tales of piers and perceval. piers plowman and the grail romances

For their generous advice, thoughtful close reading, or both, warm thanks to James Carley,Simon Gaunt, Jill Mann, Derek Pearsall, and the anonymous readers for YLS.

On the portrayal of Meed as a courtly lady, see J. A. Burrow, ‘The Audience of Piers Plowman’,1

Anglia, 75 (1957), 373–84 (p. 381); on the ‘roman d’aventure’ prologue and romances in PiersPlowman MSS, see Anne Middleton, ‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman’, in MiddleEnglish Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: Boydelland Brewer, 1982), pp. 101–54 (pp. 114–20); on connections with Saracen romance, see StephenH. A. Shepherd, ‘Langland’s Romances’, in William Langland’s ‘Piers Plowman’: A Book of Essays,ed. by Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 69–81; on the chivalric andlegalistic aspects of ‘Christ as knight’ in Piers Plowman, see below, n. 20.

Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. by George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, rev. edn2

(London: Athlone; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); La Quêtedu Saint Graal: Roman en prose du XIII siècle, ed. by Fanni Bogdanow, trans. by Anne Berrie,e

Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2006), hereafter referred to as Queste;trans. by P. M. Matarasso, The Quest of the Holy Grail (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969);

Nicolette Zeeman ([email protected]) is a Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge.

Abstract: This essay makes the case for a set of analogies between Piers Plowman and the thirteenth-century French grail narratives, the Queste del saint graal and the Perlesvaus. Presenting evidence thatLangland could have known these texts, it argues that in the grail romances, as in Piers Plowman, theologyis given a new urgency by being situated within the enigmatic, questing narratives of aventure. In all threetexts, understanding is sought in the form of uncertain ‘news’ transmitted across a spiritual landscape. Thetexts are characterised by absent objects of desire, and by multiple quests and seekers. Dominated by a logicof failure, they are all predicated on originary ‘mistakes,’ focusing with a distinctive emotional intensity onsubsequent moments of inadequacy and weakness. For the texts’ protagonists and their readers, thesefeatures contribute powerfully to the inculcation of renewed desire.Keywords: William Langland, romance, grail romance, Perceval, Perlesvaus, Piers Plowman, Harrowingof Hell, allegory, narrative, quest, Christ knight, failure.

10.1484/J.YLS.1.100300

TALES OF PIERS AND PERCEVAL:PIERS PLOWMAN AND THE GRAIL ROMANCES

Nicolette Zeeman

A llusions to the literary iconography of romance have sporadically been noticed in Piers Plowman. However, I believe that there is a case to be made1

for a more specific set of analogies between Piers Plowman and the two thirteenth-century French grail texts, the Queste del saint graal and — in particular — thePerlesvaus. Not only are there some striking local tropological parallels between2

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Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, ed. by William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins, 2 vols(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932); trans. by Nigel Bryant, The High Book of the Grail:A Translation of the Thirteenth-Century Romance of Perlesvaus (Cambridge: Brewer, 1978). Allcitations are from these editions; translations are cited directly afterward, sometimes alteredwithout comment.

these religious French prose romances and Piers Plowman, but large-structuralanalogies may also bear on the narrative modelling of Langland’s poem and itsconceptual implications.

I shall argue that in the grail romances, as in Piers Plowman, theology is givena new urgency by being situated within the enigmatic, questing narratives ofaventure. In these texts, the discovery of understanding is situated geographically,formulated as ‘news’ transmitted across a spiritual landscape; when protagonistsmeet, they question each other about the significance of events, and those who areable provide what understanding and commentary they have; if some of themknow much, many more possess only partial and uncertain bits of information.These texts are also characterized by absent objects of desire and by multiplequests and seekers; their heroes are often not present in the narrative — indeed,they are often seekers who are themselves absent and sought by others. PiersPlowman and the grail texts are also all interested in the logic of failure: theirnarratives are predicated on originary ‘mistakes’ and they focus with a distinctiveemotional intensity on subsequent moments of inadequacy and weakness; thesemultiple instances of failure and loss contribute powerfully to the inculcationof desire — both for the protagonists and for the reader. In all these texts, itseems that failure and renewed desire are so tightly juxtaposed as to be integrallyconnected.

Even if Langland had not read the grail romances, however, I believe thatcomparison with them casts light on a number of distinctive features of his poem,at the very least posing the question of what reading lies behind his choice to tellthe story in the way he does. If he had read the grail romances, however, I proposethat he might have learned a number of things from them. And yet, the followingessay is not in the narrow sense a source study. This is partly because, although anumber of Langland’s narrative motifs and figures can be paralleled in grailromance, the most interesting connections between them are large-structuralanalogies. Even when in its overt detail Piers Plowman looks very different, itseems to share with the grail romances a number of imaginative assumptions andnarrative trajectories, some of which impinge on the most idiosyncratic featuresof the fourteenth-century poem. The main reason that this cannot be a source

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TALES OF PIERS AND PERCEVAL 201

On the tradition of Perceval ‘continuations’, see Rupert T. Pickens et al., ‘Perceval and the3

Grail: The Continuations, Robert de Boron and Perlesvaus’, in The Arthur of the French: TheArthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and KarenPratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), pp. 215–73.

Queste, p. 96; see Pauline Matarasso, The Redemption of Chivalry: A Study of the ‘Queste del4

saint graal’ (Geneva: Droz, 1979), pp. 38–94.

On the way that the Queste and its emphasis on Lancelot are shaped by its position in the5

‘Lancelot-Grail Cycle’, see A Companion to the ‘Lancelot-Grail Cycle’, ed. by Carol Dover(Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), chaps 2, 6, 7, and 8; also Elspeth Kennedy et al., ‘Lancelot with andwithout the Grail: Lancelot do lac and the Vulgate Cycle’, in The Arthur of the French (see n. 3,above), pp. 274–324 (in particular p. 305).

study, however, is the degree to which Langland reworks all his materials. It is still,after all, virtually impossible to be sure what texts he read, and, if many of hisindividual citations have been identified, the means by which he acquired themhave not. Precisely because of Langland’s inventive and interactive modes ofcomposition, we are unlikely to find in his poem the kinds of unchanged matterthat would constitute, in a more explicitly referential author, plausible proof ofsource. If Langland did draw on the grail romances, they offered him not fixedforms, but a rich and pliable body of materials to think with; this is not aboutsources, but about literary dialogue.

The ‘Queste del saint graal’ and the ‘Perlesvaus’

Both the Queste del saint graal and the Perlesvaus were written in the earlythirteenth century. Best known to English readers as the source of Malory’s3

‘Noble Tale of the Sankgreal,’ the Queste del saint graal describes a chivalricaventure that can only be undertaken by virtuous, chaste knights and in whichfighting and bloodshed are condemned, to be practised only against the wicked.The quest is achieved by only three knights from the Round Table, Perceval, Bors,and the initially mysterious and often absent Galahad, ‘le Chevalier Desirré’ (thedesired knight) and type of Christ; however, the text is problematically over-4

shadowed by the unsuccessful quest of Galahad’s father, Lancelot. The Perlesvaus,5

in contrast, is a much more militaristic grail romance. Its narrative is predicatedon Perlesvaus’s failure at the castle of the Fisher King (as narrated in Chrétien deTroyes’s Perceval) to ask who is served from the grail; the disastrous effects of thisfailure, which now functions as a version of the Fall, have in the Perlesvaus beenincreased over those described in Chrétien, and here comprise the creation of aWasteland that includes Arthur’s kingdom, a concomitant moral decline within

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See Perlesvaus, I, 50–53/pp. 34–37; in the Perlesvaus the Wasteland does not disappear, even6

after the achievement of the grail quest; see Angus J. Kennedy, ‘Punishment in the Perlesvaus: TheTheme of the Wasteland’, in The Grail: A Casebook, ed. by Dhira B. Mahoney (New York:Garland, 2000), pp. 219–35 (pp. 221–26).

Perlesvaus, I, 90/p. 60; see Thomas E. Kelly, Le Haut livre du graal: Perlesvaus: A Structural7

Study (Geneva: Droz, 1974), p. 103; Kennedy, ‘Punishment’, p. 229.

Arthur’s court, and the maiming of the Fisher King as well. The literary icono-6

graphy of the Perlesvaus can be surreal in the extreme (it includes a bald maiden,a cart full of metal-encased heads and a man drowned in a vat of blood); itsepisodic narratives describe, among other things, the world prior to the comingof Christ, the death of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell, and the death of Death —a sequentially laid out series of narratives that keep playing and replaying thecrucial moments of Christian history around the Crucifixion and the transitionfrom the Old to the New Testament dispensations. The Perlesvaus is focusedon Gawain, Lancelot, and, above all, the mysterious and long absent ‘buenschevaliers’ (good knight), Perlesvaus himself (also a figure for Christ, referred toas ‘Par-lui-fet’ (Made by himself)): much of its action describes the chivalric7

world’s search for Perlesvaus, who, although implicated in this text’s version of theFall, also typologically figures the redeemer. Like Galahad in the Queste, Perlesvausis a quester who himself becomes an object of quest.

Both texts have a highly episodic character, their multiple narratives oftenoverlaying each other, describing and re-describing crucial moments and issuesin Christian history, seen from different angles. In some respects, the Perlesvauscould be described as more systematically allegorical than the Queste — manyof its narratives involve extensively sustained metaphors and many of its placesand protagonists, such as ‘li Rois du Chastel Mortel’ (the King of the CastleMortal, Death), have clearly allegorical names (I, 24/p. 20). Nevertheless, bothtexts also signal their ‘other’ meanings with a range of ethical and typologicalself-glosses, many of which are placed in the mouths of protagonists: the Questein particular is characterized by a series of monk or hermit commentatorswho hypostatize the act of self-exegesis within the action of the allegoricaltext. However, both texts situate such overt interpretation in a narrative worldwhere the pursuit and exchange of understanding is actually a very uncertainand unstable thing. This is the mysterious chivalric world, after all, in whichunderstanding is often partial and rarely complete; it is imagined as ‘news’travelling across a landscape, subject to the contingencies of time and space.Protagonists are always wondering and asking each other about what they haveseen. In these texts, what you know may be an index of spiritual advancement, but

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See A. M. L. Williams, The Adventures of the Holy Grail: A Study of ‘La Queste del saint8

graal’ (Oxford: Lang, 2001), p. 176.

few (not even Galahad in the Queste) know everything. While both the Queste8

and the Perlesvaus do narrate some kind of developing spiritual discovery, theyalso imply that in the context of such a spiritual quest, understanding is alwaysincomplete; in doing so, however, they may also problematize their own allegori-cal interpretation, revealing that in many respects, they mean more than their self-glossing says.

And, indeed, in the Queste and the Perlesvaus this is true of a number ofnarrative tropes that are not really subject to overt or exhaustive explication.Limited interpretation of their narratives of wonder, uncertainty, asking andtelling leaves a large residue of implications. This is also true of their tales of quest,struggle, and chivalric self-exposure: the chivalric aventure and its elusive objectsremain loaded figures for the divagations, imitations, and substitutions of desire.A similar set of surplus implications surrounds these two texts’ overriding pre-occupation with failure, which seems not only to be closely linked to the pursuitof desire, but also often somehow to be involuntary and inevitable. Despite thesetexts’ acknowledgement of the Fall and protagonists’ explication of individualfailures to the characters concerned, these texts never explicitly analyse theiremphasis on recurring of failure, its close linkage to the pursuit of desire, and alsoto the limited or even delusory (self-)understanding of the subject. In respect ofsome of the largest narrative tropes that shape the Queste and the Perlesvaus, then,there is remarkably little gloss — much of their meaning is produced in highlyfigured and enigmatic ways.

Langland and the Grail Romances

How plausible is it to imagine Langland reading and being influenced by thesetwo texts? Langland’s obsession with social injustice and the suffering of the poor,his concern about the economics of need and sufficiency seem, after all, much atodds with the political ideology that underlies the grail narratives. What is more,with their distinctive notions of aristocratic Christian asceticism and aggression,it would be hard to claim that the grail romances are entirely otherworldly.Although the Queste was at one time thought by its editor, Albert Pauphilet, torepresent a thorough-going Christianization of a secular Arthurian tradition,later critics from Jean Frappier onward have argued that it represents a sustainedengagement with the Christian/secular chevalerie of the whole Lancelot-Grail

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La Queste del saint graal: Roman du XIII siècle, ed. by Albert Pauphilet (Paris: Champion,e9

1923), pp. viii–xiii; Jean Frappier, ‘Le Graal et la chevalerie’, Romania, 75 (1954), 165–210;Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, chap. 8; Karen Pratt, ‘The Cistercians and the Queste del saintgraal ’, Reading Medieval Studies, 21 (1975), 69–96.

Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University10

Press, 1999); see also Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), chap. 3. For the Old French and Middle English versions, see Amis and Amiloun, ed. by Eugen11

Kölbing (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1884); and Jill Mann, ‘Messianic Chivalry in Amis andAmiloun’, New Medieval Literatures, 10 (2008), 137–59; on this and related themes, see also her‘“Taking the Adventure”: Malory and the Suite du Merlin’, in Aspects of Malory, ed. by ToshiyukiTakamiya and Derek Brewer (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1981), pp. 71–91; ‘Malory and the GrailLegend’, in A Companion to Malory, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards(Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), pp. 203–20.

The first survey of these (containing several thirteenth-century Latin versions from France)12

is Wilbur Gaffney, ‘The Allegory of the Christ-Knight in Piers Plowman’, PMLA, 46 (1931),155–68; see also Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval EnglishLiterature’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 13 (1962), 1–16; J. A. W. Bennett, Poetry of the Passion:Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), chap. 3. See furtherNicole Bozon (here unattributed), ‘An Allegorical Romance on the Death of Christ’, in Pierre deLangtoft, The Chronicle, ed. by Thomas Wright, Rolls Series, 47, 2 vols (London: Longmans,

Cycle in which it occurs, and that in many respects it celebrates the elitist practicesof the later medieval military aristocracy. Both the Queste and the Perlesvaus, we9

might say, reflect the conflicted self-representations of the aggressive culturedescribed in Richard W. Kaeuper’s Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe.10

It is not my intention to underplay the ideological differences between them andPiers Plowman.

Nevertheless, it remains indubitable that Langland does seem to have beenable to draw something of substantial spiritual and affective significance fromthe iconography and narrative structures of chivalric romance. In this respect,of course, he is not by any means alone: the grail authors themselves clearlyrecognized the devotional potential of chivalric models, and other romancessuch as Amis et Amilun and its Anglo-Norman and English versions exploit theChristian implications of the figure of the knightly sacrifice. The iconography11

of ‘Christ the lover knight,’ moreover, appears in Nicole Bozon’s allegoricaland Christological romance, ‘Un roi jadis estait qe avait un amye,’ a number ofthirteenth-century Latin sermons and pastoral works from France, the Gestaromanorum, Ancrene Wisse, and many Middle English lyrics; even Hadewijchof Anvers repeatedly describes the lover of God as a ‘chivalrous soul’ on questfor Christ. Piers Plowman partakes in a pervasive later medieval tradition of12

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1866–68; repr. Wiesbaden: Kraus, 1964), II, 426–37; Ancrene Wisse, ed. by J. R . R . Tolkien, EarlyEnglish Text Society, o.s. 249 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 198–203; Hadewijch,Strophische Gedichten, ed by J. Van Mierlo, 2 vols (Antwerp: Standaard, 1942)), Poem 1, ll. 13–17;2, ll. 1–9; 5, ll. 46–49; 9 and 10 (translated in Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. by ColumbaHart (London: SPCK, 1980), pp. 127, 130, 141, 149–53). For a broader early theological context,see Adolf Harnack, ‘Militia Christi:’ The Christian Religion and the Military in the First ThreeCenturies, trans. by David McInnes Gracie (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981).

There is almost no evidence that any of the surviving manuscripts of the other Old French13

‘Perceval Continuations’ were in England in the Middle Ages: see The Continuations of the OldFrench Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. by William Roach and Robert H. Ivy, 4 vols (Phila-delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press and American Philosophical Society, 1949–71), I,xvi–xxxiii; however, on a manuscript copied in England containing Chrétien’s Perceval withinterpolations which apparently refer to events in the ‘First Continuation’, see Keith Busby, ‘TheText of Chrétien’s Perceval in MS London, College of Arms, Arundel XIV’, in Anglo-NormanAnniversary Essays, ed. by Ian Short (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1993), pp. 75–85;I thank Thomas Hinton for advice and this reference.

See Roger Middleton, ‘Manuscripts of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle in England and Wales:14

Some Books and their Owners’, in A Companion to the ‘Lancelot-Grail Cycle’ (see n. 5, above),pp. 219–35. Most of the Queste was inserted into the prose Roman de Tristan, which also cir-culated in England in the Middle Ages.

On the manuscripts, see Perlesvaus, ed. by Nitze, I, 3–5, 19–20; James P. Carley, ‘A15

Fragment of Perlesvaus at Wells Cathedral Library’, in Glastonbury Abbey and the ArthurianTradition, ed. by James P. Carley (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), pp. 309–35 (see p. 311 n. 10 for

spiritual chivalry, even if it is also true that it operates a number of transforma-tions on this inheritance.

Could Langland have known the grail romances? In the case of the Queste,13

certainly. There were many manuscripts of this text in England in the MiddleAges, and of the many that were copied there in the late thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies, many are non-deluxe readers’ copies, well-read and sometimes con-taining readers’ notes in French or English. Although in total there are far fewer14

manuscripts containing the French Perlesvaus (two complete, eight fragmentary),most of these are written in northern French dialects. One of them is a thirteenth-century manuscript that, while it may have been produced in northern France,was certainly owned in England in the Middle Ages and may have been pro-duced by what Nitze describes as ‘a scriptorium of French monks’ there: Oxford,Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 82 contains the ex libris of ‘Sire Brian fiz alayn.’From the twelfth century, the Fitzalans were important Marcher barons; it seemslikely that this Brian Fitzalan is the man who, although part of a different familybranch and associated with the north of England, fought on the Welsh borderin 1282 and later in Edward I’s Scottish wars, dying in 1306. The English15

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two other fragments not known by Nitze); for Brian Fitzalan, see the Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2004), XIX, 757, 765.

See Perlesvaus, ed. by Nitze, I, 8–10; see Selections from the Hengwrt MSS, ed. and trans. by16

Robert Williams and G. Hartwell Jones, 2 vols (London: T. Richards, 1876–92), I, 171–433,547–720; Williams also claimed to have seen another manuscript containing this version (I, p. v);also Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Perceval in Wales: Late Medieval Welsh Grail Traditions’, in TheChanging Face of Arthurian Romance: Essays on Arthurian Prose Romances in Memory of CedricE. Pickford, ed. by Alison Adams et al. (Cambridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 78–91.

Carley, ‘A Fragment’; see also his ‘A Glastonbury Translator at Work: Quedam narracio de17

nobili Rege Arthurio and De origine gigantium in their Earliest Manuscript Contexts’, andCeridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘From Ynys Wydrin to Glasynbri: Glastonbury in Welsh’, both inGlastonbury Abbey (see n. 15, above), pp. 337–45, 161–77.

connection of this manuscript seems to be confirmed by the fact that (along withBrussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 11145) it contains the famous colophon thatlinks the Perlesvaus to the Isle of Avalon, that is, Glastonbury, Somerset:

Li latins de cui cist estoires fu tretiez en romanz [fu pris] en l’Isle d’Avalon en une saintemeson de religion qui siét au chief des Mares Aventurex, la o li rois Artuz e la roïne gisent,par le tesmoignage des preudommes religious, qui la dedenz sont, qui tote l’estoire en ont,vraie des le commencement desq’en la fin.

(The Latin text from which this story was set down in the vernacular was taken from theIsle of Avalon, from a holy religious house that stands at the edge of the Lands ofAdventure; there lie King Arthur and the queen, by the testimony of the worthy religiousmen who dwell there, and who have the whole story, true from the beginning to the end.)(Perlesvaus, colophon, I, 409/p. 265)

Whatever the standing of this piece of propaganda for the monastic establishmentat Glastonbury and for the English connection of the text, both its editor,William Nitze, and, even more substantively, James Carley have seen it as part ofa network of connections linking the Perlesvaus with Glastonbury and the south-west Midlands. This version of Perlesvaus is also in the same textual group as theWelsh translation that appears in the late-fourteenth-century National Libraryof Wales, MS Peniarth 11: the manuscript contains Welsh translations (also late-fourteenth-century) of both the Perlesvaus and the Queste. Carley has also16

discovered a Perlesvaus fragment in a manuscript transcribed in the first halfof the fourteenth century used in the book-binding of a volume held in theCathedral Library at Wells; he has also claimed that John of Glastonbury’sCronica sive antiquitates Glastoniensis ecclesie (c. 1340) and the Glastonbury textQuedam narracio de nobili Rege Arthurio derive some of their materials from thePerlesvaus. The fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman prose Fouke le Fitzwaryn,17

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See Pickens et al., ‘Perceval and the Grail’, p. 264; Fouke is a version of a thirteenth-century18

verse romance and is loosely based on thirteenth-century historical events; the editors of the proseFouke suggest that it was likely to have been written and compiled by a canon at HerefordCathedral in the first half of the fourteenth century, the same man who compiled London, BritishLibrary, MS Harley 2253 (see Fouke le Fitz Waryn, ed. by E. J. Hathaway et al. (Oxford: Black-well, 1975), pp. xxxvii–xliv). On the possible connection with the Fitzalans, see Lloyd-Morgan,‘From Ynys Wydrin’, p. 172 n. 44; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography also recordscomplaints made in the years 1255–56 about an attack on Fouke Fitzwarin by the Fitzalan family(XIX, 765).

P. J. C. Field, ‘Malory and Perlesvaus’, Medium Ævum, 62 (1993), 259–69; Barbara Nolan,19

‘The Tale of Sir Gareth and the Tale of Sir Lancelot’, in A Companion to Malory (see n. 11, above),pp. 153–81 (pp. 169, 171, 175–77).

a dynastic prose romance set in the Welsh Marches, has been found to contain anepisode from the Perlesvaus; and, finally, in the fifteenth century, Malory seems18

to have drawn on the Perlesvaus for his ‘Book of Sir Lancelot.’ Here we have,19

then, a Perlesvaus manuscript with Glastonbury connections, a linked Welshversion of Perlesvaus that, along with the Queste, could have been known by thelater fourteenth century on the borderland of Wales, another Wells Perlesvausfragment, and evidence for the influence of this romance on a series of later texts,many of which have connections with Glastonbury and the south-west Midlands.This is powerful and persuasive evidence for the English and specifically south-western affiliations of the Perlesvaus. It also suggests the availability of not onlythe Queste but also the Perlesvaus not far from Langland’s Malvern, in the periodin which Langland was writing.

Shared Literary Iconography: The Harrowing of Hell and the Good Samaritan Sequence

In the first part of this essay, I propose to look at some passages from PiersPlowman that seem to me thick with romance — and grail romance — allusions:B.16–18. I will begin with the Crucifixion and Harrowing of Hell, with theirimages of jousting, fighting, and castle-taking, though in fact the iconography ofB.17, the narrative of the Good Samaritan, is more characteristic of the grail-romance narrative structures that I believe shape Piers Plowman as a whole.

Langland’s metaphor of Christ as jouster and duellist in B.18 was first linkedto the tradition of ‘Christ the lover-knight’ by Gaffney, who noted that Lang-land’s Christ is de-romanticized and rescues not a courtly lady, but mankynde:Langland’s Christ uses none of the pitiful love language of the rejected, injured

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See Gaffney, ‘The Christ-Knight’; see also Raymond St-Jacques, ‘Langland’s Christ-Knight20

and the Liturgy’, Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa, 37 (1967), 146–58; Anna Baldwin, The Themeof Government in ‘Piers Plowman’ (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981), p. 67; more detail in her ‘TheDouble Duel in Piers Plowman B XVIII and C XXI’, Medium Ævum, 50 (1981), 64–78;Bennett, Poetry of the Passion, chap. 4; R . A. Waldron, ‘Langland’s Originality: The Christ-Knightand the Harrowing of Hell’, in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays inHonour of G. H. Russell, ed. by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: Brewer,1986), pp. 66–81; on the duel as romance duel ‘in disguise’, see Nicole Clifton, ‘The RomanceConvention of the Disguised Duel and the Climax of Piers Plowman’, YLS, 7 (1993), 123–28(p. 127); Lawrence Warner, ‘Jesus the Jouster: The Christ-Knight and Medieval Theories ofAtonement in Piers Plowman and the “Round Table” Sermons’, YLS, 10 (1996), 129–43;Shepherd, ‘Langland’s Romances’, pp. 70–71; and now Stephen A. Barney’s commentary on thewhole of C.20/B.18 in The Penn Commentary on ‘Piers Plowman’, V: C Passûs 20–22; B Passûs18–20 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), pp. 1–99.

