noght upon my fortune’ (6.603–5), Amans imagines that even his self-reform would come from an outside power. Genius, then, introduces the sin of delicacy to an immediate audience resolved to accept subjection. Over the course of his counsel, Genius attempts to restore right order by characterising divine law as the power to which Amans should be subject. A prefatory Latin poem immediately associates this form of gluttony with the powerful (potentes), describing delicie as laws (iura) that rule those who govern.70 Gluttons, the preface implies, are ‘out of rule’ not because they follow their own volition but because they are ruled unreasonably, allowing sensuality undue power over the powerful. Robert Edwards has argued that Gower uses gluttony to ‘frame monitory tales of social turmoil’: with stories like the

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Marriage of Pirithous (in which lustful drunks steal a bride from her wedding feast) or the story of Nero (who murders three men so that he might open their stomachs and compare their digestion), Edwards sees Gower extolling self-governance ‘specifically in the operation of power’.71 Yet the power dynamics that interest Gower are not primarily between male and female, emperor and subject, or rich and poor. Instead of addressing such social relationships, he explores an internal disorder in which those who govern subject themselves to their desire.72 Although Amans first resists any identification with delicacy, his confession reveals an obsession with generating and consuming thoughts of love. Amans initially describes himself as an abstinent man who goes ‘fastende to my bedd’ because he has none of love’s food to consume (6.704). As the examination of conscience progresses, however, Amans comes to understand his gluttony as a sin of the mind, not the flesh, and the goods on which he feasts the product of memory and imagination. He confesses to subsisting on the recalled sights and sounds of his beloved (6.746–52) and to indulging in tales of romance, finding hope in stories of love attained (6.875–88). His delicacy differs wholly from Dives’ insofar as it deprives no one else of nourishment. Love’s fantasies may always be replenished and do not depend on material wealth. What Amans shares with the rich man of the parable is an immoderate appetite for pleasure, ungoverned by reason or divine law. When narrating the story of Dives and Lazarus, Genius aims to expose the flawed principle behind Amans’s behaviour rather than disparage his passionate thoughts directly. After Amans asserts that ‘for no such delicacie / I trowe I do no glotonie’ (6.945–6), Genius identifies his potential sin as curiosity – a condition in which his senses direct his mind – and warns against Amans imagining his beloved to such a degree ‘that thou reson excede’ (6.958–61).73 To connect Dives’ feasting at table to Amans’s feasting on sensual memories, Genius asserts that the single form of delicacy featured in the parable attests to the danger of delicacy in all forms, that ‘in every point, hou so thei falle, / Unto the soule don grievance’ (6.968–9). In other words, Amans and Dives indulge in delicacies in different ways, but both examples of overconsumption belong to the same larger phenomenon: subjecting reason to immoderate desire. To show how sensual appetites may overthrow reason, Gower accentuates Dives’ particular manifestation of delicacy, augmenting aspects of the parable that relate to the feasting or starvation of

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Dives and Lazarus respectively. The brief statement from Luke’s Gospel that Dives ‘eete euery dai schynyngli’ (16:19) becomes a four-line description of delicate eating in Gower’s version of the story. In addition to wearing precious clothing, Dives … eet and drank therto his fille After the lustes of his wille, As he which al stod in delice And tok non hiede of thilke vice. (6.991–4).

In addition to labelling Dives’ behaviour as a vice, Gower names delicacy within the narrative itself and describes it in terms that recall Genius’s preaching: as he satiates his hunger and thirst, Dives gives free reign to the ‘lustes of his wille’. Some lines later, when Dives refuses to give to Lazarus, Gower likewise characterises him as a man of inordinate desire. Summoning an image of a rotund man, ‘which hadde his fulle panche, / Of alle lustes ate bord’ (6.1000–1), Gower’s rich man looks like a glutton. But even this description names Dives’ appetite as a form of lust with which Amans can identify. To create a physical contrast between the two titular figures, Gower transforms Lazarus the beggar into Lazarus the starving man. Luke’s Gospel first describes the poor man as ‘a begger’, whom Jesus then names as Lazarus and describes as covered in sores. The latter detail suggests that he begs because of an illness such as leprosy (16:20–1). Gower introduces this character as a ‘povere lazre’ (6.996),74 but he makes no mention of sores at this point. Instead of emphasising Lazarus’s illness, he calls attention to the severity of his ‘dedly hunger’ (6.999). Close to the point of death, Lazarus lies at the gate not simply because he requires food but because he is too ‘acold and hungred’ to move to another place (6.1007–8).75 Written in this way, the opening scene of the parable draws a sharp contrast not between rich and poor generally but between the wealthy glutton and the malnourished poor in particular. Both men’s conditions are extreme states to be feared and avoided. When Gower describes the excess that Dives does not share from his table as the alms ‘wherof the povere myhte live’ (6.1004) he comes closest to promoting the kind of social consciousness manifest in the parables by Mannyng and Idley. Yet almsgiving is such a minor theme in both Gower’s narrative and commentary that Dives’ failure to share his crumbs looks more like an aspect of his unbridled appetite – he hoards even those crumbs he cannot consume – than like a failure to live in community.

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In contrast to Mannyng’s accommodation of lavish feasting and advocacy of greater almsgiving, Gower makes clear that Dives is damned for his indulgence in physical pleasures. In the course of explaining why Lazarus may not cool his burning tongue, Abraham advises Dives: … take into thi remembrance, Hou Lazar hadde gret penance, Whyl he was in that other lif, Bot thou in al thi lust jolif The bodily delices soghtest. (6.1049–53)

With this passage, Gower participates in a wider exegetical tradition that describes Lazarus’s suffering as a form of penance that remediates his sin on earth.76 Such an explanation for poverty makes Dives’ failure to share less offensive: since Lazarus’s need serves a purpose ordained by God, it should be endured, not alleviated. Dives’ damnable offence, therefore, is not neglect or violence toward his neighbour but a willingness to follow desire, to make delicacies his laws as the Latin poem states. Whereas in the Gospel, Abraham explains to Dives that he resides in hell because he ‘resseyued good thingis in thi lijf’ (Luke 16:25), Gower highlights Dives’ agency in his damnation: overtaken by lust, Abraham reproves him as one who ‘bodily delices soghtest’ (1053). Although subject to his desires, Dives does not act against his will. Rather, Genius suggests, he regards appetite as the highest rule to be followed. Genius’s brief explication similarly emphasises Dives’ overindulgence in costly food, while characterising such behaviour as a symptom of misgovernance. Unlike Mannyng and Idley, who use their commentary to show how delicacy hurts the poor, Genius remains focused on the individual sinner, stating that the parable Hath schewed openliche at ye, That bodili delicacie Of him which geveth non almesse Schal after falle in gret destresse, And that was sene upon the riche. (6.115–19)

Although Gower attributes to Dives a double offence, delicacy along with a lack of giving, his focus remains on the plight of the rich. The primary lesson drawn from Dives’ refusal to give and subsequent inability to receive has little to do with sharing one’s wealth. Rather, Genius asserts ‘thus mai a mannes wit be lerned … that erst was swete is thanne sour’ (6.1124–7). From the parable,

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one learns the consequences of heeding sensual desire and should, therefore, exercise moderation and self-control. For Gower, the oft-neglected final section of the parable, in which Abraham refuses to send Lazarus back into the world to warn Dives’ family, offers a corrective to Dives’ unruly behaviour, since it holds up divine law as the pre-eminent and sufficient guide to right living. As in Luke’s Gospel, Abraham first refuses Dives in Confessio Amantis on the grounds that ‘his brethren mihten knowe and hiere / of Moises on erthe hiere / And of prophetes othre mo, / What hem was best’ (6.1091–4).77 In other words, knowledge of the teachings of Old Testament scripture – the law of Moses and the prophecies that show the advent of Christ – should suffice for salvation.78 Gower’s Abraham continues, however, to refer to the primary means by which lay Christians would know biblical teachings: For if thei nou wol noght obeie To suche as techen hem the weie, And alday preche and alday telle Hou that it stant of hevene and helle, Thei wol noght thanne taken hiede, Though it befelle so in dede That eny ded man were arered. (6.1101–7, italics added)

Adapting Abraham’s response to a fourteenth-century context of preaching or even examination of conscience like Amans experiences in this text,79 Gower holds up the authority of divine law as conveyed through church teachings. This part of the parable, then, validates Genius’s pedagogical mode: God reveals truth through scriptural stories, and salvation depends upon the ability to apply narrative content to one’s own life.80 In addition to highlighting scriptural authority in the narrative itself, Gower emphasises divine law in his introduction to the parable, where he devotes an unusual amount of prefatory text to establishing its authority.81 Genius claims the story ‘is no fable’ and then names Christ as its teller three times in the span of twelve lines (6.974). The parable, he insists, does not obscure in metaphor but makes ‘plein’ the danger of delicacy. Likewise, because ‘Christ himself it berth witnesse’, the parable’s lessons may be regarded as ‘certein’ (6.978–9).82 Uniquely among his introductions to biblical stories in Confessio Amantis, Genius then describes himself as a translator of scripture: And thogh the clerk and the clergesse In Latin tunge it rede and singe,

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Yit for the more knoulechinge Of trouthe, which is good to wite, I schal declare as it is write In Engleissh. (6.980–5)

Gower refers to the text’s more common Latin form and its predominantly clerical audience to convey the parable’s prestige, even as he rewrites it in Middle English in the interest of disseminating truth.83 If the final scene of the parable holds up scripture as the surest guide to salvation, the introduction ensures that audiences interpret this story as just such a guide. The parable’s salvific instruction, according to Gower, pertains to those entrusted to rule. Much like Mannyng’s and Idley’s references to lords or sovereigns, Gower addresses ‘he that is a ­governour / of worldes good’ as well as ‘he which lord is of the thinges’ in the parable’s explication (6.1128–9, 1133).84 Yet like the references to almsgiving that only addressed Dives’ impending suffering, these invocations similarly ignore the lower classes, describing power over property, not people. Far from condemning the rich’s exploitation of the poor or attributing their wealth to theft, Genius states that lords should have all the brooches, rings, gold cloth, and precious stones that become their station, so long as they do not prize such possessions in their hearts (6.1130–6). In other words, they must maintain control over their wealth and not subjugate themselves to it. Suggesting that appetite is more powerful than greed, Genius concludes that those who take mater­ial goods should nonetheless eschew delicacy, if they wish to live rightly (‘goth the rihte weie’) in a manner that nourishes their souls (6.1142–4). The rich may rightly possess and even lavishly consume,85 so long as they remain masters of their physical desires. Read only in the context of Book Six, Gower’s parable starkly contrasts Mannyng’s and Idley’s renditions that emphasise the plight of Lazarus and how the untempered greed of the rich inflicts suffering upon the poor. Seemingly, Genius looks out for the good of his confessee in this fictional examination of conscience, while those writing more pragmatic penitential texts promote the welfare of the whole community. Yet if we consider Gower’s parable within the larger frame of Confessio Amantis, including the prologue, it too connects delicacy to the health of the social body. Although the seven books of Confessio Amantis primarily focus on a single unrequited lover, the prologue opens the text with an estates satire, followed by an apocalyptic vision of disintegrating social bonds embodied by the statue in Daniel 2. As R. F. Yeager asserts,

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the juxtaposition of the social and the individual in Confessio Amantis ‘provide[s] a context for discussing love on social terms’, making explicit the connection between physical bodies and the body politic.86 In Gower’s view, the division of self, caused by the desires of the body conflicting with the inclinations of the soul, crucially affects the moral health of the aggregate. He characterises the individual body as a microcosm of the larger world and argues that ‘whan this litel world mistorneth, / The grete world al overtorneth’ (Prologue 957–8).87 Social disorder, in other words, stems from individual moral disorder. In the Prologue, Gower laments the violence inflicted by each estate upon the others and suggests that their reconciliation begins with reconciliation of the conflicting desires within the self. It is the accumulation of each individual’s experience of penance, Elliot Kendall argues, that may bring about the age of Arion that Gower invokes at the end of the prologue as his hope for society,88 an age in which ‘the comun with the lord, / And lord with the comun also / He sette in love bothe tuo’ (Prologue 1066–8). Still, this love binding commons to lords would exist with significant socio-economic inequality. The parable of Dives and Lazarus bears witness to what Kendall observes as the limits of Gower’s envisioned reform: although the penitential discourse of Confessio Amantis may mitigate the political and economic anxieties of the upper classes, it does not address ‘genuinely disadvantaged groups in society’.89 While Mannyng and Idley envision greater communal prosperity resulting from the rich looking outward, newly understanding their responsibility for and relationship to the poor, Gower encourages the rich to look inward so that the reformation of each individual may rehabilitate the larger community. In Confessio Amantis, therefore, the retold parable arguably exposes behaviours that hurt the social body, despite Lazarus’s diminished role in the story. As Gower focuses on the character closest to his reading public and his socio-economic position, he recasts Dives as the figure representing social need. Rather than Lazarus’s extreme poverty, the most prominent lack in Gower’s parable is Dives’ lack of control manifested in his unbridled appetite and his disregard for God’s law. In this retelling, the Gospel parable that Crassons calls ‘a focal text in late medieval discussions about poverty’ is a cautionary tale against personal misrule,90 one that counsels each person to take responsibility for his spiritual well-being and suggests that communal prosperity in the world and bliss after death can be reached without special regard for the poor.

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Notes  1 Margery Goates (ed.), The Pepysian Gospel Harmony (EETS OS 157, 1922).  2 Summarising medieval exegesis on the parable, Stephen Wailes writes that ‘far more space is devoted to extracting lessons in the area of moral theology than to presenting allegories’. Wailes, Medieval Allegories, p. 255. Aquinas’s Catena aurea briefly rehearses allegorical readings, primarily from Augustine and Gregory, after presenting extensive moral commentary on the full story. One allegorical reading associates Lazarus with Gentiles and the rich man with ‘proud Jews ignorant of the righteousness of God’; another reading interprets Lazarus as God ‘in the lowliness of His incarnation’. Aquinas, Catena aurea, 3:573, 576. In the longer sermon from which Aquinas has excerpted Gregory’s interpretations, Gregory characterises the parable’s moral reading as more significant than the allegory he rehearses. He writes, ‘frequently . . . what is heard last is best remembered. Therefore I will run through the allegorical meaning quickly so as to come more swiftly to the breadth of moral teaching.’ See Forty Gospel Homilies, p. 371. None of the Middle English retellings featured in this chapter presents allegorical readings of the parable.  3 Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, p. 21.  4 Crassons characterises the parable as a critique of communal division, claiming that it ‘emphasize[s] the catastrophic effects of the failure of mercy’ and ‘illustrates that charity is a form of love demanding recognition among different sectors of people’. The Claims of Poverty, p. 22.  5 A number of retellings reassure readers that the rich may be saved. A sermon in Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 806 points to Abraham and Job as evidence that one can be both rich and virtuous. Nonetheless, the writer warns that ‘harde it is to be riche and lyfe vertuously þer wiþ’. The relevant sermon in the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle similarly warns against immoderate enjoyment of wealth, while also emphasising that neither wealth nor poverty dictates one’s fate in the afterlife. As in the Bodley 806 sermon, the writer cites Abraham’s role in the story as evidence that the rich may come to heaven. See Bodley 806 fol. 75v and Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:223–4.  6 Following the Gospel’s framing, both Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica and the Glossa ordinaria refer to the parable as an exemplum warning against avarice. See Comestor, Historia Scholastica, Patrologia Latina 198, col. 1589C and Froehlich and Gibson (eds), Biblia Latina Cum Glossa Ordinaria, 4:198.  7 In addition to Mannyng’s text and Idley’s adaptation of that source, the Dives and Lazarus narrative also appears under gluttony in Of Schrifte and Penance. Like Handlyng Synne, Of Schrifte and Penance is a Middle

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English translation of Le Manual des Péchés. See Klaus Bitterling (ed.), Of Schrifte and Penance: The Middle English Prose Translation of Le Manuel Des Péchés (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1998). A short recitation of Dives and Lazarus also appears as a negative exemplum against gluttony in Alan of Lille’s The Art of Preaching, p. 33.  8 Along with Handlyng Synne, Latin collections like the Gesta Romanorum and Fasciculus Morum, as well as Middle English ones like An Alphabet of Tales and Jacob’s Well, catalogue stories for moral instruction, offering tales for use by preachers or for private reading by literate lay people. See Charles Swan (ed.), Gesta Romanorum (London: Routledge, 1905); Wenzel (ed.), Fasciculus Morum; Mary Macleod Banks (ed.), An Alphabet of Tales: An English 15th Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Basançon (EETS OS 126, 1904); and Brandeis (ed.), Jacob’s Well.  9 The overwhelming majority of the stories in Handlyng Synne, for example, are not scriptural. Eight of the sixty-six stories come from the Bible; two of those narratives are parables, including the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Luke 18:9–14) in addition to Dives and Lazarus. Many of its moral stories come from Gregory’s Dialogues, Jacques de Vitry’s sermons, or the Vitas Patrum. A few seem to be Mannyng’s own creations. See Sullens (ed.), Handlyng Synne, pp. 383–7. With regard to other collections, An Alphabet of Tales – a collection that presents exempla alphabetically according to theme –includes no parables. While only the first half of Jacob’s Well has been published by EETS, that volume contains no parables. 10 While Latin and vernacular texts alike commonly refer to the story as an example, Peter Comestor explicitly declares that the story is not a parable (‘Nec fuit hoc parabola’) but rather a historical event (‘in re ipsa’), since Jesus names the beggar figure. See Historia Scholastica, Patrologia Latina 198, col. 1589C. Compare Ambrose, whose explication begins with the assertion that ‘a narrative [narratio], rather than a parable, is seen when also a name is stated’. Exposition of the Holy Gospel according to Saint Luke, p. 339. 11 See J. Allan Mitchell, ‘Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity’, Exemplaria, 16:1 (2004), 231–3. 12 On ‘inward-focused’ and ‘outward-focused’ modes in medieval ethics, see Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 2–3. 13 As early as the 1990s, Larry Scanlon argued that defining exempla as illustrations of a moral principle was reductive. Reversing the traditional assumption that a moral precept would determine the shape of a narrative, Scanlon claims that narrative (more specifically, ‘narrative capacity for rhetorical complexity’) produces moral teachings and invests those teachings with ideological power. See Narrative, Authority, and Power, pp. 1–36 and 62 for the quotation.

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14 Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth, pp. 2 and 6. 15 Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth, pp. 1–26 (see especially p. 14). 16 As Mitchell has argued, although an exemplum may advance a specific, actionable point, the narrative instigates a process of reflection in which the individual discerns the ‘utility’ of the story and may elect to enact it in various ways. Ethics and Exemplary Narrative, pp. 17–18. 17 Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, p. 5. 18 Mark Miller describes Handlyng Synne as a text that ‘aimed at encouraging and refining ethical reflection’ and in doing so cultivated agency. See ‘Displaced Souls, Idle Talk, Spectacular Scenes: Handlyng Synne and the Perspective of Agency’, Speculum, 71:3 (1996), 608. Also relevant are Nancy Mason Bradbury’s description of the seeming discord between stories and their confessional framework in Handlyng Synne as dialogic and Anne M. Scott’s assertion that Mannyng wrote for a lay audience he assumed would be ‘open to intellectually demanding teaching’. See Bradbury, ‘Popular-Festive Forms and Beliefs in Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne’, in Thomas J. Ferrell (ed.), Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1995), pp. 158–79, and Scott, ‘“For Lewed Men Y Vnder Toke on Englyssh Tonge to Make this Boke”: Handlyng Synne and English Didactic Writing for the Laity’, in J. Ruys (ed.), What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), p. 399. 19 Christopher Cannon, ‘Form’, in Strohm (ed.), Middle English, p. 185. 20 Cannon, ‘Form’, p. 187. 21 Mannyng does make reference to his audience’s enjoyment of ‘talys & rymys’, but he intends to redirect their reading from entertainment to moral development. See lines 43–56. 22 As Peter Nicholson writes with reference to Confessio Amantis, ‘the proper question is thus not how the tales are restricted by the moral frame, for better or for worse, but instead what they add to it’. Love and Ethics in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 81. 23 For example, commentary in the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels describes Lazarus’s need as a sign of his moral depravity, asserting that Lazarus ‘hadde summe yuel dedis whiche weren purgid bi pouert and sikenesse’. This quotation comes from the short Luke commentary in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 143 in a section attributed to Bede and pseudo-Chrysostom. See fol. 154ra. 24 Gower’s retelling likely enjoyed the widest audience of these three versions, since it survives in forty-nine manuscripts – a far greater number than Mannyng’s and Idley’s texts. For a list of Confessio Amantis manuscripts that Macaulay sorts into three recensions, see

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G. C. Macaulay (ed.), The Complete Works of John Gower: The English Works, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 1:cxxxviii– clxvi or Hartung (ed.), The Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 7:2408–9. On the degree to which numbers of surviving manuscripts may indicate popularity, see Michael Sargent, ‘What Do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’, in Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney (eds), Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 205–44. 25 On the thirteenth-century pastoral writings that may have influenced Handlyng Synne, see Fritz Kemmler, ‘Exempla’ in Context: A Historical and Critical Study of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’ (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1984), pp. 24–59. On postLateran IV penitential literature more broadly, see Chapter 2 above, pp. 65 and 68–9. 26 According to Scott, the Manuel was written c.1260 and survives in twenty-five manuscripts dating as late as the fifteenth century. See ‘For Lewed Men’, 381. For an edition, see Frederick J. Furnivall (ed.), Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’, with Those Parts of the AngloFrench Treatise on which It was Founded, William of Wadington’s ‘Manuel des Pechiez’ (EETS OS 119, 1901). 27 Although Handlyng Synne is the oldest of the three texts I analyse in this chapter, it was still being copied into in the fifteenth century. In its complete form, Handlyng Synne survives in three manuscripts, all dating to c.1400; in one copy, Washington, DC, Folger Library MS V.b.236, it accompanied the C text of Piers Plowman and La Estorie del Euangelie. The other two complete versions survive in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 415 and London, British Library, Harley MS 1701. Another six manuscripts contain only fragments of the poem. See Sullens (ed.), Handlyng Synne, pp. xviii–xix. 28 Scott, ‘For Lewed Men’, 385–6. Kate Greenspan also identifies a mixed lay and clerical audience but defines those groups differently from Scott, arguing that Mannyng spoke directly to lay people and indirectly to the priests who may have read the text to that lay audience. See ‘Lessons for the Priest, Lessons for the People: Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Audiences for Handlyng Synne’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 21 (2004), 109–21. 29 Coleman, ‘Handling Pilgrims: Robert Mannyng and the Gilbertine Cult’, Philological Quarterly, 81:3 (2002), 311–26. Michael Stephenson’s hypothesis that Mannyng was a roving confessor for the Gilbertine nuns seems less relevant to his broad address to lay people and his specific references to lords in the section on gluttony. Stephenson, ‘Further Biographical Notes on Robert Mannyng of Brunne’, Notes and Queries, 45:3 (1998), 285. 30 Mannyng tells a story of St John the Almoner to encourage giving to

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the poor, even when they ask for more than they need, and a story of Bishop Troilus to instruct readers not to anticipate or plan [forþynkeþ] charitable giving. See lines 6837–7076. 31 Chaucer’s Parson, for example, commends abstinence as the remedy for gluttony based on the Summa virtutum de remediis anime. See ‘The Parson’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 317/831 and Benson’s explanatory note on page 956. Similarly, Speculum Vitae recommends soberness and temperance to counter gluttony. See William of Nassington, Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition, ed. Ralph Hanna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2:483–529. 32 The MED defines ‘deliciousli’ as eating delightfully or luxuriously. Referring to eating specifically, it defines the term as ‘sumptuously, in an epicurean manner’. Before teaching his audience about delicacy, Mannyng describes other forms of gluttony that he does not illustrate with a narrative. These include cursing or socialising with those who curse (6550–4), encouraging another to become intoxicated (6602–8), and eating during a time of fasting (6613–16). 33 See P. W. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993), pp. 114–15, and Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 50. Almsgiving was frequent and could also take more spontaneous forms. If, as Kate Mertes asserts, beggars at the door of the wealthy rarely left empty-handed, then Dives’ offence would appear especially negligent in its deviation from conventional social practice. See The English Noble Household 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 157–8. 34 Mertes, The English Noble Household, pp. 179–80. In Piers Plowman B.10, scripture censures those who deviate from this practice, stating ‘Elenge is þe halle, ech day in þe wike, / Ther þe lord ne þe lady likeþ noȝt to sitte. / Now haþ ech riche a rule to eten by hymselue / In a pryuee parlour for pouere mennes sake’ (97–100). See Kane and Donaldson (eds), Piers Plowman: The B Version. I am indebted to Alastair Bennett for drawing my attention to this passage. 35 In contrast, the later version of the Wycliffite Bible states that Dives ‘eete euery dai schynyngli’ (Luke 16:19). 36 Luke 16:20–1 states, ‘And there was a begger, Lazarus bi name, that lai at his ȝate ful of bilis, and coueitide to be fulfillid of the crummes, that fellen doun fro the riche mannus boord, and no man ȝaf to hym.’ 37 Le Manuel des Péchés states similar ideas but more compactly. What Mannyng expresses in lines 6681–6, the Manuel states in just three lines: ‘Quant fustes home terrien; / Fere couient dunc equité, / Qe Lazare seit en ioye, & vus penés’ (5548–50). See Furnivall (ed.), Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’, pp. 215–16. 38 Most of this content is unique to Handlyng Synne. After a short injunction to give alms in lines 6723–9, Handlyng Synne offers nearly

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ninety lines of commentary on the parable with no parallel in Manuel des Péchés. 39 Elena Levy-Nevarro, The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 35. 40 On the complex, even game-like multiple meanings of ‘kinde’, see Andrew Galloway, ‘The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to “Kyndenesse”’, The Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 365–83 and Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 191–6. 41 The relevant portion of Luke 16:21 states, ‘but houndis camen, and lickiden hise bilis’. 42 For example, a Wycliffite sermon asserts that the dogs’ action ‘syng­ nefieth compassioun of riche mennus seruauntis þat tey han of pore men’. Hindered by their lord from providing the extensive care that Lazarus required, these servants manifest the desire to show mercy but may not save the sick man from his impending death; Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:223–4. A similar interpretation appears in the relevant Bodley 806 sermon (see fol. 77v). In earlier Latin commentary, Gregory likewise interprets the dogs positively, associating them with preachers specifically: ‘When a dog licks a wound with its tongue it heals it. When holy teachers give us instruction during the confession of our sins it is as if they are touching the wounds of our hearts with their tongues. When they free us from our sins by speaking to us, it is as if they are restoring our health by touching our wounds.’ Conversely, Augustine describes the dogs as sinful men who ceaselessly praise wicked deeds with their broad tongues (‘qui lata lingua etiam laudare non cessant opera mala’). See Gregory, Forty Gospel Homilies, p. 372 and Augustine, Quaestionum evangeliorum libri duo, Patrologia Latina 38, col. 1350. 43 According to Crassons, Langland also argues that Dives was damned on account of unkindness in his commentary on the parable in Piers Plowman C.19 (or B.17). She identifies a similar argument in the sermon of William Taylor as well. See The Claims of Medieval Poverty, pp. 66, 150. 44 This content has no parallel in Manuel des Péchés. It does, however, recall part of Gregory’s sermon on Dives and Lazarus, in which the moral interpretation begins with the observation that New Testament commandments can be stricter than those in the Hebrew scriptures. He notes that in the Old Testament, ‘theft, not miserliness, is punished: wrongful taking of property is punished by fourfold restitution. In this place the rich man is not censured for having taken away someone else’s property, but for not having given away his own. He is not said to have forcibly wronged anyone, but to have prided himself on what

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he received. It is principally from this that we must infer what punishment a person will receive who plunders another’s property, if one who does not give what is his own is afflicted by punishment in hell.’ See Forty Gospel Homilies, p. 375. In Middle English, the Glossed Gospels rehearse a similar reading that they attribute to Bede and Augustine: ‘Bi what peyn shal he be punyshid þat rauyshiþ oþere mennis þingis, if he is dampned in helle whiche ȝiueþ not his owne þingis.’ See Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 143 fol. 153ra. 45 Peter Idley omits these lines from his adaptation of Mannyng’s text. While Matthew Giancarlo argues that Idley habitually covers up teachings that potentially would embarrass wealthy lay people, analysis of Idley’s parable will show a subtle but poignant critique of how the wealthy abuse their power. See Matthew Giancarlo, ‘Dressing Up a “Galaunt”: Traditional Piety and Fashionable Politics in Peter Idley’s “Translacions” of Mannyng and Lydgate’, in Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (eds), After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. 443. 46 Charlotte D’Evelyn (ed.), Peter Idley’s Instructions to His Son (Lancaster, PA: Lancaster Press, 1935), p. 45. For a detailed description of how the Instructions’ contents compare to the source texts, see pp. 36–57. 47 Complete or partial copies survive in ten manuscripts, three of which were discovered after D’Evelyn published her edition. For a list of the more recently discovered manuscripts, see Giancarlo, ‘Dressing Up a “Galaunt”’, p. 430. 48 Trained as a lawyer, Idley served as the Bailiff of Wallingford and the Controller of the King’s Works. Matthew Sullivan, ‘Biographical Notes on Robert Mannyng of Brunne and Peter Idley, the Adaptor of Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne’, Notes and Queries, 239:3 (1994), 303–4. 49 Giancarlo places Idley’s Instructions within a larger movement of ‘secular authors encroaching on clerical texts for edification and entertainment of a spiritual nature’. See ‘Dressing Up a “Galaunt”’, p. 431. 50 D’Evelyn (ed.), Instructions, p. 46. 51 These sentiments reveal the complexities and potential contradictions of a composite text: his rendition of Albertanus’s Liber Consolationis represents poverty considerably more negatively than the translation of Dives and Lazarus does. 52 Likewise, he writes that ‘in shrewes hande’, worldly goods further endanger the soul (lines 705–7). 53 Giancarlo highlights an omission from Handlyng Synne 6789–804 that condemns the rich as robbers. Idley does abbreviate this section considerably but still denounces an audience he directly addresses as ‘ye’ for robbing the poor. See ‘Dressing Up a “Galaunt”’, p. 443 and page 121 above.

