Trifunctionality and the Tree of Charity: literary and social practice in 'Piers Plowman.'

discussion of how the "backbyter" and his lot, like "grete wynedes and grete tempestis," blast a "vair tre, vul of fruit, bewtewus of bowes" (Three Middle English Sermons From the Worcester Chapter Manuscript F. 10, ed. G. M. Crisdale [Leeds: School of English Language, 1939], 36-37).

79 On "suture," see note 45.

80 Frank (note 9), 3. An inner dream is also found in passus 11, of course.

81 Liberum Arbitrium's sharing the functions of two estates is itself a violation of trifunctionality.

In nineteenth-century studies of Piers Plowman, which emerged in the thick of Hegelian modes of aesthetic analysis, the orchestration of literary history and social history often produced (from a later, non-Hegelian perspective) discordant effects. Following Hegel but perhaps more closely Hyppolyte Taine, J. J. Jusserand implemented a kind of Wissenschaft in 1894 that enabled him to delve within and beyond the literary form of Piers Plowman to get at the poem's essential psychological content.(1) This method affected the way Jusserand understood the poem's social content also. For Jusserand, when the poem took up the social, it dropped its literariness - its relation to English mystical writings - and assumed the immediate, nonliterary, documentary nature of laws or statutes.(2)

Others emulated Jusserand. In 1898, Vida Dutton Scudder drew attention to Piers Plowman's social content by placing the poem alongside the social(ist) writings of Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Fabians, not by locating it within a tradition of medieval texts, alliterative or otherwise.(3) Scudder found nothing the least bit literary about Langland's poem.(4) Nearly two decades after Scudder, Dorothy Chadwick, in a sweep of scientificity, extricated all of the poem's references to social life, cast them into citations by passus and lines, relegated them to footnotes, and translated their content into a consumable historical narrative, all in the attempt to let the poem speak to its own history entirely and sufficiently alone: held against a certain social history, literary history had become invisible.(5)

This brief account of some early literary/social criticism of Piers Plowman should be kept in mind as we visit, nearly sixty years later, Barbara Nolan's review of David Aers's pioneering, quasi-Marxist reading of Langland and Chaucer. Nolan protests that Aers