Bennett, Poetry of the Passion, pp. 101–02; Clifton, ‘Romance Convention’; J. A. Burrow,21

Langland’s Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 73, 76. St-Jacques links this passage toliturgical commentaries that liken priestly clothing to the ‘armour of God’ (‘Langland’s Christ-Knight’, pp. 155–56); see also the Queste, pp. 81–82, 142/pp. 103, 158). On Christ’s ‘blood-brotherhood’ (Piers Plowman, B.18.376–77, 393–98), see Baldwin, ‘Double Duel’, p. 75.

Baldwin, Theme of Government, pp. 68–73; and ‘Double Duel’.22

lover found in other versions of this narrative. According to Gaffney, Langland’sChrist has most in common with Nicole Bozon’s version — and perhaps also anumber of the Middle English lyrics — in that he is portrayed as the romanceknight, a duellist, champion, and conqueror; Langland’s description of Christentering Mary’s chambre, using the ‘arms’ of humanity as a means of deceivingthe devil, and his descent to the enclave of hell all have analogues in Bozon.20

The whole sequence is thick with chivalric, military, feudal, and legal detail. Thejoust begins with the arrival of the knight on his steed, with Faith the herald andthe eager crowds. Christ is the young knight who seeks his spurs and title, andhis disguise in humana natura, the ‘arms’ of Piers, also links him to manyromance knights, some of them not yet knighted, who fight incognito ( J. A.Burrow observes the incongruity of the chivalric imagery in B.18 and 19 for theplowman Piers, which seems to affirm Langland’s active choices here). This is,21

according to Anna Baldwin, a legal duel over property, in which Pilate is thejudge, and Christ and Longinus are ‘champion chivalers,’ champions fightingfor their respective sides; in this context larger references to a ‘bitter bataille’elsewhere work to situate the legal duel within another, larger conflict, possiblyalso a ‘duel of treason.’ Like the Green Knight, however, Christ is a bootles (shoe-22

less) knight who comes paradoxically to challenge, but without the intention of

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According to Baldwin, when champions made their initial challenge, they came with bare23

feet (‘Double Duel’, p. 68); see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R . R . Tolkein and E. V.Gordon, rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), line 160. But see also Barney,Penn Commentary, pp. 8–9.

fighting. In due course the Jews’ supposedly unknightly conduct loses them their23

fraunchise and ‘lordshipe in londe,’ and Satan’s treachery loses him his title to, andpossession of, the dead. Until the triumphant speech at the Harrowing of Hell,Langland’s Christ is almost entirely silent (his only words are ‘consummatum est’);Book even describes him as a monstrous romance giant with a military engine:‘For Iesus as a geaunt wiþ a gyn comeþ yonde | To breke and to bete adoun alleþat ben ayeins hym’ (B.18.252–53). Although he fights with the paradoxicalredemptive methods of submission, suffering, and death, Langland’s Christ alsoacts like a military knight, riding to the joust, taking his blows, being wounded,and swooning into death; at the Harrowing of Hell, he approaches the castle ofHell, utters his challenge, and the gates fall. Some of the language here is also regal,for Christ is both knight and king: we already see something of the way that thelanguage of knighthood will mesh with the language of conquering kingship laterin this passus and the next.

The paradoxical Christian references encoded in so many of these details —the disguise of the incarnation as a gyn for the devil, the role as ‘champion chivaler’as an allusion to taking on the sins of the community in the Redemption, thebootlessness as a signal of his intent to fight by submission, and the shedding ofblood as a reference to the saving bloodshed in the Crucifixion — are familiar.However, their very familiarity may have caused us to overlook the fact that theseconstitute some of the central paradoxes of the Queste del saint graal, where thequest is defined as a reversal of the usual, violent forms of chivalric narrative:

Si ne devez pas quidier que cez aventures qui or corent soient de chevaliers ocirre etmehaignier, ainçois sont des choses esperitex, qui sont graindres et meuz valent assé.

(Do not imagine moreover that the adventures now afoot consist in the slaying andmutilating of knights; they are of a spiritual order, higher in every way and of much moreworth.) (Queste, p. 410/p. 174)

Here, ideally, there should be no fighting or killing, and ultimate success does notcome by assertive or coercive methods, but by actively allowing God to do hiswork, by Christological submission to the adventure and, in the case of Percevaland Galahad, to death.

However, Langland’s Harrowing of Hell is also cast in romance terms, someof them, as we shall see, specifically associated with grail romance. The Harrowing

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Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. by George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone,24

1997), C.20.289–90 (also 281–94).

Clifton, ‘Romance Convention’, p. 127.25

‘The Gospel of Nicodemus, or Acts of Pilate’, in The Apocryphal New Testament, trans. by26

Montague Rhodes James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; corrected repr. 1972), pp. 94–146(Latin A and B, pp. 124–136; citations Latin A, chap. 6 (pp. 135–36)); for the Latin text, seeEvangelia apocrypha, ed. by Constantinus de Tischendorf, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1876),

describes the taking of a castle in a landscape, with its knight-like figure travellingacross the land to a castle, standing outside and calling to those within to open thegates; when the castle falls, this is treated as a military triumph on the aggressorChrist’s part — Satan is bound and Christ takes possession of his own. Indeed, inthe expanded C text, Satan understands this narrative with comic but spirituallyrevealing literalism: ‘Brumstoen boylaunt, brennyng out cast hit, | Al hoet on herehedes þat entrith ney þe walles.’ Regarded from the point of view of this military24

metaphor, as Nicole Clifton has noticed, even the debate of the ‘Four Daughtersof God’ looks different. Langland’s originality, of course, is to have placed this25

widespread Bernardine allegory explaining the divine dilemma of justice andmercy in the middle of the narrative of the Redemption, after the Crucifixion andbefore the Harrowing of Hell. This placing not only foregrounds the challengingtheological questions it raises but also enhances a very distinctive feature ofLangland’s narrative of the Redemption, its sense of mounting excitement, andalso uncertain outcome. However, as Clifton says, what it also does is to recast the‘Four Daughters of God’ as romance damsels at loggerheads, damsels who need achampion knight to solve their difficulties and reconcile them through combat.This Christ may not be a lover, but he is a saviour of women. In fact, as Langland’sFour Daughters stride in from the points of the compass, we might also rememberthe wandering damsels of grail romance, and above all Perlesvaus’s mother andsister, whose respective wait and search for ‘li buens chevaliers’ shape the narrativeof Perlesvaus.

However, Arthurian grail romance also provides much more specific analogiesfor the conquest of Hell in Piers Plowman. One reason for this may be that theapocryphal source of the Harrowing of Hell, the Gospel of Nicodemus, alsonarrates the deeds of Joseph of Arimathea after Christ’s death: in the grailromances, of course, it is Joseph of Arimathea who will bring the grail to Britain.Not only does a narrative of the Harrowing of Hell occur at the opening of theprose Merlin, but allegorical, chivalric versions appear in both the Queste and thePerlesvaus. The several versions that appear in the Perlesvaus, perhaps because26

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pp. 333–432 (citation at pp. 399–400); Latin A also in The Gospel of Nicodemus, ed. by H. C.Kim (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973). See Robert de Boron, Merlin.Roman de XIII siècle, ed. by Alexandre Micha (Geneva: Droz, 1979), pp. 18–23; Queste, pp.e

176–84, 192–94/pp. 72–76, 79–80; for Perlesvaus, see below; noting the ‘constant theme’ of theHarrowing of Hell in Arthurian romance, see Eithne M. O’Sharkey, ‘The Maimed Kings in theArthurian Romances’, Études celtiques, 8 (1958), 420–28 (p. 426).

Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam, ed. by Alberto Colunga and Laurentio Turrado27

(Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1977); The Holy Bible. Douay Version (London:Catholic Truth Society, 1956); see also Barney, Penn Commentary, pp. 25–26.

He is the bad sibling to the three brothers, Perlesvaus’s father, the Fisher King and King28

Pelles; the author comments that the existence of this mysteriously evil brother is no moresurprising than the existence of Cain (I, 267/p. 172); it is a striking instance of the way Perlesvausintegrates figures of failure and renewal, both as part of a historical narrative and as a recurringhuman problem (see Kelly, Le Haut livre, pp. 101, 155).

Perlesvaus, I, 177–80, 267/pp. 116–18, 171.29

they represent a close engagement with the Gospel of Nicodemus, offer strikingcomparisons with Langland’s Harrowing of Hell.

In the Gospel of Nicodemus, Satan militantly disputes Christ’s right to con-quer hell, but a personified Hell or ‘Lower region’ (Inferus) repeatedly expressesthe fear that, if this is the one who took Lazarus out of Hell, then Hell will beunable to resist him; when the divine call to unbar the gates sounds, sendingSatan out to defend it, Hell bars the gates; finally Christ actually appears, andHell and Death (Mors) are seized with fear: ‘We are overcome by thee […]. Whoart thou that art so great and so small, both humble and exalted, both soldier andcommander, a marvellous warrior in the shape of a bondsman?’ Christ then seizesSatan and delivers him ‘unto the power of Hell,’ which reproaches Satan bitterly.In dramatizing this sequence, the Perlesvaus also draws on a number of scripturalpassages that are also crucial to Langland, in particular two passages that refer todeath and Hell as somehow being destroyed through their own natures: Hosea 13.14, ‘Ero mors tua, o mors! Morsus tuus ero, inferne!’ (Oh death, I will be thydeath; oh hell, I will be thy bite), and Psalm 7. 16, according to which the enemy‘cecidit in foveam quam fecit’ (is fallen into the hole he made).27

In the Perlesvaus ‘li Rois del Chastel Mortel’ (the King of the Castle Mortal,Death) kills himself. Perlesvaus encounters him twice; the first time, when the28

King of the Castle Mortal discovers whom he is jousting with, he runs away; thesecond time, when Perlesvaus finally attacks his castle, approaching on a mule tosignify his reliance on God’s grace, the men of the King of the Castle Mortalsubmit to Perlesvaus, and the King stabs himself, falling dead in the moat. Later29

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Perlesvaus, I, 402/p. 260; see Piers Plowman, B.18.35a, 360a; see also Kelly, Le Haut livre,30

p. 129, where he also notes the relevance of Isaiah 25. 8, Proverbs 1. 12, and I Cor. 15. 54–57. Otherintriguing possible Piers Plowman parallels include Perlesvaus’s claim that ‘you must make war onthe warlike and peace with the peaceful’ and his drowning of the Lord of the Fens in the blood ofhis own men (Perlesvaus, I, 232–35/pp. 150–52); compare Piers Plowman B.18.338–64).

William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text, ed. by31

A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd edn (London: Dent/Everyman, 1995), note to B.17.49ff.

on, Perlesvaus arrives at the castle of ‘li Noirs Heremites’ (the Black Hermit, theDevil); although the Black Hermit initially puts up a fight, Perlesvaus unhorseshim, and the Hermit’s men at once open up a stinking pit (Hell) and throw himinto it. The Perlesvaus, with its emphasis on the auto-destruction of Death andthe Devil, thus gives narrative form to the apocryphal narrative and the verybiblical passages cited by Langland. While these particular parallels between30

Piers Plowman and the Perlesvaus could well be due to their common apocryphaland scriptural reference points, they nevertheless illustrate parallel attempts to re-create those passages within the tropes of romance — tropes that allow bothauthors to foreground the paradoxes of specifically Christian modes of conquestand to situate events in a dramatic narrative context of apparently uncertainoutcome.