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54 Idley’s condemnation of Dives affirms Christina Normore’s observation that, with regard to late medieval feasting, even magnificence (displays of greatness) required proper balance and restraint. On the relationship between the virtues of magnificence and temperance, see Normore, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance, and the Late Medieval Banquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 102–20. 55 D’Evelyn divides Book Two between the ten commandments and seven deadly sins sections (labelling them A and B, respectively) and begins line numbering anew at the beginning of section B. 56 See especially Piers’s conversation with Hunger in passus six of Piers Plowman B. For a cogent discussion of that scene, see Emily Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 83–92. 57 The MED includes blame in the first definition of ‘atwiten’ and lists reproach and taunt in the second. See also Idley’s claim that ‘the almes is grucched and vnthankelie yoven / With scornfull wordis and grete rebuke’ (2227–8). 58 In the NHC, for example, the author introduces the parable as a warning not to wait until the point of death to give alms and then commends almsgiving as a practice that illuminates a path to God. For the man who willingly gives to the poor, the author claims, ‘almus gose bifor him euyn, / And wises [reveals to] him þe way to heuyn’. Charitable giving, according to this discourse, is not intended to heal social division but rather to bring the giver closer to God. See Nevanlinna (ed.), The Northern Homily Cycle, 2:275/14948–9. On the broader tradition in which, as David Aers states, the deserving poor were ‘viewed as one of God’s main contributions to the salvation of the rich’, see Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), p. 111. 59 Gower, like Idley, was a relatively wealthy layman. For evidence of Gower’s financial and legal transactions, as well as the suggestion that he was a lawyer, see John Fisher, John Gower, Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 47–69. For a more recent and concise summary of Gower’s social position, see Diane Watt, Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 1. 60 Joyce Coleman describes three immediate audiences for Confessio Amantis: royals and other nobles, the clerks who would read poetry to that audience, and Gower’s professional coterie. See ‘Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower May Have Intended the Confessio Amantis to Be Read’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 24 (2005), 209–36. Watt argues that Gower’s lay audience extended to a circle of educated gentry that may have included other writers like Chaucer and Hoccleve as well

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as one mayor of London (John Hend) and a member of Richard II’s household who eventually became Speaker for the House of Commons (Sir Arnold Savage). See Amoral Gower, pp. 2–4. 61 Confessio Amantis quotations come from Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, trans. Andrew Galloway, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000–4). 62 Matthew Irvin compares Genius to the private confessors of ‘great lords’ like John of Gaunt and imagines audiences reading Confessio Amantis with their confessors, during which time, he suggests, the difference between clerical and quasi-clerical discourses would be quite apparent. Irvin, The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), pp. 93–4. 63 See William Robins’s claim that through Genius’s and Amans’s exchange, Gower attempts ‘to provoke the subjectivity of the reader’. See, ‘Romance, Exemplum, and the Subject of the Confessio Amantis’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 19 (1997), 180–1. 64 James Simpson argues that Amans represents desire. Like the speaking voice in Ovid’s Amores, he describes Amans as ‘a lover who is divided against himself, humiliated by love though unable to stop loving’. Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 144–6. 65 Irvin notes that Amans repeatedly describes himself in a ‘seignioral relationship’ with Venus in which ‘his rights are totally at the discretion of his lord (or lady)’. The Poetic Voices of John Gower, p. 83. 66 Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), p. 125. 67 Based in part on Gower’s treatment of gluttony in Book Six, R. F. Yeager has argued that there was a tradition of associating blasphemy and sorcery with gluttony in late medieval England. See ‘Aspects of Gluttony in Chaucer and Gower’, Studies in Philology, 81:1 (1984), 45–8. 68 Irvin, The Poetic Voices of John Gower, p. 230. 69 See also lines 128, 183, 213, and 269 for similar statements. 70 The poem begins: ‘Delicie cum diuiciis sunt iura potentum, / In quibus orta Venus excitat ora gule.’ Joyce Coleman has suggested that Gower’s Latin verses would have been read aloud and translated by clerical readers in oral performance. See ‘Lay Readers and Hard Latin’, 225–9. On the aesthetic implications of Gower’s Latin poems and the similarity of Gower’s bilingual poetry to prosimetrum, see Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory, pp. 183–201. 71 Robert R. Edwards, ‘Gower’s Poetics of the Literal’, in Elisabeth Dutton, John Hines, and R. F. Yeager (eds), John Gower, Trilingual

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Poet: Language, Translation, and Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), p. 72. 72 Peck connects Gower’s representations of delicacy and sorcery with the power of the will to ‘re-create events according to its special wishes and even pervert[s] the senses so that they conspire’. See Kingship and Common Profit, p. 128. 73 ‘Bot, sone, if that thou understode / What is to ben delicious, / Thou woldest noght be curious / Upon the lust of thin astat / To ben to sore delicat, / Wherof that thou reson excede’ (6.956–61). 74 According to the MED, ‘laser’ could refer to a leper or to a diseased person more generally. 75 The idea that Lazarus is too weak to leave Dives’ gate does not appear in the Gospel text. 76 See note 23 above. 77 Cf. Luke 16:29: ‘And Abraham seide to him, Thei han Moyses and the prophetis; here thei hem.’ 78 Comments on this passage in the Glossed Gospels, attributed to pseudo-Chrysostom, suggest that Dives’ request shows his own lack of faith in scripture: ‘For in herynge Goddis scripturis he dispiside hem and gesside hem to be fablis. Bi þese þingis whiche he suffride or dide in him silf, he demyde of his briþeren.’ See Bodley 143 fol. 155ra. 79 Compare Luke 16:31: ‘And he seide to hym, If thei heren not Moises and prophetis, nethir if ony of deed men rise aȝen, thei schulen bileue to hym.’ 80 Patrick J. Gallacher argues that this encouragement to heed scripture directly opposes Amans’s eagerness to feed on the words of his beloved and the text of romances. See Love, The Word, and Mercury: A Reading of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), pp. 84–5. 81 By contrast, Mannyng does not name the source of the story when he introduces it; he treats it, instead, as a proverbial tale his audience should call to mind: ‘Wldest þou þenke on syre dyues, / And of þe pore man also, laȝare.’ At the beginning of his explication, Mannyng names Jesus once as its teller. See Handlyng Synne, lines 6628–9 and 6723. 82 Genius frequently praises the truth of biblical tales, calling the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s punishment in Book 1 a ‘tale that is soth’ and the tale of Ahab and Micaiah in Book 7 a ‘credible’ tale (1.2780, 7.2528). Even in comparison to other biblical stories, however, Genius’s focus on the authority of the parable is unusual. 83 Additionally, the final words before the narrative itself, ‘Crist seith’, succinctly reiterate its divine authorship. See line 986. 84 Irvin notes a shift in this passage to spiritual advice that ‘applies directly and only to actual governors and the wealth to which they have access’. He links that shift to a larger trend in the later books of Confessio Amantis in which Gower differentiates between his immedi-

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ate fictional audience and his wealthy readers or listeners. The Poetic Voices of John Gower, pp. 233–4. 85 ‘The beste mete that ther is / He ett, and drinkth the best drinke; Bot hou that evere he ete or drinke, / Delicacie he put aweie’ (6.1138–41). 86 See R. F. Yeager, ‘The Body Politic and the Politics of Bodies in the Poetry of John Gower’, in Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (eds), The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 160–1. 87 On the relationship between the microcosm of the ethical individual and the macrocosm of the body politic, see Elizabeth Porter, ‘Gower’s Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm’, in A. J. Minnis (ed.), Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 135–62. 88 Elliot Kendall, ‘Saving History: Gower’s Apocalyptic and the New Arion’, in John Gower, Trilingual Poet, p. 55. On Arion and the correspondence between self-rule of the king and the health of the nation, see R. F. Yeager, John Gower’s Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 265–79. 89 Kendall, ‘Saving History’, pp. 56–7. 90 Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, p. 21.

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4 Ethical allegories: the parable of the Good Samaritan

… and siþþe þus I hym tolde How þat feiþ fleiȝ awey and Spes his felawe boþe For sighte of þe sorweful segge þat robbed was with þeues. ‘Haue hem excused’, quod he; ‘hir help may litel auaille.’ (Piers Plowman B 17.90b–93)1

To an even greater degree than the story of Dives and Lazarus, the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:25–37) appears on its surface to be a moral exemplum: it showcases charitable good living, almost hyperbolically, and ends with an explicit injunction to do likewise. As this chapter will demonstrate, however, both the text of the parable in Luke’s Gospel and the exegetical tradition that emerged around that text complicated its exemplary function, calling into question whom one should help or if one should emulate the Samaritan at all. In fact, most scholars who discuss the parable in Middle English texts emphasise the Christological allegories exegetes found within the narrative and either disregard or take for granted its moral instruction. With reference to the retelling in the C text of Piers Plowman, David Aers persuasively argues that ‘Langland writes the parable of the Samaritan and Semyuief to figure forth processes through which the consequences of sin are recognized, forgiven, and gradually healed in that strange history that is the Atonement.’2 In other words, rather than instruct readers to act charitably, the parable reveals how Christ acts charitably toward human sinners. This chapter demonstrates that Middle English writers also presented the Samaritan parable as an exemplary tale that teaches audiences how to live. It argues, more specifically, that textual factors – the dynamics of the Gospel story and the tradition of allegorical interpretation – as well as social factors spurred disagreement about the ethical injunction advanced by this seemingly straightforward example of Christian charity. Even in the context of Luke’s Gospel, the parable’s ethical

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implications are more complicated than often assumed. The story appears in a discourse on salvation, where a lawyer asks Jesus how he may attain eternal life. When Jesus affirms that the lawyer should love God and love his neighbour as himself, the lawyer attempts to test Jesus by probing a potential ambiguity: he asks, ‘And who is my neiȝbore?’ Rather than answer directly, Jesus narrates the story of an anonymous man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho, who encounters thieves that rob him, wound him, and leave him half-alive. The three men who pass the wounded man on the road display radically different responses to him: total neglect or exceptional care.3 A priest and a Levite both walk by and do nothing. But the Samaritan attends to his every need – an act made more extraordinary by the fact that, in the first century, Samaritans were considered enemies of the Jews.4 Demonstrating an unconventional degree of love, the Samaritan treats his wounds, transports the man to an inn where he pays for his care, and promises to pay for any extra expenses upon his return. At the story’s conclusion, Jesus rephrases the lawyer’s initial question in a way that focuses on action. Rather than identify whom the lawyer should love as neighbour, Jesus characterises neighbourliness as an expression of love, enquiring which of the three men was neighbour to the wounded man. The lawyer responds ‘He that dide merci in to him’, and Jesus tells him to go and do likewise. Whereas Luke’s Gospel characterises the parable as a moral example, an exegetical tradition stretching back to the early church explained it as an allegory of the Redemption.5 Commonly, patristic and medieval exegetes associated Adam (or humankind) with the wounded man, who was injured by sin after travelling from heaven (represented by Jerusalem) into the world (represented by Jericho).6 The priest and the Levite who fail to heal him are often associated with the law and the prophets, while the Samaritan is read as a figure for Christ. Commentators variously explain the oil and wine with which the Samaritan treats the wounds as, for example, forgiveness and judgement or hope and fear.7 The placement of the wounded man upon the Samaritan’s horse may signify the Incarnation, or Christ bearing humanity’s sins, and the innkeeper or inn itself the church.8 Finally, the Samaritan’s promise to pay for expenses upon his return typically refers to his resurrection,9 while the two denarii that should provide for the wounded man’s care in the meantime are said to represent a variety of pairs within Christian teaching: father and Son, the old and new covenant, or the commandments to love God and neighbour.10

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Such allegorical readings seemingly deflect the ethical challenge the parable poses for ordinary Christians, insofar as they identify the extraordinary deeds of the Samaritan with the divine love of Christ: instead of urging people to care for one another, the parable reassures an audience that God meets human need. Among Middle English works, this Christological allegory is best known through its animation in Piers Plowman (B.17 or C.19). In his Samaritan episode, Langland integrates a Redemption allegory into the action of his story, inverting the Samaritan’s journey so that he travels from Jericho to Jerusalem, where he then jousts with the devil and mounts the cross. Since the Samaritan-Christ heals the man’s sin just before the crucifixion, the parable functions as a prelude that foreshadows and explicates the redemptive significance of the Passion. Given the long history of interpreting the parable allegorically and the popular dramatic poetry Langland creates from such exegesis, it is tempting to assume that allegory displaced exemplarity in medieval accounts of the parable. Suggesting just this scenario, J. A. W. Bennett has characterised moral readings as modern readings that differ ‘almost toto coelo from that of the early Fathers of the Western Church and their medieval successors’.11 The medieval hermeneutic for this parable, he implies, is figurative – or so it would seem if we read Piers Plowman only in the context of medieval Latin and patristic exegesis. In fact, the landscape of Middle English retellings is far more diverse. Translations in lives of Christ often present only moral interpretations of the story, with no mention of allegory. Moreover, a number of Middle English sermons combine a Christological allegory with an injunction to imitation, sometimes in awkward ways that highlight the potential disjunction between the two interpretive traditions. Beyond demonstrating the persistence of moral interpretations, such translations show authors’ attempts to reconcile the parable with contemporary discourses on charity: notably, none of these retellings commends the same course of action, and some articulations of the parable’s ethical injunction directly conflict. Given the parable’s focus on an anonymous man in need, it squarely intersected with late medieval debates over the value of indiscriminate charity. Did the Samaritan’s example obligate Christians to care for their immediate neighbours or to care for all? Should Christian generosity extend even to those who chose poverty, neglected to work, or became destitute on account of immorality?

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Although almsgiving remained an integral part of Christian living throughout the later Middle Ages, socio-economic factors in the decades following the plague may have generated less attention to and sympathy for poverty than in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In addition to creating a labour shortage and putting pressure on wages, the massive population decline after 1350 made more land available to each rural family, all of which reduced structural poverty. Historians estimate that whereas nearly one in five people suffered from hunger in the early fourteenth century, only one in twenty experienced the same degree of poverty by 1500.12 In this climate of relatively abundant opportunity, the able-bodied and wandering poor were often derided as loafers who elected not to work.13 At the same time that the overall number of people in poverty decreased, the population that was unable to provide for itself – the sick, disabled, orphaned, and unskilled – held steady or, in some locations, increased.14 While Christopher Dyer concludes that these groups received more attention once the general level of poverty waned,15 some still regarded the neediest with suspicion, accusing people of feigning disability to avoid work.16 Moreover, despite the fact that many involved in the Peasants’ Revolt had considerable wealth, class conflict at the end of the fourteenth century fostered distrust of the poor and may have converted charitable sympathy into fear.17 In addition to socio-economic factors, Christian teachings and ecclesiastical structures further complicated the question of to whom one should give. Patristic and medieval theologians alike recommended discriminate charity as a response to limited resources, with some prioritising the morality of the recipient and others prioritising kinship or proximity.18 As discussed with reference to Dives and Lazarus, medieval Christian doctrine described poverty in conflicting ways: it could be seen as an especially holy state, one cherished and chosen by God, or it could be viewed as an indicator of sin, a kind of purgatorial suffering in the world.19 In choosing mendicant poverty, the friars both received resources that could be given to the poor and attempted to redefine poverty as a mode of spiritual perfection. Yet as the friars’ wealth and corruption increased, in the words of Kate Crassons, both ‘poverty and mendicancy came to be described more readily as signs of sinfulness than as hallmarks of Christian sanctity’.20 Giving to one’s parish, a monastery, or a local hospital could eschew the moral dilemma or logistical complications of identifying the deserving poor;21 yet that approach to giving shifts love of neighbour from an interpersonal

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to an institutional context, in which only those of a particular vocation care for the material and spiritual needs of the poor. Both the transhistorical problem of limited resources and the particular cultural dynamics of late medieval England inform how authors translated the Samaritan parable. In the analysis that follows, I will show how medieval writers made sense of the Samaritan’s radical charity, understood as an example of good Christian living and a manifestation of divine love in the divine person of Christ. After highlighting discrepant accounts of the parable’s moral injunction in Middle English lives of Christ and what I consider unsatisfying, sometimes discordant attempts to combine allegorical and moral readings in Middle English sermons, I offer an extended analysis of the Samaritan episode in Piers Plowman that more coherently integrates allegorical and moral readings of the parable. In an act of ‘tropological invention’ that converts allegory into action,22 Langland shows the complementarity, even mutual dependence, of these two seemingly divergent interpretive traditions: humanity both needs the healing mercy of Christ and actively participates in its expression through diverse forms of work in the world. While his account of the Samaritan story reflects investment in the same questions that occupy other translators, he presents innovative, theologically adventurous answers that characterise actions in the world as constituent of a transcendent, spiritual reality. Going beyond exemplarity, Langland insists that the critical question that emerges from the parable is not how to act like the Samaritan but how to act with Christ. Who is my neighbour? Disagreement about the story’s moral implications stems from ambiguities within the Gospel parable, as well as from the cultural context into which writers translated it. Although the Gospel story is framed by a conversation about the commandment to love one’s neighbour, the focus of that conversation changes from the introduction to the conclusion of the parable in a way that creates two ethical dilemmas. The lawyer originally asks who is his neighbour in an effort to discern whom the law requires him to love. At this point, we anticipate that the parable will indicate the proper recipients of Christian charity. Yet at the conclusion of the parable, we recall, Jesus asks who was neighbour to the wounded man, aligning the term neighbour with the one who gave love.23 In doing so, Jesus redefines the ethical crux of the parable, asking not who

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should receive mercy but rather how a person acts charitably. The term ‘neighbour’ comes to describe not just people close to one another in terms of geographical proximity or familial relations, but also a kinship based on an ethic of mercy. This redeployment of the term focuses readers’ attention on how they may act mercifully while raising important questions about the relationship between giving and receiving charity. Navigating these ambiguities, writers of Middle English retellings agree that the parable teaches readers how to love, but they offer different answers to the question ‘and who is my neiȝbore?’ that yield different standards for living charitably in community. Attention to the parable’s ethical implications is especially prominent in lives of Christ, a genre that translated the historical memory of Christ into ‘a structuring principle for Christian conduct’.24 Two such texts define neighbour widely, creating an inclusive sense of community. In the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, a mid-fourteenth work that interweaves all episodes from the four Gospels, the author adapts the parable to characterise it as a straightforward illustration of a moral principle: love everyone as your neighbour.25 Since the author aimed to create a cohesive, yet concise text out of the four Gospels, he typically streamlined his sources and rarely amplified parables.26 In the case of the Samaritan story, however, the author deviates from his normal practice, making additions that issue a stronger injunction to radical charity. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus immediately narrates the Samaritan parable following the man’s enquiry about the identity of his neighbour, without articulating a more direct response. In the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, however, Jesus gives a succinct answer to the lawyer’s question before proceeding to the story: ‘And Jesus hym seide euerychman, & tolde hym a tale of a man þat ȝede from Jerusalem to Jerico.’27 The author recites the full parable, in a translation that closely resembles the Vulgate, with the exception of one small addition: after stating that the Samaritan encountered the wounded man, he adds that this man ‘was paene also’.28 While historically inaccurate, the designation of the Samaritan as a pagan suggests that this man cared for someone with whom he shared no ties of kinship, community, or religion.29 When Jesus says to love everyone, this revision implies, he means a group even wider than one’s fellow Christians. The end of the parable reiterates the initial call to indiscriminate charity. Following Jesus’ instruction to go and do likewise, the author clarifies ‘þat is to sigge, þat he schal done to euerych man as to his neiȝborȝ’.30 Any ethical ambiguity

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generated by Jesus’ narrative reply to the lawyer has dissipated; the parable promotes an inclusive sense of community in which common humanity motivates merciful action. The author of Þe Lyfe of Soule similarly interpreted the Samaritan parable as an injunction to love all, with a retelling that emphasises both the centrality of this message to the Christian faith and the sharp challenge it imparts.31 This late fourteenth-century devotional text is not a traditional life of Christ, since it features a dialogue about salvation between a clerical and a lay speaker, but within that dialogue, the author translates and harmonises a wide range of scriptural teachings.32 Similar to lives of Christ and to the form of living Book to a Mother, this work attempts to integrate Gospel teachings into a coherent ethic for Christian life. Particularly in its latter half, as Nicole Rice describes, its author ‘arranges sections of New Testament antiphonally, demanding synthesis of the text into new forms of self-judgement and regulation’.33 Together, the two speakers collaborate to find the exemplary, actionable meanings of scripture.34 The Samaritan story appears in a section of the dialogue where ‘Frend’ teaches ‘Sire’ the positive acts of love that lead to eternal life.35 He begins with the seven bodily works of mercy, which he aligns with ‘þe lawe and þe prophetis’ and enumerates actions enjoined by the injunction to do unto others as you would have them do to you.36 Like Augustine in De doctrina christiana, Frend defines an ethic of love as the centre of all Christian teachings.37 He insists that all the ways in which Christ bids one to behave toward a neighbour either ‘is loue or it comeþ ouȝt of loue or it norischeþ loue’, and he describes such love as an outward sign of discipleship.38 The Samaritan parable appears as an illustration of the commandment to love your neighbour as yourself, a maxim that Frend characterises as the central ethic of Christian life. Directly preceding the parable, the author recites the portion of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus condemns the convention of loving friends yet hating enemies: He [Christ] seiþ also: It was iseyde summe tyme, þou schalt loue þi frend and hate þi enemy. But I seye ȝow, loueþ ȝoure enemyes and doþ wele to hem þat han ihated ȝow … For if ȝe loueþ onliche þilk þat louen ȝow, what mede schul ȝe haue. So doon puplicanes. And if ȝe gretteþ oonliche ȝowre owne breþeren, what schul ȝe doon more. So doon heþen men. Wherfore be ȝe parfyȝt as ȝoure heuenely Fadre is parfiȝt. And many tyme whan Crist bad a pharyse þat he schulde

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loue his nexte broþer as hymseluen, and seyde þat hit was oon of þe grettest comaundementis of Goddis lawe, þe pharise axid hym who was his broþere nexte.39

By combining Jesus’ rebuke of common social practice with the Samaritan parable, the author insists that the story is not an illustration of a self-evident ethic but rather an example of social action that defies human logic. As in the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, the writer adds information about the Samaritan’s identity to show that his good deeds were not motivated by affinity. After reciting a fairly close translation of the Vulgate parable, the author describes the story as an illustration of love that combines the golden rule and the instruction to love one’s enemy. Specifically, he rephrases the commandment to love one’s neighbour as ‘and so euery cristen man schulde louen his enemy as hymseluen’ and adds, with reference to the sociopolitical context of first-century Palestine, ‘for þe samaritan and þe Iew þat was iwoundid weren enemys’.40 Further clarifying the ethic of indiscriminate love articulated in the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, the author suggests that Christians should act charitably to the widest conceivable community, especially those the giver deems least deserving of mercy. Although these two harmonisations of Jesus’ teachings advocate indiscriminate charity in reference to the Samaritan, not all Middle English lives of Christ present the parable in this way. The retelling of the Samaritan story in the SEMP – a vita Christi narrative included in some copies of the SEL – presents a narrower vision of community based on affinity and advocates giving to others according to merit.41 In the conversation preceding the parable, the lawyer figure, here an anonymous inquiring man, states explicitly his desire for a limited definition of neighbour: Ther cam on & askid oure lord how he schulde his lyf lede To wynne here þe blysse of heuene; oure lord to hym sede: ‘Loue þi God with al þi herte & with al þat þou myȝttyst do, And þin euencristene þat is þe next euene forth þiself also.’ ‘Lord’, seyde þis oþer, ‘ho is myn next? – & myn euyncristen þer be so fele.’42

This final line that directly precedes the parable suggests both a desire to understand the relationship of the terms neighbour and fellow Christian, as well as a reluctance to assert that they are synonymous because of how demanding this would make the injunction to love.

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Rather than rebuke the man for wishing to constrict the scope of his charitable obligations, Jesus confirms that the instruction to love one’s neighbour applies to a limited group. The author unites the two uses of the term neighbour in the parable, suggesting that those who show mercy, as the Samaritan does, are the neighbours whom the law instructs one to love. Encouraging the man to imitate the Samaritan, Jesus states ‘and þou do also; / hoso do þe most mercy, most loue þou hym do’.43 In other words, the Samaritan’s acts of mercy merit mercy in return. The author extends this moral lesson in his explication, suggesting that this imperative trumps obligations of familial love: Be þis gospel we seeþ here þat oure lordys wil it is, Hoso is mylde and louyth þe wel, þou do so hym iwis, & þat þou holde hym nyȝ þin herte, & ofte[r] þou haue in mynde þan þou do þi nexte ken, ȝif he is vnkynde.44

While bonds of kinship would typically determine who is closest to one’s heart, the author suggests that a kind stranger should be the object of more inward affection and receive more acts of kindness than an unkind family member. According to the SEMP, the Samaritan parable depicts love as an act of reciprocity rather than something given unconditionally to others in need. Neighbourly love extends to a limited community defined by common virtue. Doing likewise While these scriptural harmonies concentrate on the scope of the commandment to love one’s neighbour, Middle English sermons that address the parable’s moral implications focus on the instruction to do likewise, showing less interest in whom to love than in how to do so. Like Langland, sermon writers articulate both moral and allegorical readings of the parable, but they rely upon the injunction to imitation to reconcile these different strands of interpretation. Three examples will show a range of approaches to advancing both moral and allegorical readings, collectively revealing the tensions inherent in such combination. In a sermon on the Samaritan parable from London, British Library MS Harley 2276,45 the writer does not even attempt to integrate his allegorical and moral interpretations. Instead, instruction to imitate the acts of love demonstrated by the Samaritan simply frames the explication of the story’s allegory. Commenting on the lawyer’s question ‘who is my neiȝbore?’ the

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Harley 2276 author describes the parable as having both moral and allegorical significance: ‘oure lord temprid his answer to him on such maner þat he shuld vndirstonde þat ech merciful worcher were his neiȝbore, but speciali goddis sone þat is cheef patroun of merci bitakyng of mankynde’.46 Initially, this twofold definition of neighbour seems to unite the moral and allegorical readings of the story to justify the ethic of love articulated in the SEMP: to love your neighbour means to love the merciful. Yet the explication that follows contains no mention of neighbours or physical acts of mercy; it exclusively focuses on an allegory of human sinfulness and redemption through Christ. The man in need is ‘Adam and oþer þat sprongen aftir of him’, wounded by the seven deadly sins while ‘he descendid in to derkenesse from liȝtsum paradys’.47 Only Christ, represented by the Samaritan, may heal humanity’s wounds ‘bi grace of techyng of þe Euangelie’. The oil used to treat the wounds represents the hope of forgiveness, while the wine, more ominously, ‘shewid to synful man fier of peyne for his synne’. The inn to which Christ brings sinful humanity is the stable of holy church, while his promise to return refers to final judgement.48 The writer returns to a discussion of loving one’s neighbour when he explicates the final exchange between Jesus and the lawyer at the end of his sermon, but he does so without relating that ethic to the specific acts of the Samaritan in the story or the sacrifice of Christ. He concludes that Christ recited the parable to teach that not ‘kinrede [blood relation]’ but mercy makes someone a neighbour, and he defends this unconventional understanding of neighbour as natural, stating that nothing ‘comeþ more of kynde’ than to help another in one’s same condition.49 As an example of such mercy, the author recommends feeding the hungry: ‘And herfor seiþ þe profete Ysaie, “breke þi breed to þe hungryng man. And such maner helpe is vndirstonde in þese nexte wordis aftir, go and do þou on lich maner.”’50 Not only does the author avoid direct articulation of how to imitate Christ’s redemptive act, he does not advocate imitation of the Samaritan in his specific act of caring for the sick or wounded. According to this sermon, the parable generally encourages works of mercy, like healing or feeding the hungry, but it remains unclear why and how the allegory of the Redemption relates to this moral imperative. Other sermon writers attempt to integrate the conversation about love of neighbour more directly into their allegorical interpretations. In the Middle English version of Robert de Gretham’s Mirror,51 a collection of sermons for lay readers translated from

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Anglo-Norman,52 the writer will ultimately advocate imitatio Christi as a means of following the gospel’s injunction to do likewise. His retelling begins, however, with commentary that conflates the precepts to love God and neighbour. In response to the enquiring man, here described as ‘a gret mayster of þe Iewes’ who wanted to ‘ouercomen Jesu’, the writer implores his audience to ‘holde we us in þe loue of God wiþ al oure herte & al oure soule & wiþ al oure þouȝt, & loue we oure neiȝebore as vsseluen’.53 His advice for how to do so emphasises an interior ethic of personal virtue. Whoever loves God will forsake wicked thoughts and the desires of his body; those who live in sin and folly love neither God nor themselves. Therefore, the writer explains, he who loves his neighbour as himself will help him live virtuously, ensuring that he ‘be in good lyf to Godward as hymself is’.54 In this reflection, love of God remains the writer’s primary concern and love of neighbour becomes a means of helping others fulfil the first commandment. The moral charge preceding the parable, insofar as it is focused on community, is essentially pastoral, encouraging readers to align their own wills and their neighbours’ with God’s. The retelling of the parable itself emphasises God’s love for humanity and the mystery of the incarnation. After observing that the enquiring man did not understand that Jesus was both God and man, the writer goes on to recite a version of the Samaritan parable that primarily consists of allegorical interpretations. For example, the writer never narrates the Samaritan’s basic actions. Instead, his retelling takes his readers’ knowledge of those and other events for granted, referring to them only briefly as he articulates their figurative meanings: þe Samaritan þat com þere for by bitokneþ Iesus Crist. For Samarien is as michel to seye as kepere oþer federe, & Iesus is kepere as Dauid seiþ in þe sauter … Vnto þe wounded man com Crist whan he toke oure kynde. Þe woundes of þe wounded man he bond whan he chastiseþ man of synne. & oyle he ȝet into his woundes whan he sendeþ us grace to repenten vs.55

In the Mirror, readers encounter not a story of worldly charity that can be understood as a figure for divine charity but just one allegorical narrative that explains how God redeemed humanity. At that story’s conclusion, the writer does not recommend ordinary acts of kindness or basic works of mercy but instead urges his audience to emulate the divine act of charity. Since Christ healed humanity by suffering on the cross, contemporary Christians should will-

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ingly suffer death for their neighbours’ spiritual well-being: ‘Crist suffred deþ for to ȝeue lyf. & we moten don also. We ne schul noȝt doute þe deþ for to bringe oure neiȝebore to heuene.’56 Bluntly applying the injunction to imitation to a Christological version of the story, the writer characterises the practical ethic of the parable as martyrdom. Presumably, this extreme form of imitatio Christi is one that Langland dismisses when his Samaritan insists that if the first two men acted in the same way as the third, ‘hir help may litel auaille’ (B.17.93). The author of the relevant sermon in the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle also characterises pastoral care as a subject of the parable, but he applies the idea of imitation in a way that distinguishes between the work of human beings and God. In this sermon, brief statements about loving one’s neighbour frame an allegorical interpretation of the Samaritan as Christ. In the opening sentence, the author declares that ‘this gospel telluþ by a parable how eche man schulde louen his eemcristene’.57 While the category of fellow Christian is significantly wider than a definition of neighbour based on proximity, this rendering still suggests a narrower social obligation than in The Pepysian Gospel Harmony or Þe Lyfe of Soule, where audiences are told to love everyone, including pagans or enemies. The concept of community invoked by this retelling becomes more ambiguous in the explication, where the author first states that a common human nature makes everyone a neighbour but then goes on to define neighbours as ‘alle men þat God ordeynuþ to blysse’.58 Even if ‘ordeynuþ’ refers to those chosen by God, not strictly those predestined, the charitable example offered by the Samaritan seems not to extend to those whom Wycliffite writers would describe as outside the true church. The sermon author explicates the narrative itself in a typical allegorical manner: the Samaritan is Christ, who heals humans of sin and arranges for their care in the church until he returns. Like the Samaritan character in Piers Plowman, the sermon author maintains that the priest and deacon who passed by the wounded man could do little to help him. In fact, he attributes the men’s inaction to their knowledge that only God could heal sin.59 Although God appears as the key actor in this account of the parable, the idea of loving one’s neighbour returns after the author identifies the innkeeper with prelates, whom God charges with nourishing the church with Christian teachings. Rather than advocate imitation of Christ the Samaritan, the author encourages readers to perform the role of the innkeeper who ‘is alle þese men þat God haþ choson

