Imaginative Prophecy in the B-Text of Piers Plowman.

By Ernest N. Kaulbach. Piers Plowman Studies, 8. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993. $59.

Let me begin this review by acknowledging that Ernest Kaulbach's book is difficult when not daunting. I do not mean that the larger outline of the argument is hard to perceive; it is not. The book begins with an Introduction that asserts the importance of Imaginatyf to the whole poem, argues that the way the faculty is treated ultimately derives from Avicenna's analysis of Aris-totle's study of imagination, and then reads the Vita as an example of Avicennan dream psychology. But Kaulbach gives a particular twist to his analysis when he proposes that Langland's characterization is not indebted to the mainstream theorization of the vis imaginativa developed by Jean de la Rochelle and others in pseudo-Augustinian texts; rather, it is a purer form of Avicenna that is found in the tract of an anonymous thirteenth-century English scholar (the source for jean) whose work survives in three English manuscripts, one of which may have been at Worcester in the fourteenth century. Although he would like to believe that the Worcester MS was available to Langland at the time that he was revising the A-text into B, Kaulbach knows that the evidence does not exist to support such a case, so he makes the indirect argument that Langland's Imaginatyf is more obviously that of the anonymous English writer than of the mainstream ones. The key difference is that Avicenna and the English writer attribute a prophetic power to Imaginatyf that does not exist in the adaptations of Avicenna by the mainstream theologians. The remaining two chapters…