Even more interesting, however, are the romance echoes — and the connec-tions to the Harrowing of Hell — to be found in the preceding sequence ofPiers Plowman, the narrative of the Good Samaritan on the road to Jerusalem,beginning at B.16.172. This in fact constitutes the opening of what Schmidt hasdescribed as Langland’s distinctive ‘“chivalric” view of the Samaritan-Christ.’31

The narrative takes place in an identifiable and palpably spatial geographicalterrain, on a road through a dangerous wood beset by a predatory Outlawe fromInferno; it is, in fact, a proleptic vision of the castle of Hell seen in the next passus.The protagonists travel across the landscape like chivalric adventurers, seeking thejouster of Jerusalem: Abraham is ‘an heraud of armes’, and Moses is a military spie,a scout, ‘inquiring’ after the knight, while the Good Samaritan rides, both knight-like and Christ-like, on a mule or capul; we might recall Perlesvaus taking on theKing of the Castle Mortal. On the road is the wounded man, the semyvif, and,although the first two travellers, Abraham and Moses, cannot help him, theSamaritan takes him to the graunge of ‘lex Christi’, promising that all will berighted and the wood made safe at the joust in Jerusalem. If the general romanceparallels seem obvious, once again many of these elements can be specificallyparalleled with the grail romances.

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Perlesvaus, I, 54/p. 37; see also I, 63/p. 43.32

See Amis and Amiloun, ll. 1072–83; ME, ll. 2197–208; Hartmann von Aue, Der arme33

Heinrich, ed. by Hermann Paul (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), ll. 224–32; also the healing of theleprous maiden (Queste, pp. 570–76/pp. 247–50). On this motif, see Woolf, ‘Christ the Lover-Knight’, pp. 15–16.

Both the Queste and the Perlesvaus use the trope of travelling through thewoods past the castle of an aggressive knight as an allegorical version of humanity’sbondage to the Devil and Hell. In the Queste, Hell is imaged in ‘le Chastel asPuceles’ (the Castle of the Maidens): ‘ce est li chastiax maleois, et tuit cil sontmalooit qui i conversent; car tote pitiez en est hors et tote durtez i est […] l’en i fethonte a toz les preudomes qui i trespasssent’ (this is the cursed castle; all itsinhabitants are accursed, for all compassion banished and cruelty is found there[…] all good men who pass that road are brutally abused; Queste, p. 176/p. 72). Allwho pass are made to fight an unfair battle that they cannot win. In the Perlesvaus,Gawain and the damsels of the cart, which contains the metal-encased heads ofthe human dead, also have to make a dangerous passage through the woods pastthe castle of the predatory Black Hermit. One of the damsels, the ‘bald maiden’,warns Gawain that the Black Hermit’s predations cannot be stopped, and that heshould not try to prevent the heads from being seized; the living, in other words,only have safe passage through the woods if they give the dead to the Devil. Thetext tells how, as he passed —

Messire Gavains voit l’entree de la porte si lede com se fust enfers, e ot dedenz lechastel granz criz e granz pleurs, e ot que li pluseur dient:

‘Dex! qu’est devenuz li Buens Chevaliers, e qant vendra il?’

(Sir Gawain saw the gateway, as ugly as the mouth of hell, and from within he heardgreat cries and great weeping, with many people calling out:

‘God! What has become of the Good Knight? When will he come?’)32

All the dead in hell cry out pitifully for the advent of the Messiah. As in PiersPlowman, in other words, this narrative describes the era of death before theRedemption, when all the dead must enter the domain of the Devil, and nobodyalive can do anything about it. It describes those stuck in the pre-Christian era,who wait desirously for the coming of Perlesvaus/Christ, the only one who canachieve this particular aventure.

Langland’s semyvif , the post-lapsarian ‘wounded man’ who can only be curedwith the plastre of a child’s blood, recalls a number of romance protagonists whosesickness can only be cured by the blood of others. He also, of course, recalls the33

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See O’Sharkey, ‘Maimed Kings’.34

Perlesvaus, I, 133/p. 88; also I, 18; for the view that the Fisher King represents ‘present35

suffering’, see Kelly, Le Haut livre, pp. 149–53.

See ‘Gospel of Nicodemus’, trans. by James, Latin A, chaps 2–3 (pp. 123–28); Latin in36

Evangelia, ed. by Tischendorf, pp. 391–94.

romance king or knight whose wounds will not heal; originating in Chrétien deTroyes’s ‘Roi Pescheor’, or Fisher King, the maimed king or knight multipliesacross the history of medieval romance into a series of incurably wounded men,figures of need and lack. These figures dominate the Perlesvaus and the Queste.34

In the Perlesvaus, the Fisher King, in whose castle Perlesvaus originally made hislapsarian error and who has fallen ‘en langeur’ (weakness, suffering), is explicitlyread as the sacrificial Messiah, Christ (‘li rois a non Messios’; ‘the king’s name isMessios [Messiah]’). In the course of the narrative, in fact, he dies. Intriguingly,35

we do not actually see this in the narrative, but rather hear dramatically anddespairingly about it from a place of human death, the Perilous Cemetery, wherelie ‘so many knights who [have] been killed in combat’ (I, 222/p. 144). We hear,in other words, about the Christological Fisher King’s death from a dark place ofhuman mortality — another version, perhaps, of the vision of Hell prior to theHarrowing.

Endroit la mienuit s’aparut une voiz desus la chapele, qui dist: ‘[…] li buens RoisPeschieres est morz, qui fesoit fere vostre servise chascun jor en la saintisme chapele la ouli saintismes Graaus s’aparoit […]. Or l’a sesie li Rois del Chastel Mortel, et l’iglise et lechastel. Onques puis ne s’i aparut li Graaus […] si ne set l’en que li prouvoire qui la chapeleservoient sunt devenu […].’ Atant se tut la voiz, et uns plainz et uns dolousemenzconmença par tot le cimetire et en la chapele si grant que il n’est nus hom el monde, se ill’oïst, qui n’en deüst avoir pitie.

(Then about midnight a voice rang out above the chapel, saying, ‘[…] the good FisherKing is dead, who had a service celebrated for you each day in the sacred chapel where theHoly Grail appeared […]. Now both the church and the castle have been seized by theKing of the Castle Mortal. The Grail has not since then appeared […] and no-one knowswhat has become of the priests who used to serve in the chapel […].’ Then the voice fellsilent, and there in the chapel and throughout the graveyard there began so great a wailingand lamentation that no man in the world who heard it could have failed to feel pity.)(Perlesvaus, I, 225/p. 146)

Here, the old dispensation is seen in crisis, as the King of the Castle Mortal,Death, seizes all the human dead, who once more lament and weep pitifully. Thescene ultimately, of course, recalls the Gospel of Nicodemus, with its attention tothose who wait for the coming of Christ in hell. Although the Cemetery is36

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Lancelot also sees a knight who has long waited to be healed by a vision of the grail, but is37

himself unable to share the experience (Queste, pp. 198–202/pp. 82–83); see Matarasso, Redemptionof Chivalry, p. 120. Closest in function to Langland’s post-lapsarian semyvif in Perlesvaus is perhapsthe dead knight on a litter whom a maiden accompanies through the landscape until Perlesvaus canavenge him; the one who avenges the knight whom she has ‘borne so long’ will, she says, have ‘savedthe land of King Arthur’ (Perlesvaus, I, 190–91, 245–46/pp. 125, 158–59).

Romans 3. 10; see Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, pp. 82–84.38

Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, p. 16.39

dominated by the remembrance of Christ’s death — Perlesvaus’s sister has beensent here to fetch from its chapel a piece of Christ’s tomb shroud, and theCemetery itself lies in the shadow of a crucifix — it describes the death of theMessiah seen from the perspective of those living at the time, who do not yetknow how history will turn out. Once again, the Perlesvaus provides an extremeexample of the way that romance can defamiliarize the familiar story of theRedemption, dramatizing the imagined fear and uncertainty of those livingthrough it.

Langland’s semyvif, however, is more like the maimed kings and knights of theQueste; the wounded bodies of these kings and knights figure a damaged humanityand a lacking world, waiting patiently and desirously for the grail or the arrival ofGalahad. If Mordrain is wounded in punishment for having had the hubris to37

draw too near to the grail, the ‘languishing’ of the apparently virtuous Fisher Kingin the Grail Castle simply illustrates, according to Matarasso, the fact that ‘[t]hereis not any man just.’ Above all, these incurably wounded men are figures of38

spiritual want. King Mordrain —

Einsi a atendu […] des le tens Josephé ore la venue de cel chevalier qu’il a tant desirré avooir. Si fet ausi come Symeon li vielz fist, qui tant atendi la venue de Nostre Seignor […].Et ausi com cil atendoit a grant desirrier a tenir et a vooir le fil Deu […] ausi atent li roisla venue Galaaz, le virge, le verai Chevalier et le parfait.

(from the time of Josephus […] has lain waiting thus for the coming of that knight whomhe has yearned to see: he has done as the aged Simeon did, who watched so long for theadvent of our Lord […]. And even as Simeon waited desirously to hold and see the Sonof God […] even so the king now waits for the coming of Galahad, the virgin, the true andperfect Knight. (Queste, pp. 255–56/pp. 107–08).

In the figure of Mordrain, who has been waiting for four hundred years, we see‘the whole of the Old Testament waiting patiently for the New, and even oftime waiting upon eternity’. Daily a priest ministers to him and monks tell his39

story to those, such as Perceval, who pass by. Seen in this context, the inability of

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Piers Plowman, B.17.93–94. The comically fearful and resigned ‘Coward Knight’ of the40

Old Law in Perlesvaus offers another intriguing parallel for Abraham and Moses (Perlesvaus, I,78–80, 189, 241–43/pp. 52–54, 124, 155–57): in the course of the narrative, he is graduallyequipped and taught to fight like a Christian knight.

Matarasso intriguingly connects Galahad’s rescue of Melyant (Queste pp. 164–70/pp.41

67–69) with the narrative of the Good Samaritan (Redemption of Chivalry, p. 57).

Piers Plowman B.16.176–252a; John the Baptist of course also appears in the Gospel42

of Nicodemus, similarly announcing that he has already seen Christ on earth (‘Gospel ofNicodemus’, trans. by James, Latin A, chap. 2 (p. 125); Latin in Evangelia, ed. by Tischendorf,pp. 392–93).

Langland’s Old Testament representatives, Abraham and Moses, to cure or helpthe semyvif is scarcely surprising: the grail romance maimed king is alwayssurrounded by others who look on with sorrow and concern, but can do nothing.So in Piers Plowman the Samaritan comments sympathetically of Abraham andMoses: ‘Have hem excused […] hir help may litel availle. | May no medicyne undermone þe man to heele brynge.’ Like the Fisher King and Mordrain waiting for40

Galahad, the semyvif waits for the Samaritan/jouster of Jerusalem.41

Larger Narrative Analogies

The Good Samaritan sequence also recalls the grail romances in large-structuralways. The first of these similarities relates to the often partial or uncertain natureof the commentary placed in the mouths of the various interpreters who appearwithin the narrative. While the primary mode of narrative is exemplary ormimetic embodied action, this action is the constant object both of wonder andquery, and also of a variety of attempts to name, explain, and gloss. But suchcommentary is often highly contingent. So, in the Good Samaritan sequence,the narrator repeatedly asks about what he observes, and although Abrahamand Moses have their own distinctive forms of understanding, these are alwaysincomplete. Abraham explains that he once saw the bacheler Christ, recalls hisknightly blasen, and says that he knows John the Baptist has recently been seen onearth. Moses says that he seeks a knight who once gave him ‘a maundement upon42

þe mount of Synay’ so that the same knight can now ‘seal’ the document with ‘crosand cristendom, and crist þeron to honge;’ Abraham comments, ‘He seith sooth[…] I have found it ofte’ (B.17.2–22). Neither Abraham nor Moses know as muchas the Samaritan, who, when asked, can foretell the salvific events that are to occurwithin three days, and even explain the actions and limitations of the other

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In Kennedy et al., ‘Lancelot with and without the Grail’, p. 310; see also Williams,43

Adventures of the Holy Grail, chap. 6.

actants and glossators, Abraham and Moses. This allegorical commentary, in otherwords, depends on the allegorical perspective of the speaker.