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to fedon his chyrche wiþ his lawe’. Directing his closing remarks to prelates, the author concludes ‘and so eche trew prelat þat helpuþ Crist to helon his chyrche is trew neybore to þe chirche and doþ in part as Crist dude’.60 Instead of doing likewise, the audience should do ‘in part’; essentially, they should participate in the charity manifested by the Samaritan, or Christ, in a helping, pastoral role. This shift in role model, from the Samaritan to the innkeeper, reorients the parable’s ethical imperative from one guiding diverse individuals to one guiding an institution.61 The true church cares for the needy in an extension and anticipation of the mercy bestowed by Christ. Beyond exemplarity The Middle English translations highlighted above show a lack of consensus about the scope and nature of the Samaritan’s charity as well as uncertainty about how his identification with Christ affects the injunction to imitation in Luke’s Gospel. Such competing accounts of the Samaritan parable’s moral implications should draw our attention to how a socially and theologically provocative poem like Piers Plowman represents and participates in this contemporary debate about what the parable calls audiences to do. Overwhelmingly, scholarship on the Samaritan episode in Piers Plowman has explored the exegetical sources of Langland’s allegory, elucidating his potential engagement with a rich commentary tradition while simultaneously characterising this Christological discourse as an interpretive key to the parable.62 The remainder of this chapter presents a complementary investigation of the ethics implied by Langland’s retelling, responsive to both contemporary discussions of the parable and to the ethical discourses that surround the Samaritan narrative in the poem. Like Piers Plowman as a whole, the poem’s Samaritan episode is dialogic, both quite literally, as a biblical drama that involves extensive conversation, and in a Bakhtinian sense of literature that emerges from and responds to the polyphonic threads of social discourse.63 In passus 17 of the B text, Langland gives voice to heterogeneous readings of the parable that circulated in the later Middle Ages:64 in Will’s questions and the Samaritan’s long speeches, the ‘vernacular, practical, worldly’ discourses that Anne Middleton associates with the voice of ‘public poetry’ in late medieval England meet with discourses that are Latinate, Christological, and transcendent.65 These practical discourses include the poem’s

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exploration of how to do well and contemporary discussions of the scope and degree of Christian charity, especially as they relate to the example of the Good Samaritan.66 Langland, I argue, intervenes in ongoing debates about the parable’s ethical implications by showing how moral readings may intersect with an allegory of Redemption. In other words, he employs the Samaritan parable to articulate a Christological ethic. Despite their careful attentiveness to the implications of Langland’s dialogism elsewhere in the poem, scholars have typically read passus 17 monologically, placing the Samaritan in a position of ‘power and arbitration’67 and regarding Will as the misunderstanding interlocutor who occasions the Samaritan’s explanation of the Redemption and the sacraments through which Christians share in it. Few scholars consider the social interactions featured in the parable at any length;68 some even downplay issues of human action, characterising the emphasis on Christ’s mercy as a corrective to earlier passages that suggest human actions can be salvific.69 Essentially, in scholarship on this aspect of the poem, the allegorical has eclipsed the moral. This habit, I argue, stems not simply from Will’s sometimes obtuse questions (as he attempts to determine whether he should believe in the Trinity or the law) but from critics’ privileging of the allegorical interpretations typical of patristic and medieval exegesis over the seemingly more obvious moral readings of the story. Yet as the retellings discussed above make clear, writers advanced competing notions of charity in relation to the parable and struggled to reconcile those injunctions to charity with a Christological allegory that encouraged audiences to identify with the one receiving, rather than showing, mercy. Langland’s intervention in this moral discourse hinges on a surprising omission: the Samaritan-Christ never tells Will to ‘go thou, and do thou on lijk maner’, as Jesus asserts at the end of the parable in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 10:37). The practical questions raised by the Gospel parable, regarding to whom and to what extent the obligation to love one’s neighbour extends, play a prominent role both in Langland’s depiction of communal living in the half acre (6.222–6; 7.70–8) and in a late medieval society concerned to discourage idleness while still caring for those in genuine need.70 Yet Langland rejects the notion that such questions are answered by imitation of one man’s exemplary actions, even if this imitation pertains not to a benevolent Samaritan featured in Jesus’ story but to Christ as the ultimate exemplar. The following analysis will show that Langland conceived of imitation as too narrow a mode of

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action to foster charitable living in the world. While the Samaritan provides a powerful example of how human actions can manifest divine mercy, his is not an exclusive or normative model. Rather than encouraging everyone to be like the Samaritan or even to be like Christ, Langland advocates collaborative participation with Christ, emphasising the redemptive nature of social responsibility and its diverse forms in differentiated vocations. While scholars have shown that exemplarity plays a large role in Langland’s poetics,71 in the Samaritan episode, Langland dismisses the idea of imitation.72 The long discourse on charity – which starts in passus 15 with Will’s question to Anima, ‘What is charite?’ (15.149), and culminates in the Samaritan episode – begins with a critique of exemplarity. When Anima tells Will that charity is a free, liberal will, as of a child, Will insists he has never encountered such a thing: ‘non inflatur, non est ambiciosa, non querit que sua sunt – / I seiȝ neuere swich a man, so me god helpe’ (15.157a–8).73 Will’s invocation of 1 Corinthians 13, the primary intertext of Langland’s Samaritan episode, implies that his ignorance of charity results not from unfamiliarity with church doctrine but from the imperfect enactment of such love within the world. He knows what charity should be but cannot find it exemplified in his fellow Christians. Anima attributes this lack of visible charity to the clergy who should provide a model for the laity, acting ‘as a good Banyer [standard-bearer]’, so that those who follow may be strengthened in their knowledge of Christ’s love (15.435–7). Yet the hypocrisy of the priesthood renders exemplary living an unreliable indicator of charity.74 Since even those who appear to follow Christ’s teachings often do so in the hopes of material gain, one cannot tell from action whether a person is charitable. After comparing the clergy to a snow-covered dunghill full of snakes, Anima next declares that ‘right so preestes, prechours and prelates manye, / Ye are enblaunched wiþ bele paroles and wiþ bele cloþes / Ac youre werkes and wordes þervnder aren ful wolueliche’ (15.114–16). While these lines suggest that works and words may divulge what appearance obscures, Anima goes on to discount apparently virtuous behaviour as a sign of charity. He warns that charity may be known ‘neiþer þoruȝ wordes ne werkes, but þoruȝ wil oone’ (15.210).75 If speech and action are not reliable indicators of charity, a person cannot learn to love simply by emulating the behaviour of another. Anima argues that those who follow the model of the clergy only adopt the semblance of holiness and lack an inner disposition of charity:

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And so it fareþ by som folk now; þei han a fair speche, Crowne and cristendom, þe kynges mark of heuene, Ac þe metal, þat is mannes soule, myd synne is foule alayed. Boþe lettred and lewed beþ alayed now wiþ synne That no lif loueþ ooþer, ne oure lord as it semeþ. (15.351–5)

The consequence of such hypocrisy is inversion of the law: no one loves God or neighbour. With this emphasis on example and law, Anima’s speech relates to the upcoming parable in ways more specific than just the common subject of charity: it teaches that example is an insufficient guide to good living, as deeds alone do not constitute charity. Instead of basing ethical behaviour on a single model, even the model of the Samaritan-Christ, Langland will define an ethic based on the ‘kyndenesse’ of actions – their responsiveness to human need and derivation from the divine nature humanity shares with God – in a variety of forms. When Langland introduces the parable itself, he casts Will in the role of the inquiring man. At this moment, Will shares some of the disregard for the law condemned by Anima. Whereas the question of defining ‘neighbour’ prompts the parable in Luke’s Gospel, the Samaritan’s arrival in Piers Plowman follows Will’s dismissal of the very commandment to love. Langland never directly engages the question of how to define neighbour, concentrating instead on the necessity of following the law. In fact, he never uses the Middle English word ‘neighebor’ in the Samaritan episode. Will reads the two commandments in Latin, as they appear on Spes’ patent: ‘Dilige deum et proximum tuum’ (17.12a).76 Will, not Spes or the Samaritan, defines ‘proximum’ widely, just as in the Pepysian Gospel Harmony or Þe Lyfe of Soule, when he declares that the law requires loving ‘as wel lorels [good-for-nothings] as lele [loyal ones]’ (17.47). Having learned about belief in the Trinity from Abraham and about following the law from Moses, Will views the two doctrines as alternatives and attempts to determine which provides the easier path to salvation. He complains about the difficulty of loving your neighbour, in a way that makes explicit those reservations hinted at by the anonymous man in the SEMP. Because the law of love does not discriminate according to affinity or merit, Will dismisses it as impractical and claims ‘so me god helpe, / Tho þat lernen þi lawe wol litel while vsen it’ (17.48–9). Yet the events of the parable swiftly contradict this assertion that the commandment to love all people as your neighbour is too burdensome, and it is Will himself who identifies disregard for the law as a transgression of social responsibility.

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The response to the parable that Langland encourages is not to try to be the Samaritan, emulating him as an imperfect copy, but rather to commit to working with him. In other words, Langland suggests that individuals are both in need of mercy and an integral part of how God meets human needs. Will follows the Samaritan upon his departure and effectively pledges to help him spread compassion.77 As a first step in this cause, Will points out the fearful neglect of those who passed by the wounded man, directing the reader’s attention to the moral dilemma of how to respond to people in need. Recounting events to the Samaritan, he remembers ‘How that feiþ fleiȝ awey and Spes his felawe boþe / For sighte of þe sorweful segge þat robbed was with þeues’ (17.91–2). Langland adapts the parable in ways that not only integrate allegory into the action of the story but also highlight the physical, practical reactions of the three travellers. His description of the first two depicts them as intensely afraid of the wounded man’s condition: they do not simply pass by but recoil from him. When Abraham perceives the man, ‘he fleiȝ aside / And nolde noȝt neghen hym by nyne londes lengþe’ (17.60–1). Langland raises expectations that Moses may be willing to help, as he boasted about saving many through the commandments.78 Nonetheless, Moses also self-protectively flees from the man ‘as doke dooþ fram the faucon’ (17.65). Their parallel reactions render the Samaritan’s behaviour more exceptional by comparison. With a similar rapidity to the first two travellers, the Samaritan moves toward the injured man, immediately alighting from the mule to inspect the man’s wounds (17.66–7). He offers what Crassons has described as ‘nonscrupulous empathy … with no hesitation, reservation, or inquiry into the cause of his suffering’.79 Even as the Samaritan figuratively represents Christ’s healing of human sin, he also provides a tangible example of caring for physical human needs without regard to personal relationships or merit.80 While Crassons rightly calls attention to the physical care provided by the Samaritan, Langland’s engagement with the issue of social responsibility is not restricted to commendation of those acts featured in the literal events of the parable. He addresses ethics in his allegory as well. When the Samaritan excuses the actions of Abraham/Faith and Moses/Hope, telling Will that ‘hir help may litel auaille’, he confirms that the wounded man needs the redemptive power of divine love, made possible by Christ’s Passion and experienced through the sacraments. As virtues, and even as historical figures living before the Incarnation, Faith and Hope

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would offer insufficient help because ‘no medicyne vnder mone þe man to heele brynge, / Neiþer Feiþ ne fyn hope, so festred be hise woundes’ (17.94–5). The Samaritan equates their powers with worldly medicines, while the medicines that he describes as curative come from God. Hailing the salvific power of the Passion, he insists that the man cannot be healed ‘wiþouten þe blood of a barn born of a mayde’ (17.96). Moreover, the complete path to recovery includes the continued experience of grace through sacrament: And he be baþed in þat blood, baptised as it were, And þanne plastred wiþ penaunce and passion of þat baby, He sholde stonde and steppe; ac stalworþe worþ he neuere Til he haue eten al þe barn and his blood ydronke. (17.97–100)

Just as the Samaritan enables the wounded man’s ongoing healing in the inn, the crucifixion enables the redemptive healing continually offered through the church. Through baptism, penance, and the Eucharist, the wounded man partakes of Christ’s sacrifice and gains his full strength (becomes ‘stalworþe’). According to these first lines of the Samaritan’s explication, the parable highlights expressions of love unique to Christ, as it teaches Will about the fundamental Christian mysteries of the Incarnation and the Redemption as well as the ritual mediation of divine love through the church. While Langland identifies a unique, essential role for Christ in meeting humanity’s essential need for forgiveness, he also describes ways in which people may work with each other and Christ to alleviate both physical and spiritual needs. Langland leaves out the injunction to imitation, but he still encourages his audience to follow the Samaritan. Just like Abraham, Moses, and Will, who all physically follow the Samaritan after the events of the parable (17.83–6), the Samaritan suggests that his followers are protected against sin, represented here by the outlaw in the woods: For wente neuere wye in þis world þoruȝ þat wildernesse That he ne was robbed or rifled, rood he þere or yede, Saue feiþ and myselue and Spes his felawe, And þiself now and swiche as suwen oure werkes. (17.101–4)

Langland expands the injunction from Luke’s Gospel to imitate a single individual’s actions to commend the wider, yet more ambiguous activity of ‘oure werkes’.81 The Samaritan emphasises his central role as he attributes the well-being of the fellow travellers to his presence: ‘For he [the devil] seigh me þat am Samaritan

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suwen Feiþ & his felawe / On my Capul þat highte caro – of mankynde I took it – / He was vnhardy, þat harlot, and hidde hym in Inferno’ (17.109–11). The Samaritan credits their safety not only to his accompaniment but also to the fact that he rides a horse, allegorically understood as his assumption of human flesh in the Incarnation. While this certainly invokes the Redemption, characterising it as essential for forgiveness of sin, it also calls attention to the essential humanity of Christ, suggesting that divine love in human form enables the well-being of this community. As the Samaritan will go on to reveal, such incarnate charity includes the acts of mercy people perform for one another. Within the collaborative action of ‘oure werkes’, Langland promotes differentiated participation in the Samaritan’s charity, suggesting that each may fruitfully labour in a different way.82 In a passage unique to the B text, Langland attributes specific roles to Faith and Hope that show these two figures are not just abstractions of theological virtues or Christian doctrines but representatives of particular activities in the world.83 The Samaritan calls Faith a forester and describes him as a guide for those who wish to follow his path to Jerusalem, here understood as heaven: ‘And þanne shal Feiþ be forster here and in þis Fryth walke, / And kennen outcomen men þat knowen noȝt þe contree / Which is þe wey þat I wente and wher forþ to Ierusalem’ (17.115–17). Performing the pastoral activities of the clergy, Faith teaches right living to those who have lost their way, so that they may follow the general manner of living of the Samaritan-Christ (‘þe wey þat I wente’) and progress to the same spiritual destination.84 Hope similarly enables people to follow Christ, but he does so through works of mercy that care for the weak and the sick. Like the innkeeper of the parable, ‘Hope þe Hostiler’ cares for ‘alle þat feble and feynte be, þat Feiþ may noȝt teche’ (17.118–19). The comment that Hope helps those whom Faith fails to teach suggests that Hope reaches out to those who are spiritually weak or faint of heart as well. He does so ‘with loue as his lettre [the law] telleþ’ (17.120), showing that where doctrine proves insufficient, Hope conveys God’s love through actions that address worldly needs. These roles remind readers that the virtues personified in the Samaritan episode may be manifest in a variety of human actions. Collectively, they suggest that the earthly pilgrimage is not individual but communal, a journey in which people must assist one another both through spiritual edification and by meeting neighbours’ basic needs. The assignment of different roles to Faith and Hope reinforces

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earlier assertions in the poem that communal prosperity depends upon people fulfilling their respective vocations, suggesting that this work is not only socially responsible but redemptive. In the plowing of the half acre, Piers enumerates diverse roles that contribute to the harvest, including sewing the bags that will store the crop and making clothes for the workers as well as for the needy (6.7–14). He explicitly discourages a knight from participating in the plowing and offers to ‘swynke and swete and sowe for vs boþe’ (6.25). As Piers adopts the role traditionally attributed to labourers in the three-estates model, he enjoins the knight to fulfil his conventional role as the protector that guards ‘holy kirke and myselue / Fro wastours and wikked men’ (6.27–8).85 In light of the collaborative work described by the Samaritan, such delegation of roles is not simple recourse to traditional social division but is central to Langland’s theology that regards human labour as a part of divine charity. Moreover, Langland does not restrict such participation to a role within the three-estates model; instead he shows how contemporary social groups may promote the well-being of their communities. In the explanation of the pardon in passus 7, Truth instructs merchants how they may care for the needy: Ac vnder his secret seel truþe sente hem a lettre, And bad hem buggen boldely what hem best liked And siþenes selle it ayein and saue þe wynnyng, And make Mesondieux þerwiþ myseise to helpe, Wikkede weyes wightly amende And bynde brugges aboute þat tobroke were, Marien maydenes or maken hem Nonnes, Pouere peple bedredene and prisons in stokkes Fynden swiche hir foode for oure lordes loue of heuene, Sette Scolers to scole or to som kynnes craftes, Releue Religion and renten hem bettre. (7.23–33)

As articulated here, Christian social responsibility goes beyond imitating the particular acts of Jesus. Using their profits, merchants may care for the sick by financing hospitals that serve the poor. Beyond acts of healing and feeding the hungry, Truth also describes financing public works or supporting poor scholars as means to ensure communal well-being. As in passus 17, Langland characterises these acts of charity as integral to safe passage in the world and constitutive of a path to salvation. Truth tells the merchants that if they care for their community in these ways, they need not fear the devil; their souls will reach heaven ‘in saufte’

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(7.35–7). Such parallels show continuity between the Samaritan episode and the communal ethics featured earlier in the poem. Even when Langland calls attention to the healing of sin made possible by the crucifixion, he articulates practical and varied ways for humans to participate in their redemption. The theological basis for both, of course, is fully articulated in passus 19 with the gift of vocations at Pentecost (19.215–59). If vocations are a manifestation of grace, it follows that divine charity emerges from fulfilment of those diverse roles.86 Living in divine community The Samaritan’s extended discourse on the nature of the Trinity further suggests the interconnection of social responsibility and salvation, as Langland insists that actions within human communities are actions within the divine community. Langland addresses the moral implications of the parable most poignantly where the reader least expects it: having employed a parable about love of neighbour to demonstrate the nature of divine love, he then shows the necessity of human kindness in the ultimate figure of divine love, the Trinity. This integration of ethical and theological doctrines aptly appears where Will tries to reconcile codes of behaviour and belief, as he reconsiders his earlier dismissal of the law and asks the Samaritan whether he should believe in it or in the Trinity (17.127–33). When the Samaritan affirms both teachings, he demonstrates the interrelation of the communal love of the Trinity and communal love of one’s neighbour. In two extended metaphors, the Samaritan defines the nature of the Trinity, the ‘kynde’ or natural participation of humanity in this divine community, and ultimately, how human actions may facilitate or impede God’s redemptive love. Both the hand metaphor and the candle metaphor particularly emphasise the role of the Holy Spirit – the member of the Trinity with whom people directly interact.87 My analysis will focus on the second image, as it is in this one that Langland depicts human interactions as a part of the communal interaction of the Trinity. With the candle metaphor, the Samaritan likens the Father to the wax, the Son to the wick, and the Holy Spirit to the flame. As he does in the preceding image of the hand, the Samaritan attributes to the Holy Spirit a power central to the functioning of the Trinity, particularly for the expression of divine mercy.88 As the flame, the Holy Spirit warms the wick (the Son) and the wax (the Father) so that he ‘melteþ hire

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myȝt into mercy’ (17.230). The metaphor demonstrates that people participate in the work of the Holy Spirit in a way that generates divine mercy: their acts of charity fuel the flame of the Holy Spirit that ‘gloweþ but as a glede [burning coal] vnglade / Til þat lele loue ligge on hym and blowe’ (17.227–8). Characterising the relationship between human love and God’s love as symbiotic, Langland suggests that human mercy cultivates divine mercy. He expresses this relationship most emphatically in the negative, warning that unkindness impedes this exchange of love, effectively quenching the flame of the Holy Spirit. For all ‘vnkynde’ Christians, the Samaritan explains, the Holy Spirit is ‘god and grace wiþoute mercy’ (17.218). With this final portion of the Samaritan’s speech, Langland argues that the presence or absence of divine mercy in the world is a function of people expressing or transgressing their divine nature or ‘kynde’.89 The Samaritan’s speech both informs and is informed by the union of the compassionate and the natural that scholars have observed in Langland’s use of ‘kynde’ earlier in the poem.90 Andrew Galloway describes ‘kyndenesse’ in Piers Plowman as simultaneously referring to nature, compassion, and God, and he argues that Langland’s ‘kyndnesse’ refers to a social ethic that unites a ‘vast and diverse’ community through the sharing of goods and ideas.91 In other words, ‘kyndenesse’ is charitable action among an inclusively defined group of neighbours and resembles the care for physical and spiritual needs commended as the collective works of the Samaritan and his companions. Unkindness, on the other hand, is the failure to address people’s needs in community, as Wit points out in passus 9 when he condemns Christians for not helping one another, while the Jewish people ‘helpeþ ooþer of þat þat hym nedeþ’ (9.88).92 Nicolette Zeeman’s analysis of the concept ‘kynde’ in the poem similarly resonates with the Samaritan parable, as she describes the two commandments to love God and neighbour as ‘Langland’s kynde morality’. Associating ‘kynde’ with the condition of physical and spiritual lack, she argues that ‘kynde love’ must be expressed in the act of giving to those in need.93 Langland combines the varied meanings of ‘kynde’, including natural inclination or characteristics, care for others’ needs, and divinity, in the Samaritan’s explanation of the Trinity. In the scope of 26 lines (17.251–77), Langland employs the term no less than fourteen times, whether as ‘kynde’, ‘vnkynde’, or ‘vnkyndenesse’.94 As the Samaritan asserts that the lack of human love leads to a lack of grace, the multivalence of the term ‘kynde’ coalesces into

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a cohesive vision of divine and human charity: ‘Thus is vnkyndenesse þe contrarie þat quencheþ, as it were, / The grace of þe holy goost, goddes owene kynde. / For þat kynde dooþ vnkynde fordooþ’ (17.274–6). ‘Vnkynde’, here invoking both antisocial behaviour and spiritual perversion, destroys that which ‘kynde’ or God creates;95 thus, as John Chamberlin aptly puts it, ‘vnkynde’ Christians transgress their creator and ‘unmake’ themselves.96 With ‘vnkyndenesse’, Langland characterises selfish, harmful action as a distortion of human goodness and the divine order.97 Offenses against one’s neighbours are offences against God. Referring to this section of passus 17, Galloway argues that the Samaritan ‘sacralizes’ a secular social ethic articulated earlier in the poem. But we need not view the Samaritan’s use of ‘kyndenesse’ as an addition to or an adaption of an earlier concept. Langland does not render a secular ethos more sacred in the Samaritan’s speech but reveals the already sacred nature of communal interaction, as he shows that human community is circumscribed by and constituent of divine community. While explaining this interrelation, Langland warns against specific offences through which people frequently or severely damage communal bonds. In using the Samaritan parable as an occasion to censure particular vices, his explication differs from other Middle English renditions of the parables, including extant sermons, that focus their moral readings on imitation. Instead, Langland urges his audience to consider their potential participation in a variety of different roles in the story. The Samaritan’s first example of unkindness is akin to the actions manifested by Abraham/Faith and Moses/Hope – neglect of those in need – and attests to the legitimacy of Will’s initial concern. Speaking to rich men in particular, the Samaritan warns them not to meet the same fate as the rich man from the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31): refusing to feed the sick, hungry man who lay at his gate, ‘Diues deyde, dampned for his vnkyndenesse / Of his mete and moneie to men þat it nedede’ (17.268–9). By means of a different parable from that he has just narrated, Langland suggests that failure to respond to someone visibly in need jeopardises salvation. With a second example of unkindness, he condemns more active offences resembling those committed against the man in the Samaritan parable. He focuses on the literal acts of theft and murder, as opposed to their allegorisation as the effects of sin, and describes an unkind Christian as he who ‘for coueitise and enuye / Sleeþ a man for hise moebles wiþ mouþ or with handes’ (17.277–8).

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The example suggests that people should not simply identify with the man lying half-dead, wounded by his own sin, but also should recognise how their sins may wound others. By adding that people may verbally slay one another, the Samaritan widens the scope of this malice from those who actually commit acts of violence to those who encourage violence or defame others for material gain. All such people injure the two qualities that the Holy Spirit guards, ‘life and loue, þe leye [flame] of mannes body’ (17.280). With this analogy that likens a person to a candle, the Samaritan reminds Will that people are made in the image of and union with the trinitarian God. When one person destroys another, extinguishing the flame of life, the flame of the Holy Spirit that would extend divine mercy is destroyed as well. As seen in the invocation of Dives and Lazarus, Langland most explicitly addresses the relation of love of neighbour and divine mercy when condemning specific offences. Explaining in more practical terms how sins like theft and murder extinguish God’s love, the Samaritan suggests that without love of neighbour, repentance is ineffective: Be vnkynde to þyn euenecristene and al þat þow kanst bidde, Delen and do penaunce day and nyght euere, And purchace al þe pardon of Pampilon and Rome, And Indulgences ynowe, and be ingratus to þi kynde, The holy goost hereþ þee noȝt ne helpe may þee by reson. For vnkyndenesse quencheþ hym þat he kan noȝt shyne Ne brenne ne blase clere, for blowynge of vnkyndenesse. (17.254–60)

The Samaritan dismisses the mechanisms of penance that offer individuals absolution from sin without directly rectifying their misdeeds. Feeling contrite or securing a pardon cannot redress offences against one’s neighbour. So long as a person antagonises or neglects his neighbour, he remains estranged from the Holy Spirit. The Samaritan asserts the inverse of this relationship as well, ultimately claiming that God extends mercy to those who live well in community. The Samaritan introduces an ethic of reciprocal love when he states: ‘Leue I neuere þat oure lord at þe laste ende / Wol loue þat lif þat lakkeþ charite’ (17.296–7).98 On its surface, this idea of giving love to those who act charitably looks similar to the reciprocal ethic articulated in the SEMP, but its context differs significantly. The Samaritan refers to Christ, not Christians, and applies this ethic to a very particular moment: ‘at þe laste ende’. Just

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as Langland does not encourage direct imitation of the Samaritan, neither does he suggest that people should discriminate in the same way Christ does at judgement. The Samaritan never narrows the definition of neighbour so that it only applies to the virtuous; rather, the law has as its object ‘alle manere men’ (17.353). Divine community may include only those who act with love; for people to participate in it, however, they must extend charity to a human community rife with sinners. Although the idea of Christ showing mercy only to the merciful seems exacting, the Samaritan tempers this message with an insistence that people have an innate ability to act charitably. Whereas the author of Þe Lyfe of Soule stresses the ethical challenge of the Samaritan parable, characterising it as one that goes against human convention, Langland emphasises how easily people should be able to participate in the Samaritan’s work. Kindness comes so readily that no one is so sick, sorry, or wretched that he may not ‘wisshen and willen / Alle manere men mercy and forȝifnesse, / And louye hem lik hymself, and his lif amende’ (17.350–4). Countering Will’s earlier complaint that loving one’s neighbour is too difficult, the Samaritan describes merciful action as humanity’s intrinsic and realisable vocation. This insistence on a natural ability to live well in community explains why Langland devotes so much of the Samaritan’s explication to condemnation of particular behaviours rather than injunctions to positive actions. For Langland, the parable does not necessarily invite radical acts – we are far from the Mirror sermon’s suggestion that people should imitate the Samaritan by risking their lives – but exposes transgressions that destroy community and urges people to turn their behaviour to those intuitive acts that participate in and express divine, redemptive love. The injunction that follows from the story is not to do as the Samaritan does but to charitably perform one’s social vocation, recognising physical and pastoral work as not just elements of a pilgrimage to Truth but as a means of already belonging to and participating in it. Reading Middle English accounts of the Samaritan story alongside Piers Plowman throws into relief the complexity of Langland’s parable. He does not merely dramatise an allegory of the Redemption that enables forgiveness of sin; nor does he simply offer a moral reading that defines ‘neighbour’ and encourages imitation of the Samaritan’s actions. Langland brings these interpretive strands into conversation with one another and then synthesises them in a Christological ethic that regards love of neighbour as

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central to the Redemption. According to this ethic, people should address human need without reference to merit but should not, as individuals, try to address all need. For Langland, human charity is necessarily limited, even selective. But rather than emphasise this lack, in the Samaritan episode, Langland asserts a positive ability to perform divine charity ‘in part’, to borrow a phrase from the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle. When the Samaritan connects human kindness to the flame of the Holy Spirit, he suggests that loving one’s neighbour makes one not like God, in an act of imitation, but rather of God. Langland’s Christological allegory, therefore, depends upon human ethics: because acts of social responsibility are what cultivate and express divine mercy, humanity is redeemed in community.99 Notes  1 Unless otherwise indicated, all Piers Plowman quotations come from Kane and Donaldson (eds), Piers Plowman: The B Version.  2 David Aers, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and FourteenthCentury Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), p. 93.  3 Charles Hedrick characterises both actions as exaggerations and suggests the story could be read as burlesque or satire. See Parables as Poetic Fictions, p. 116.  4 Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, p. 204. Robert Funk calls the help from a Samaritan specifically a ‘surprising, odd turn which shatters the realism, the everydayness of the story’. See ‘The Old Testament in Parable’, in Scott (ed.), Funk on Parables, pp. 76–7.  5 According to Riemer Roukema, individual elements of the allegory appear in the writings of Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria. While Origen offers the first comprehensive allegorical reading of the parable, he attributes it to an earlier, unnamed presbyter. Roukema, ‘The Good Samaritan in Ancient Christianity’, Vigiliae Christianae, 58 (2004), 59–62. Wailes calls this allegorical tradition ‘remarkably consistent’ across the Middle Ages. One exception to the predominant allegory is Hugh of St Cher’s reading in which he associates the Samaritan with pious lay Christians and the innkeeper with Christ. See Medieval Allegories, pp. 210 and 214.  6 This strand of interpretation frequently appears in Middle English sermons on the Good Samaritan parable. For example, the writer of the relevant sermon in Bodleian Library MS Bodley 806 associates the wounded man with Adam in his original sin and each human thereafter, who travels from Jerusalem to Jericho ‘whenne he brekiþ þe heest of God or doiþ a dedly synne’. See fol. 111r–v. Likewise, a

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sermon in British Library MS Harley 2276 identifies and expounds upon three moments at which Adam descended from Jerusalem to Jericho: when eating the forbidden fruit, when cast out of paradise, and upon descending into hell at his death. Explication of the wounds suffered by the injured man occasions detailed discussion of the seven deadly sins. See fols 125v–26v.  7 Ambrose interprets the oil as forgiveness and the wine as judgement, while Bede associates the two items with hope and fear. Wailes records a variety of other interpretations, including the severity and sweetness of scripture, mercy and justice, and indulgence and penance. See Medieval Allegories, pp. 212–13.  8 In a homily on the Good Samaritan, Origen identifies the inn with the church and the innkeeper with an angel of the church. In other works, he writes that the innkeeper represents Paul or the apostles and their successors. See Roukema, ‘The Good Samaritan’, 62–4.  9 Roukema, ‘The Good Samaritan’, 62. 10 See Wailes, Medieval Allegories, pp. 210–12 and Roukema, ‘The Good Samaritan’, 66–7. 11 J. A. W. Bennett, ‘Langland’s Samaritan’, Poetica, 12 (1979), 10. 12 Christopher Dyer, ‘Poverty and Its Relief in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 216 (2012), 43. For a more nuanced account of this change that describes difficulties for the poor within that transition, see Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 22–6. 13 Rubin writes of the climate in the late fourteenth century, ‘now the poor were not to be helped but to be hunted down and put back to work or into prison’; Charity and Community, p. 32. Dyer acknowledges a similar dynamic but notes that, in the fifteenth century, rural wills do not express as much antipathy for beggars as urban ones do, and some indicate efforts to house the travelling poor. See ‘Poverty and Its Relief’, 61–7. 14 Dyer, ‘Poverty and Its Relief’, 44. 15 Dyer, ‘Poverty and Its Relief’, 76. Michel Mollat makes a similar claim in The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 199. 16 Langland takes up the specific issue of feigned disability in Piers Plowman B.6.121–8 (C.8.128–35). For a discussion of this passage, see Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, pp. 34–7. 17 Gower reflects such distrust in his prologue to Confessio Amantis that compares the third estate to a vessel in danger of bursting or a stream of overflowing its banks. See the Prologue, lines 499–510. On mistrust affecting charity, see Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages, pp. 251–2 and Rubin, Charity and Community, pp. 50–2. 18 For a range of views, see Rubin, Charity and Community, pp. 69–71. 19 See Chapter 3, p. 127.

