The Politics of Consuming Worldly Goods: Negotiating Christian Discipline and Feudal Power in Piers Plowman-Reference-Cited by-同舟云学术

The Politics of Consuming Worldly Goods: Negotiating Christian Discipline and Feudal Power in Piers Plowman

Published:2004 Issue: Volume:59 Page:339-368
ISSN:0362-1529
Container-title:Traditio
language:en
Short-container-title:Traditio

Author:

Kim Margaret

Abstract

In passus 15 of the C-text of Piers Plowman, Will meets a doctor of divinity at a feast and is outraged by his simultaneous learning and consumption. The doctor mouths a doctrinally “unobjectionable” definition of Dowel, but Will accuses him of being uncharitable to the poor anyway (15.113–16, 76a). What conspicuously gives away the emptiness of his religious discourse, to Will and to us modern readers as well, is the enormous appetite of this man for the “manye sondry metes, mortrewes and poddynges, / Brawen and bloed of gees, bacon and colhoppes” (15.66–67).

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Literature and Literary Theory,Philosophy,Religious studies,Visual Arts and Performing Arts

Reference56 articles.

1. I discuss Langland's anxiety and conflict about poor people's taking political action in “Need, Hunger, and the Politics of Poverty in Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies (2002): 131–68, esp. 145–66.

2. See for example Freedman Paul , Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1990), 40–59.

3. Anne Savage also points out that the external imposition of discipline on consumption does not eradicate the cause of wasting because it cannot serve as internal moral control: “as any kind of real moral force, food remains ineffective: wasters can, sometimes, be made to work, but not to reform inwardly” (“Piers Plowman” [n. 3 above], 20).

4. Baldwin , Theme of Government, 17.

5. Baldwin , Theme of Government, 17.