However, the grail romances are similarly shaped by enquiry, foretelling, andthe transmission of uncertain ‘news’ across the landscape, as various protagoniststurn up to comment on narrative events. This is what Andrea Williams calls ‘theinterplay of the metaphoric and homiletic modes’ in the Queste; and, althoughit is the case, especially in the Queste, that many of these dramatic glosses areremarkably clear-cut and seemingly conclusive, it is also true that there is a greatdeal more incomplete commentary: knightly adventures are, Williams also notes,often only ‘partially explained’. A monk attending on the wounded King43

Mordrain, for instance, describes his long-hoped-for cure in an anticipatory,contingent but also uncertain manner:

Et li Chevaliers est ja en cest païs, si com nos avons oï dire, cil qui les aventures doit menera chief. Et par ces signes que nos en avons ja veu penson nos bien que encor verra il et avratot le pooir des ses menbres.

(And now we have heard it said that the knight is already in these parts who is to bring allthese things to their conclusion. What is more, we firmly believe, from the signs alreadyvouchsafed to us, that he will see again and regain the strength of his limbs.) (Queste, p.254/p. 107)

The second of these structural likenesses between Langland’s sequence ofthe Good Samaritan and the grail romances derives from the way that all theprotagonists in this section of Piers Plowman are travellers and questers, chasingafter each other along the road to Jerusalem: Abraham, Moses (here named Faithand Spes (Hope)), and the narrator run after the Samaritan, who hastens toJerusalem:

Feiþ folwed after faste, and fondede to mete hym,And Spes spakliche hym spedde, spede if he myate,To overtaken hym and talke to hym er þei to towne coome.And when I seia þis, I soiourned noat, but shoop me to renne.

(Piers Plowman, B.17.83–86)

Ultimately they all seek the absent chivalric bacheler or jouster of B.18, who may,of course, be the same as the Samaritan, though the text leaves this uncertain; theurgency of the quest co-opts even the reader into the pursuit. Langland’s narrativesuggests that we are seeing those who live under the old dispensation running

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Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, p. 62; Miranda Griffin, The Object and Cause in the44

Vulgate Cycle (London: Legenda, 2005), pp. 53–55. On the ‘blood sample’ of the grail, see JacquesLacan: ‘Don’t forget that the blood of the grail is precisely what is lacking’ (The Ethics ofPsychoanalysis 1959–1960: Seminar 7, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter(London: Routledge, 1992), p. 142); on the role of lack or the ‘empty space’ in the Vulgate Cycle,see Griffin, Object and Cause, chap. 2.

For two recent psychoanalytic readings of desire in the Queste and the Perlesvaus, see45

Griffin, Object and Cause, especially chap. 2; and Benjamin Ramm, A Discourse for the Holy Grailin Old French Romance (Cambridge: Brewer, 2007).

In this respect, the Queste, at any rate, builds on the Lancelot, much of which is also organized46

round the pursuit of the elusive Lancelot, who passes under many pseudonyms, including those ofthe ‘White’, ‘Red’, ‘Black’, and simply the ‘Unknown’ Knight; see Lancelot do Lac. The Non-CyclicOld French Prose Romance, ed. by Elspeth Kennedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Lancelot:Roman en prose du XIII siècle, ed. by Alexandre Micha, 9 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1978–83); ande

Elspeth Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail: A Study of the Prose ‘Lancelot’ (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1986), chap. 2.

toward the new — he reveals to us history’s desire to realize itself in the redemp-tive action of Christ. I scarcely need to say how reminiscent this is of the Questeand the Perlesvaus, where knights spend so much of their time either seekingthe grail or looking for other knights, seekers looking for other seekers; indeed,in the Queste, as Matarasso says, knights seek Galahad ‘with a fervour not ac-corded to the grail’. For the reader as much as the protagonists, these are44

texts structured in terms of desire, a desire that is always imitative and mediatedby others. The various objects of this desire are unstable, ungraspable, andsubstitutive — seemingly determined by the narratives of pursuit in which theyoccur. Both the Queste and the Perlesvaus circle round the search for a mysterious45

‘good knight’, a hero who is more absent than he is present in the text.46

The third of these structural similarities between Langland’s Good Samaritannarrative and the grail romances lies in their preoccupation with failure. All theprotagonists in Langland’s narrative fail in crucial and theologically telling ways:not only is the semyvif unable to help himself, but Abraham and Moses cannothelp, and even the Samaritan is unable to do anything till the joust takes place inJerusalem. These apparently involuntary failures overlap with and corroborate theeffects of loss and desire that we have just noted; if on the one hand they producea powerful sense of a narrative ‘demand’ to put things right, they also suggest thathere the exercise of human volition and intentionality is fraught with difficulty.

Although this could be paralleled with the knightly failures that occur in manyromances, the grail romances in particular are dominated by what Baumgartnerhas called ‘la dissemblance et […] la faille’. Indeed, frequently these romances

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Emmanuèle Baumgartner, L’Arbre et le pain: essai sur ‘La Queste del saint graal’ (Paris:47

Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1981), p. 90; Griffin, Object and Cause, p. 45 (on thisphenomenon in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, see Walter Haug, Vernacular LiteraryTheory in the Middle Ages: The German Tradition, 800–1300, in its European Context, trans. byJoanna M. Catling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 153–57). See alsoElspeth Kennedy, ‘Failure in Arthurian Romance’, in The Grail: A Casebook (see n. 6, above),pp. 279–99.

Lancelot, ed. by Micha, IV, 210; see Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, pp. 115–16. On the48

increasing emphasis in the later parts of the Lancelot (in anticipation of the Queste) on thesinfulness of Lancelot’s love for Guenevere, see Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail, pp. 263–64,274–303; for an even more pervasive view of Lancelot’s failure in this text, Luke Sunderland,‘Heroism without Sacrifice: Ethics in Old French Narrative Cycles’ (unpublished doctoraldissertation, King’s College, London, 2008), chap. 3.

imagine these crucial chivalric failures as involuntary, as a culpability that derivesnot from intentionalized wrong-doing, but from what might be described as ‘badluck;’ Miranda Griffin speaks of their strange ‘lack of distinction […] between sinand misfortune’, between ‘mescheance and peschié ’. In the Queste, the most47

powerful and moving of these culpable protagonists is Lancelot, whose narrativeand brief, imperfect moments of penitential spiritual encounter often seem toovershadow those of more successful grail knights. Indeed, if his story provides theAdamic and tragic dimension of the Queste, this is anticipated in the proseLancelot, when, at the very moment at which Lancelot fathers Galahad, unawarethat he is lying with the daughter of King Pelles, the author actually refers toAdam, apparently suggesting that Lancelot’s sexual act is a kind of ‘felix culpa’.48

In the Perlesvaus, of course, the most important of the failed knights is Perlesvaushimself, whose originary and inadvertent error, as in Chrétien, initiates the wholegrail quest:

‘Il ot en l’ostel le Roi Pescheeur .i. chevalier devant cui li Graauz s’aparut .iii. foiz,c’onques ne voust demander de coi li Graauz servoit ne cui on en servoit.’

‘Sire […] vos dites voir, e si est li meldres chevaliers du mont, ce dit on […]. Mes parle fol sens du chevalier est cheüz li Rois Peschierres, mes oncles, en langeur.’

(‘At the house of the Fisher King there was once a knight to whom the grail appearedthree times, but he failed to ask what was done with it or who was served from it.’

‘True Sire […]. Yet they say he was the finest knight in the world […]. Yet because ofthat knight’s folly, my uncle the Fisher King is now languishing.’) (Perlesvaus, I, 68/p. 46)

In both the Queste and the Perlesvaus, of course, there is an overt recuperativeagenda: although the process by which these failures can be rectified remains in

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many respects mysterious, the failures themselves still have the effect of intensi-fying the protagonists’ desire to do so.

And, in the Perlesvaus at any rate, the failed knight is also the ‘finest knight’,the one who will finally manage to put things right. Something similar mightbe partly true of Langland’s narrative, where the Good Samaritan seems tobe connected to the jouster of B.18, his charitable actions prefiguring those ofthe Samaritan-like Christ. In fact, once the joust has taken place in Jerusalem,the Samaritan will return, and not only he but also Abraham and Moses willparticipate in the recuperative process, Abraham becoming a ‘forester’ to policethe wood and Moses becoming the hostiler at the grange of ‘lex Christi’(B.17.115–18). We might say that in the narrative of the Good Samaritan, as inthe Perlesvaus, failure is integrally associated with the desire to put that failureright. Although this striking identification of failure and renewal is neveranalytically explained in either text, it seems central to the inner narrative logic ofboth.

In the last part of this essay, I propose to look at these three structural featuresof grail romance — questions and news, seeking and seekers, and failure andinvoluntariness — as they occur in Piers Plowman as a whole.

Questions and News in the Landscape

Piers Plowman is a drama of uncertain knowledge, of questions, partial answers,and ‘news’ heard in a landscape. Its dream prologues, for instance, do not cease toforeground its emphasis on the mysterious and the marvelous, and the dreamerdoes not cease to ask ‘what may þis bymeene?’ (B.1.11). In B.5, for instance, theworldly pilgrim knows nothing of Truth, but Piers Plowman bursts in and is ableto convey firsthand information and to provide directions: ‘I knowe hym askyndely as clerc doþ hise bokes’ (B.5.538). When Piers Plowman disappears at theend of B.7, he too becomes the inspirational subject of ‘news’, as when Clergiereports his views at the feast of Patience: ‘oon Piers þe Plowman haþ impugned usalle’ (B.13.124); and again, more inspirationally, when Anima announces thatPiers is now tending the Tree of Charity. The narrator is always waking andlooking around — ‘And I awaked […] | And after Piers þe plowman pried andstared. | Estward and westward I waited after faste’ (B.16.167–69). ThroughoutB.8–13, the narrator walks constantly, encountering a series of perspectivizedspeakers, whose partial information depends on their allegorical or personalsignificance, as with Trajan’s ‘Baw for bokes!’ (B.11.140). As Emily Steiner hasshown, Piers Plowman is also full of documents, many of which are described as

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Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature49

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

having been ‘sent’: Piers with his Pardon sente by Treuþe, Moses with his49

maundement, Peace with her lettres again sente by Love (B.7.1; 17.2; 18.170).Other protagonists in the poem also receive ‘news’: at the Crucifixion dead bodiesrise up out of ‘depe graves’ to report the ‘bitter bataille’ of Life and Death ‘in þisderknesse’ (B.18.62–65), Mercy and Truth report and wonder about all thedistant cosmic activity occurring in front of Hell. Much of the excitement andanticipation of these passages derives from effects of contingency, and the fact thatthe ‘news’ is unclear. In the run-up to the Crucifixion and Harrowing of Hell, forinstance, nobody knows for sure what is going to happen: who will have maistrie,Life or Death? Nobody will know, as the bodies say, ‘er soneday aboute sonne-risyng’ (B.18.66–67).

In the grail romances too, despite the presence of a certain number of monasticor heremitical commentators who are in possession of fuller knowledge, news onthe whole travels uncertainly across the chivalric landscape. One or two morestriking examples. When in the Queste Galahad mentions the grail to a monk, themonk responds from a position of contingent and partial understanding, asking:‘What, is this quest then begun?’ ‘Indeed it is,’ responds Galahad, ‘and we areboth companions’ (‘Coment,’ fet .i. des freres de leenz, ‘est ele [la queste] donccomencié?’ ‘Oïl,’ fet Galaad, ‘et en sommes andui compaignon’; Queste, p. 170/p. 70). Such effects of discovery occur everywhere in the Perlesvaus, in whichasking about Perlesvaus, enquiring his name, and discussing what it means aresomething of an obsession:

‘D’un chevalier que ge vois qerre vos sui venue demander noveles.’ ‘Qi est li chevaliers?’ fet li hermites. ‘Sire, c’est li chastes chevaliers du saintisme lignage […]’ ‘Damoisele,’ fet li hermites, ‘je no vos enseigneré pas, car ge ne sé certainnement o il

est. Mes il a geü en ceste chapele par .ii. foiz n’a pas .i. en.’ ‘Sire,’ fet ele, ‘ne m’en direz vos autres noveles?’‘Damoisele, nae.’ ‘E vos, biax sire?’ fet ele a Monseigneur Gavain.‘Damoisele,’ fet il, ‘ge le verroie autressi volentiers comme vos, mes ge ne truis qi

noveles m’en die.’