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20 Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, p. 5. 21 Dyer describes institutional charity as significant but insufficient to meet social need in the fifteenth century. On the percentage of income parishes and monasteries devoted to the poor, see ‘Poverty and Its Relief’, 46–8. 22 Ryan McDermott distinguishes tropological ethics, which is grounded in scripture, from other moral discourses. More specifically, tropology integrates the allegorical and anagogical senses of scripture with life in the world, in a way that ‘opens human action to participation in God’s action in human history’. On tropological interpretation, see Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), pp. 11–86 (especially p. 28). 23 On this shift in the discussion, see Hedrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions, p. 95. 24 Johnson, The Middle English Life of Christ, p. 7. 25 The Pepysian Gospel Harmony survives in only one copy: Cambridge Magdalene College MS Pepys 2498. The manuscript, which also contains a Middle English translation of Robert de Gretham’s Mirror, a ten commandments commentary, a translation of the Apocalypse, a Psalter in Latin and English, Ancrene Riwle, The Complaint of Our Lady, and the Gospel of Nicodemus, has been described by Ralph Hanna as ‘the most extensive project of English vernacular bookproduction undertaken before the close of the fourteenth century’. See Hanna, London Literature, pp. 153–4. 26 The writer offers only truncated accounts of all other parables featured in this study. The harmony includes only the first half of the Wedding Feast parable, leaving out the entire episode in which the king enters the feast and expels the man in the wrong garment. For the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard, the author omits the labourers’ complaint and the vineyard owner’s response. The parable of Dives and Lazarus lacks the conversation between Dives and Abraham, where Dives requests that Lazarus be sent to warn his family. The retelling of the Prodigal Son parable consists of only one sentence. See Goates (ed.), The Pepysian Gospel Harmony, pp. 79, 69, 64, and 63. 27 Goates (ed.), The Pepysian Gospel Harmony, p. 35. 28 Goates (ed.), The Pepysian Gospel Harmony, p. 35. 29 On Samaritan ancestry claims and beliefs they shared with first-century Jews, see Gary N. Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans: The Origins and History of Their Early Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 2–3. The reference to the Samaritan as a pagan aligns with the ancient Jewish claim that Samaritans ‘were the descendants of the polytheistic foreign settlers whom the Assyrians had imported into the land in the late 8th century BCE to replace the departed Israelites’. See Knoppers, Jews and Samaritans, p. 3.

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30 Goates (ed.), The Pepysian Gospel Harmony, p. 35. 31 The text appears in three manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 210, San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 502, and London, British Library, MS Arundel 286. It appears alongside works of Richard Rolle in each manuscript. MS Laud Misc. 210 also contains Book to a Mother. See Helen M. Moon (ed.), Þe Lyfe of Soule: An Edition with Commentary, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 75 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1978), pp. v–xv. 32 Nicole Rice characterises the dialogic form of Þe Lyf of Soule as one that resists a hierarchical relationship between cleric and lay pupil in favour of horizontal, collaborative sharing of knowledge. See Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, p. 52. 33 Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, p. 75. 34 Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, pp. 68–75. See especially pages 72–3 where Rice compares the dialogic form of Þe Lyfe of Soule with the dialogic character of the Piers Plowman Samaritan episode. 35 The names of the two figures differ among the three manuscripts. The titles ‘Frend’ and ‘Sire’ appear in Laud Misc. 210. In MS HM 502, the two figures are ‘Fader’ and ‘Suster’, and in MS Arundel 286, they are ‘Fader’ and ‘Sone’. Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, p. 54. 36 Moon (ed.), Þe Lyfe of Soule, 41. For the golden rule, see Matt 7:12 and Luke 6:31. 37 St Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. and ed. R. H. P. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 27. 38 Moon (ed.), Þe Lyfe of Soule, p. 42. Compare John 13:34–5: ‘Y ȝyue to ȝou a newe maundement, that ȝe loue togidir, as Y louede ȝou, and that ȝe loue togidir. In this thing alle men schulen knowe, that ȝe ben my disciplis, if ȝe han loue togidere.’ 39 See Matt 5:42–8 and Moon (ed.), Þe Lyfe of Soule, pp. 42–3. In Matthew, the passage appears in the Sermon on the Mount as the last item in a series of six antitheses. Jesus begins each statement with ‘You have heard it said’ and then establishes a more rigorous standard for his own law. 40 Moon (ed.), Þe Lyfe of Soule, p. 44. A sermon in Bodley 806 similarly describes the Samaritan as a stranger to the wounded man because ‘Iewes werin in a manere enemyes to þe Samaritane.’ See fol. 112r. 41 On the contents and manuscripts of the SEMP, see p. XX, n. 44. 42 Pickering (ed.), South English Ministry, p. 123. 43 Pickering (ed.), South English Ministry, p. 123. 44 Pickering (ed.), South English Ministry, p. 124. 45 According to the Sarum rite, the Samaritan parable was read on the thirteenth Sunday after the Trinity. O’Mara and Paul date British Library MS Harley 2276 to the mid-fifteenth century. Its cycle of sixty sermons is based on a twelfth-century Latin collection known

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as filius matris. See A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, 2:1224. 46 Harley 2276, fol. 125v. 47 The sermon presents an extended reflection on the man’s condition, first articulating humanity’s multiple falls (disobedience in the garden, the expulsion from Eden, punishment in Hell) and then briefly addressing each of the seven deadly sins. See Harley 2276 fols 125v–6v. 48 Harley 2276 fols 126v–7r. 49 More specifically, the writer states, ‘But now whan Crist had endid þis parable and askid þe lawier, “Which of hem þre him semed was neiȝbore to him þat fel in to þe þeuys?” He answerd and seide, “He þat dide merci to him.” And here mowe we vndirstonde þat kynrede of Cristis entent makiþ not man an oþeres neiȝbore but merci, and such merci comeþ of kynde. For no þyng comeþ more of kynde þanne a man to helpe his felawe of his owne same kynde.’ See Harley 2276 fol. 127r. 50 These are the final words of the sermon. See Harley 2276 fol. 127r, lines 23–4. 51 An anonymous translator rendered the thirteenth-century Miroir into Middle English. Thomas Duncan and Margaret Connolly suggest that the ‘translation was made, at the latest, towards the beginning of the final quarter of the fourteenth century’ (p. l). The Miroir and Mirror both consist of a prologue and sixty sermons, primarily for the Sunday Gospels according to the Sarum use. The Middle English text survives in six manuscripts, most of which were produced in London. In one codex, Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2498, the Mirror appears alongside the Pepysian Gospel Harmony. On the manuscripts, the Middle English translation, and its projected audience and uses, see Duncan and Connolly (eds), The Middle English Mirror, pp. xi–lx. 52 Hanna identifies Gregory the Great’s sermons on the Gospels as a primary source for Robert de Gretham. He also notes that the translator represents himself explicitly as a compiler, rather than an author, who works directly from Latin originals. According to Hanna, ‘the English reader is allowed to believe that his text is direct from learned originals, without intermediary, that it reproduces what was in fact Robert’s source directly and not at a linguistic distance’. See London Literature, pp. 177–83. 53 Kathleen Marie Blumreich (ed.), The Middle English ‘Mirror’: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library, Holkham misc. 40 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 355–6. I cite the Blumreich edition rather than Duncan and Connolly’s parallel text because their edition of the relevant sermon (the 13th Sunday after Trinity) is not yet available. 54 Blumreich (ed.), The Middle English ‘Mirror’, pp. 356–7. 55 Blumreich (ed.), The Middle English ‘Mirror’, pp. 358–9. 56 Blumreich (ed.), The Middle English ‘Mirror’, p. 360.

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57 Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:271. 58 Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:273. While ‘ordeyneþ’ could mean to predestine in this context, it need not mean more than to choose. See MED ‘ordeinen’ definition 4a for the latter and 6b for the former. 59 The relevant text reads, ‘and boþe þei knewen þat þei myȝte not help neyþur oþre men ne hemself fro þe synne þat þei fellen ynne by temptyng of þe feend’. Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:273. 60 Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:274. 61 This sermon reflects a greater interest in sin at an institutional level than at an individual level, which Katherine C. Little has described as characteristic of the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle. See Little, ‘Catechesis and Castigation: Sin in the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle’, Traditio, 54 (1999), 213–44. 62 To explain the basic association of the Samaritan with Christ, D. W. Robertson and B. F. Huppé cited passages from Bede and Hugh of St Victor; expanding this approach, Ben Smith offered readers a table of interpretations from Rabanus Maurus, Honorius of Autun, and others as context for Langland’s allegory. See D. W. Robertson, Jr and Bernard F. Huppé, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition, pp. 205–8, and Ben H. Smith, Jr, Traditional Imagery of Charity in Piers Plowman (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1966), pp. 75–7. Scholars have gone on to illustrate the depth and breadth of allegorical interpretations potentially relevant to the Samaritan episode, connecting various elements of Langland’s rendition with sources and analogues in Latin commentaries and sermons: Raymond St Jacques turned to liturgical readings and sermons to explain features like Langland’s substitution of Abraham and Moses for the priest and Levite, whereas Tom Hill connected the Samaritan’s haste in Piers Plowman to Augustine’s writings on the urgency of Christ’s cosmic journey. Likewise, for his interpretation of semiuief, Aers turned to Augustine, Aquinas, and Nicholas of Gorran. See Raymond St Jacques, ‘The Liturgical Associations of Langland’s Samaritan’, Traditio, 25 (1969), 217–30, and Tom Hill, ‘The Swift Samaritan’s Journey: Piers Plowman C XVIII–XIX’, Anglia, 120:2 (2002), 184–99. 63 On dialogic discourse, see M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422 (especially pp. 276–9). For the characterisation of Piers Plowman as a dialogic poem, see David Lawton, ‘The Subject of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 1 (1987), 4. 64 I focus on the B text because it contains a longer version of the parable itself, with more vivid detail, and a more extensive explication of the story than the C text. Additionally, while both versions address human

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ethics, Langland shows greater interest in this aspect of the parable in the B text. Major differences are noted throughout the analysis. 65 Anne Middleton, ‘The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II’, Speculum 53 (1978), 96. 66 In this way, the Samaritan episode offers a prime example of Will’s ‘common’ voice, concerned with questions of action in the world and expressing the impulses of our ‘best and most actively responsible selves as members of the human community’. See Middleton, ‘The Idea of Public Poetry’, 109. 67 Lawton, ‘The Subject of Piers Plowman’, 2. 68 Crassons’s discussion of the Samaritan is an important exception to this trend. Characterising the sacraments figured in the parable as important social relations and the actions of the Samaritan as examples of material charity, she argues that the episode ‘accommodate[s] both the literal and allegorical levels’ of interpretation. See The Claims of Poverty, pp. 65–6. My argument goes beyond Crassons’s to not only note the presence of multiple interpretive discourses but to claim that the Samaritan episode theorises how those discourses relate to one another. 69 See especially Aers, Salvation and Sin, pp. 100–1. Aers’s reading of the Samaritan parable is central to his larger argument that Langland did not espouse a ‘semi-Pelagian’ soteriology. Malcolm Godden similarly points to Langland’s Samaritan parable as evidence that ‘if love or charity is what saves, it is not the love of man for God and his neighbour but the love of God for mankind’. Godden, The Making of Piers Plowman (New York: Longman, 1990), p. 134. 70 On the problem of and responses to poverty in Piers Plowman, see Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, pp. 21–88; Anne M. Scott, ‘“Nevere noon so nedy ne poverer deide”: Piers Plowman and the Value of Poverty’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 15 (2001), 141–53; and Derek Pearsall, ‘Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman’, in Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (eds), Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane (D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 167–85. 71 See especially Lawrence Clopper’s discussion of Franciscan exemplarism in ‘Songes of Rechelesnesse’: Langland and the Franciscans (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 105–44, as well as Ryan McDermott’s discussion of exegesis and exemplarity in Tropologies, pp. 144–88, and Emily Steiner’s arguments about historical exemplarity in ‘Radical Historiography: Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 27 (2005), 171–211. Also relevant are discussions of the exemplarist tradition as it pertains to nature, specifically those by Nicolette Zeeman, Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 157–200, and Rebecca Davis, ‘“Save man

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allone”: Human Exceptionality in Piers Plowman and the Exemplarist Tradition’, in Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (eds), Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 41–64. 72 Although I do not intend to reduce exemplarity to simple repetition of another’s acts (or to suggest that scholars have presented exemplarity as such), the concept of imitation plays a key role in studies of exemplarity in Piers Plowman and is obviously highly relevant to the Samaritan parable. 73 Compare 1 Cor 13:4–5. 74 Steiner argues that this absence of exemplarity in the contemporary clergy stems from their failure to heed historical exemplarity, i.e. to imitate the deeds of early English missionaries. See ‘Radical Historiography’, 200–5. 75 Anima explains that Will cannot see charity without the help of Piers the Plowman, who takes on divine qualities in this passage. Piers has special insight into people’s will because he is likened to Christ (15.199–200, 211–12). 76 The Samaritan uses the term ‘euenecristene’ where we may expect to see ‘neighebore’ in his explication. See 17.137, 254, and 264. The MED defines the former as ‘fellow Christian; fellow man, neighbor (in the Biblical sense)’. See ‘even’ adj. 16c. 77 Will describes the Samaritan as a man ‘so ful of pite’ and offers to be his ‘gome’ or servant (17.87–8). 78 See 17.62–3. 79 Crassons analyses the C text, but there are very few differences between the two versions in the lines that describe how the Samaritan cared for the man’s wounds. See The Claims of Poverty, p. 65. 80 Crassons, The Claims of Poverty, pp. 65–6. 81 A small revision in the C text significantly alters the sense of these lines so that they attribute more agency to the Samaritan-Christ. Instead of naming Faith, Hope, and Will as those who passed safely, the Samaritan says that no one travelled safely ‘saue mysulue soethly and such as y louede’ (C.19.93). The shift from those who ‘suwen oure werkes’ to those whom the Samaritan loved clarifies that protection from sin derives from Christ, not an individual’s efforts. See Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 82 Clopper makes a similar argument about following Christ according to a person’s degree with reference to Conscience’s speech in passus 19. See ‘Songes of Rechelesnesse’, p. 140. 83 The C text revisions eliminate twenty-one lines describing the unique protection the Samaritan provides against the outlaw in the woods and the roles that Faith and Hope assume after the crucifixion. The

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revision concentrates the passage on the agency of Christ and the nature of Will’s belief, focusing on the relationship between a single individual and God with less reference to the larger community. Langland does address social responsibility in a small number of lines he adds to the C text shortly before the Samaritan’s explanation of the Trinity, but here he advocates patient suffering, not active charitable works. Expanding upon Hope’s instruction that Will should love his neighbour as himself, Will states, and the Samaritan affirms, that he should resist the desire to avenge wrongdoing and ‘thonken hem þat me euel wolden’ (C.19.106–7). 84 Faith’s role echoes Holy Church’s self-description in passus 1, who taught Will he may save his soul by seeking Truth through ‘Deus caritas’ (1.86). Just as Faith teaches Will about the doctrine of the Trinity and signifies the vocation of spiritual guidance, Holy Church first taught Will about the interconnection of works of charity and the pilgrimage to heaven to dwell with the trinitarian God: ‘Ac þo þat werche wel as holy writ telleþ, / And enden, as I er seide, in truþe þat is þe beste, / Mowe be siker þat hire soule shal wende to heuene / Ther Treuþe is in Trinitee and troneþ hem alle’ (1.130–3). 85 On the knight’s subsequent failure to protect the half-acre from wasters, see Cole, ‘Trifunctionality and the Tree of Charity’, 8–9. 86 On Langland’s representation of Pentecost as a ‘vision of unity amidst diversity’, see McDermott, Tropologies, pp. 152–6. 87 Langland first describes cooperation between humans and the Holy Spirit in the Tree of Charity episode, when Piers describes how the three poles protect the tree from the wicked wind of sin. Piers explains that he strikes the devil first with potencia dei patris and then with sapiencia dei patris, proceeding through the persons of the Trinity so that the reader anticipates a third strike from the third member, spiritus sanctus (16.30, 36). Instead, Piers states that ‘liberum arbitrium letteþ [the fiend] som tyme’ and describes free will as working ‘þoruȝ grace / And help of þe holy goost’ (16.46, 51–2). In cooperation with the Holy Spirit, Langland suggests, human free will plays an active role in preventing sin from corrupting the fruits of charity. 88 With the image of the hand, Langland adapts a traditional metaphor to give a more prominent role to the Holy Spirit, associating the third person with the palm rather than the fingers. Since the palm has the power to unfold the fist (the Father) and extend the fingers (the Son in Langland’s rendition), the Holy Spirit may disperse the might of the Father into gentler interaction with the world through the Son (17.178–81). The Samaritan describes the Holy Spirit as uniquely critical to the function of the Trinity, as he explains that with injured fingers, the hand may still accomplish much, but with an injured palm, the fingers no longer function as they should. The Samaritan equates the one who sins against the Holy Spirit with he who ‘prikeþ god as

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in þe pawme’ (17.202) and concludes that such offences may quench the grace of God (17.205). On Langland’s changes to the traditional metaphor, see Frederick M. Biggs, ‘“For God is After an Hand”: Piers Plowman B.17.138–205’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 5 (1991), 23. On how that metaphor communicates ‘the human obligation to continue the creator’s work’, see Rebecca Davis, Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 22–30. 89 Langland’s employment of the word ‘kynde’ is richly varied throughout the poem. In its adjectival form, it includes both ‘natural’ or ‘innate’ (e.g., 12.108) as well as ‘benevolent’ or ‘generous’ (e.g., 10.368 or 11.188). In its substantival form, it denotes inherent qualities, human nature, and even God (see 2.77, 18.222, and 9.2 respectively). 90 See especially, Nicolette Zeeman, ‘The Condition of Kynde’, in David Aers (ed.), Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 1–30, and Andrew Galloway, ‘The Making of a Social Ethic in Late-Medieval England: From Gratitudo to “Kyndenesse”’, The Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 365–83. On the Samaritan’s use of ‘kynde’, see John Chamberlin, Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Place in Langland’s Poetics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), pp. 60–72. 91 Galloway, ‘The Making of a Social Ethic’, 378–9. 92 Galloway, ‘The Making of a Social Ethic’, 380. 93 Zeeman refers to Trajan’s articulation of the two commandments in B.11.167–71. See ‘The Condition of Kynde’, 17–18. 94 See 17.251–77. 95 Kane defines ‘vnkynde’ in line 276 as the personified substantive of ‘lacking natural goodness, wicked’, and he defines ‘kynde’ in the same line as the personification of divine nature. See The Piers Plowman Glossary (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 217, 107. On Langland’s broader use of ‘kynde’ to refer to God as creator, see Davis, Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature, pp. 85–132. 96 See Chamberlain, Medieval Arts Doctrine, p. 68. 97 Kane defines ‘vnkyndenesse’ in line 274 as ‘the absence of natural affection or consideration for others’. See The Piers Plowman Glossary, p. 217. 98 Commenting on this statement in the C text (19.277–8), Aers simply observes that ‘this is not Christ’s final word in Piers Plowman’ and claims that the crimes against the Holy Spirit remind readers of the enslavement of the will to sin. He does not discuss the lines analysed below that suggest all are capable of merciful love. See Aers, Salvation and Sin, pp. 116–17. 99 An earlier version of this chapter has been published as M. Raschko, ‘Love of God and Neighbour: The Communal Ethics of Langland’s Samaritan Parable’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 26 (2012), 49–75.

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5 Paradox formed into story: the parables of the Wedding Feast and Great Supper

Thus comparisunez Kryst þe kyndom of heuen To þis frelych feste þat fele arn to called; For alle arn laþed luflyly, þe luþer and þe better, Þat euer wern fulȝed in font, þat fest to haue. (Cleanness, 161–4)1

This final chapter returns to the parable of the Wedding Feast (Matt 22:1–14), a story fraught with contradictions, both within the narrative itself and in its relation to other Gospel stories. The Wedding Feast is a paradigmatic parable: it is explicitly metaphorical, beginning with the formulaic comparison to the kingdom of heaven; its subject matter pertains to a significant, yet common ritual of human life; and its representation of worldly hospitality and decorum is frighteningly strange. These dynamics alone inspired prolific efforts to explain the logic of a king – even one who signifies God – inviting everyone to a wedding and then subjecting one ill-suited man to profound suffering.2 Yet for this story, we find competing versions not just in vernacular medieval translations but within the Gospels themselves. Luke’s Gospel presents an analogous narrative, the parable of the Great Supper (Luke 14:15–24), that features radically democratic hospitality and no expulsion scene. Although modern biblical scholarship tells us that the two parables come from a common source,3 their distinct contents project dramatically different images of God: while the Wedding Feast parable features a fierce, sometimes violent judge, the Great Supper showcases a gracious host eager to commune with all humanity, especially those on the social margins. Aside from the prefatory statement in Matthew that compares the narrative to the kingdom of heaven,4 the two stories begin similarly: both tell of a host who sends his servants to summon invited guests to his feast. In these initial lines, the primary distinctions between the parables pertain to individual descriptors: supper versus feast, host versus king, and a standard meal versus one

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celebrating a wedding. In both parables, the invited guests refuse to attend. In Luke, the guests excuse themselves to tend to other obligations: one bought a town, another bought five yoke of oxen, and a third has a new wife. In Matthew, the invited guests do not make excuses but simply depart, one to a town and another to his merchandise. Matthew’s parable then contains a dramatic turn of events, in which some murder the servants who came to summon them to the feast. In retribution, the king sends his army to kill those men and burn their city. According to both parables, after the initial invitation has been rejected, the host orders his servants to go out into the streets to summon a different group of people: in Matthew, they should invite everyone they encounter, both good and evil, and in Luke, they should invite the poor, feeble, blind, and lame. Luke’s parable ends with a final order to fill the void places at the table, while Matthew’s parable goes on to narrate the exclusion of an inappropriately dressed guest. In that story, the king enters the feast, apprehends someone without a wedding garment, and orders his servants to bind the man’s hands and feet and cast him into outer darkness. Despite the expulsion of only one guest, Matthew’s text ends with the statement that many are called but few are chosen, potentially implying that most people will share the expelled guest’s fate. The two parables’ divergence raises implicit questions about their authority and verity. Do the stories carry equal weight or does one offer a more authoritative image of God than the other? Do both attest to a unified truth or do they present contradictions within sacred text? If they attest to a single truth, how can their unifying logic be explained? Most Middle English translators eschew such questions by treating the two parables as separate entities. This practice may be unsurprising in sermons, since the stories would be read and explicated on different liturgical occasions.5 Yet two surviving Middle English Gospel harmonies, Oon of Foure and the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, also retain both stories separated by a substantial amount of text.6 Among Middle English works, the late fourteenth-century poem Cleanness stands out for its hybrid parable that integrates the two stories. This poetic work, I argue, is a theological exercise that attempts to address questions of scriptural unity and truth raised by the two competing stories and the two testaments of Christian scripture. As this chapter will demonstrate, the harmonised retelling sharpens contradictions between the two parables, holding up the complex multiplicity of scripture, even as it asserts that such multiplicity belongs to one,

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unified truth. In Cleanness, in other words, we find a poignant example of parable as ‘paradox formed into story’.7 Most analyses of Middle English Wedding Feast narratives, and especially of the Cleanness retelling, regard the parable much more simply, as a negative exemplum concerned with how to be saved. Scholars typically subordinate Luke’s parable to Matthew’s, and in keeping with the poem’s incisive condemnations of impurity, they emphasise the king’s harsh judgement and seek to clarify the expelled man’s offence.8 Lynn Staley’s study of ‘the man in foul clothes’ provides a particularly thought-provoking example of scholarship that searches for the parable’s moral implications: examining a cluster of late fourteenth-century works, including Cleanness, St. Erkenwald, Piers Plowman, and The Canterbury Tales, she identifies a common tendency to connect the expelled figure with sinful clerics and to use the parable to ‘interrogate the institutional church’.9 While I agree that the parable held special interest for clergy, especially as retold in Cleanness, the questions and debates it provoked go far beyond clerical or even lay conduct. Narrowly focused on the expelled man, Staley’s analysis, like many others’, takes for granted that the host acts justly. If we shift our attention from the figure expelled to the one who expelled him, we find that the parable presents an intellectual quandary as well as a moral one. Within the Wedding Feast parable and in comparison to its analogue, the host appears puzzlingly incoherent, inviting and expelling, welcoming and judging. With its vividly strange host, the Wedding Feast parable invites audiences to scrutinise not only their own conduct but also the very nature of God. Because the Wedding Feast and Great Supper parables are fundamentally theological stories that prompt readers to ask who God is,10 this chapter situates the Cleanness retelling in related theological discourses with reference to a roughly contemporary vernacular text: the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels.11 Although we often think of speculative, mystical, and philosophical discourses as theology, the primary vocation of theologians in the later Middle Ages was the interpretation of scripture.12 Tools like the Glossa ordinaria, the Historia scholastica, various postilla (or running commentary), and even concordances of canon law, aided scholastic exegetes in their efforts to unfold layers of meaning from scriptural text.13 The Glossed Gospels emulate and expand one such tool, Aquinas’s Catena aurea: they present early version Wycliffite Bible translations that are divided into short passages and interpolated with patristic and medieval exegetical commentary. Simultaneously

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innovative and conventional,14 the Glossed Gospels bring a scholarly genre beyond its traditional setting and audience, but their contents are largely derivative and uncontroversial. Primarily, they feature what Henry Hargreaves has called ‘the most obvious works to choose for anyone wanting to compile an orthodox commentary on the gospels in the fourteenth century’; occasionally, however, they also present commentary thematically, in a way that connects scripture to contemporary religious practice.15 With their record of interpretations from early Christian to nearly contemporary sources, the Glossed Gospels allowed late medieval audiences without sophisticated knowledge of Latin to read scripture in the fullness of their historical moment. Reading the Cleanness parable alongside this catalogue of exegesis, I aim to contextualise the poem’s retelling in a larger and longer exegetical conversation, without subordinating vernacular theological thinking to the patristic and medieval interpretations conveyed in Latin. Conventionally, when literary scholars read academic exegesis alongside biblically based poetry, they seek to clarify the latter’s meaning via the former, to discern what an author used as a source or what an audience would readily associate with a given story.16 But the variety that characterises a collection like the Glossed Gospels should caution against using commentary as an interpretive key. Rather than provide a fixed notion of what the Great Supper and Wedding Feast parables meant within late medieval culture, the Glossed Gospels challenge the idea of relatively fixed, normative interpretations, instead signalling, as Alastair Minnis writes of commentary, that ‘authoritative textual meaning … was regarded as well-nigh inexhaustible, there to be discovered, inscribed, transmitted’.17 This orientation toward scripture, I argue, is foundational to the Cleanness retelling and the larger poem: as the poet translated biblical stories, he worked from and contributed to a larger exegetical enterprise that embraced multiplicity of meaning. Yet he participated in this theological exploration in a way that complements, rather than replicates, the work of the Glossed Gospels. Alone, the multiplicity generated by commentary could become cacophonous, rendered less meaningful by the sheer breadth and volume of interpretation. Harmony – the effort to integrate expansive, divergent scriptures – attempts to articulate the coherence of such diversity: it acknowledges multiplicity while insisting upon a grounding unity.18 Whereas the Glossed Gospels offer evidence of the interpretive diversity generated by

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parables, Cleanness shows one effort to articulate unity amidst such difference. In addition to integrating the two parables, the poet interlaces Old and New Testament scripture across the larger work. In a period when the New Testament enjoyed far greater popularity,19 this poem primarily features Old Testament narratives with retellings of Noah’s flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar’s feast. In other words, it integrates Hebrew stories into a primarily Christological religious landscape. Yet the poet frames his series of Old Testament stories with the beatitude that the pure of heart will see God (Matt 5:8) as well as his hybrid Wedding Feast / Great Supper parable. Moreover, when transitioning among Old Testament stories, he makes reference to the Incarnation, to Jesus healing the unclean, and to the possibility of penance. Notably, the poet harmonises disparate biblical passages, but he maintains and sometimes even sharpens the contradictions that emerge between the two parables and between the two canons of scripture. As he brings together the parables, the poet asks his readers to confront the mysterious nature of God and to accept that its complexity transcends human understanding: divine truth, the retelling suggests, is both singular and multiple, integrated and paradoxical. Reading for multiple meanings The Wycliffite Glossed Gospels convey the variety of interpretations that surrounded the Wedding Feast and Great Supper parables throughout the Middle Ages, making clear that the stories carried no singular authoritative meaning. Likely created in the 1380s, the Glossed Gospels showcase the range of possible readings with which a theologically minded writer in the late fourteenth century might be familiar. In other words, they provide us not with a source for the poet’s hybrid parable but with insight into how the poet might regard scriptural polysemy and navigate the parables’ many meanings. Based on the eight primary extant copies, it seems that the Glossed Gospels compilers wished to convey a large volume of biblical interpretations but did not insist upon a particular set: the commentaries survive in two different versions for Luke and three different versions for Matthew.20 Within a given manuscript, the textual presentation emphasises plurality of meaning. Like the Catena aurea, the Glossed Gospels break scripture into paragraph-length passages and then further subdivide those passages into brief lemmata.21 After each lemma, translators provide