(‘I have come here, sire, to ask you news of a knight I am seeking.’‘And who is the knight?’ said the hermit.

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See also Perlesvaus’s partial self-revelation to his sister (Perlesvaus, I, 220/p. 143).50

‘Sire, it is the chaste knight of most holy lineage […]’‘Damsel,’ said the hermit, ‘I can tell you nothing, for I do not know for certain where

he is. But he has slept in this chapel twice in less than a year.’‘Sire,’ she said, ‘can’t you tell me any other news?’‘No, damsel.’‘And you, good sir?’ she said to Sir Gawain.‘Damsel,’ he said, ‘I would be as glad to see him as you, but I have met no-one who

could give me any news of him.’) (Perlesvaus, I, 61/pp. 41–42)

All are seeking something they desire but do not and cannot yet have. This is aworld of questions and fragmentary understanding, and both are an expression ofand an incitement to desire:

Misire Gavains […] s’en vet tote la forest qui s’aonbroit jusc’an la marine, et esgardaau chief d’un sablonoi et voit .i. chevalier armé sor un grant destrier […].

‘Ha! Dex,’ fet Misire Gavains, ‘savroit moi cel chevalier dire novele de celui que je voisquere?’ […]

‘Sire,’ fet Misire Gavains, ‘savriez me vos dire noveles d’un chevalier qui porte .i. escubendé d’argent et d’azur a une croiz vermoille?’

‘Sire,’ fet li chevaliers, ‘oïl, molt bien; a l’asanblee des chevaliers le troverez dedenz .xl.jorz.’

‘Sire,’ fet Misire Gavains, ‘ou iert l’assanblee?’ ‘En la Vermelle Lande […]’

(Sir Gawain […] rode on through the forest which spread its shadow right down tothe shore, and then, looking ahead over the sand, he saw a knight in armour on a greatwarhorse […].

‘Oh God!’ said Sir Gawain, ‘might this knight have news of the one I seek?’[…]‘Sire,’ said Gawain, ‘can you give me news of a knight who bears a shield banded argent

and azure with a red cross?’‘Yes indeed, sire,’ said the knight, ‘You will find him at the tournament in forty days.’‘Sire,’ said Sir Gawain, ‘Where is the tourney to take place?’‘On the Crimson Heath […].’) (Perlesvaus, I, 190/pp. 124–25)

Once again, the effects of desire here derive from this combination of some news,some apprehension, and above all continued uncertainty. Interestingly, of course,the knight to whom Gawain speaks here is in fact in disguise — it is Perlesvaus,the knight whom he seeks. Compare how in Piers Plowman the Good Samaritan50

announces the imminent appearance of a jouster — a jouster who will in fact turn

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On the pervasive terminology of semblaunce in the Queste, see Baumgartner, L’Arbre et le51

pain, p. 76 n.16, and pp. 81–82; also her ‘The Queste del saint graal: From semblance to veraiesemblaunce’, in Companion to the ‘Lancelot-Grail Cycle’ (see n. 5, above), pp. 107–14.

See Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, p. 97.52

B.15.50; see Mary Carruthers, The Search for St Truth: A Study of Meaning in ‘Piers53

Plowman’ (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), chap. 4; Joseph S. Wittig, ‘PiersPlowman B, Passus IX–XII: Elements in the Design of the Inward Journey’, Traditio, 28 (1972),211–80; Nicolette Zeeman, ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006), chaps 3 and 6.

out to be suspiciously ‘semblable to the Samaritan’ himself. One aspect of51

knowledge’s contingency is the possibility that those who answer may be morethan they seem and know more than they reveal. In these allegorical narratives,then, the protagonists’ dramatic commentary rarely articulates all that the nar-rative is offering. If these narratives prevent intellectual complacency and renewthe sense of quest, however, they also affirm the phenomenological uncertaintyof the world in which the subject moves.

These three texts are, interestingly, all fascinated with questions. If, in Per-lesvaus and Piers Plowman, the question functions as a recurring expression ofdesire, it can also be a site of failure. Perlesvaus, for instance, continues to figureoriginal sin in terms of the fatally unasked question; the Queste, of course, choosesto give up this particular trope. For Langland the question is also potentially52

problematic, but in a different way, because for him the question asked can signifythe misuse of cognitive powers. This occurs at those moments when interlocutorsimply that the narrator has slipped from an ethical and volitionally driven pursuitof understanding to a commodified, covetous understanding pursued for its ownsake, as when Anima rebukes him for wanting to know all her names: ‘Thanneartow inparfit […] and oon of prides knyates.’ Langland’s concern about the53

question is informed by his late-medieval pastoral and critical concern about theabuse of the intellect and its learning, and is very different from that of the‘Perceval tradition’ as expressed in Perlesvaus. And yet Langland’s concern aboutthe question is such that he too uses it to describe the Fall: in B.16 the narrator’sapparently laudable request to taste the apples of the Tree of Charity leads toevents in the garden of Eden. Like the Fall, of course, this request is both badand good in its consequences, and the narrator’s question, with its partial orenigmatic answers, simultaneously figures the problematics of human inten-tionality and desire, and also articulates a human urge to experience charity in afallen world.

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Anne Middleton, ‘Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers54

Plowman’, in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Honor of Morton Bloomfield, ed. by Larry Benson andSiegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), pp. 91–122 (pp. 108–09).

‘The Sacrament of the Altar in Piers Plowman’, in his Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian55

Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004),pp. 29–51 (p. 44).

Zeeman, Medieval Discourse of Desire, pp. 1–19, and chaps 1, 3, and 6.56

Seeking and Seekers

My second point of comparison concerns the quest and its objects. Piers Plowmanhimself has long been recognized as the most striking ‘absent object of desire’ ina poem full of such absent objects. He is simply not present for the great part of54

the poem, and his appearances, even just the mention of his name, always producean effect of intense excitement, discovery, and recognition. And he always dis-appears again. Intriguingly, however, these very absences also make Piers himselfinto a figure of travel or search: one of the dominant tropes of the poem, we mightsay, is that of the ‘seeker sought’. David Aers has also recently written about the‘absence and presence’ of the sacrament in Piers Plowman, writing, in oddly grail-romance-like terms: ‘our deprivation belongs to a long process in which Christ’spresence and the sacrament of the altar are not yet, a not yet which is at the heartof the poem’s sacramental theology.’ The Eucharist is certainly not an overt55

presence in Piers Plowman and the grail does not appear at all; however, Aers’ssuggestive claim is that the text makes us feel the Eucharist, if only as an absence.I too have argued that in fact the poem systematically creates effects of cata-strophic loss and desire. The poem is punctuated by a series of dramatic break-56

downs in which narratives fall apart, objects turn out to be something differentfrom what we thought they were, protagonists depart, and speakers refuse to tellthe narrator anything more. I have in mind passages such as the Plowing of theHalf-Acre or the Tearing of the Pardon, the disastrous losses of the Tree ofCharity, the disintegration of the Barn of Unity — as well as all those passageswhere the narrator appears to go awry, and is rebuked by figures such as Study,Scripture, Reason, and Anima. Such disintegrative moments are sites of desire,moments of sudden lack that leave the narrator — and the reader — gaping formore. Such moments of frustration are of course often also the catalyst for newnarrative beginnings.

The grail romances are also shaped by absence and desire. The Queste be-gins, after all, with Arthur weeping over the anticipated dispersal of his court:

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Queste, p. 116/p. 45; also p. 108/p. 42.57

‘Gauvain, Gauvain, mis m’avez le grant corrox el cuer […] car trop ai grant doteque mi ami charnel n’en reviegnent ja’ (Gawain, Gawain, you have filled my heartwith anguish […] I have a great dread that my earthly companions will neverreturn). The importance of Lancelot in both the Queste and Perlesvaus derives57

from his role as the one who loses again and again; in the Queste he loses his statusas ‘the best knight’; at the Castle of Corbenic he has a distant sight of the grail andthen loses it, an experience apparently replicated in his swoon of twenty-four days;and in the Perlesvaus (as in the conclusion of the Morte d’Artur) he tragically losesGuenevere. However, the really important absences of the grail romances are theirelusive spiritual objects of desire. There is the unpredictable eucharistic grailitself — desired by all, but miraculously seen only by the chosen few. But the greatpart of both grail romances (perhaps especially Perlesvaus) is devoted to thepursuit of the grail’s spiritual knights, those other seekers, whether Perlesvaus orGalahad, ‘the Desired Knight’ (Queste, p. 96/p. 37). Like Piers Plowman, theseknights are moving targets, endlessly sought and asked about. At moments theyare found, but they invariably leave again; repeatedly, they travel and fight in disguise;they refuse to say who they are or to join the court; they are always departing.

So here in the Perlesvaus:

‘Nos atendon la venue dou Bon Chevalier de jor en jor […] et c’est la riens ou montque je desir plus a voer.’

‘Dame, qui est li Bons Chevaliers?’ dist Clamadoz. ‘Li fiz a la Veve Dame des Vax de Camaaloth.’ ‘Dites vos, dame,’ fet il, ‘qu’il venra ci entreset?’ ‘Ausi le cuit je,’ fet ele […]. Il sejorna la dedenz […] por atendre la venue del chevalier

dont il ot oï nouveles; et la dame se mervelle molt qu’il ne vient.

(‘We are daily awaiting the arrival of the Good Knight […] and there is nothing in theworld I desire to see more.’

‘Who is the Good Knight, my Lady?’ asked Clamadoz.‘The son of the widowed Lady of the Vales of Kamaalot.’‘And do you think he will soon be coming here, Lady?’ he said.‘I think so,’ she said […]. He stayed there […] waiting for the coming of the knight of

whom he had heard news, and the lady was greatly puzzled that he didn’t come.)(Perlesvaus, I, 148/pp. 97–98)

The belated arrivals of these knights (usually a prelude to more departures) arealso, like those of Piers Plowman, moments of ecstatic delight: when Perlesvaus

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Queste, p. 486/p. 208, and Matarasso, in the translation, n. 55.58

is finally revealed to his sister, ‘the maiden fell at his feet in joy’ (la damoisele lichiét as piez de joie; Perlesvaus, I, 228/p. 148). ‘We have waited so long for youthat now’, a monk tells Galahad, ‘praise God, you are come’ in the Queste (Si vosavons tant atendu, Deu merci, que ore nos vos avons; p. 158/p. 64); but withina page or so Galahad has set off again. Matarasso has compared Galahad’s mys-terious comings and going to those of Christ: ‘Galahad pursued them for somedistance, and when he saw they were gone for good, he slipped away so discreetlythat none could tell which way he had gone’ (Et il les enchauce grant piece. Et comil voit que neenz est del retorner, si s’en va si quoiement que nus nel puetapercevoir quel part il est tornez). Such encounters, with their dynamics of58

mystery, anticipation, and revelation can also occur between other protagonists,seekers ‘on their way,’ as here, in the Perlesvaus, where Lancelot has this exchangewith a hermit:

‘Sire,’ fet li hermites, ‘savriez me vos dire nouveles d’un chevalier qui geü a lonc tanschiés .i. roi hermite?’

‘Sire,’ fet Lancelot, ‘il n’a mie lonc terme que je le vi […].’‘Est donc gariz li chevaliers?’ fet li hermites. ‘Sire, oïl,’ fet Lanceloz, ‘de coi il est molt grant joies; et por coi le demandez vos ?’ ‘Je le doi molt bien demander,’ fet li hermites, ‘car mes peres li rois Pelles est ses oncles,

et sa mere est suer germaine mon pere.’ ‘A! sire, est dont li Rois Hermites vostre pere?’ ‘Certes, sire, oïl.’ ‘Tant vos aim ge melz,’ fet Lanceloz, ‘car je n’é trouvé onques home qui tant d’enor

me feïst com il me fist. Et conment est vostre nom?’ fet Lanceloz. ‘Sire, certes j’é a non Joseps; et vos conment?’ ‘Sire,’ fet il, ‘on m’apele Lancelot del Lac.’ ‘Sire,’ fet li hermites, ‘nos sonmes prochain parent entre moi et vos.’ ‘Par mon chief,’ fet Lanceloz, ‘de ce sui je molt joieus en mon cuer.’

(‘Sire,’ said the hermit, ‘can you give me news of a knight who lay for a long time at thehouse of the hermit king?’