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multiple readings from seminal exegetes like Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great, and sometimes from later writers like Peter Lombard, Robert Grosseteste, and Odo of Chateauroux.22 Attribution of sources appears within the text, and sometimes in the margins as well, in a way that visibly divides individual interpretations.23 The grammar of the glosses, particularly those elements that connect the different interpretations, reinforces their polysemy as well. Transitions that build argument (because, therefore) or construct hierarchical or schematic orders (first, primarily) are mostly absent.24 Instead, the reader encounters neutral signals of exposition (that is) along with abrupt shifts to new strands of interpretation or signs of accreting meaning (and, also). Multiplicity can exist without reconciliation or subordination of divergent parts, and sometimes, the transitions even characterise meaning as unfixed, prefacing new interpretations with ‘eþer’. With this panoply of varied readings, the Glossed Gospels show that medieval hermeneutic practices intensified the complexity of already-complex narratives. Analysis of this exegetical commentary will reveal both multiplicity within the interpretive tradition of one parable and sharp differences between readings of the two. In other words, it points to the difficulty of reconciling the related stories. Evidence of their divergence appears in the initial lines of commentary for each. A gloss on the first words of the Great Supper, ‘sum man’, introduces the parable as a story of compassion, stating that when God wants to show punishment, he ‘is clepid a bere, a parde [leopard], a lioun and siche oþere’, but when he wants to show mercy ‘he is seide man’.25 Conversely, introductory comments on the Wedding Feast state that Jesus narrated the parable to show that ‘worse wraþþe of god is to comynge’.26 These characterisations, of course, do not govern the rest of the interpretations, but they do gesture toward the contrasting accounts of God often associated with each story. In my analysis of the interpretive traditions surrounding each parable, I will focus on four prominent elements for which the Glossed Gospels record extensive exegesis: the feast itself, the initial guests’ refusal to attend, the second wider invitation, and the offending garment. My primary sources are the longest and earliest versions of the glosses on Luke and Matthew (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.2.9 and London, British Library, MS Add. 28026).27 Comparative analysis of these four features begins with a commonality: in the commentary on both parables, explications of

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the feasts are highly Christological. An extensive gloss on Luke’s ‘soper’, attributed to Cyril of Alexandria, first describes the meal as ordained by God the father and ‘fillid in Christ’. That initial statement then expands into multiple meanings. Cyril’s explication asserts that God nourished humanity through the incarnation, explaining that ‘goddis sone ȝaf liȝt to us and he suffryng deeþ for us ȝaf his owne bodi to us to ete’.28 This brief passage invokes the teachings and miracles of Jesus’ ministry, the redemptive sacrifice of the crucifixion, and the ongoing communion offered in the Eucharist as manifestations of the metaphorical supper. Further emphasising sacrifice and sacrament, this line of commentary then associates the supper with the lamb of God: since the Mosaic law specifies that lamb should be eaten in the evening, the event of God becoming flesh is said to be rightly compared to the evening meal, or supper.29 Another reading, attributed to Bede, reinforces the supper’s Christological associations but characterises the feast to which guests are invited as a blissful union with Christ. It first names the supper as ‘þe fulnesse of innward swetnesse’ and then, in a rare moment connecting the two stories, explains it with reference to the aphorism at the end of the Wedding Feast parable. The supper is an event to which the host ‘clepiþ many men but fewe comen’. While alluding to Matthew’s story, the gloss also substantively adapts its last line. Changing the verb associated with the few from ‘chosen’ to ‘comen’, it asserts that many will not attend yet refrains from characterising the host as judge. The divine host welcomes all, but many ‘aȝenseien his euere lastyng feeste in lyuyng yuel’.30 Here, the feast has become heavenly bliss, and the choice to dwell in that bliss lies with the individual who accepts or rejects God’s invitation by his manner of living.31 Despite introductory statements that refer to God’s wrath, neither eternal bliss nor punishment plays a role in initial explications of the feast in Matthew’s parable. Instead, exegetes focus exclusively on spiritual nourishment and explain what God offers humanity. As with the supper in Luke’s parable, explications of the feast start with the person of Christ. A reading attributed to Gregory compares the wedding feast to the moment ‘whanne by misterie of his incarnacioun [Christ] felowschipede to hym holy chirche’. More specifically, God arranged for the bridal chamber in Mary’s womb, where Christ wed the church by becoming human.32 The varied interpretations that follow all emerge from or surround this central event of hypostatic union. A reading attributed to pseudo-Chrysostom describes a feast of scripture that one eats by

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hearing, reflecting, and following God’s word.33 Like an elaborate wedding feast, God offers ‘dyuerse spices of goddis scripturis’, within which one finds everything needed for health: education for the unlearned, fear for the rebel, glory and motivation for those who work.34 Some interpretations of the specific foods awaiting guests (the ‘bolis’ and ‘volatilis’) further associate the feast with scripture. Citing Jerome, the compilers first associate the two foods with the ‘gretnesse of techynges and doctrine of God’.35 A gloss attributed to Gregory more specifically aligns each animal with a body of scripture based on their common characteristics: like bulls, figures in the Old Testament righteously smote the adversaries of God, while birds represent ‘fadris of þe newe testament’ whose ‘grace of inward fatnesse’ protected them from earthly desires and whose feathers lifted them into contemplation.36 Similarly associating the foods with Hebrew and Christian history, a gloss from pseudo-Chrysostom equates bulls and birds with prophets and saints who died as martyrs, ‘slayn for helþe of þe puple whom þei tauȝten’.37 Collectively, these explications of the meal give no forewarning of the expulsion scene to come. Indeed, some do not even logically correspond to the feast featured later in the parable: why would one be deemed unworthy of and banned from scriptures that contain healing for all? Regardless of the associations brought to the feast by later events in the parable, these glosses on the Wedding Feast variously, yet simply, assert that God prepared a feast of spiritual nourishment. Interpretations of the two parables begin to diverge more noticeably in their explications of the guests’ refusal. One primary difference pertains to length. While the Matthew glosses provide extensive interpretations of the meal, they contain very little commentary on the guests’ disinterest; in contrast, the Luke glosses explain the occasion for the feast more briefly but offer wideranging commentary related to the guests’ refusal. With a series of interpretations that equate the guests’ excuses with varied sins, the compilers of the Glossed Gospels effectively create a guide to right living within their explication of the Great Supper parable. With regard to the initial excuse that ‘Y haue bouȝt a toun’ (Luke 14:18), they first present a reading from Augustine that associates the town excuse with pride stemming from worldly lordship: ‘Lordschip is markid, þerfore pride is chastisid. For whi, to haue a toun holde and welde to make men þerinne suget to hym likiþ to be lord, an yuel vice.’38 From this excuse, the gloss states, readers should learn to submit to heavenly authority. Alternatively, a reading from

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Gregory associates the first excuse with wealth, since a town brings to mind material goods or property. Accordingly, the man offering this excuse signifies those who look to sustain themselves with physical goods rather than with the spiritual goods offered at the metaphorical supper.39 With regard to the second excuse, having purchased oxen (Luke 14:19), the glosses bypass the subject of agricultural labour and locate meaning in the number of oxen or their activity. Again citing Augustine, a gloss equates the five oxen with the five senses since both seek goods from the earth. The excuse, therefore, refers to those preoccupied with affairs of the world or the desires of the flesh, as well as to those who will only believe what they perceive through the five senses.40 Another strand of interpretation condemns those who too readily inquire into the world around them. A gloss attributed to Gregory first associates the oxen with the senses but primarily condemns curiosity. Describing it as a grievous vice that hinders introspection, the gloss states that as curiosity ‘lediþ a mannis mynde to seke wiþoute forþ þe lif of his neyȝbore, euere it hidiþ his owne innest þingis to itself’.41 Attendance at the feast, this gloss implies, requires looking not only beyond the world but within oneself.42 With regard to the final excuse of having just married, all the interpretations in some way condemn physical desire. To explain how a laudable, sacramental event could signify sin, a gloss attributed to Gregory associates the excuse with marrying to satisfy lusts rather than to have children.43 Relatedly, a reading attributed to Ambrose asserts that the excuse shows the superiority of virginity over marriage. Virgins ‘þenkiþ þo þingis þat ben of þe lord’, while those who are married, much like those criticised in explications of the oxen-excuse, direct their attention to the world.44 Indeed, love of the world, a comment from Augustine affirms, glues together spiritual wings.45 Going beyond sexual desire, readings from Augustine also extend the excuse to encompass an Epicurean lifestyle focused on bodily appetites: ‘þes it ben þat seien, as Poul markiþ, “ete we and drynke we for tomorowe we shul die”’. Readers should beware to not feed their bodies so eagerly that they ‘die bi innward hungir’ of the soul.46 In this especially homiletic stretch of commentary, the three excuses are presented as even more numerous examples of sinful living. Nearly all readings castigate preoccupation with the world as the primary way in which people refuse their invitation to Christ’s feast, whether that takes the form of desiring prestige,

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wealth, gossip, or romance. Some offer positive injunctions to more spiritual forms of living, such as chaste marriage or virginity. In contrast to this robust moral discourse, the glosses to Matthew explicate the guests’ excuses much more quickly and narrowly.47 The Wedding Feast parable names two reasons that the invited guests decline to come: one departs to his town and another to his merchandise (Matt 22:5). In the Glossed Gospels, exegetes explicate them solely in economic terms.48 Commentary attributed to pseudo-Chrysostom interprets the pair in two different ways. It first suggests that the town refers to physical labour while merchandise refers to profit gained without physical labour from sources like ‘chafferynge, knyȝthode and wordly onour’. Alternatively, the town invokes any profit gained from secular work, while merchandise refers to priests’ profits from spiritual activities like ‘prechynge of lawe and procuryngge of þe temple’.49 A final interpretation attributed to Gregory associates the town with immoderate earthly labour and merchandise with the profit gained from that activity.50 The lack of correspondence between these glosses and those in Luke is striking, especially considering that the town excuse appears in each story. The Luke glosses mention wealth only once and never discuss labour, despite the presence of the oxen excuse. While showing the independence of each interpretive tradition, this point of contrast also indicates that exegetes located the primary moral crux of the parable in distinct parts of the narratives. Exegesis on the Great Supper encourages audiences to see themselves in those who refuse the invitation. This same event appears less significant in the Wedding Feast, where the bulk of moral commentary surrounds the unworthy guest. One interpretive tradition emphasises people’s response to invitation, while the other questions people’s worthiness to attend. Commentary on the third common element, the wider invitation after the initial guests’ refusal, furthers this divergence in the purposes it attributes to invitation, especially when the commentary addresses sin. The Great Supper includes the instruction to invite the poor, feeble, blind, and lame – a narrative event that echoes Jesus’ instruction to the Pharisees earlier in Luke 14 to invite those same groups to their feasts.51 In explicating this facet of the story, the Luke glosses continue to avoid socio-economic discourses and give few readings that interpret these groups literally. One attributed to Gregory observes that ‘God chesiþ hem whiche þe world dispisiþ’, suggesting that these four groups invoke any marginalised figures. Reference to those suffering economic or

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physical need comes in two forms: a statement that the needy more hastily heed God’s call and an assertion that God called the poor to rebuke the proud.52 More prominent, however, are readings that interpret these conditions figuratively. A reading attributed to Ambrose asserts that the extended invitation ‘shewide to vs þat feblenesse excludiþ no man fro þe rewme’. Extending feebleness beyond physical weakness, it asserts that God forgives the ‘sikenesse of synnes’ and rephrases the commission to invite the poor and feeble as the invitation of sinners.53 Readings attributed to Augustine take a similar approach: they describe feeble men as those ‘hauyng yuel’, crooked men as those who need to learn God’s ways, and blind men as those asleep in sin.54 While expanding the scope of invitation, these readings maintain an emphasis on the guests’ imperfections. In doing so, they characterise the unworthy as especially welcome: as the gloss attributed to Augustine states, God calls those in need of healing to Christ’s supper.55 Commentary describing the second, wider invitation in the Wedding Feast parable also emphasises the summoning of sinners but in a far less sanguine tone. The host instructs his servants to seek guests in the ‘outgoyngis of weyes’ (Matt 22:9), for which the glosses offer three interpretations. First, commentary attributed to Jerome reads the ‘outgoyngis of weyes’ (or the farthest reaches) as the lands of the gentiles and interprets their invitation as a figure for Paul’s preaching.56 The next two readings are more immediately applicable to contemporary readers. Following pseudoChrysostom, the glosses compare the streets where servants find new guests to vocations and assert that ‘alle professiouns of þis world ben weyes to þe deuyl’. Naming specifically ‘professioun of filosophie and professiouns of knyȝthode and wordly dignites, and professioun of pleyes’, the commentary describes worldly work as the ‘general wey of perdicioun’.57 The third line of interpretation associates the outgoing streets – here read as points of departure rather than faraway locations – with particular sins: ‘As chastite and oþere vertues ben wey þat leden to Crist, so lecherie, coueytise, and oþer synnes ben wey þat lediþ to þe deuel.’58 In contrast with the reference to healing in the Great Supper glosses, pseudoChrysostom explains that the host seeks out sinners in order ‘þat þei ben not excusable’.59 Whereas initial explication of the feast only enumerated forms of spiritual nourishment, this commentary points forward to the expulsion scene and hints at some form of reckoning. Commentary attributed to Gregory associates the mixed company of the wedding feast, referred to in the parable as

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‘good and yuel’, with the church in the world in which ‘yuele men mowun not be withoute goode, neþer goode withoute yuele’.60 Rather than affirm that God welcomes all, the gloss counsels good men to ‘suffre ȝe yuel men as longe as ȝe ben in þis lyif’, lest they cease to be good through their lack of patience. As sinners gather at the wedding feast, this reading implies, they are tolerated rather than healed. While Luke’s parable ends with this extended invitation, Matthew’s story goes on to narrate the violent exclusion of one guest, inspiring commentary with both moral and soteriological dimensions. Explication of the final episode gives a new association to the feast itself. Instead of spiritual nourishment, the event is now repeatedly characterised as ‘domesday’ where, according to one exegete, the host will ‘deperte [distinguish] þe meritis of alle by hem silf.’61 Further articulation of those merits comes in three complementary readings of the offending wedding garment. First, a gloss attributed to Jerome associates bridal clothes with ‘þe lordis heestes and werkes þat ben fillid of þe lawe and of þe Gospel’.62 Not dressing for the wedding means disregarding the commandments or neglecting to perform acts of charity. Whereas this gloss characterises the guest’s offence as a failure to act, a subsequent reading by pseudo-Chrysostom associates the garment with more active offences. The garment is here described as soiled and is said to defile ‘þe glorie of weddynges’. While bridal clothes represent the faith of Christ and righteousness, the foul garment reflects the dark works of those who corrupt or disparage the Christian faith.63 These first two readings imply that deeds determine whether one may remain at the feast and, in doing so, suggest a works-based soteriology. A final strand of commentary on the garment obscures that relationship. A gloss attributed to Gregory describes the garment as charity, given when Christ married the church. Recalling the initial associations of the feast with the Incarnation, the gloss observes that out of love, ‘God schulde one [unite] to hym þe soulis of chosun men.’64 While the gloss goes on to encourage charitable living, urging love of one’s neighbour and of one’s enemy out of love for God, the reference to ‘chosen men’ raises questions about the breadth of God’s love. Some, it implies, may be summoned only to be expelled, not because of their works but because they did not belong to the church of the elect whom Christ wedded. Explication of the final aphorism, also attributed to Gregory, states more explicitly that only a select group will remain at the feast. Called by faith, all come to the wedding to partake of

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God’s nourishment. Nonetheless, even when people ‘byleuen and knowlechen þe mysterie of his incarnacioun and taken meetis of goddis word, but we witun not wher we ben chosun’. Faced with the mysterious prospect of election, Gregory instructs readers to live humbly and in fear of ‘how moche he knoweþ not þat þat is to comynge’.65 With this statement, the compilers of academic commentary end their parable explication by asserting the limits of human knowledge about God; their theological exercise culminates in mystery. The collected exegesis in the Glossed Gospels indicates some points of intersection between the two feasting parables. Commentary on each, of course, associates the host with God and describes the feast Christologically. Additionally, explications of both stories condemn preoccupation with the world, whether defined narrowly as seeking wealth or more broadly across a variety of behaviours. Finally, commentary on each parable asserts that sinners will attend the metaphorical feasts. Even within these commonalities, however, we see the presentation of multiple interpretations that characterise the parable’s meaning as unfixed. Other translators familiar with such glosses might choose to emphasise one reading over another, to synthesise readings, or to make sense of the parable in a new way. The Glossed Gospels show a nexus of interpretations and, in doing so, remind us that a parable has no single, normative meaning. The Cleannesspoet’s hybrid parable, therefore, should be viewed as one creative statement in a dynamic and sometimes incoherent discourse. Even as the retelling attempts to unify two separate narratives and exegetical conversations, it will generate its own ambiguities and resulting range of meanings.66 A discordant unity Like the creators of the Glossed Gospels, the Cleanness-poet regards scripture as capacious, but he employs a different strategy to express its expansive meaning. Without foreclosing the polysemy displayed in academic exegesis, the poet showcases plurality and asserts that it belongs to a single unified truth. As the Glossed Gospels have made clear, combining the Great Supper and Wedding Feast stories depends upon the union of contraries: a welcoming and a wrathful host, an invitation to healing and to judgement, an image of humanity rejecting God and an image of God rejecting humanity. In his hybrid story, I argue, the Cleanness-poet embraces

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the puzzling dynamics of parables and holds up paradox as fundamental to theology, as what people encounter when they strive to understand God.67 This account of the poet’s aims and accomplishments differs considerably from those that characterise the poem as a sermon proscribing impurity and the Wedding Feast as one in a series of exempla.68 J. J. Anderson, for example, downplays the poem’s discordant notes that temper images of divine wrath and characterises all the biblical stories in Cleanness as illustrations of the same principle: ‘that God loves cleanness and hates uncleanness’. He describes the poem as monologic and its treatment of morality as black and white, arguing that the Wedding Feast parable ‘is retold in such a way as to demonstrate … that God is even harder on uncleanness than an earthly prince would be’.69 One conspicuous problem with Anderson’s reading is that it fails to account for the inclusion of the Great Supper. If the poet’s retelling should convey hatred and punishment of impurity, surely it would be more effective to translate only Matthew’s parable. Given the two stories’ traditional separation, the poet does not need to integrate Luke’s parable at all. Doing so only disrupts the poem’s supposed project of frightening its audience into living purely.70 The poet’s integration of the two competing parables makes considerably more sense when we approach the narrative as something more than a moral exemplum. Because of Cleanness’ strident moralising, scholarship often focuses on rigid injunctions against sexual or ritual impurities.71 Yet the introductory discourse that precedes the collection of narratives announces an interest in both human action and intellection. The poem’s initial lines do seem preoccupied with morality: they first commend cleanness and then declare that God is ‘wonder wroth’ with those who follow him in filth (1–6). The poet especially directs his proscription of filth to clergy, those ‘renkez of relygioun’ commonly called priests (7–8), and calls to mind their privileged role consecrating the eucharistic host: sacramental union with God, he writes, requires the utmost ritual purity and a pure heart (9–11).72 Like other contemporary texts that call for ecclesiastical reform, these introductory lines also warn against hypocrisy,73 cautioning that if priests are ‘honest vtwyth and inwith alle fylþez’, they defile themselves, the sacrament, and God (13–16). When the poet first introduces scriptural content, however, he characterises priestly purity as an issue of understanding as well as of pastoral exemplarity. More specifically, he translates the sixth

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beatitude (Matt 5:8), which asserts that purity of heart allows one to see God: ‘Þe haþel clene of his hert hapenez ful fayre, / For he schal loke on oure Lorde with a leue chere’ (27–8). If we regard the poem as a moral treatise, we naturally emphasise the first half of the beatitude pertaining to purity of heart. Yet the poem also offers sustained meditation on the beatific vision that Theresa Tinkle describes as ‘a figure for spiritual understanding’.74 According to the beatitude, Monica Brzezinksi similarly claims, a pure heart makes a person like God and, in doing so, enables contemplation of divine mystery.75 We should expect, therefore, that the poem’s scriptural narratives pertain both to human conduct and to human knowledge. Indeed, a dual emphasis on morality and intellection frames the Cleanness parable. In its explication, reiteration of the verb ‘to see’ affirms that the stakes of purity, or impurity, go beyond where one resides after judgement to what one comprehends: wrapping oneself in clean garments allows a person to ‘se þy Sauior’, but many faults may forfeit bliss, so ‘þat he þe Souerayn ne se’ (176–8). Purity, in other words, effects epistemological change: it enables direct perception of God no longer mediated by text or restricted by human reason. The dual emphasis on conduct and knowledge conveyed by the beatitude should inform how we read the hybrid parable and the larger poem. While it is true, as the poet asserts shortly before the parable, that ‘þe hyȝe Kyng is harder in heuen’ than an earthly prince (49–50), the poem does not characterise heavenly law as an intensified version of earthly law. Rather, Cleanness depicts a hard god whose standards of behaviour are difficult to satisfy and whose seemingly contrary characteristics are difficult to comprehend.76 It is that struggle to comprehend or resolve scriptural revelation that the following analysis will emphasise. Although critics pay greatest attention to the expelled guest, much of the Cleanness parable focuses not on purity or decorum but on the hospitality offered to an exceptionally diverse community gathered at the feast. Consequently, the host’s punitive actions become more shocking, more difficult to reconcile with the figure who welcomes all. That paradoxical disruption, I argue, is foundational to the poet’s conception of scriptural revelation, as perceived by necessarily imperfect people living in the world. With its integration of two competing stories, the Cleanness parable simultaneously incites an audience’s desire to live well and to understand God, even as it ultimately showcases the limits of human comprehension.

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A story of multiple morals Before examining how the integration of the Wedding Feast and Great Supper narratives sharpens paradox, making God more mysterious, we should note that the inclusion of Luke’s story also multiplies the parable’s moral implications. Specifically, the introduction of the excuses from Luke’s story creates two primary ethical dilemmas within the hybrid parable, one asking how people live up to God’s law and another, more foundationally, asking whether people value God’s law at all. Rather than issuing a narrowly focused proscription of uncleanness, the parable opens up multiple strands of moral discourse that each evoke a variety of potential meanings. Because earlier exegetes often associated the three excuses with particular sins, the inclusion of this portion of the Great Supper may bring to mind for readers moral teachings related to pride, curiosity, or lust.77 But given the variety that characterises exegetical commentary, we should not assume that the poet intended to convey what Staley calls ‘the conventional understanding of these excuses’.78 Instead, we should seek to understand what this specific rendition adds to an ongoing exegetical conversation. The Cleanness-poet’s account of the guests who refused to attend emphasises their eagerness to avoid the feast. He casts doubt on the legitimacy of their excuses, stating that ‘alle excused hem by þe skyly [excuse] he scape by moȝt’ (62). The guests’ conflicts, the poet implies, are not truly pressing; rather, they appear to be the most convenient or legitimate reason for rejecting the invitation. One defends his stated conflict by swearing, an act that highlights the far-fetched nature of his excuse: ‘On hade boȝt hym a borȝ, he sayde, by his trawþe: / “Now turne I þeder als tyd þe toun to byholde”’ (63–4). The third excuse is equally concise, but the poet again characterises it as a strategic, defensive move: ‘“And I haf wedded a wyf”, so wer hym þe þryd; / “Excuse me at þe court, I may not com þere”’ (69–70). Whereas the man’s speech seems deferential and straightforward, the verb ‘wer’ characterises it as an act of resistance, an effort to protect or justify oneself. The narrator’s concluding statement that the men ‘droȝ hem adreȝ with daunger vchone’ reinforces the idea of strategic opposition (71), since the Middle English term ‘daunger’ denotes domination, resistance, or even arrogance, as well as something that poses harm. This summative statement, then, poignantly describes the excuses as an imperilling act of defiance and charac-

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terises the moral problem in this situation as a disregard for divine authority.79 At the same time that the narrative warns against headstrong disobedience, it also suggests that preoccupation with worldly work can estrange one from God. The second excuse, that pertaining to oxen, receives the longest articulation in the Cleanness parable: Anoþer nayed also and nurned [declared] þis cawse: ‘I haf ȝerned and ȝat ȝokkez of oxen, And for my hyȝez hem boȝt; to bowe haf I mester [need], To see hem pulle in þe plow aproche me byhouez.’ (65–8)

Like in the Pearl rendition of the Labourers in the Vineyard, here the poet augments scripture to create a more vivid image of agricultural work. The potential guest is a farm owner or manager, someone who would hire servants (hyȝez) rather than plow the field himself. He describes the oxen as a possession he has long desired and twice phrases his departure in terms of need. Notably, the poet eliminates a key detail on which some allegorical readings rest: the man has multiple yokes of oxen but the number five does not appear. Without this link to the five senses and the problem of curiosity, the poet maintains a simple focus on worldly occupation, both in this instance and in the overall narration of the excuses. Although the wife excuse could provide an opportunity for promoting chastity, the poet articulates that line as concisely as it appears in Luke’s Gospel.80 He only amplifies the excuse related to labour and, in doing so, suggests that worldly occupation – the prospective guests’ roles as governor, farmer, and husband – often displace spiritual concerns. The poet’s rendering of the excuses from Luke’s story interjects two main strands of moral commentary into the hybrid parable, one concerned with a selfish disregard for God’s will and another with a form of idolatry that prioritises worldly work over communion with God. These excuses replace both the more succinct refusals in Matthew’s story and the subsequent acts of violence, in which invited guests kill the servants and the host takes revenge on them and their cities. The latter omission is unusual among Middle English translations of the Wedding Feast: in the Pepysian Gospel Harmony, for example, the second of only two sentences summarising the parable describes the killing of the servants: ‘And siþen tolde hem Jesus þe þridde tale of a kyng þat helde his sones fest. And þo þat he hadde boden to þe fest, chidden and slowȝen his seruauntȝ whan hij comen after hem.’81 While the writer of the

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Pepysian Gospel Harmony may have relied on the reader to fill in the rest of the story, the event from the parable he considered most memorable was the violent refusal of the king’s invitation, not the offence of wearing an improper garment.82 The episode’s absence is also discordant with the larger poem, in which the poet gives pathos-rich accounts of God wiping out humanity in the flood and destroying Sodom with fire and brimstone. Throughout much of Cleanness, readers encounter precisely the sort of vengeful God who would punish the murderers and those associated with them. While Anderson suggests that the poet eliminated the episode to streamline the parable to a condemnation of impurity,83 its replacement with the excuses from Luke works against such streamlining. The excision creates a more consistent focus on the guests’ casual disrespect and preoccupation with the world, while also heightening ambiguity in the rest of the narrative: without the killing episode, God appears primarily generous and welcoming up to the scene of expulsion from the feast, thereby intensifying the contrast between hospitality and rebuke. Radical hospitality With regard to moral and allegorical interpretations, the Cleannesspoet takes a both/and approach to exegesis: the parable warns against disobedience and impurity, just as it depicts a divine host who is radically welcoming and punishingly exclusive. As he brings together contradictory images of the feast and its host, the poet does not subordinate one to the other to give the narrative a satisfying logic. Rather, as the remainder of my analysis will show, he insists upon discordant plurality as a characteristic, even authoritative feature of scripture. In the first half of the Cleanness parable, the integration of Luke’s Great Supper accentuates the inclusivity and generosity characteristic of the feast in Matthew’s Gospel. Like in the Glossed Gospel commentary on Matthew, the Cleanness wedding feast eventually becomes the site of judgement, but it also provides a figure for gift-giving and communion in the world. Early in the parable, the Cleanness-poet emphasises material abundance as a means of conveying the host’s generosity, expanding the description of the prepared foods in a way that accentuates its opulence at the expense of doctrinal allegories. Whereas earlier exegetes variously associated the two main dishes (‘bolis’ and ‘volatilis’) with corresponding pairs within the Christian tradition, like prophets

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and martyrs or scriptures of the Old and the New Testament, these foods are just two items on a wider menu in Cleanness. The host summons guests with the news that … my boles and my borez arn bayted and slayne, And my fedde foulez fatted with sclaȝt; My polyle þat is penne-fed, and partrykez boþe, Wyth scheldez of wylde swyn, swanez, and cronez, Al is roþeled and rosted ryȝt to þe sete; Comez cof to my corte, er hit colde worþe. (55–60)

With this amplification, the poet signals that readers should pay attention to this story, as a distinct, renewed parable, and resist the temptation to read it as a story whose details and significance are already known. The inclusion of boars, swans, and cranes on the feast menu, as well as the specification of preparation techniques, such as pen-feeding and roasting poultry, create a sense of worldly largesse and make the meal more appetising to fourteenth-century audiences.84 While these changes translate the parable to late medieval culture, they simultaneously render the story more subversive: when the host offers rich provisions to the privileged and the marginalised alike, the feast provides a worldly example of a host sharing his prosperity with the needy, going even further than the model advocated in Mannyng’s translation of Dives and Lazarus. At this feast, food is not reserved for the poor outside the host’s home; rather, the poor partake of the feast as welcomed guests. After the initial guests refuse this bounty, the poet fuses the subsequent summons from the Wedding Feast and Great Supper, emphasising the inclusivity of God’s invitation and the broadly communal nature of the feast. In Matthew’s Gospel, following the refusal of the initial invitation, the king orders his servants to ‘go ȝe to the endis of weies, and whom euere ȝe fynden, clepe ȝe to the weddyngis’ (Matt 22:9). The servants return with all they found, both ‘good and yuele’ (Matt 22:10). What Gregory characterised as an allusion to the elect and the damned, comingled in the church before judgement,85 the poet describes in terms of social diversity: Þenne gotz forth, my gomez, to þe grete streetez, And forsettez on vche a syde þe cete aboute Þe wayferande frekez, on fote and on hors, Boþe burnez and burdez, þe better and þe wers, Laþez [urge] hem alle luflyly to lenge at my fest, And bryngez hem blyþly to borȝe as barounez þay were, So þat my palays plat ful be pyȝt al aboute. (77–83)

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The poet describes those gathered in a series of opposites to emphasise the broad scope of people welcomed: those travelling on foot or on horse, men or women (burnez and burdez), the virtuous and the sinful. Yet the manner of invitation that the host recommends implies that he gathers them to offer gifts, not to hold them accountable for their sins. The servants should ‘luflyly’ urge them to be present at the feast and should ‘blyþly’ bring them to the hall, honouring them as they would honour barons. Belying the judgement and punishment that will eventually take place at the feast, this invitation suggests that a degree of hospitality normally reserved for a few will be lavished on all. The poet’s emphasis of inclusive hospitality intensifies when he integrates the invitation from the Great Supper. In Luke’s parable, the host similarly requests that his servants search broadly, going out ‘in to the grete stretis and smal stretis of the citee’, but he names more specifically the types of people who should attend: ‘pore men, and feble, blynde, and crokid’ (Luke 14:21). This same list of guests appears slightly earlier in Luke 14, when Jesus instructs a group of Pharisees how to live humbly:86 when attending a wedding, they should take the lowest seat; when they hold feasts, they should invite not friends, kinsmen, and rich neighbours but the poor, feeble, blind, and lame (Luke 14:8–13).87 Although differing in form from this exhortative speech, Luke’s parable of the Great Supper similarly subverts conventional social relations by suggesting that the poor and marginalised should enjoy honours normally extended to those of means and communal bonds often limited to family and friends. In contrast with the many figurative interpretations of the needy in the Glossed Gospels, the Cleanness-poet accentuates the physical and social conditions of those invited from the margins of society, invoking the social subversion associated with the earlier passage in Luke 14.88 After the host has issued an invitation to all ‘wayferande frekez’, space still remains and the servants go out once more to ensure that all seats are filled. In this next summoning, the poet integrates and expands upon the invitation to the sick and disabled in Luke’s parable: Whatkyn folk so þer fare, fechez hem hider. Be þay fers, be þay feble, forlotez none, Be þay hol, be þay halt, be þay onyȝed, And þaȝ þay ben boþe blynde and balterande cruppelez, Þat my hous may holly by halkez by fylled. (100–4)

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The pair of contrasts – the fierce and the feeble, the healthy and the lame – changes the social inversion from Luke 14 to inclusivity: the marginalised do not enjoy an exclusive privilege withheld from the wealthy but join the community from which they are normally estranged. Thus, like many exegetes, the poet makes room for the wealthy at the feast, but he does so without relegating poverty and sickness to spiritual conditions. Instead, he vividly extends the list of physical maladies that may afflict potential guests to include the one-eyed and stumbling cripples. In doing so, the poet reinvigorates a potentially familiar scriptural formula so that readers may more readily imagine and identify those members of society whom this unusual invitation includes. Important for our reading of the expulsion scene, the poet makes clear that the feast included those whose physical or socio-economic conditions render them least socially acceptable and least familiar with the rules of decorum that govern social relations.89 Seemingly, if unclean or unkempt dress excludes one from the feast, many should find themselves unwelcome. Yet prior to the exclusion scene, the poet emphasises the festivity enjoyed by this diverse community. After the invitations have been issued, the poet goes beyond the conventional storyline of Matthew’s and Luke’s parables to describe the hospitality extended to all members of society. In the Gospels, Luke’s parable ends before the feast even begins, while Matthew’s merely states that the hall was filled with guests and then immediately transitions to the king apprehending the guest without a wedding garment (22:10–11). In contrast, the Cleanness parable reaffirms that the host gathered both the affluent and the needy in an extended description of the guests in attendance. Like a feast in a fourteenth-century manor, guests sit according to social rank with their attire reflecting their respective position:90 Wheþer þay wern worþy oþer wers, wel wern þay stowed, Ay þe best byfore and bryȝtest atyred, Þe derrest at þe hyȝe dese, þat dubbed wer fayrest, And syþen on lenþe bilooghe ledez inogh. And ay as segges serly semed by her wedez, So with marschal at her mete mensked þay were. Clene men in compaynye forknowen wern lyte, And ȝet þe symplest in þat sale watz serued to þe fulle, Boþe with menske and with mete and mynstrasy noble. (113–21)

The description of some guests as the ‘fairest’ and ‘brightest attired’ indicates that guests attended the feasts in garments of

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varying quality.91 Indeed, stewards differentiated among guests by their clothing and seated them accordingly. This expansion both enhances the contemporary social resonance of the parable and complicates allegorical readings. Only some guests are described as ‘clene men’, yet the poet contrasts them not with the unclean but with ‘þe symplest’, suggesting cleanliness pertains to class, not virtue.92 Here, moral purity and socio-economic status mix in a manner difficult to disentangle. At one level, the poet provides an ethical model of inclusive hospitality that still accommodates medieval social hierarchy. Yet if we read ‘clene’ as an indicator of moral purity, rather than class, the poet presents an alternative form of social stratification, in which people are ranked according to their righteousness. In this case, the differentiation of guests implies that the standard for attendance is far from perfection and raises questions about the threshold for exclusion: what degree of sinfulness would lead to expulsion? In addition to highlighting the feast’s inclusivity, this section of the parable emphasises its revelry. The poet comments that the guests became glad with good drink and made themselves at ease with their neighbours (123–4). The king enters this festivity not as judge but as a host eager to provide for and celebrate with his guests: Now inmyddez þe mete þe mayster hym biþoȝt Þat he wolde se þe semblé þat samned was þere, And rehayte rekenly þe riche and þe poueren, And cherisch hem alle with his cher, and chaufen her joye. Þen he bowez fro his bour into þe brode halle And to þe best on þe bench, and bede hym be myry, Solased hem with semblaunt and syled fyrre, Tron fro table to table and talkede ay myrþe. (125–32)

In this scene of festive communion, the poet again emphasises the presence of the ‘poueren’ in addition to the rich. Courteously, the host wishes to show all his guests good will (‘rehayte rekenly’) and to kindle (‘chaufen’) joy within them. His intent seems far from assessing who is worthy or unworthy to stay, which makes the subsequent expulsion appear all the more capricious and irrational. At this point in the text, just before he expels a guest, the king is a figure for a loving God, who would become incarnate to commune with and offer the bliss of salvation to all – rich and poor, healthy and sick, righteous and sinner.

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Exacting judgement It is this same God, the poet insists, who angrily judges, expels, and torments one guest, manifesting behaviour that seems altogether inconsistent with the preceding narrative. After blithely mingling with his guests, in what David Wallace describes as a shocking turn to ‘furious indignation’, the host expels a man who, quite understandably given the scope of the invitation, does not wear clothes suited to a wedding feast.93 Especially within this hybrid parable, the punitive act stands out as a paradigmatic reversal of expectations that disorients readers and initiates an interpretive quest to explain the narrative’s logic. Andrew and Waldron, for example, attempt to make the host’s action more reasonable by suggesting that proper garments may have been available to any in need.94 Wallace rejects this effort to normalise the story and describes such editorialising as symptomatic of a ‘desire for symbolic consistency throughout the poem’. He then imports his own narrative logic, suggesting that the host’s behaviour represents God’s absolute power, described by the moderni as an ultimate freedom from the covenantal obligations to which humans are bound.95 Both of these interpretations add to the parable in an attempt to make it more sensible. Yet the poet’s persistent efforts to build tension and ambiguity suggest that he sought to craft a provocative story, not to resolve its difficulties. At this narrative climax, while the poet brings together two sharply contrasting images of a generous and punitive God, he cultivates ambiguities that call into question the justice of the host’s actions. Like in his earlier description of the guests, the poet continues to comingle issues of physical and moral cleanness in his account of the offending man: Bot as he ferked ouer þe flor, he fande with his yȝe – Hit watz not for a halyday honestly arrayed – A þral þryȝt in þe þrong vnþryuandely cloþed, Ne no festiual frok, bot fyled with werkkez; Þe gome watz vngarnyst with god men to dele. And gremed þerwith þe grete lorde, and greue hym he þoȝt. (133–8)

With reference to a soiled garment, the poet lays a foundation for the moral associations of ‘uncleanness’ he defines in a subsequent explication and potentially connects his text to parts of the interpretive tradition that associate the state of the garment with the righteousness of the man’s deeds. Interpreted figuratively,

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the phrase ‘fyled with werkkez’ could invoke the dark works described by pseudo-Chrysostom or could imply the inversion of the good works associated with the wedding garment by Jerome. Nonetheless, the phrase also invokes physical labour:96 a garment ‘fyled’ with work could be covered with the soil from a field – one of the locations from which the king sought guests. At least two other details suggest that the man’s low socio-economic status registers offence. The poet describes him as ‘vnþryuandely’ dressed, which suggests that he wore the garment of a poor or unfortunate person.97 Likewise, he is said to be ‘vngarnyst’ to dwell with good men, a term that can mean to decorate or adorn as well as to equip, or be prepared, for defence. Those gathered from fields, heaths, and forests (98–9) would seem to fit both definitions, understandably arriving unprepared for a fashionable, formal event. Such description of the guest’s material condition both justifies and calls into question the king’s behaviour when he apprehends the unclean man. The guest clearly violates social mores: in an addition unique to Cleanness, the parable opens with the instruction that the servants should invite the initial guests ‘in comly quoyntis [fine clothes] to com to his feste’ (54). At least as initially envisioned, the feast was a fashionable affair.98 But since this social expectation requires financial means, and the host has gathered guests from all walks of life, the guest appears powerless to avoid his infraction. Even when we interpret the garment figuratively, this conundrum remains. The expulsion asserts an expectation that guests should have unsoiled garments. But given the inevitability of human sin, no person will arrive spotless.99 Why, then, would a host who welcomes sinners and wishes to commune with them mark one individual as unworthy? The articulation of the guest’s punishment enhances the tension between the host’s generous and judgemental character. While emphasising his ruthlessness, the poet also tempers the punishment inflicted upon the unclean man, suggesting the host is both unreasonably punitive and merciful. In Matthew’s Gospel, the guest is bound and expelled to a dark exterior where there is ‘wepyng and grentyng of teeth’ (22:13), an expression that associates the punishment with the finality of hell.100 The Cleanness-poet removes this reference to eternal punishment and locates the man’s suffering and punishment firmly in the world. Instead of sending the guest to outer darkness, the host places the man first in stocks and then in his dungeon:

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Stik hym stifly in stokez, and stekez hym þerafter Depe in my doungoun þer doel euer dwellez, Greuing and gretyng and gryspyng harde Of teþe tenfully togeder, to teche hym be quoynt. (157–60)

Based on medieval courtesy books, Jonathan Nicholls has argued that the host’s actions could be viewed ‘as not merely thin allegories of hellish torment, but also a reflection of current practice’.101 He claims that the unclean man should have expected ‘painful exclusion’ if he did not abide by social norms, citing expectations for appearance and demeanour from a fifteenth-century conduct guide, and he describes the stocks as appropriate punishment for household offences including ‘fightyng, oreble chydyng, makyng of debates, drawyng of knyves and stelynges, affrayes and such oþer’.102 Yet to conclude that this information provides a rationale for the host’s actions characterises improper dress as another form of physical or verbal violence. It also neglects the second phase of punishment in which the man is moved from the stocks to the dungeon. Rather than justifying the host’s actions, what Nicholls’ research shows is the host’s supersession of cultural norms, in which the host elevates a lack of conformity to an offence that disturbs the communal peace. The poet grounds the parable in contemporary circumstances, I argue, not to justify the king’s actions but to better define how his actions contradict medieval expectations of hospitality and justice. Although the host appears unjust in his medieval context, the designated punishment is still more merciful than that featured in Matthew’s Gospel. Replacing outer darkness (‘vtmer derknessis’) with a tangible space in the world discourages associating his anticipated suffering with hell. Moreover, the addition of the words ‘to teche hym be quoynt [well dressed]’ (160) suggests that the purpose of the guest’s imprisonment is not simply punishment, but reform. He will learn to dress well because, presumably, he will rejoin this community in the future. If we read this scene figuratively, the idea that the guest will learn to change himself through this punishment corresponds to a process of penance or to purgatory, rather than to damnation. According to the Cleanness-poet, therefore, God may hate impurity as much as he hates hell (168), but he does not necessarily punish one with the other. Instead, God attempts to return the outsider to the communal fold. Within the space of a few short lines, then, the poet asserts that the host is both cruel in his subjection of a guest to unusually harsh physical punishment for violating decorum yet benevolent in his aim to reform. Given these contrary

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tendencies, punishment for sin appears frightening not because of its certainty but because it fails to conform to human logic. The explication immediately following the parable offers tangible moral advice in the face of an inscrutable, seemingly illogical God. Like the parable itself, this commentary asserts both God’s generous love and God’s exacting moral standards. It opens with a revised version of Matthew’s final aphorism that describes God’s radical hospitality: Thus comparisunez Kryst þe kyndom of heuen To þis frelych feste þat fele arn to called; For alle arn laþed luflyly, þe luþer and þe better, Þat euer wern fulȝed in font, þat fest to haue. (161–4)

Whereas Matthew’s parable closes with the statement that many are called but few are chosen (22:14), the poet eliminates the reference to the few, transforming a proverbial message of exclusion into one of comprehensive inclusion: many are called. The two lines that follow emphasise the breadth of that inclusivity; not just many, but all baptised Christians – the worse (‘luþer’) and the better – are called to the feast of heaven. Although the explication goes on to warn readers about the importance of clothing that is ‘clene / and honest for þe halyday’, the poet never asserts that few are chosen. In other words, in a poem that recounts frightening tales of divine punishment, readers find a radically optimistic revision of Matthew’s Gospel that renders heaven open to all. Critics overwhelmingly disregard these first lines of explication, skipping ahead to the meanings assigned to the soiled garment that resemble readings from patristic exegesis. Directly addressing the reader, the poet goes on to ask, Wich arn þenne þy wedez þou wrappez þe inne, Þat schal schewe hem so schene, schrowde of þe best? Hit arn þy werkez, wyterly, þat þou wroȝt hauez, And lyued with þe lykyng þat lyȝe in þyn hert. (169–72)

The equation of clothing with works is consistent with both Jerome’s reading of the garment as adherence to the law and Gregory’s interpretation of it as charity. Yet rather than explicitly refer to doctrine like the ten commandments, the poet describes the internal process that gives rise to charitable living in keeping with God’s law. Here, I favour Andrew and Waldron’s reading of line 172 as ‘lyued with þe lykyng’ over Anderson’s sartorial term ‘lyned’, but the basic idea remains when rendered either way.

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Bright, beautiful (‘schene’) garments derive from the pleasures or desires (‘lykyng’) that reside in the human heart. By emphasising a person’s internal state, the poet suggests that charity is not something people simply put on or perform – as the clothing metaphor might imply – but is something more integral, stemming from a properly oriented will. Like the warning against clerical hypocrisy issued earlier in the poem, these lines imply that seemingly virtuous actions with false or hollow intent will not prepare one for the feast of heaven. Moreover, reference to the desires of the heart connects the parable with the sixth beatitude, since the pure of heart are those who will see – or comprehend – God. In one of the many oppositions that permeate Cleanness,103 the poet swiftly moves from the idea of beautiful garments to contaminated ones, enumerating the many ways a person may ‘forfete his blysse’ (177). Through multiplication and greater specificity, he affirms and deepens exegetes’ associations of the soiled garment with dark works or uncharitable behaviour. The list of offences goes well beyond themes of sexual and ritual purity to include thieving, dealing dishonestly, depriving widows of their dowries, spreading false rumours, and committing perjury and treason (177–88). If readers had failed to see themselves in the figure ejected from the feast, this more expansive and specific allegory casts a wider net that encourages a large swath of late medieval society to identify with the one expelled. At the same time, however, as Tinkle has observed, this catalogue makes contaminating sins seem unavoidable, such that ‘uncleanness appears to equate with the condition of man’.104 Whereas the explication first asserts that God welcomes all to the heavenly feast, the likelihood that any individual may expect to stay decreases as the explication progresses. The logic of the banquet remains frustratingly and frighteningly mysterious. As figured in the Cleanness parable, God is both loving and severe, eager to include and quick to exclude, generous yet protective of his gifts. According to Anderson, by highlighting these disparate qualities, the poet characterises God as essentially moody and unpredictable, vacillating among different demeanours.105 And so the host figure of the Cleanness parable would be if human and not divine. But the parable, as metaphor, does not liken God to a human host; it asserts that what appears irrational, even inconceivable in the world characterises the kingdom of heaven.106 In other words, rather than depict God as fundamentally capricious, the fused parable asserts that these seemingly opposite qualities mysteriously cohere in the divine. By highlighting what is known

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through scripture and what transcends human knowledge, the poet asserts that God is both the Great Supper host and the Wedding Feast king. God, like a parable, is paradoxical. In both of his arresting parables, the poet of Cleanness and Pearl emphasises the limits of human knowledge. In Pearl, the maiden repeatedly tells the Dreamer, who protests the seemingly illogical rewards of heaven, that the grace of God is great enough (612). That he must abide this mystery, rather than understand it fully, is made clear by the Dreamer’s inability to cross the river to join his daughter. In Cleanness, the poet insists that the ineffability of God can be terrifying as well as reassuring, since God’s power to punish is also great. Together, the two poems attest to divergent divine impulses, both widely attested to in scripture. While Pearl testifies to God’s radical love, Cleanness emphasises theological ideas often eclipsed by the New Testament’s gospel of redemption as well as the typological exegesis that explained events from the Hebrew Bible with reference to Christ. With the great flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God inflicts tragic suffering, sparing only the righteous few. Although the grace of God may be great enough, it seems in short supply in Genesis. At the same time that the poet compiles examples of divine punishment, he does not assert in Cleanness that the God of judgement is the one true God. In between the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the story of Belshazzar’s feast, the poet reassures sinners that ‘þat Mayster [Jesus] is mercyable’ (1113). In an abbreviated life of Christ, the poet describes Jesus healing lepers, paralytics, the blind, and even the dead. These people ‘claim’ grace and are made clean by Jesus’ courtesy (1093–1100). In addition to welcoming the physically unclean, the poet goes on to suggest, God may welcome the spiritually unclean: although all people are ‘sore and synful and sovly [unclean]’, they may still commune with God in the Eucharist and become clean through penance (1106–16).107 In the midst of commentary on God’s capacity for judgement and punishment, the poet reminds readers that these qualities of the divine coexist with a capacity for profound love and forgiveness.108 While he brings together divergent scriptural attestations of God, the Cleanness-poet does not try to resolve conflict, even as he harmonises the two stories. He affirms scriptural multiplicity: the stories are both true and contradictory because divine revelation says more than human readers can hope to comprehend. For this writer, the ideal form for expressing the unity of seemingly incoherent multiplicity is not a logical treatise that neatly eliminates

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contradictions but narrative packed with tensions and repeated subversions, simultaneously familiar and mysterious. God, the Cleanness-poet claims, is parabolic. Notes 1 All Cleanness quotations are from Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (eds), The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 4th edition (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002). 2 For a short summary of diverse Middle English renditions, see the Introduction, p. 6. 3 The story of a great feast is a part of the hypothetical Q source, which contains the material shared by Matthew and Luke but not included in Mark. In addition to the stories in Matthew and Luke, the Gospel of Thomas contains a story of guests refusing an invitation to a feast. See Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, pp. 64–5. 4 Directly preceding the parable in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus instructs Pharisees to invite the marginalised to their feasts and concludes ‘Blessid is he, that schal ete breed in the rewme of God’ (14:15). I discuss this context more extensively on p. 196. 5 According to the Sarum use, the parable of the Great Supper would be read on the second Sunday after Trinity, while the parable of the Wedding Feast would be read on the twentieth Sunday after Trinity. 6 For an outline of Oon of Foure, see P. M. Smith, ‘An Edition of Parts I–V of the Wycliffite Translation of Clement of Llanthony’s Latin Gospel Harmony Unum ex Quattuor known as Oon of Foure’ (PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 1985), 1:cxxxv–cli. For the text of the parables in The Pepysian Gospel Harmony, see Goates (ed.), pp. 62 and 79. For a rare instance of fusing the two parables, Jane Lecklider refers readers to Victor of Capua’s Evangelicarum harmoniarum interpretatio. See Cleanness: Structure and Meaning (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 28. 7 John Dominic Crossan characterises parables in this way in ‘Parable, Allegory, and Paradox’, in Semiology and Parables, ed. Daniel Patte (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick Press, 1976), p. 253. 8 Even those who discuss the integration of Luke’s story at some length still primarily emphasise Matthew’s story. See, for example, T. D. Kelly and John T. Irwin, ‘The Meaning of Cleanness: Parable as Effective Sign’, Mediaeval Studies, 35 (1973), 232–60. 9 Lynn Staley, ‘The Man in Foul Clothes and a Late FourteenthCentury Conversation about Sin’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 24 (2002), 1–47 (quotation on p. 1). 10 Eugene Lemcio calls ‘theology per se’ fundamental to the Wedding Feast and the related Great Supper parable. See ‘The Parables of

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the Great Supper and the Wedding Feast: History, Redaction, and Canon’, Horizons in Biblical Theology, 8:1 (1986), 6. 11 In her study of Glossed Gospels manuscripts and their contents, Anne Hudson concludes that the Glossed Gospels ‘originated in Oxford … certainly before 1400 and probably before 1390 or even 1385, in close association with the work on both versions of the Wycliffite Bible’; Hudson, Doctors in English, p. cliii. 12 See Ian Christopher Levy, Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 45–6. Christopher Ocker makes a similar assertion in Biblical Poetics, pp. 24–6. 13 For a discussion of these tools, see Ocker, Biblical Poetics, pp. 8–15. 14 The Glossed Gospels are unusual, but they are not the only extant commentary collections in Middle English. On Gospel commentaries in northern dialects, surviving in three manuscripts, see A. B. Kraebel, ‘Middle English Gospel Glosses and the Translation of Exegetical Authority’, Traditio, 69 (2014), 87–123. 15 Henry Hargreaves, ‘Popularising Biblical Scholarship: The Role of the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels’, in W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (eds), The Bible and Medieval Culture (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1979), p. 183. Thematic sections, or ‘topics’, tend to include more commentary from more recent theologians and integrate references to other relevant parts of scripture; some include overtly ideological polemic. We should note, however, that this style of discourse does not appear in commentary on any of the parables featured in this book. On topical sections, see Hudson, Doctors in English, pp. xcvi–cxvi. 16 In Cleanness scholarship, for example, scholars sometimes equate feast guests with Jews and Gentiles based on earlier exegetical commentary. Maija Birenbaum characterises this single strand of interpretation as the parable’s primary meaning. The Wedding Feast, she asserts, ‘which would have been familiar to the poem’s audience, represents the Jews’ denial of Christ’s Incarnation, God’s consequent rejection of the Jews, and the transmission of the divine promise from the Jews to the Gentiles’. See Maija Birenbaum, ‘Communal Purity and Jewish “Filth” in Cleanness’, Philological Quarterly, 91:3 (2012), 340. Monica Brzezinski similarly refers to this reading, in the singular, as ‘the traditional exegesis of the parable … it represents the Jews’ rejection of the Incarnate Word.’ See Monica Brzezinski, ‘Conscience and Covenant: The Sermon Structure of Cleanness’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 89:2 (1990), 171. Notably, in the Glossed Gospels, this allegory features most prominently in explication of the invited guests who kill the servants and the king’s revenge for that deed. The poet omits this episode from the parable in Cleanness.

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17 Minnis, Translations of Authority, p. 11. The commentaries do not, of course, suggest that there are no false readings of scripture; much of the patristic commentary collected in the Glossed Gospels stems from efforts to condemn heresies. Rather, their polyvalence indicates the coexistence of many meanings. 18 Jean Gerson articulates this relationship between exegetical multiplicity and scriptural harmony in the preface to his Gospel harmony, the Monotessaron. See Jean Gerson, ‘Monotessaron’, in P. Glorieux (ed.), Œuvres Complètes, vol. 9: L’œvre Doctrinale (Paris: Desclée, 1973), p. 246. See also Ryan McDermott’s discussion of exegesis and multiplicity in Tropologies, pp. 22–8. 19 Complete New Testaments are the most common form of surviving Wycliffite Bible manuscripts, with more than ninety extant copies. For a list, see Dove, The First English Bible, pp. 281–306. 20 A short version of Luke survives in two copies (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 143 and MS Bodley 243), which seems to be an abbreviation of the longer text in Cambridge, University Library (CUL), MS Kk.2.9. The situation with the Matthew glosses is more complicated. The commentary in London, British Library, MS Add. 28026 is the longest and was created without reference to Catena aurea. An abbreviated version of that commentary survives in Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 235. British Library, MS Add. 41175 contains another commentary on Matthew, shorter than the other two and based on the Catena aurea. Hudson notes that the creator of the Add. 41175 commentary knew of the version in Add. 28026 and refers to it as ‘þe firste exposicioun’. The shorter commentary on Matthew is also extant in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.1.38. For more on the varied versions, see Hudson, Doctors in English, pp. liii–xcv. 21 Hudson notes, however, that formal similarities between the Glossed Gospels and the Catena aurea do not extend to their manuscripts. Whereas the latter present interpretations surrounding the biblical text, in a style similar to the Glossa ordinaria, commentary in the Glossed Gospels appears in the main text area after the scriptural quotation, not in the margins or interlinearly; Doctors in English, pp. xxiii and xlv. 22 On the sources of the Glossed Gospels, see Hargreaves, ‘Popularising Biblical Scholarship’, pp. 182–3, and, more extensively, Hudson, Doctors in English, pp. liii–cxvi. 23 In most manuscripts, a double-slash or a paraph mark denotes the beginning of a new reading. 24 Topical sections found sporadically throughout the manuscripts put together glosses in a more synthetic and argumentative manner. In these glosses, commentary often begins with the invocation of a scriptural authority, using a phrase like ‘Christ says’, and then

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connects passages from the Gospels and other parts of the Bible to contemporary practices, like confession, or problems within the church, like simony. For a brief formal analysis of such sections, see M. Raschko, ‘Re-forming the Life of Christ’, in Patrick Hornbeck II and Michael van Dussen (eds), Europe After Wyclif (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 299–301. No topical passages appear in the commentaries on the parables in this study. 25 The compilers attribute this reading to a ‘greek doctour’. CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 169rb. Aquinas attributes the same reading to Cyril of Alexandria in Catena aurea. See 3:510. 26 Add. 28026 fol. 131va. This gloss, attributed to pseudo-Chrysostom, connects the Wedding Feast parable to its immediate context in Matthew 21, where Jesus has just angered priests and Pharisees with a declaration that the kingdom of heaven will be taken away from them. God’s power, the gloss insists, is far greater than their anger. 27 Add. 28026 actually has a smaller variety of sources than the shorter gloss (extant in British Library MS Add. 41175), but I chose the former to work with the earliest glosses and to have fuller versions of each interpretation offered in the commentary. On the relationship of these manuscripts to other commentaries on Luke and Matthew, see Hudson, Doctors in English, pp. lxxii–lxxiv and lv–lx. 28 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 169va. 29 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 169va. 30 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 169va. 31 A final gloss on supper, attributed to Gregory, associates it with end times, asserting that the ‘our of þe soper is ende of þe world’. It goes on to claim that the parousia is imminent and that readers should therefore not ignore God’s invitation, citing Paul’s statement that ‘þe worldis ende neyȝed now’. CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 169va. 32 Add. 28026 fol. 131va–b. Compare Gregory, Forty Gospel Homilies, p. 341. 33 Specifically, the gloss states, ‘Þe mete to wiche God clepiþ men here in þis Gospel is þe techynge of ryȝtfulnesse and wordis of heuenly mysteries of goddis sone to comynge, wiche alle a man etynge, þat is herynge, þenkynge, and kepynge, getiþ euerlastynge lyf.’ See Add. 28026 fol. 131vb. 34 See Add. 28026 fol. 132ra for the first quotation and fol. 132rb where the text reads, ‘Now alle þyngis ben reedy: what euer þyng is souȝt to helþe now al is fillid in scriptures. He þat is vnkunnynge in scriptures schal fynde þere þat þat he oweþ to lerne. He þat is rebel and synnere schal fynde þere þe turmentis of doom to comynge, whom he schal dreede. He þat traueyleþ schal fynde þere glorie byhyȝt in euerelastynge lyf, whom etynge he schal be more excitid to werk. He þat is of litil corage and sik schal fynde þere mene meetis of ryȝtfulnesse, wiche þouȝ þei maken not þe soule fatt, naþeles suffren not it to dye.

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He þat is of greet corage and feiþful schal fynde þere gostly meetes of more contynent liyf, wiche schullen fully brynge hym to þe kynde of angelis. He þat is smytun of þe deuel and wondid þoruȝ synnes schal fynde þere medycynal meetes, wiche schullen restore hym to helþe by penance. No þyng failiþ in þis feeste þat is nedeful to helþe of mankynde. Crisostom here.’ 35 Add. 28026 fol. 132ra. To read this interpretation within Jerome’s longer commentary, see Commentary on Matthew, ed. Thomas P. Scheck (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 3:249. 36 Add. 28026 fol. 132rb. 37 That meal, the gloss explains, is sustaining but not salvific like the sacrificial lamb; prophets who anticipated the paschal sacrifice and martyrs who imitated it are said to honour the wedding (the Incarnation) with their gift of flesh. Add. 28026 fol. 132ra–b. 38 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 170rb. Compare Augustine, ‘Sermon 112’, Patrologia Latina 38, col. 644. 39 The relevant text states, ‘Erþely substaunse eþer catel is signyfied bi a toun þerfore he goþ oute to se a toun whiche þenkiþ vtmere þingis aloone fore substaunse.’ A brief comment attributed to Ambrose then asserts that possessions can keep one from heaven, since Jesus instructed a rich man to ‘sille þou alle þi þingis and sue me’ (Luke 18:22). See CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 170rb. 40 ‘Þei ben seide ȝockis of oxun for erþely þingis ben souȝt bi þes wittis of fleysch for oxun eeren lond.’ The text goes on to list all five senses and, asserting that they should all be considered yokes, to explain how each consists of two parts: seeing with two eyes, hearing with two ears, smelling with two nostrils, tasting with tongue and palate, and feeling both within and without. CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 170rb. 41 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 170va. 42 A final comment on the second excuse cautions against hypocrisy. Attributed to Gregory and Bede, it takes issue with the man’s ‘wordis of mekenes’ when he asks to be excused. Like an insincere penitent, his speech conveys humility but his action betrays pride. CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 170va–b. 43 Although marriage is good and ordained by God, ‘neþeles sum men desiren not herby plente of children but desires of lustis. And þerfore a þing vniust may couenably be signyfied bi iust þing.’ CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 170vb–171ra. 44 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 171ra. 45 ‘Loue of erþely þingis is glu of gostly pennes. Þerfore nyle ȝee loue þe world.’ CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 171ra. 46 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 170vb. 47 Add. 28026 and CUL Kk.2.9 are similarly sized manuscripts with fifty and fifty-two lines per column, respectively. Commentary on the

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excuses takes up six columns of text in long Luke but only one column in long Matthew. 48 The translated passage of scripture in Add. 28026 says ‘vineȝerd’, but the compilers refer to ‘his towun’ when they break the passage into lemmata. The Matthew commentary in Laud Misc. 235 follows the same pattern, while the commentary in Add. 41175 uses the word town in both instances. See Laud Misc. 235 fol. 193ra–b and Add. 41175 fol. 75ra. 49 The association of avaricious priests with the man departing to his merchandise is the most extensive explication in this section. Add. 28026 fol. 132va. 50 ‘For to go in to a town is to bysy unmesurably aboute erþely labour, but to go in to marchandise is to coueite wynnynges of erþely dedis.’ Add. 28026 fol. 132va. 51 In the interest of clarity and efficiency, I refrain from discussing readings of the third summoning of guests that takes place when room still remains (Luke 14:22–3). Commentary associates these final guests with a wide range of figures, including heathen converts, heretics being called to the unity of the church, and those who know the church’s teachings but do not act on them. Collectively, these readings characterise the feast as radically open. See CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 172va–b. 52 Both statements occur in commentary attributed to Gregory. It asserts that ‘sike men and dispisid in þis world in so myche heren hastiliere þe voys of God’ and refers to the parable of prodigal son as evidence: ‘þe ilke sone þat lefte his fadir and wastide his substaunse lyuyng in leccherie hadde not come aȝen to hym self if he hadde not hungrid for after þat he hadde nede to erþely þingis’. The same gloss begins with the assertion that the poor were invited to rebuke the rich: ‘for proude men dispisen to come, pore men ben chosun. For as Poul seiþ, God ches þe sike þingis of þe world to counfounde þe stronge þingis.’ CUL Kk.2.9 fols 171vb–172ra. For the full homily from which these readings derive, see Gregory, Forty Gospel Homilies, pp. 312–25. 53 CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 171vb. 54 A reading attributed to Gregory similarly interprets the ‘crokid’ or lame as those who behave wrongly (‘whiche hau not riȝt goyngis in worchyngis’), but it describes blindness as lacking knowledge (or ‘liȝt of witt’). CUL kk.2.9 fol. 172ra. 55 The relevant portion of the gloss reads, ‘Com feble men, for a leche is not nedeful to hool men but to men hauyng yuel. Come crokid men whiche seien to hym dresse my steppis in þe weies. Come blynde men whiche seien lȝtene myn yȝen lest ony tyme I slepe in deep þat is of synne. Austyn in þe same sermoun.’ CUL Kk.2.9 fol. 171vb. 56 The gloss begins, ‘þe puple of heþen men was not in þe weyes but in outgoynges of weyes.’ Add. 28026 fol. 133ra.