‘Sire,’ said Lancelot, ‘it is but a short while since I saw him […].’‘Then the knight is now cured?’‘Yes, sire,’ said Lancelot, ‘which is a great joy indeed. But why do you ask?’‘It is only right that I ask,’ said the hermit, ‘for my father King Pelles is his uncle, and

his mother is my father’s sister.’

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Perlesvaus, I, 164/p. 108; compare the encounter between the Fisher King and Lancelot at59

I, 170/pp. 111–12.

My thanks to Graham Caie for the thought of this liturgical echo.60

‘Oh, sire, then the Hermit King is your father?’‘Indeed he is, sire.’‘Then I love you the more,’ said Lancelot, ‘for I never met a man who did me such

honour as he. What is your name?’‘In truth, sire, my name is Joseus; and yours?’‘Sire,’ he said, ‘they call me Lancelot of the Lake.’‘Sire,’ said the hermit, ‘then we are closely related, you and I.’‘Truly,’ said Lancelot, ‘that brings joy to my heart!’) 59

These almost antiphonal revelatory dialogues are often moments of discovered60

affinity and even, sometimes, identity, as here, in the Queste:

‘Voire, sire,’ fet li chevaliers, ‘e non Deu, vos soiez li tres bien venuz sor toz les homesdel monde, car je vos desirroie plus a vooir et a avoir en ma compaignie que rien vivant. Etj’ai droit, que vos fustes comencemenz de moi.’ Lors oste son hiaume de sa teste et le meten mi la nef. Et Lancelot li demande:

‘Ha! Galaaz, estes vos ce?’ ‘Sire,’ fet cil, ‘oïl, ce sui je voirement.’

(‘Truly, Sir,’ the knight said, ‘In God’s name, you are, of all the men in the world, themost welcome, because I have desired to see you and have you in my company more thananyone alive. And it is only natural that I should, for in you was my beginning.’ With thatthe knight removed his helm from his head and placed it in the bottom of the boat, andLancelot asked:

‘Ah! Galahad, is it you?’‘Yes, Sir, in truth it is I’ he said.) (Queste, p. 594/pp. 257–58)

To the end, the Queste is dominated by earthly partings (though also by al-lusions to possible meetings in heaven), which gives it an elegiac quality notfound in Piers Plowman. When Galahad and Perceval leave each other, Percevalexpresses the wish they should meet again soon, ‘for I never found anyone’scompany so easy and delightful as yours seems to me to be’ (Car, certes, je netrovai onques conpagnie si douce ne si plesant com la vostre me semble); thenarrator continues, ‘for they loved each other with a great love, as was well provenin their death, for the one lived only a little after he knew that the other was dead’(molt s’entr’amoient de grant amor; et bien i parut a la mort, car assez pou vesqui

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li .i. puis que il sot que li autres fu morz; p. 584/p. 253). When Galahad andLancelot part for the last time, Galahad weeps and tells Lancelot that he does notknow if they will meet again:

Lors comence li uns et li autres a plorer. Et en ce que il fu oissuz de la nef et il fumontez sor son cheval, vint une voiz entr’els qui lor dist:

‘Or penst chascuns de bien fere endroit soi, que ja mes ne verra li .i. l’autre devant legrant jor del Joïse qui sera espoantable que Nostre Sires rendra a chascun ce qu’il avradeservi.’

(And then both the one and the other began to weep; and when he [Galahad] had leftthe boat and mounted his horse, a voice rent the space between them, saying:

‘Henceforth let each bestir himself to virtue, for neither one shall see the other moreuntil the great and fearful day of Judgement when our Lord shall render unto each hisdue.’) (Queste, p. 598/p. 259)

There is rather less anticipation of heaven and reference to last days in thePerlesvaus, where the Christ-figuring hero’s military adventures carry on prettymuch to the end; repeatedly we hear, ‘he took his leave and departed, for he hadstill not completed all that he had to do’ (il s’en partie e prist congié, car il n’avoitmie encore tot son afaire achevé; I, 365/p. 235). Bar his short final stay in theGrail Castle, Perlesvaus is always moving on. In the text’s much more open-endedconclusion, word comes that the grail will not appear any more even at the GrailCastle; the newly established order begins to fragment, as the holy tombs in theGrail Chapel crack and the Chapel relics are dispersed through the land; a shiparrives in the harbour, and Perlesvaus boards with the most precious relics and thebodies from the tombs:

Josephes nos recorde que Perlesvaus s’en partie en tel maniere, ne onques puis ne sot nushom terriens que il devint, ne li estoires n’en parole plus.

( Josephus tells us that Perlesvaus thus departed, and from that time forth no earthlyman ever knew what became of him and the story tells nothing more.) (Perlesvaus, I,408/p. 264)

Readers will scarcely need reminding of the startling meetings and encountersof Piers Plowman, with their sense of discovered affinity or identity. The moststriking of these of course involve the long-sought Piers:

‘Piers þe Plowman!’ quod I tho, and al for pure IoyeThat I herde nempne his name anoon I swowned after,And lay longe in a lovedreem; and at þe laste me þouateThat Piers þe Plowman al þe place me shewed.

(B.16.18–21)

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We might even compare the way secular chivalry transmutes into spiritual in the figure of61

Perceval and the way secular labour transmutes into spiritual and ecclesiastical in the figure of PiersPlowman.

On the ‘disappearance’ of St Peter from the Acts of the Apostles, see Burrow, Langland’s62

Fictions, p. 79.

When the dreamer arrives at the Crucifixion, he asks ‘Is Piers in þis place?’, andwhen he finds himself at Mass in B.19 —

sodeynly me metteThat Piers þe Plowman was peynted al blody And com in wiþ a cros […]And þanne called I Conscience to kenne me þe soþe,‘Is þis Iesus þe Iustere,’ quod I, ‘þat Iewes dide to deþe?Or it is Piers þe Plowman? who paynted hym so rede?’

(Piers Plowman, B.19.5–7, 9–11)

Every time of course, Piers vanishes once more, tending simply to drop out of thenarrative, almost without comment. Sometimes this is because a dream ends, asat B.7 or B.16 (even though the C text excises the Tearing of the Pardon in C.9,after all, it retains the disappearance of the eponymous hero). Sometimes Piers61

leaves for reasons that are not overtly articulated at all, but seem to be associatedwith some kind of ambient corruption. In B.19, for instance, Piers becomes acentral actant in the establishment of the Barn of Unity, ‘holi chirche’; however,he then ceases to appear in the narrative, though the others continue to refer tohim; finally, when the Barn has disintegrated and been infiltrated at the end ofB.20, it is clear from the final cry of Conscience that Piers Plowman is no longerin the barn at all.

If the comings and goings of Piers are one of the poem’s most distinctiveeffects, they are unparalleled in any other text that I know — perhaps apart fromthe grail romances. Piers’s name has always been understood as an amalgam ofthe vernacular working man Piers and the Church-founding figure of St Peter;62

but I cannot refrain from observing that it also contains a variant of the firstsyllable(s) of the name Perceval/Perlesvaus: can we go so far as to claim thatLangland’s ‘Piers’ contains in his name an allusion to the grail knight?

There are various kinds of possible circumstantial support for this riskysuggestion. Medieval writers were certainly highly alert to the syllabic parts ofnames. The Perlesvaus after all breaks up the name ‘Per-les-vaus’ into syllables forthe purposes of etymological analysis, both as ‘He who has lost the vales’ (‘car li

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First citation, I, 42/p. 30; see also I, 231/p. 149; second citation, I, 90/p. 60. For a similar63

pun in the fourteenth-century French prose romance of Perceforest, whose hero ‘pierces’ thepreviously inaccessible ‘forest’, see Le Roman de Perceforest: première partie, ed. by Jane H. M.Taylor, Textes littéraires français, 279 (Geneva: Droz, 1979), p. 202. I am grateful to Sylvia Huotfor drawing this to my attention.

For Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval and the Continuations see The Manuscripts of Chrétien64

de Troyes, ed. by Keith Busby et al., 2 vols (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), II, figs 195, 199, 212, 213(Mons, Bibliothèque Universitaire, MS 331/206 (4568), pp. 25, 68, 267, 280); figs 120, 124,129 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr.12576, fols 193 , 219 , 261 ; for the Queste,r r r

see London, British Library, MS Royal 19.C.XIII, fols 321 –22 ; London, British Library, MSr v

Additional 17443, fols 60 –61 ; London, British Library, MS Additional 10294, fols 57 –58 ;v v v r

see also the ‘Romaunz de per le Galois’ cited in M. Blaess, ‘Les Manuscrits français dans lesmonastères anglais au moyen âge’, Romania, 94 (1973), 321–58 (p. 355).

For ‘Per’, see Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 82, fols 31 , 36 , 46 , 48 ; for Per-r v r r–v65

lesvaus systematically abbreviated to ‘P’, see also Carley, ‘A Fragment’, pp. 49–61.

This can be seen most quickly and vividly in Joseph S. Wittig, Piers Plowman: Concordance:66

Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-well, Do-better and Do-best (London: Athlone, 2001), under‘piers n prop.’ Piers Plowman manuscripts of the C text that I have consulted seem not toabbreviate the ‘Per’ part of the name (see London, British Library, MS Additional 35157;Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.5.35; Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.3.13).

See M. L. Samuels, ‘Langland’s Dialect’, Medium Ævum, 54 (1984), 232–47; ‘Dialect and67

Grammar’, in A Companion to ‘Piers Plowman’, ed. by John A. Alford (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

Sires des Mares li toloit la greigneur partie des Vax de Kamaalot’ (because theLord of the Fens took away from him the great part of the Valleys of Kamaalot)),and as ‘Par-lui-fet’ (Made by himself). However, manuscript abbreviated spelling63

may also support the Perceval/Piers echo. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval andthe Queste, after all, the name Perceval/Perchevaus is subject to a number ofscribal abbreviations, and is quite often written ‘Pc’, ‘Perc’ or ‘Per’. In the version64

of Perlesvaus found in Bodleian MS Hatton 82, the name Perlesvaus/Percevalis often abbreviated to ‘p’, but also appears sporadically as ‘Per’. A reader65

of French grail romance, in other words, might well have encountered the namePerceval/Perchevaus in this ‘Piers-like’ form. What is more, Piers Plowmanmanuscripts themselves vary in the spelling of ‘Piers’. Whereas in the B-textmanuscripts, with their predominantly south-eastern English dialect, the ortho-graphy is usually ‘Piers’, in the C-text manuscripts, with their mainly south-westMidlands dialect, the most common spellings are ‘Peres,’ ‘Peris’, and even ‘Pers’.66

If this was Langland’s dialect (though of course this is not possible to prove fromcurrent evidence), then this might well have encouraged not only the hearing butalso the seeing of such a verbal likeness. Could Langland’s ‘Piers’, ‘Peres’, ‘Peris’,67

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University of California Press, 1988), pp. 201–21 (pp. 205–08); see also Simon Horobin, ‘“InLondon and Opelond”: The Dialect and Circulation of the C Version of Piers Plowman’,Medium Ævum, 74 (2005), 248–69.

I thank the YLS readers for suggestions here: these include the intriguing possibility of an68

echo in B.19.163, ‘Peter parceyved al þis’, and even an anagrammatic allusion in B.20.77, ‘for peresloue þe Plowman’.

or ‘Perkyn’, then, be a sort of ‘absent-on-quest’ English and working man’sPerce[val]?68

Failure and Involuntariness

My third and final point of comparison between Piers Plowman and the grailromances involves the centrality of the protagonist who ‘fails’. As I have arguedelsewhere, the repeating moments of narrative breakdown and loss that char-acterize Piers Plowman are also often moments of social or personal failure(though pinpointing what exactly the source of the failure is or why it occurredis notoriously difficult). This is true of all those moments I mentioned above, thePlowing of the Half-Acre or the Tearing of the Pardon, the losses of the Tree ofCharity, the disintegration of the Barn of Unity, as well as all those passages wherethe narrator appears to go awry, and is rebuked by figures such as Study, Scripture,Reason, and Anima. In such passages, even if the protagonists seem to have meantwell, we are repeatedly left with a sense of failure — characters speak angrily,rebuke each other, and seem to some extent to acknowledge their failings. Thepoem offers its own distinctive, narrative-driven version of I John, 1. 8: ‘If we saythat we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.’ The repetitionof such episodes makes them seem both inexplicable and unavoidable, sharpreminders of the place of the subject within the Symbolic and under the eye of theOther. The Tree of Charity episode is paradigmatic, for here, in a strange replayof the Fall, the narrator’s apparently praiseworthy desire to taste the apples of theTree leads to their loss, when Piers shakes the tree and the devil carries the applesoff. Equally important, this episode implicates both the narrator and Piers. ForPiers is just as prone to error of this kind as the narrator — from the Plowing ofthe Half-Acre to the establishment of the Barn of Unity, every one of his well-intentioned institutional projects is in turn derailed.