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57 Add. 28026 fol. 133ra. 58 This gloss is also attributed to pseudo-Chrysostom. Add. 28026 fol. 133ra. 59 Add. 28026 fol. 133ra. 60 Add. 28026 fol. 133rb. 61 Add. 28026 fol. 133va. 62 Add. 28026 fol. 133va. 63 ‘Bride cloþ is very feiþ of Ihesu Crist and his ryȝtfulnesse. If ony man is foundun in weddigges with foul cloþ, he defouleþ þe glorie of weddynges. So he þat haþ derk werkes and lyueþ among Cristen men as oon of hem doþ dispit to Cristendom.’ Add. 28026 fol. 133va. 64 Add. 28026 fol. 133va–b. 65 Add. 28026 fol. 134rb. 66 David Wallace’s description of the poem’s symbolic instability resonates with the interpretive variety we observed in the Glossed Gospels. He writes that ‘the Cleanness-Poet repeatedly represents and then interprets complex linguistic and symbolic figures. Each figure, it seems, must be investigated on its own terms, not in terms of what has gone before. We are therefore committed to a perpetual exercise of our interpretive faculties.’ See ‘Cleanness and the Terms of Terror’, in Robert Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian Wasserman (eds), Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-poet (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1991), p. 97. 67 My argument complements the work of both Lawrence Clopper and Arthur Bahr, who study different features of the poem but similarly conclude that it holds up the inscrutability of God. Clopper claims that the poet embraced the moderni’s distinction between God’s potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta and, correspondingly, depicted God as fundamentally mysterious. See ‘The God of the “GawainPoet”’, Modern Philology, 94:1 (1996), 1–18. Bahr studies the quatrain structure indicated in the manuscript and argues that the irregular syntax of the poem’s final lines suggests that efforts to make sense of God ‘are destined to remain imperfect and, as such, must never truly conclude’. See ‘Finding the Forms of Cleanness’, Studies in Philology, 110:3 (2013), 480. 68 I share Sandra Pierson Prior’s view that referring to Cleanness as a ‘verse homily’ can have the effect of ‘closing off readers’ minds rather than opening them’ by reducing the work to a didactic treatise. See The Pearl Poet Revisited (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994), p. 53. 69 J. J. Anderson, Language and Imagination in the Gawain Poems (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 83–6. See also Derek Brewer’s assertion that both the Gospel parable and the poet’s rendition issue an unambiguous moral lesson: he claims that ‘neither the poet nor the Gospel writers are troubled by the problem of how

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a man compelled to come unexpectedly to a feast can be blamed for not having the appropriate clothes’. See ‘Feasts’, in Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (eds), A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), p. 135. 70 For characterisations of Cleanness as especially frightening, see Pierson Prior’s description of Cleanness as a poem about ‘the nearly hopeless relationship between a terrifying, angry Creator and his repulsively wicked creatures’, in The Pearl Poet Revisited, p. 53. Wallace similarly claims that the poet ‘terrorizes’ the reader with the threat of God’s judgement: Cleanness shows what God requires of humanity through covenant, even though God has the ultimate power not to honour that covenant. Wallace, ‘Cleanness and the Terms of Terror’, p. 100. See also Eleanor Johnson’s characterisation of Cleanness as a horror narrative, in ‘Horrific Visions of the Host: A Meditation on Genre’, Exemplaria, 27:1–2 (2015), 151. 71 On the poet’s promotion of sexual purity, especially his condemnation of sodomy, see Allen Frantzen, ‘The Disclosure of Sodomy in Cleanness’, PMLA, 111:3 (1996), 451–64 as well as Michael Calabrese and Eric Eliason, ‘The Rhetoric of Sexual Pleasure and Intolerance’, Modern Language Quarterly, 56 (1995), 247–75. On ritual purity, see Amity Reading, ‘“The Ende of Alle Kynez Flesch”: Ritual Sacrifice and Feasting in Cleanness’, Exemplaria, 21:3 (2009), 274–95. Also of interest is Monica Brzezinski Potkay’s argument that the poem praises eloquence and censures unclean speech, in ‘Cleanness’s Fecund and Barren Speech Acts’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 17 (1995), 99–110. 72 Staley associates these lines with ‘the ideals and observances undergirding the colleges of priests, or canons, to be found in the major cathedrals of England, whose duties were those of richly endowed stewards, celebrating the Eucharist, singing the divine office, preaching, and overseeing the estates and parishes owned by the cathedral’; ‘The Man in Foul Clothes’, 9. 73 For example, Chaucer laments in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales that one cannot expect to have a ‘beshiten shepherd’ and clean sheep. See The Riverside Chaucer, p. 31/501–6. 74 As my analysis will show, however, I disagree with Tinkle’s conclusion that the poet offers increasingly clear revelation of God across the course of the poem. See Theresa Tinkle, ‘The Heart’s Beatific Eye: Beatific Vision in Purity’, Studies in Philology, 85:4 (1988), 452, 470. 75 See Brzezinksi, ‘Conscience and Covenant’, 168–9. 76 According to the MED, ‘hard’ could indicate an unfeeling or violent figure, as well as something ‘difficult to understand or resolve’. See definitions 3, 5, and 6c. 77 In addition to the readings in the Glossed Gospels, Middle English sermons provide more evidence of a robust moral discussion surrounding the excuses. For example, the writer of the relevant sermon

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in the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle associates the three excuses with pride, coveting worldly goods, and sins of the flesh, respectively. Differing slightly, the relevant sermon in the Middle English version of Robert de Gretham’s Mirror first associates the town with worldly goods, the oxen with the five wits and curiosity, and the wife with sins of the flesh, but then concludes that the three together signify pride, covetousness, and lechery. See Hudson (ed.), English Wycliffite Sermons, 1:229 and Blumreich (ed.), The Middle English ‘Mirror’, pp. 270–4, 277. 78 The connections Staley draws between the language of the parable and interpretations from Augustine, Gregory, and Jerome, depend upon her theory that the subsequent Old Testament narratives illustrate the three vices she associates with the three excuses. Thus, for example, the excuse that the man has bought a town warns against pride because the poet castigates pride in the towns of Jerusalem and Babylon as well. See Lynn Staley, The Voice of the Gawain-Poet (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 101–2. 79 See MED ‘daunger’, definitions 3a and 5a. 80 Luke 14:20 states, ‘And an othir seide, Y haue weddid a wijf; and therfor Y may not come.’ 81 Goates (ed.), Pepysian Gospel Harmony, p. 79. 82 See also the Southern Passion, in which the author inserts twenty-six lines of commentary following the statement that ‘Þe hynen þat were to ham ysend hi ham nome wiþ wowe / And helde ham in great pyne and wiþ shame ham slowe.’ This is the only commentary interpolated into the basic narrative of the parable. See Beatrice Daw Brown (ed.), The Southern Passion (EETS OS 169, 1927), pp. 11–12. 83 Anderson, Language and Imagination, p. 94. 84 According to J. J. Anderson, baiting animals (55) refers to chasing them with dogs so that the exercise may increase the flavour of the meat. The practice was used from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. See Cleanness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 63. 85 See pp. 187–8 above and Gregory, Forty Gospel Homilies, p. 344. 86 The modern exegete John T. Carroll describes this speech as ‘counterculture advice from Jesus in the guise of social director’. Luke: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), p. 300. 87 Luke 14:12–14: ‘And he seide to hym, that hadde bodun hym to the feeste, Whanne thou makist a mete, or a soper, nyle thou clepe thi freendis, nethir thi britheren, nethir cosyns, nethir neiȝboris, ne riche men; lest perauenture thei bidde thee aȝen to the feeste, and it be ȝolde aȝen to thee. But whanne thou makist a feeste, clepe pore men, feble, crokid, and blynde, and thou schalt be blessid; for thei han not, wherof to ȝelde thee, for it schal be ȝoldun to thee in the risyng aȝen of iust men.’

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88 Even patristic and medieval exegetes often interpreted the reference to the poor, feeble, blind, and lame in Luke 14:13 literally. For a short survey of interpretations, see François Bovon, Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51–19:27, trans. Donald S. Deer, ed. Helmut Koester (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), pp. 358–9. For an analysis of relevant interpretations in the Glossed Gospels, see Raschko, ‘Re-forming the Life of Christ’, pp. 294–5. 89 On how the amplified realism of the invitees makes the host seem ‘quixotic and tyrannous’ after he expels the guest in a poor garment, see Davenport, The Art of the Gawain-Poet, pp. 82–3. 90 On seating according to rank, see P. W. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1993), p. 116. 91 Here I disagree with Anderson’s claim that line 117, ‘And ay a segges soberly semed by her wedeȝ’, provides evidence that the guests from lines 101–3, whom he refers to as ‘a motley collection’, are all ‘more or less respectably dressed’; Language and Imagination, p. 95. Malcolm and Waldron record ‘serly’ instead of ‘soberly’ on line 117 and translate it as ‘And always as befitted men severally according to their clothes.’ Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, p. 116. Similarly, William Vantuono writes ‘soerly’, which he describes as a variant of ‘serly’ or, in modern English, ‘individually’. The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus Edition, I: Pearl and Cleanness (New York: Garland, 1984), pp. 90, 296–7. 92 Anderson glosses ‘clene’ as well-bred or fair. See Cleanness, p. 123. 93 Wallace, ‘Cleanness and the Terms of Terror’, p. 99. 94 After positing that medieval readers would not find the host’s reaction as disturbing as modern readers do, Andrew and Waldron write ‘it is also possible that at the literal level there was the understanding that wedding garments were available to all who chose to ask for them’. See The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, p. 117. 95 Wallace, ‘Cleanness and the Terms of Terror’, pp. 99–100. 96 Anderson glosses ‘werkkez’ in this line first as ‘labour(s)’ and then as ‘evil deeds, sins’. See Cleanness, p. 66. 97 The MED defines ‘unthriven’ as ‘to be unsuccessful, fail; also, be unfortunate, come to grief’. See definition 1a. In its past participle form, the MED lists unseemly, unworthy, and wretched as potential meanings. Both Anderson and Andrew and Waldron favour definitions related to poverty, rather than worthiness. Anderson glosses ‘vnþryuandely’ as ‘poorly’, while Andrew and Waldron define it as ‘meanly’. See Cleanness, p. 169 and The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, p. 357. 98 The relevant MED definitions of ‘queintise’ are ‘3. a) Beauty, charm, elegance; (b) elaborate clothing or ornament, finery; (c) elegance of clothing or appearance, fashion.’ 99 This problem is exacerbated further if we follow Anderson’s reading

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of the poem, which claims that the poet deals in extremes (‘there are no degrees of sin and no degrees of punishment of sin’) and advances an ‘absolutist logic’ that holds that all humans, with the exception of the innocents featured in Pearl, are sinners. See Language and Imagination, pp. 84, 86. 100 Compare the use of the same formula in Matthew 13:40–2: ‘Therfor as taris ben gaderid togidere, and ben brent in fier, so it shal be in the endyng of the world. Mannus sone shal sende hise aungels, and thei schulen gadere fro his rewme alle sclaundris, and hem that doon wickidnesse; and thei schulen sende hem in to the chymney of fier, there shal be weping and betyng to gidere of teeth.’ 101 Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1985), p. 94. 102 Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy, p. 93. 103 On the poet’s use of oppositions, see Anderson, Language and Imagination, p. 86. 104 Tinkle, ‘The Heart’s Beatific Eye’, 455. 105 Anderson, Language and Imagination, p. 96. 106 The grammar of Matthew 22:1, we should note, compares the actions of a king to the kingdom of heaven, not God to a king: ‘The kyngdom of heuenes is maad lijk to a kyng that made weddyngis to his sone.’ 107 In Pierson Prior’s words, this section articulates a ‘strong and abrupt exception to God’s hatred of uncleanness’. See The Pearl Poet Revisited, p. 68. 108 Reading the Old Testament narratives typologically, some might deny any tension between the narratives and the discursive passages on Christ. Yet I find David Coley’s argument persuasive in this regard. He claims that although the Old Testament narratives in Cleanness have a ‘Christological force’, a hopeful Christology and counter-narratives of loss that ‘unsettle’ that Christology sit side by side in the poem. See ‘Remembering Lot’s Wife / Lot’s Wife Remembering: Trauma, Witness, and Representation in Cleanness’, Exemplaria, 24:4 (2012), 349–50.

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Epilogue Writing parabolic fiction: Langland’s pardon episode

I have argued that parables, within the context of the Gospels, share certain dynamics that generated the varied acts of revision and cultural negotiation featured throughout this book: Gospel parables are often explicitly metaphoric, they portray familiar scenes from everyday life, yet they render that familiar world strange or unfamiliar. In essence, the form of Gospel parables intensifies the interpretive work involved in their translation. As writers crafted new versions of parables in Middle English, they navigated contentious cultural debates with which the stories intersected, reconciled narrative events with familiar religious or social practices, and re-formed the stories to better fit the generic conventions of their surrounding literary contexts. In doing so, writers offered divergent accounts of what parables should say and do. While some created parables that would promote specific behaviours and affirm existing social and ecclesiastical structures, the preceding chapters have shown that Middle English parables also functioned as epistemological stories that call into question what audiences know of God and of themselves. Both the Pearl parable and the Cleanness Wedding Feast assert that the ways of God and the heavenly kingdom transcend human justice and even human reason. At the same time, the Cleanness Wedding Feast, like some renditions of Dives and Lazarus, encourages readers to better know themselves through introspection: the Cleanness parable asks audiences how they potentially refuse God’s invitation, while Mannyng and Idley’s Dives and Lazarus retellings help audiences perceive the social implications of seemingly individual actions. Often, Middle English parables are simultaneously intellectual and ethical. Both Piers Plowman’s Good Samaritan parable and Book to a Mother’s Prodigal Son parable advocate transformative modes of living derived from boldly imaginative renditions of the life of Christ. In these varied

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ways, Middle English parables ambitiously reconfigure not only Gospel stories but also the ways in which their audiences perceive and act in the world. Whereas most of this book has investigated how writers diversely constructed a set of narrative scriptures, I wish to conclude by exploring how the poetics of Gospel parables are manifest in original Middle English stories. A robust body of scholarship has examined how Gower, Chaucer, and others adopted and adapted the form of the sermon exemplum to create affective tales that inspired moral reflection and action.1 Parable, I argue, was another influential form of religious storytelling actively explored by late medieval writers, both in their translations of well-known scriptural narratives and in their creation of original tales. We can locate parabolic fiction across Middle English literature in narratives that combine worldly and other-worldly subject matter, so that the literal storyline both communicates challenging ideas in its own right and serves as a vehicle for spiritual allegory. Moreover, in a manner distinct from similitudes or exempla, these socially and spiritually formative tales foreground narrative tension, inspiring diverse, sometimes conflicting efforts to explain and rewrite them. To show that parable plays an important role in Middle English literature, I turn one final time to Langland’s enigmatic poem Piers Plowman. In this instance, I offer an analysis of the poem’s pardon episode as a case study that both illustrates the parabolic qualities of that narrative and potentially expands our understanding of the epistemological aims of Middle English storytelling. Scholars commonly refer to this pivotal scene in Piers Plowman as a puzzle or an enigma.2 My analysis goes a step further to argue that such puzzling or enigmatic narratives participate in a well-known genre, one influenced by Gospel stories yet under continuous negotiation by writers seeking to make sense of Christian teachings.3 A formalist reading of the pardon episode as parable will not, and should not, solve one of the most elusive mysteries in the poem – what Langland means, in some definitive sense, with the paradoxical pardon and its tearing in the A and B texts. Rather, it prompts us to reconsider how the episode functions. Instead of making definitive statements about salvation, Langland crafted a story that would tease his readers into open-ended intellectual and ethical enquiry. A formal reading of the episode as parable reveals that the object of Langland’s provocative story is the search for truth itself.

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The pardon episode as parable In all versions of Piers Plowman,4 the pardon episode takes place within the half-acre, where Piers has urged each member of society to participate in the harvest in a way suited to their estate. Truth, upon learning of their activity, sends a pardon ‘a pena & a culpa’ for Piers and his heirs ‘eueremore aftir’ (A.8.4–5).5 At this point in the text, a lengthy commentary intervenes that enumerates the parties covered by the as-yet-unopened pardon. Narrative action then resumes with a priest volunteering to read the pardon for Piers, to ‘construe iche clause & kenne it þe on englissh’ (A.8.90). Within the pardon, he finds only two lines, familiar from the Athanasian Creed: Et qui bona egerunt ibunt in vitam eternam; / Qui vero mala in ignem eternum [those who have done well will come into eternal life; indeed, who have done evil into eternal fire] (A.8.95–6). Baffled by these contents, the priest complains to Piers that he can find no pardon in these words. In two versions of the poem, Piers famously responds by tearing the document, reciting two lines from the twenty-third psalm in Latin, and then announcing that he will quit his agricultural work and turn to a life of prayer and penance.6 As Piers and the priest go on to argue about biblical and spiritual literacy, Will awakens from his dream. Like Gospel parables, Langland’s story has both social and spiritual implications. With its agricultural setting that recalls many of Jesus’ stories,7 the episode is grounded in an ordinary, routine event that occasions further discussion of the problem of idleness for contemporary labour politics.8 The story suggests that even ordinary, worldly work has spiritual implications, insofar as it presents the plowing of the half-acre as an alternative to another ritualistic, contemporary activity: pilgrimage to a holy place in search of forgiveness.9 Whereas medieval pilgrims might travel to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, or Canterbury to receive pardon in the form of papal indulgences, in this story, Truth tells Piers to ‘holde hym at hom & erien his laiȝes’ (A.8.5); in return for their humility, God will grant them penance and purgatory on earth (A.8.87–8). While the episode figuratively evokes pilgrimage as well, at a basic level it reinforces contemporary criticisms of such journeys as wasteful excursions that distract Christians from working for the good of their home communities.10 Finally, Piers’s interactions with the priest highlight a third facet of contemporary life insofar as they both model and challenge conventional social roles. If we assume that Piers represents labourers with a relatively

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low level of literacy, the priest’s offer to parse the pardon’s contents affirms each man’s traditional vocation: Piers works to sustain the social body, while the priest takes responsibility for the care of souls.11 Yet Piers’s subsequent criticism of the priest for not living in accordance with scripture subverts the social order, simultaneously recalling and enacting late medieval anticlerical critiques that censure clergy for their pride and hypocrisy. While grounded in everyday life, the pardon episode is also an explicitly metaphorical story whose meanings go far beyond its basic narrative. The attribution of the pardon to ‘Truth’ immediately signals that the narrative is more than a quasi-historical story: like Matthew’s parables that begin with a comparison to the kingdom of heaven, this episode represents the worldly as an expression of the divine. Yet the spiritual meanings of the episode are neither fixed nor easy to ascertain. Like the exegetes cited throughout the Glossed Gospels, modern readers unfold layers of meaning that collectively show the episode’s complex multivalence, often by focusing on one of the episode’s constituent parts. Ellen Rentz, for example, has argued that in this scene agricultural labour represents both physical and spiritual work: although plowing is first introduced as an activity to be done before or in place of pilgrimage, it eventually becomes a kind of pilgrimage itself, a means of journeying closer to God.12 Others have found multiple meanings in the figure of Piers, who may represent not only an individual plowman but all plowmen, the ideal penitent pilgrim or a prophet; for one reader, he embodies two contesting salvation theologies – first a nominalist soteriology and then an Augustinian one, after tearing the pardon.13 Similarly, in the object of the pardon, readers have seen far more than a papal document. Emily Steiner, for example, interprets it as the Charter of Christ, a metaphorical pardon written on the crucified body, which offered ‘a blueprint for a better society (a detailed system of works) and a new contract for the individual soul’.14 With these figurative readings, modern scholars approach the narrative much like medieval exegetes who derived moral or spiritual instruction from a particular aspect of a narrative, such as the initial guests’ excuses in the Great Supper parable or the person of the innkeeper in the Samaritan story. Like scriptural parables, the explicitly metaphorical character of Langland’s pardon story has generated not one or a few right readings but rather a growing nexus of figurative interpretations that unfold and expand its spiritual significance. Langland’s presentation of late medieval social and political

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phenomena as allegorical figures is, of course, a common and defining feature of Piers Plowman. Amidst this figurative poem, the pardon episode stands out as parabolic in the way that it also renders the familiar unfamiliar. In part, such strangeness results from Piers’s enigmatic action of tearing the pardon, an action that, as I will discuss shortly, Langland removes from the episode in the C text. Across all three versions, however, the pardon itself is richly paradoxical and disruptive. Whereas a pardon would normally be regarded as absolving people of punishment and expediting their passage through purgatory,15 the two lines from the Athanasian Creed offer no such relief. The priest voices the audience’s anticipated surprise when he protests, ‘I can no pardoun fynde / But do wel & haue wel, & god shal haue þi soule, / And do euele & haue euele, & hope þou non oþer / Þat aftir þi deþ day to helle shalt þou wende’ (A.8.97–100). The non-pardoning pardon neither reassures sinners that they will receive God’s mercy nor clearly endorses a particular salvation theology. Rather, it provocatively intersects with debates over the efficacy and authority of indulgences, raising questions about how sin may be expiated, punishment may be mitigated, and communities may collectively seek salvation. Piers’s actions do little to resolve the paradox of the pardon, since he seems to embrace and reject the creedal statement contained within the document. Although he tears the pardon apart in ‘pure tene’, he verbally expresses trust in God as he tears it, praying in the psalmist’s words that ‘Si ambulauero in medio umbre mortis / Non timebo mala quoniam tu mecum es’ (A.8.101–3).16 Piers’s subsequent declaration that he will quit his agricultural labour (‘cesse of my sowyng’) and take on a vocation of penance and prayer signals some acceptance of the severed pardon’s terms, a determination to do well to have eternal life. Piers’s actions, therefore, generate a further series of narrative, social, and theological questions. How should readers reconcile Piers’s seeming embrace of the charge to do well with his destruction of the document that conveyed it? Why does this rejection/acceptance put Piers at odds with the priest? And what does Piers’s sudden commitment to what Aers calls ‘transcendent spiritual individualism’ mean for the vision of communal salvation figured by the collective labour and pardon promised in the half-acre?17 Such questions give rise to a final characteristic that attests to the episode’s parabolic nature: its inspiration of extensive glossing and further acts of storytelling. Even within the episode itself, we find prolific efforts to explicate the ambiguous nar-

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rative, when Langland offers an example, perhaps a parody, of exegetical commentary.18 Between the promise that all who plow will receive pardon and the priest’s act of opening the text, the poem offers a long gloss on ‘alle þat holpen to erien or to sowen, / Or any maner mester þat miȝte peris helpen’ (A.8.6–7). In the A text, an ambiguous speaker specifies how kings, knights, bishops, merchants, lawyers, and labourers may share in the pardon, as well as the elderly, pregnant women, the blind, and lame who cannot work.19 Able-bodied beggars, however, are excluded. While such commentary attempts to clarify the terms of the upcoming pardon, revisions in the B and C texts show how even such expository lines inspired further acts of clarification. What occupies 79 lines in the A text grows modestly to 97 lines in the B text. Although Langland simplifies the narrative itself in C, he dramatically amplifies this quasi-exegetical commentary. In a passage spanning 270 lines, Langland particularly expands his discussion of legitimate and illegitimate begging, such that, as Steiner writes, ‘in the C.9 revision, the beggar threatens to overtake the Pardon and become the whole poem, subsuming all questions about identity, association, and work’.20 The commentary that grows across the three versions points to one of the primary cultural issues with which the narrative ­intersects – the problem of identifying who legitimately refrains from work. If salvation is communal, or at least has a communal dimension as the half-acre setting implies, are there some who should receive more from the community than they contribute? Like in the A and B texts, the C-text commentary condemns false beggars who would injure their children to garner more alms (C.168–73),21 but it also criticises slothful false hermits at length, blaming friars for inspiring their behaviour and bishops for tolerating it (C.9.188–269). More positively, the C-text commentary directs readers to care for their neighbours who struggle to feed their children but are ‘abasched for to begge’ (C.9.86). Likewise, it characterises the mentally ill as God’s minstrels who should be welcomed into people’s homes with warm hospitality (C.9.105–38). Collectively, these revisions indicate that the pardon episode has occasioned and become the site for negotiating the forms of need that demand relief and the forms of poverty that should be considered holy. Like Gospel parables, in other words, the narrative intersects with and inspires ongoing debate about how socio-economic realities express or transgress divine justice. The larger narrative in which this commentary appears is also

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an unsettled text, repeatedly reshaped and reinterpreted, first by authorial revision and then by generations of literary scholars. Because the pardon episode presents such a vexing puzzle near the end of the A text, some have cast it as a catalyst for writing the B-version of the poem. In an early articulation of this claim, Nevill Coghill wrote, ‘it was the Pardon and his ponderings upon it that in the end forced the revising poet to recast the whole work’.22 From this perspective, the inner dreams, the crucifixion narrative, and the building of the barn of unity are all stories that seek to answer the problems raised by the parabolic pardon episode. Yet we need not adopt this argument about the poem as a whole to recognise how one parable inspired further retellings. In the B text, Langland has subtly reworked the episode from A: most notably, he eliminates the reference to the pope as grantor of the pardon (A.8.8), and he intensifies Piers’s feelings of repentance after hearing the pardon’s contents.23 Such changes increase the ambiguity of the initial pardon, making it less clearly a representation of papal indulgences, and sharpen the surprising critique of agricultural work that had, up to this point, represented pious Christian living. The C-text changes are far more dramatic. In addition to more than doubling the commentary that precedes the pardon, Langland removes both the final exchange between Piers and the Priest about religious literacy and Piers’s action of tearing the pardon. In their place, after the priest protests that he can find no pardon in the twoline text, Langland simply asserts that ‘the prest thus and perkyn of þe pardon iangelede’ (C.9.293). That argument wakes the Dreamer and ends the episode. Much like translators sometimes attempted to mitigate a parable’s discordance with its surrounding social or ecclesiastical context, this retelling potentially can be understood as a reaction to a changing cultural context. Reading the episode in light of the 1381 rebellion, Steven Justice explains that Langland may have cut the tearing of the pardon ‘because it seemed in retrospect to confer theological dignity on the destruction of archives’.24 Barbara Newman likewise sees both theological and political factors at play in the latest version: she posits that after the rebellion Langland might ‘have wished to quash the idea that holy action can proceed from “pure tene”’, and she raises the possibility that in C, Piers leaves the pardon intact because ‘it remains valid, with its assurance of salvation for working people and even muchmaligned merchants’.25 Together, these explanations suggest how a changing cultural context could reshape the earlier narrative’s

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meaning, motivating revisions that reinvent the narrative for a new sociopolitical and religious landscape. Although many read the C-text retelling as an effort to create a clearer story, I consider this rendition as a refinement of a puzzling tale, one that still embraces the disruptive dynamics of parabolic fiction. Without the provocative tearing, Langland streamlines narrative tensions to one central paradox: the pardon that holds people accountable for their actions. Revelation of its contents still subverts readers’ expectations, with a message that rebukes the contemporary practice of seeking (and granting) indulgences and raises questions about how Christ’s atonement affects human sin.26 The episode remains riddling and complex, worldly and otherworldly, but Langland has concentrated readers’ attention on two focal concerns: the relationship between work and charity and the question of how sins may be forgiven. When we debate whether the pardon is really a pardon or whether Piers’s act of tearing it is a rejection of its precepts, we enact precisely what the narrative asks us to do – to query the spiritual implications of familiar worldly practices, to seek out the story’s manifestations in other discourses or in a wider cultural context, and to wrestle with seemingly paradoxical religious teachings. As parabolic fiction, Langland’s pardon episode plunges readers into the contradictions and problems of everyday life and encourages them to confront the difficulties of reconciling Christian ideals with human systems of thought and social practice. In translated Gospel parables, we have seen the vibrant interpretive debates that such stories provoke as well as creative efforts to make sense of them in the form of new narratives. The parabolic qualities of Langland’s pardon episode suggest that just as particular Gospel stories, like the Labourers in the Vineyard or the Good Samaritan, played a prominent role in late medieval poetry, so did their formal dynamics, by influencing writers’ craft and structuring readers’ expectations of what short narratives might evoke and inspire. Nelson and Gayk have argued that ‘genres are often defined by their effects, by the affect, experience, or lifeworlds they generate’.27 The inverse, likewise, holds true for how our knowledge of medieval genres affects our reading, how it shapes our expectations of what Middle English literature might foster. When we assume that spiritually instructive stories should have actionable ends that affirm some particular religious tenet or ideological perspective, we search for the particular sociopolitical or theological doctrine that may resolve our puzzlement over an ambiguous narrative. Yet if we add parable to the

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repertoire of genres through which we expect late medieval writers to reimagine and reconfigure their world, we may more readily accept intellectual enquiry itself, fostered by disorientation and deliberate provocation, as a desired end of Middle English fiction.

Notes  1 See, for example, Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truth; Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower; and Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power.  2 David Aers, for example, calls the pardon itself an enigma and describes Will’s ‘puzzlement’ at it as ‘thoroughly appropriate’. Salvation and Sin, 110. Similarly, A. C. Spearing comments that the episode leaves Will ‘to puzzle over the meaning and reliability of his dream’, and Britton J. Harwood writes that ‘no criticism, after all, should dispel [the pardon’s] puzzling effect’. See, respectively, Readings in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 236, and Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 156.  3 Traugott Lawler has compared the pardon episode to multiple Gospel parables, but our conceptions of the genre differ. He describes both Langland’s story and the evangelists’ parables as binary and semiPelagian. See ‘The Pardon Formula in Piers Plowman: Its Ubiquity, Its Binary Shape, Its Silent Middle Term’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 14 (2000), 137–8.  4 I will discuss only the A, B, and C versions of this episode, since the Z text contains only half the narrative and, in this abbreviated form, does not resemble a parable. The Z text ends after the commentary outlining to whom the pardon pertains.  5 I initially cite the shortest and earliest version of Piers Plowman because of my interest in how this particular episode expands and changes shape as Langland continued to revise his poem. All A-text citations come from Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. George Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1960).  6 The A text reads, ‘And piers for pure tene pulde it assondir / & seide “Si ambulauero in medio umbre mortis / Non timebo mala quoniam tu mecum es. / I shal cesse of my sowyng”, quaþ peris, “& swynke not so harde, / Ne aboute my belyue so besy be namore; / Of preyours & of penaunce my plouȝ shal ben heraftir, / and beloure þat I belouȝ er þeiȝ liflode me faile”’ (8.101–7).  7 Agricultural parables include the Sower (Matt 13:3–8; Mark 4:3–8; Luke 8:5–8), the Tares among the Wheat (Matt 13:24–30), the Labourers in the Vineyard (Matt 20:1–16), and the Wicked Husbandmen (Matt 21:33–44; Mark 12:1–11; Luke 20:9–18).

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 8 The problem of idleness is a key issue in Piers’s previous discussions with Hunger; it re-emerges in the extended gloss on the pardon.  9 Alastair Minnis suggests that ‘Langland had in mind a pilgrimagecommutation of a kind which was common in his day, whereby a person who did not actually go on a pilgrimage received, by special dispensation, the benefits which would have accrued had he or she actually done so.’ See Minnis, ‘Piers’ Protean Pardon: The Letter and Spirit of Langland’s Theology of Indulgences’, in Studies in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts in Honour of John Scattergood (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), p. 232. 10 On opposition to ‘place pilgrimage’, see Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature: 700–1500 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 141–4. 11 On the relationship between literacy and spirituality in this part of the poem, see Wendy Scase, ‘Writing and the Plowman: Langland and Literacy’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 9 (1995): 121–39, especially 125. On the evolution of Piers from a servant plowman in passus five to a ‘self sufficient peasant tenant’ in passus six, see Christopher Dyer, ‘Piers Plowman and Plowmen: A Historical Perspective’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 8 (1994), 160–3. For a relevant discussion of rural literacy in the late fourteenth century, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 25–7. 12 Ellen Rentz more broadly observes that the pardon scene participates in a ‘discourse of spiritualised agricultural metaphor with biblical and liturgical roots’. I agree that the scene is at once worldly and spiritual, but I think its disruption of ordinary plowing and pardons prevent it from aligning the worldly and the divine to the degree Rentz describes. See ‘Half-Acre Bylaws: Harvest-Sharing in Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 25 (2011), 95–115, especially 98. 13 Denise Baker, ‘From Plowing to Penitence: Piers Plowman and Fourteenth Century Theology’, Speculum, 55:4 (1980), 715–25. 14 Emily Steiner, ‘Langland’s Documents’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 14 (2000), 103. 15 On the spiritual benefits associated with pardons, or indulgences, in the later Middle Ages, see Minnis, ‘Piers’s Protean Pardon’, pp. 223–9. 16 On Piers’s Davidic speech and the psalmic character of the Pardon itself, see Michael Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp. 209–12. 17 Aers writes that Piers’s anger at the pardon ‘leads to another real and recurrent temptation, for many besides Piers. The temptation is to withdraw from the complex field of social practice to a supposedly transcendent spiritual individualism (VII.122–35), a retreat which

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simply abandons the realm of human activity to whatever emerging forces can take possession, and assumes a split between body and soul which many forms of Christianity have resisted.’ See David Aers, Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 23. 18 Spearing remarks that the gloss has ‘some element of self-parody, or at least of parody of the wish to pin down God’s mysterious purposes in legalistic documentary form’. See Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, p. 232. 19 On the ambiguity of the speaker at this point of the poem, see Spearing, Readings in Medieval Poetry, p. 232. 20 Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman, p. 88. 21 See A.8.73–9 and B.7.91–7. 22 Nevill Coghill, ‘The Pardon of Piers Plowman’, in The Collected Papers of Nevill Coghill, ed. Douglas Gray (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 151. See also Godden’s claim that the ‘tearing of the Pardon vicariously enacts the poet’s tearing of his poem. Piers’ action enabled Langland to go forward with the poem and develop the alternative to the Pardon’s ideals more gradually.’ The Making of Piers Plowman, p. 56. Also relevant is D. Vance Smith’s characterisation of the tearing as ‘the poem’s scene of greatest disruption … and its most disjunctive beginning’. The Book of the Incipit (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 189. 23 In the A text, after stating that prayers and penance will be his plow, Piers states that he will ‘beloure [disapprove] þat I belouȝ [smiled upon] er þeiȝ liflode me faile’ (8.107). Comparatively, in the B text, he will ‘wepen whan I sholde werche þouȝ whete breed me faille’ (7.125). 24 Justice argues, however, that the rebels’ concerns still appear in the episode: Langland moved ‘the language of rural experience’ to the expanded commentary on begging. See Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 240, 243–4. 25 Barbara Newman, ‘Redeeming the Time: Langland, Julian, and the Art of Lifelong Revision’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 23 (2009), 29–30. 26 Scholars disagree about the particular salvation theology evoked by the pardon. Robert Adams, for example, associates it with a semi-Pelagian theology according to which Christ’s sacrifice made available the possibility of salvation, namely that by doing well, one can be saved. Likewise, David Lawton has argued that the pardon articulates the criteria used at judgement and insists that the A- and B-text versions, with the pardon-tearing, and the C-text version without all project the same message. Aers, in contrast, reads the episode as an ‘enigmatic prefiguration’ of a Christocentric Augustinian salvation theology. See Adams, ‘Piers’s Pardon and Langland’s Semi-Pelagianism’, Traditio,

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39 (1983), 367–418; Lawton, ‘Piers Plowman: On Tearing – and not Tearing – the Pardon’, Philological Quarterly, 60:3 (1981), 413–22; and Aers, Salvation and Sin, p. 109. 27 Nelson and Gayk, ‘Introduction’, 9.

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Index

abstinence 110–11, 135n.31 Aers, David 59n.62, 83, 102n.104, 142, 172n.62, 173n.69, 176n.98, 220, 224n.2, 225n.17, 226n.26 Alan of Lille 103n.111, 132n.7 allegorical interpretation 8–10, 23n.27 of Dives and Lazarus 131n.2 of Good Samaritan 143–4 of Great Supper 182–9 of Labourers in the Vineyard 31–2 of Prodigal Son 91n.4, 104n.124 of Wedding Feast 182–9, 206n.16 see also Good Samaritan parable Allen, Elizabeth 108 almsgiving 68, 110–11, 113, 121, 126–7, 135n.33, 138n.58, 145–6 Alphabet of Tales, An 132nn.8–9 Ambrose of Milan 91n.4, 103n.113, 104n.127, 132n.10, 168n.7, 185, 187 Anderson, J. J. 52n.9, 59n.62, 190, 194, 202, 203, 213n.84, 214nn.91–2, 214nn.96–7, 214n.99 Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron 60n.72, 62n.89, 199, 202, 214n.91, 214n.94, 214n.97

Andrew of St Victor 8 Aquinas, Thomas 9, 18, 30, 172n.62 Catena aurea 131n.2, 179, 207nn.20–1, 208n.25 Athanasian Creed 218, 220 Augustine of Hippo De doctrina christiana 148 on Dives and Lazarus 136n.42 on Good Samaritan 172n.62 on Great Supper 184, 185, 187, 213n.78 on Labourers in the Vineyard 30, 52n.10 on parable genre 9 Piers Plowman and 172n.62 on pilgrimage 87, 103n.117 on Prodigal Son 88, 104n.124 promotion of close translation 22n.16 salvation theology 42, 60n.68, 219, 226n.26 on self-reform 70 on Wedding Feast 3, 21n.10 avarice 106, 113, 114–15, 116, 129, 210n.49 Barr, Helen 41, 45, 58n.56, 61n.79 Bede 168n.7, 172n.62, 183 beggars, begging 105, 117, 118, 120, 135n.33, 168n.13, 221 Bible see scripture

246 Book to a Mother audience 82–3, 101n.94 author 82, 101n.91 close translation 87, 103nn.115–16 date 93n.14 genre 70, 95n.33, 98n.67 Lollardy and 67, 93nn.13–14 reading scripture 83–4, 102n.107 reformist outlook of 66–7, 83–4, 92–3n.12, 104n.125 use of term ‘book’ in 84, 102–3n.108 view of laity in 82–5 Bowers, John 43, 59–60n.65, 61n.72 Bradwardine, Thomas (De causa Dei) 30 Butler, William 83 Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2498 96n.41, 169n.25, 171n.51 Cannon, Christopher 108–9 Carruthers, Mary 102n.107 charity see love/charity Chaucer, Geoffrey 97n.51, 99n.74, 135n.31, 138n.60, 212n.73, 217 Christ audience for parables of 8, 24n.33 as book 83–5, 102nn.106, 103n.109 explanation of parable genre 8 imitatio Christi 85–6, 88–90, 152–3 interest in ministry of 83, 102n.104 as storyteller 10, 12, 107, 128 see also lives of Christ church institution 37, 89, 90, 92n.10, 143, 159, 179, 187–8, 195–6

The politics of Middle English parables scripture as foundation for authority of 66, 92n.9, 128 Wycliffite view of 6, 153–4 Cigman, Gloria 33, 56n.45, 57n.52 Cleanness in context of exegetical tradition 180–1, 206n.16 as epistemological story 190–1 as frightening 190, 212n.70 on hospitality and inclusivity 194–8 on inscrutability of God 202, 203–4, 211n.67, 215n.108 on judgement and exclusivity 199–203 morality in 192–4 as sermon 190, 211n.68 Clement of Llanthony 59n.64 Clensyng of Mannes Soule, The 69, 94n.26 clergy criticism of 58n.59, 104n.125, 156–7, 174n.74, 179, 190, 212n.73, 219, 221 extraclergial writings 66–7, 92n.12, 93n.13 as mediators of scripture 83, 84–5, 179–80 role in penance 67–70, 92n.10, 93n.18, 94n.20 in three estates model 35–8 Clopper, Lawrence 174n.82, 211n.67 Cole, Andrew 35 Comestor, Peter (Historia scholastica) 131n.6, 132n.10, 179 commentaries see exegesis and scriptural commentaries Confessio Amantis (Gower) Amans as desire 139n.64 audience of 122, 138n.60, 139n.62, 140n.84 on authority of scripture 128–9, 140n.80, 140nn.82–3

Index moral frame 123, 133n.22 on poverty 127, 130, 168n.17 on self-regulation 122–30, 140nn.72–3, 141n.85 confession 67–70, 76, 78–9, 80–2, 92n.10, 93nn.17–19, 94n.27 see also penance contrition 48–9, 67–70, 78, 81, 93nn.17–19 see also penance Copeland, Rita 22n.16, 25n.45 Crassons, Kate 106, 130, 131n.4, 136n.43, 158, 173n.68, 174n.79 Crossan, John Dominic 12, 25n.50, 205n.7 cultural translation 5, 22n.20 Cyril of Alexandria 183, 208n.25 Decretals (Gratian) 67–8 delicacy (moral sin) 109, 111, 123–9, 135n.32, 140nn.72–3, 141n.85 see also gluttony De veritate sacrae scripturae (Wyclif) 9 Dives and Lazarus parable abuse of power and 118–22, 137n.53 associated with greed 26n.60, 131n.6 as critique of communal division 131n.4 Gospel version 26n.60, 105–6, 135nn.35–6, 136n.41, 140n.75, 140n.77, 140n.79 mindful eating and 110–16 overview of retellings 109–10 salvation of the wealthy and 106, 118, 131n.5 self-regulation and 122, 125–30 suitability for penitential story collections 107 Dodd, C. H. 11–12, 23n.27

247 Dyer, Christopher 53n.16, 60n.72, 145, 168n.13, 169n.21 economy see society and economy exegesis and scriptural commentaries allegorical sense 8, 10, 23n27 Glossa ordinaria 26n.60, 55n.30, 60n.70, 131n.6, 179 literal sense 9, 24n.38, 25n.39 moral sense and tropology 7, 169n.22 multiplicity of meaning 180–1, 207nn.17–18 as primary vocation of theologians 179–80 see also sermons/preaching; Wycliffite Glossed Gospels exempla Dives and Lazarus and 131nn.6–7 dynamics of 108 relationship to parable 7–8, 217 in sermons 79, 92n.10 Wedding Feast and 179, 190 exemplarity Christ as exemplar 84–6, 88–90, 102nn.106–7, 103n.109, 152–3, 155–6 clergy and 156–7, 174n.74 as concept 132n.13, 173n.71, 174n.72 imitation and 156–8 in penitential story collections 108–9, 132n.13, 133n.16 see also imitatio Christi; lives of Christ extraclergial writings 66–7, 92n.12, 93n.13 Fasciculus Morum 94n.24, 94n.27, 132n.8 forgiveness from God alone 68, 69, 94n.20 Good Samaritan and 142–3, 151, 159, 168n.7

248 forgiveness (cont.) pardon episode in Piers Plowman 217–24 penitential process for 67–8, 76–82 Prodigal Son and 71–6 form of living (literary genre) 70, 95n.36 Foucault, Michel 66, 92n.10 Fourth Lateran Council (1215) 65, 91n.6, 110 friars 68, 145–6, 221 Gerson, Jean 207n.18 Gesta Romanorum 132n.8 Ghosh, Kantik 11 Glossa ordinaria 26n.60, 55n.30, 60n.70, 131n.6, 179 Glossed Gospels (Wycliffite) see Wycliffite Glossed Gospels gluttony as abuse of wealth 118–20 associated with blasphemy and sorcery 124, 139n.67 delicacy and 109, 111, 123–9, 135n.32, 140nn.72–3, 141n.85 feasting and 111–12, 116, 118– 19, 138n.54 physical corruption and 114–15 remedy for 110, 135n.31 socio-economic dynamics of 110–16 God as inscrutable 52n.9, 189, 202, 203–4, 211n.67, 215n.108 as just 30, 40, 42–3, 46, 47–8 love for humanity 71–6, 194–8 love of God and neighbour 143, 152–3, 157, 188 poor as servants of 117, 121 punishment by 35, 182, 194, 199–204, 212n.70 as sole source of forgiveness 68, 69, 94n.20 see also Trinity

The politics of Middle English parables Godden, Malcolm 173n.69, 226n.22 Good Samaritan parable as allegory of Redemption 143–4, 155, 167–8nn.5–8, 172n.62 as burlesque or satire 167n.3 charity and 144–6, 147, 152, 154, 156–7, 158–62, 173n.69, 174n.83, 175n.84 Gospel version 142–3, 146–7 as injunction to imitation 150–4 interpretation of ‘neighbour’ in 146–50, 153, 174n.76 liturgical context for 170n.45 Samaritan identity 147, 169n.29, 170n.40 Gospel of Thomas 205n.3 Gower, John 138n.59 see also Confessio Amantis grace forgiveness through 74, 76 as gift 30, 45–6, 47, 49, 62nn.80–1 pactum theology and 30, 52n.12 see also love/charity Gratian 67–8, 93n.18 Great Supper parable Gospel version 177–8, 196, 205n.4, 213n.87 interpretations of excuses 184–6, 209nn.39–40, 209nn.42–3, 212n.77 invitation of marginalised 186–7, 196–7, 210nn.51–2, 214n.88 liturgical context for 205n.5 as part of Q source 205n.3 as theological story 179, 205n.10 see also Wedding Feast/Great Supper hybrid parable greed see avarice Gregory the Great on Dives and Lazarus 131n.2, 136n.42, 136–7n.44

Index on Great Supper 185, 186–7, 208n.31, 209n.42, 210n.52, 210n.54 in Handlyng Synne 132n.9 on Labourers in the Vineyard 58n.58 as source for Robert de Gretham 171n.52 on Wedding Feast 183, 184, 187–9, 195, 202 Grosseteste, Robert 182 Handlyng Synne (Robert Mannyng) audience of 110, 134nn.28–9 authority of scripture and 140n.81 on confession 91n.7 on gluttony 110–16, 135n.32, 135n.38 manuscripts of 134n.27 penitential models in 79, 100n.88 reflective aim of 108–9, 133n.18 sources of 132n.9 Hanna, Ralph 96n.41, 169n.25, 171n.52 Hargreaves, Henry 180 Hedrick, Charles 11, 26n.51, 167n.3 Herzog, William 11, 53n.19 Holcot, Robert 30, 52n.12 Holy Spirit 162–3, 165, 175nn.87– 8, 176n.98 Hornbeck, J. Patrick 54n.27, 56n.45 Hudson, Anne 206n.11, 207nn.20–1 Hugh of St Cher 3, 167n.5 Hugh of St Victor 102n.107, 172n.62 idleness 31, 38, 43–4, 53n.16, 61n.73, 61n.75, 218, 225n.8

249 Idley, Peter 117, 137n.48 see also Instructions to His Son imaginative literary theory 14 imitatio Christi 88, 152–3 see also exemplarity; lives of Christ indulgences 68, 165, 218, 220, 222, 223 Instructions to His Son (Idley) on abuse of wealth 117–22, 137n.45, 137nn.52–3, 138n.57 broader literary context of 137n.49 manuscripts of 137n.47 sources of 117 interpretation of scripture see exegesis and scriptural commentaries Jacob’s Well 69, 78, 91n.6, 132nn.8–9 Jeremiah, Joachim 23n.27 Jerome 22n.16, 104n.124, 182, 184, 187, 188, 200, 202 Jesus see Christ Jülicher, Adolf 23n.27 Kendall, Elliot 130 kindness 115, 116, 150, 163–6 ‘kynde’ (Middle English) 114, 163, 176n.89, 176n.95 see also love/charity labour, agricultural Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 58n.56, 145, 222 regulation of 31, 53nn.16–17 three-estates model 35–8, 56n.40, 58nn.55–6 wages 31, 35, 43, 53n.17, 60n.72 Labourers in the Vineyard parable associated with ten commandments 33, 55n.30 in broader scriptural context 39–42, 59n.64

250 Labourers in the Vineyard parable (cont.) as demonstration of grace 46–9 as exposure of worker oppression 53n.19 Gospel version 27–8, 60n.70, 60n.72, 61nn.77–8, 62n.83, 62n.93 idleness and 43–4, 61n.73, 61n.75 as injunction to work 32–8, 54n.26 interpretation of wage in 60n.72, 62n.86 as justification of ownership rights 62n.82 liturgical context for 15, 26n.55, 32 prominent allegorical readings of 31–2, 53n.21, 54n.29 as subversion of worldly norms 27, 42–6, 50–1, 61n.75 laity 37, 77, 82–5, 101n.97 Langland, William see Piers Plowman Levy, Ian Christopher 103n.109 liturgy 15, 26n.55, 32, 60n.67, 100n.80, 170n.45, 205n.5 lives of Christ genre of 70–1 Good Samaritan and 147–50 Prodigal Son and 71–6 see also exemplarity; imitatio Christi Lochrie, Karma 92n.10 Lollard/Lollardy see Wycliffites/ Wycliffism Lollard Sermons Labourers in the Vineyard in 33, 36, 37–8, 57n.52, 58n.56, 58n.59, 61n.73 Lollardy and 56n.45 Lombard, Peter (Sentences) 68, 69, 93n.17, 93n.19, 94n.20, 182 London, British Library, MS

The politics of Middle English parables Harley 2276 (sermons) 150–1, 167n.6, 170n.45, 171n.47, 171n.49 Long Life of Christ, The 96n.44 Lost Coin parable 65 Lost Sheep parable 65, 74, 86 love/charity clergy and 156–7 differentiated participation in 160–2 discriminate/indiscriminate charity 145, 149, 157 institutional charity 169n.21 of neighbour 146–50 relationship between human and divine love 162–7 see also almsgiving; Good Samaritan parable Lydgate, John 117 Lyfe of Soule, Þe 148–9, 170nn.31–2, 170n.35 Mannyng, Robert 110, 134nn.28–9 see also Handlyng Synne Manuel des Péchés 110, 131n.7, 134n.26, 135n.37, 136n.44 Mary Magdalene 69, 74, 75, 98nn.59–60, 100n.88 Mary (Virgin) 85 mass 41–2, 60n.67 see also liturgy McDermott, Ryan 169n.22 Memoriale Credencium 68–9, 78, 80 mendicants 145–6 Middle English Sermons (MES) 62n.82, 79–82, 100n.82, 100nn.86–7 Middleton, Anne 154 Minnis, Alastair 22n.17, 24n.32, 25n.48, 180, 225n.9 Mirk, John 15, 33–4, 35, 55n.35 Miroir/Mirror (Robert de Gretham) 53n.21, 55n.29, 151–3, 169n.25, 171nn.51–2, 213n.77

Index Mirour of Mans Saluacioun 74–5, 98nn.59–60, 98n.62, 98n.65, 103n.119 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (Nicholas Love) 83, 102n.102 Mitchell, J. Allan 107, 133n.16 Nicholas of Gorran 172n.62 Nicholas of Trevet 24n.32 Northern Homily Cycle (NHC) 10, 62n.82, 76–9, 99nn.68–73, 138n.58 Ocker, Christopher 25n.39, 25n.43 Odo of Chateauroux 182 Of Schrifte and Penance 131–2n.7 Oon of Foure 59n.64, 178 Origen 31, 167n.5, 168n.8 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 806 (sermons) 33, 55n.30, 56n.39, 131n.5, 136n.42, 167n.6, 170n.40 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e Museo 180 (sermons) 33, 34–5, 55n.31, 55n.37, 56n.38 pactum theologies 30, 46, 52n.12, 62n.80 parables (gospel) agricultural 224n.7 complex interpretive tradition of 1–2, 4–7 as genre 7–14, 22n.17, 23nn.27–9, 24n.32, 24n.35, 25n.45, 25n.50, 224n.3 of the kingdom 9, 27–8, 42, 60n.70, 177 as paradox 12, 179 penitential story collections and 107 scholarly treatment of 3–4, 20n.9, 23n.27 see also specific parables

251 parabolic fiction 217–24 paradox 12, 39–40, 179, 190, 205n.7, 220, 223 Paul (apostle) 56n.39, 75, 79, 168, 187, 208n.31 Pearl Dreamer as human 27, 51n.2 as homiletic 39, 59n.62 on limits of human knowledge 204 Matthew’s gospel in 39–40, 49–50 salvation of innocents and 40, 59n.65 as socio-economic commentary 42–6, 60n.67, 61n.75 subversion of worldly norms in 42–6, 50–1 theology of grace in 29, 46–9, 60n.68 Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 58n.56, 145, 222 Pelagianism/semi-Pelagianism 30, 173n.69, 224n.3, 226n.26 penance Christ as model for 88, 104n.122 debates about 67–8, 93nn.17–19, 94n.20 divine love and 71–6 Fourth Lateran Council and 65 grace and 48–9 as payment 79, 100n.78 proper performance of 76–82, 100n.86 reform and 85–7, 88–90 suffering as 127 vernacular treatises on 68–70, 94n.30, 95nn.31–2 penitential story collections examples 132n.8 suitability of parables for 107 use of exempla in 108–9, 132n.13, 133n.16, 133n.22 see also Confessio Amantis;

252 penitential story collections (cont.) Handlyng Synne; Instructions to His Son Pepysian Gospel Harmony 71–2, 96n.41, 105, 147–8, 169nn.25–6, 171n.51, 178, 193–4 Piers Plowman (Langland) allegory and 144, 154–5, 172n.62, 219 on begging 120, 221 communal ethics in 154–62, 173n.66 dialogism in 155 on dining practices 135n.34 on disability 168n.16, 221 on divine community impacted by humanity 162–7, 175nn.87–8 on exemplarity 155–62 on gluttony 114 parable retellings in 2–5, 19n.3, 20n.4, 20nn.7–8, 106, 136n.43 pardon episode in 217–24 on salvation 219–22, 226n.26 use of term ‘kynde’ in 163–4, 176n.89, 176n.95 pilgrimage 68, 87, 103n.117, 160, 175n.84, 218, 219, 225n.9 poverty/the poor almsgiving 68, 110–11, 113, 121, 126–7, 135n.33, 138n.58, 145–6 disdain for/distrust of 115–16, 120–1, 138n.57, 145, 168n.13, 168n.17 disregard for 111–14 hospitality and 196–8, 214nn.91–2 relation to sin 73–4, 118, 127 as servants of God 117, 121 wealth/the wealthy and 106, 112–13 predestination 30, 54n.27, 153, 172n.58

The politics of Middle English parables priests see clergy Prodigal Son parable as demonstration of God’s love 71–6 Gospel version 64–5, 91n.2, 97n.48, 97n.53, 97n.55, 103n.114 illustrations of 97n.57 liturgical context for 100n.80 as model for penance 76–82 as model for reform 82, 86–90 as subversion of penitential process 65–6 pseudo-Chrysostom 183–4, 186, 187, 188, 200 Rabanus Maurus 172n.62 Rentz, Ellen 219, 225n.12 repentance see penance rhizomatic networks 2, 19n.2 rich, the see wealth/the wealthy Rich Man and Lazarus see Dives and Lazarus parable Ricoeur, Paul 10 Robert de Gretham see Miroir/ Mirror Rolle, Richard 170n.31 Rosarium 94n.30 salvation Augustinian salvation theology 30, 42, 60n.68, 219, 226n.26 as dependent on grace 46–9 as dependent on works 32–8, 40–1, 47–8, 77, 99n.71, 157, 161–2, 164–6, 188 of innocents 40, 59n.65 Lollard/Wycliffite soteriologies 54n.27, 56n.45 in pactum theologies 30, 46, 52n.12, 62n.80 in Piers Plowman 219–22, 226n.26 scripture as guide to 128, 129 of the wealthy 106, 118, 131n.5

Index satisfaction 67–70, 82, 93nn.17–19, 94n.24 see also penance Scott, Anne M. 110, 133n.18, 134n.26 scriptural commentaries see exegesis and scriptural commentaries scripture authority of 128–9, 140nn.80–3 as dynamic 1, 19n.1, 92n.9 as foundation for church authority 66, 92n.9 harmonisation of 180–1 lay comprehension of 82–4, 101n.97 popularity of New Testament 181, 207n.19 semi-Pelagianism see Pelagianism/ semi-Pelagianism sensual desire 123–8, 185 Septuagesima Sunday about 32, 54n.24 as context for parable readings 41–2 sermons for 32–5, 36–8, 54n.22, 54n.29, 57n.47, 58n.56, 58n.59 Sermon on the Mount 148–9, 170n.39 sermons/preaching aims of 14–15, 26n.58 on Dives and Lazarus 131n.5 on Good Samaritan 150–4, 167n.6, 168n.8, 170n.40, 171n.47, 171n.49, 172n.61 on Great Supper 212n.77 homiletic style of Pearl 39, 59n.62 on Labourers in the Vineyard 32–8, 54n.29, 55nn.36–7, 56nn.38–9, 57nn.46–7, 58nn.55–6, 58n.59, 62n.82 laity as preachers and 85

253 on Prodigal Son 76–82, 99nn.68–73, 100n.80 on Wedding Feast 6 simony 58n.59, 68 Simpson, James 3, 92n.9, 123, 139n.64 society and economy dining practices 111–13, 135n.33, 138n.54 dynamics of population and poverty 145, 168n.13 labour regulation 31, 53nn.16–17 Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 58n.56, 145, 222 three-estates model 35–8, 56n.40, 58nn.55–6 see also poverty/the poor; wealth/ the wealthy Somerset, Fiona 66–7, 93nn.13–14, 94n.30, 95n.36 South English Legendary (SEL) 72, 96nn.44–5, 97n.46 South English Ministry and Passion (SEMP) 72–4, 96nn.44–5, 97n.46, 97n.52, 149–50 Southern Passion 213n.82 Sower parable 8 Spearing, A. C. 51n.2, 224n.2, 226n.18 Speculum humanae salvationis 74, 97n.56 Speculum vitae (William of Nassington) 135n.31 Staley, Lynn 179, 192, 212n.72, 213n.78 Statute of Labourers 31, 53n.17, 61n.72 Steiner, Emily 174n.74, 219, 221 ten commandments 33, 55n.30, 83, 89, 101n.94, 110 Thomas of Chobham 10 three-estates model 35–8, 56n.40, 58nn.55–6

254 Tinkle, Theresa 191, 203, 212n.74 translation cultural 5, 22n.20 as displacement 21n.14 interpretation and 5 preservation-model of 22n.16 Trevisa, John 93n.13 Trinity 157, 162–3, 175n.84, 175nn.87–8 tropology 146, 169n.22 vagrancy 31, 53n.16 Venuti, Lawrence 22n.20 vitae Christi see lives of Christ Vitas Patrum 132n.9 Vulgate 2, 5, 20, 21n.15, 24n.35, 73, 81, 90, 91n.2, 97n.50, 147 Wailes, Stephen 20n.9, 23n.29, 54n.26, 58n.58, 104n.127, 131n.2, 167n.5, 168n.7 Wallace, David 199, 211n.66, 212n.70 Warren, Nancy Bradley 101n.94 Watson, Nicholas 82, 92n.12, 95n.33, 98n.67, 101n.91 wealth/the wealthy abuse of wealth 117–22, 137nn.52–3, 138n.54 almsgiving 110–11, 113, 121, 126–7, 135n.33, 138n.58, 145–6 condemnation of 49–50 disregard for the poor 111–14, 115–16 inclusive hospitality 196–8, 214nn.91–2 salvation of 106, 118, 131n.5 self-regulation and 122–30, 140nn.72–3, 141n.85 Wedding Feast/Great Supper hybrid parable hospitality and inclusivity in 194–8, 214nn.91–2 judgement and exclusivity in 199–203, 214–15n.99

The politics of Middle English parables moral implications of 192–4 as union of contraries 189–90, 203–5 Wedding Feast parable allegory of Jews and Gentiles 187, 206n.16 Gospel version 177–8, 215n.100, 215n.106 judgement and 188–9, 200 invitation in 186–8 liturgical context for 205n.5 as negative exemplum 179 as part of Q source 205n.3 in Piers Plowman 2–5, 19n.3, 20n.4, 20nn.7–8 salvation and 6 as theological story 179, 205n.10 violence in 193–4 William of Ockham 30, 52n.12 Wimbledon, Thomas 33, 34, 35–6, 55nn.35–6, 57n.46, 58n.55 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 5, 99n.70 women as audience for Book to a Mother 82–3, 101n.94 reading practices of 82, 101n.93 works, and salvation 32–8, 40–1, 47, 54n.27, 77, 99n.71, 161–2, 164–6, 188 Wyclif, John 9, 11, 54n.27, 68, 84, 103n.109 Wycliffite Bible 21n.15, 24n.35, 73, 87, 103n.115, 179, 207n.19 Wycliffite Glossed Gospels Dives and Lazarus in 133n.23, 137n.44, 140n.78 Great Supper in 182–8, 209nn.39–40, 209nn.42–3, 209n.45, 210nn.54–5 Labourers in the Vineyard in 58n.58, 61n.73 manuscripts of 181, 182, 207nn.20–1, 209n.47

Index overview 179–80, 181–2, 206n.11 on penance 69–70, 95nn.31–2 Prodigal Son in 103n.120 topical sections in 206n.15, 207n.24 Wedding Feast in 182–4, 186–9, 206n.16, 208n.26, 208nn.33–4, 209n.37, 210nn.48–52, 210nn.56, 211n.63 Wycliffites/Wycliffism on baptism 59n.65 Book to a Mother and 66–7, 93n.14 as extraclergial writers 66, 93n.13

255 on penance 69–70, 91n.8, 94n.30 soteriologies 22n.21, 54n.27 Wycliffite Sermon Cycle compared to Lollard Sermons 56n.45 Dives and Lazarus in 131n.5, 136n.42 Good Samaritan in 153–4, 172nn.58–9, 172n.61 Great Supper in 212n.77 Labourers in the Vineyard in 33, 36–7, 57n.47 Wedding Feast in 6 Yeager, R. F. 129–30, 139n.67 Zacharias Chrysopolitanus 55n.30