And yet, because such incidents lead to rebuke and loss, they not only producethe effects of desire but are also places from which the poem catapults itselfforward into new answers and fresh starts. In Piers Plowman, failure is closely

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Zeeman, Medieval Discourse of Desire, pp. 1–19 and, chaps 1, 3, and 6.69

Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, p. 97.70

associated with renewal: at the Tree of Charity the loss of the apples and Piers’stene lead in turn to a narrative of the Redemption; the disintegration of the barnleads to Conscience’s departure. This gives rather different implications to theapparent inevitability of these narratives, which can also be read to suggest thepresence of some mysterious shaping force at work within events. 69

Knightly failure is also endemic in grail romance. Moments of failure areoften highly emotive and pitiful, frequently creating the romances’ most powerfuleffects of loss and desire; as we have already noted, these romances also oftenimply that this failure is involuntary, something knights must undergo or sufferas part of their adventure. Although the Queste diverges from the Perceval tra-dition by no longer identifying the hero who achieves the grail quest with thesource of original failure, the text is still dominated by other failing knights.70

There are all those worldly knights who in the new world of the grail quest can nolonger find any adventures; and there are those knights who undertake adventuresthat, although they do not know it, turn out not to be for them, and are punishedfor doing so. Here is the pitiful scene when Hector (who has been warned abouthis weaknesses but somehow seems not to hear) is excluded from the Castle ofCorbenic and hears that Lancelot is within:

‘Ha! Dex, or double ma honte et croist plus et plus! Or n’oseré je mes venir devant monfrere, quant j’ai failli a ce ou li preudome et li vaillant chevalier ne faudront pas.’

(‘Ah! God, now is my shame redoubled and grows greater and greater! Now I shall neverdare to face my brother, since I have failed where others shall not fail, the worthy men andtrue knights.’ )

When Lancelot hears that Hector has been turned away he too is pained byHector’s disappointment:

il est si dolenz qu’il ne set qu’il doie fere ne dire. Si ne se puet tant celer que cil de leenz nes’en aperçoivent, a ce que il li voient les lermes degoter tot contreval les faces.

(He was so distressed that he did not know what to do or say. However he strove to hidehis feelings, he could not prevent his hosts from seeing the tears that were running downhis face.) (Queste, pp. 614–16/p. 267)

Such narratives describe an endless and inexplicable recurrence of compoundedhuman failures, all the while simultaneously implying that the knights’ choicesand actions are inevitable. And yet out of this failure, these romances also producea reviving sense of what is lost and might be sought. This is precisely the emotive

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Queste, pp. 608–10/p. 264; see Matarasso, Redemption of Chivalry, pp. 138–40. 71

Kelly, Le Haut livre, p.100.72

power of the narratives of Lancelot, the most poignant protagonist of the Queste,reminded by everyone of his fall from grace, his sinful love of Guenevere: ‘hehastened out, his eyes blinded with tears, groaning and cursing the day that he wasborn’ (se part de leenz maintenant mout formant de cuer souspirant et de ses iexlarmoiant, et maudit l’ore qu’il onques fu nez; Queste, p. 206/p. 85). Finally at theCastle of Corbenic he is offered some kind of vision, but then deprived of it:

Si comença a fere trop grant duel et dit: ‘Ha! Dex, por quoi m’avez esperi ? […] Je ai […] veu si grant merveilles et si grant

beneurté que ma langue nel vos porroit mie descovrir […] que se ma maleurté ne fust etmi grant pechié, encore eusse je plus veu.’

(He set up a great lamentation, crying: ‘Ah! God, why didst thou waken me? […] I have seen […] such wonders and such

great joys that my tongue could never reveal their magnitude […]. And but for mymisfortune and my grievous sins I should have seen still more.’)71

This interest in failure and ‘maleurté’ is even more apparent in the Perlesvaus,where the whole Arthurian world seems to have gone into a moral decline. Thekingdom of Arthur has fallen into disrepute, as Arthur has become sinful, his boyis punished, Gawain’s armour is worn out and Perlesvaus is sick. Above all, thenarrative continues to be predicated on, and dominated by, Perlesvaus’s disastrousfailure to ask the purpose of the grail at the Grail Castle before the romancebegins: as noted above, this failure is responsible for many more ills than inChrétien de Troyes’s original text: Perlesvaus is a figure for Christ but also forAdam. Repeatedly throughout the text characters refer to him as ‘the knight72

who went [to the Grail Castle] first and did not ask the question’ (celui quipremierement i fu, qi ne fist la demande; Perlesvaus, I, 53/p. 37). Equally im-portant, however, his ‘original’ failing at the castle of the Fisher King is describedin terms that disrupt the language of ethics and responsibility — as inexplicableand apparently involuntary. It is not clear why Perceval did not ask the question,or how he should have known to do so. Later in the text, Gawain replicates themistake, despite having been warned, and everyone looks on in amazement andconfusion as he does so. When the Grail appears,

Missire Gavains est pensis, et li vient si grant joie en sa pensee q’il ne li menbre de rien sede Dieu non. Li chevalier sont tuit mat et dolent et le regardent […]. Li mestres des

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Perlesvaus, I, 119/p. 79; see also Gawain’s earlier apparently involuntary failure of alertness73

at I, 58–59/p. 40; Perlesvaus too never entirely escapes error, as is illustrated even toward the endof the romance, when he takes Aristor’s horse (I, 361/p. 233).

See Zeeman, Medieval Discourse of Desire, chap. 1.74

See Jan M. Ziolkowski, ‘Theories of Obscurity in the Latin Tradition’, Mediaevalia, 1975

(1993), 101–70.

No extended attempt has been made since Dorothy L. Owen, ‘Piers Plowman’: A Com-76

parison with Some Earlier and Contemporary French Allegories (London: University of LondonPress, 1912).

chevaliers semont Monsaingnor Gavain, et il esgarde devant lui et voit chaoir .iii. gotes delsanc desus la table, si fu toz esbahiz de l’esgarder, si ne dist mot.

(Sir Gawain was so deep in thought, and in his thought there came such joy to him thathe could only think of God. The knights stared at him, all downcast and grieving […]. Theforemost knight cried out to Sir Gawain, and he, looking before him, saw three drops ofblood drip onto the table, and was so astonished by the sight that he did not say a word.)73

Throughout the Perlesvaus, protagonists recall Perlesvaus’s disastrous mistake andthe misfortunes that have come from it. Like the loss of the apples in PiersPlowman, this failure is clearly a figure for the ultimate, ‘original’ failure — andthe whole chivalric world desires that it be put right. Like Langland’s mostspiritual adventurer, Piers Plowman, Perlesvaus is both an object of desire and siteof renewal. However, even though this cannot be said explicitly, both texts seemto imagine these failures as at some level desirable. Despite widespread acceptanceof the notion of the ‘felix culpa’, it was scarcely possible in the Middle Ages torecommend sinning. What we have to be talking about here are inevitably, in74

other words, obscure forms of allegorical significance, secret words which maybeit could not ‘be granted to man to utter.’ 75

Conclusion

This essay is part of a larger project to think about Langland as the author of anallegorical narrative and to ask what earlier allegorical narratives he might haveread and been in dialogue with. Although Langland scholarship is punctuated bya series of groundbreaking analyses of his distinctive allegorical technique, itremains the case that Piers Plowman does not fit very easily into the usual historiesof medieval allegorical narrative, and in recent years scholars seem to have avoidedeven attempting to make the comparison. It is true that both the narrative scale76

and individual iconographical elements of Piers Plowman can be compared with

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Kelly, Le Haut livre, p. 178; on prolonged suffering as a theme in Perlesvaus, see also77

pp. 147–54, 165.

the epic Old French personification narratives of Guillaume de Deguileville, andwith many shorter allegorical narratives such as the Old French ‘voie d’enfer et deparadis’ poems, the various Latin and vernacular allegories of the Four Daughtersof God, as well as vernacular texts such as the Roman de Fauvel and RobertGrosseteste’s Chasteau d’amour. Nevertheless, these texts’ vividly and substantiallyvisual images, their extensive internal self-glossing, and their pastorally clearnarrative and didactic ends make them very different from Piers Plowman. Theyprovide no parallels for Langland’s exploitation of the interplay of multiplecommentators and forms of understanding, nor for his use of incomplete under-standing as a means of inculcating desire; they certainly do not help us to read theuncertainties of his spiritual quest, his seekers sought — and his structuringpreoccupation with failure. Here, Piers Plowman seems to have far more incommon with the grail romances — in particular in respect of the three featuresthat I have discussed in this essay: partial understanding, questions and answersfigured as ‘news’ in a landscape; notions of absence, loss, and desire imagined asjourney or quest; and failure, implied to be integrally related to that quest.

Like the grail romances, Piers Plowman situates theological and moral eventswithin a shifting and unbounded landscape, and within an open-ended tem-porality: it is remarkably reminiscent of the restless, reiterative world of chivalricaventure. The simultaneously recursive and unfinished nature of the fourteenth-century poem can illuminatingly be seen in the context of chivalric narratives thatrepeat or echo themselves and yet also spool out into an ever-increasing plethoraof new departures. As in the romances, of course, the poem’s narrative meander-ings work unstably in relation to its recuperative, spiritual agenda. Thomas Kellyhas discussed the unconcluded aspects of the Perlesvaus, and the fact that in thistext the Wasteland is never fully undone: according to Kelly, the Perlesvausnarrates ‘a slow process which, although well under way as the story closes,remains to be completed […]. [O]ur author reveals a keen sense of the reality ofsalvation history, which is the progressive transmission and extension of the effectof Christ’s victory over sin.’ His remarks could equally well apply to Piers77

Plowman. On the one hand, as in the Arthurian romances as a whole, theconclusion of Langland’s poem can be seen mysteriously to offer the readergrounds for hope; but on the other hand, also as in those romances, the conclusionof Piers Plowman involves the disappearance of its main protagonists and thedisintegration of a world. Langland, too, is interested in the unfinished story.

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We have also seen that, as in the grail romances, Piers Plowman is thick withinternal self-commentary; however, again as in these romances, its exploitation ofnarrative enigma also destabilizes this commentary. The explicators who appearto comment on the action of Piers Plowman are often in incomplete possessionof the relevant knowledge — they each offer their particular and partial versionof what signs mean, when mysteries will be solved, and where the objects of questmight be. In all these allegories, the decoding discourse is, if not actually ironized,then always under query. These are allegories that understand their work to bethat of inevitably partial disclosure.

And this in turn involves a distinctive version of subjecthood: the oblique andpuzzling aventure of Langland’s seeker charts the spiritual quest as founded inepistemological uncertainty and the impossibility of ever fully knowing its ownterms. Such epistemological uncertainty has been recognized as contributing toa volitional and affective project to solicit desire; this occurs both positively, bymeans of what is known, and also through ‘lack’, by means of what cannot beknown. However, this constitutive epistemological uncertainty also seems tocontribute to a distinctive version of the subject, according to which ethicalunderstanding and intentionality, although offered as one important — andindeed necessary — category of assessment, are not the only means by which thesubject is described. Just as some failures in the grail romances are presented notas intentional misdemeanours but as ‘maleurté’, so in Piers Plowman failure issomething that often occurs mysteriously, even when protagonists mean well. Inthis poem the adventuring subject is always unable fully to understand thephenomena — words, objects, institutions — within which (s)he must desire andact. Few medieval allegorical narratives apart from Piers Plowman and the grailromances, I suggest, contain such a disturbing vision of painfully unintendederrance.

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tales of piers and perceval. piers plowman and the grail romances

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