¹ This is Derek Pearsall's characterization of the doctor's discourse. See n. 15.113 in Pearsall's edition: Piers Plowman by William Langland (Berkeley, 1978), 251. I want to thank the editors of, and outsider readers for, Traditio for helping me revise this essay. Also, I want to thank Mary-Jo Arn and my teachers, Derek Pearsall, Larry Benson, and Daniel Donoghue, for their comments and suggestions at the earlier stage of this project.Google Scholar

² All references to the C-text, Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. Russell, George and Kane, George (Berkeley, 1997), are to passus and line numbers and will appear in the text proper.Google Scholar

³ For a thorough examination of Langland's critical attitude toward the doctor's excessive consumption, see Savage, Anne, ”Piers Plowman: The Translation of Scripture and Food for the Soul,” English Studies 74 (1993): e.g., 214, 215, 216, 217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ See for example Aers, David, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity (New York, 1988), 35–46, for comments on Langland's condemnation of socially defiant working poor people as wasters. See also Justice, Steven, Writing and Rebellion (Berkeley, 1994), 102–39; Middleton, Anne, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work , ed. Justice, Steven and Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn (Philadelphia, 1997), 208–317; and Pearsall, Derek, “Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman” in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane , ed. Kennedy, Donald, Waldron, Ronald, and Wittig, Joseph W. (Cambridge, 1988), 167–85.Google Scholar

⁵ Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley, 1987), 1–2. The entire work builds on this significance of food in medieval culture and the way eating figures as a vital social and religious concern in an age of material scarcity.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid., e.g., 32, 36, 82, 216, 297.Google Scholar

⁷ Ibid., e.g., 79, 82, 174, 213, 216.Google Scholar

⁸ Ibid., 82.Google Scholar

⁹ Nelson Francis, W., ed., The Book of Vices and Virtues (London, 1942), 47–48.Google Scholar

¹⁰ That gluttony is at once a sin and a socially destructive and irresponsible behavior in Piers Plowman indicates that Langland's concern with the salvation of the individual and the well-being of the community addresses, ultimately, one and the same problem, that of the fallen condition. In my discussion of consumption, I treat the categories of the individual and the communal, personal and private, not as mutually exclusive but as mutually reinforcing. I disagree, therefore, with scholars such as Dunning, T. P., who see the need to establish a hierarchical distinction between the individual and the communal. While for Dunning, “the regulating principle, in social life … was not, as in modern times, the welfare of the community, but first and above all, the good of the individual conscience,” I see Langland's discourse of the individual as being inextricably bound up with the communal (Piers Plowman , ed. Dolan, T. P. [Oxford, 1980], 51).Google Scholar

¹¹ Alighieri, Dante, The Purgatorio, trans. Ciardi, John (New York, 1961), canto 24, lines 151–55.Google Scholar

¹² Froissart, Jean, Chronicles, select., trans., and ed. Brereton, Geoffrey (New York, 1968), 354.Google Scholar

¹³ Bynum, , Holy Feast, esp. 113–42.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky, Helene (Bloomington, IN, 1984), 281. Jill Mann comments on and applies Bakhtin to the Hunger episode in Langland in “Eating and Drinking in Piers Plowman” Essays and Studies, n.s., 32 (1979): 28, 29, 32.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Henisch, Bridget Ann, Fast and Feast (University Park, PA, 1976), 11. See also Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham, Savoring the Past (New York, 1983), 3, 5.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Fortescue, John, The Governance of England, ed. Plummer, Charles (Oxford, 1885), 124.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Starkey, David, “The Age of the Household: Politics, Society and the Arts c. 1350–1550,” in The Later Middle Ages, ed. Medcalf, Stephen (New York, 1981), 224–27, 243–82, esp. 224, 244.Google Scholar

¹⁸ For an account of feudal magnanimity and magnificence see ibid., 253–61.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Henisch, , Fast and Feast, 12.Google Scholar

²⁰ Thomas, A. H. and Thornley, I. D., eds., The Great Chronicle of London (Gloucester, 1938), 215, quoted in Myers, A. R., ed., introduction to The Household of Edward IV (Manchester, 1959), 5.Google Scholar

²¹ Bynum, , Holy Feast (n. 5 above), 143.Google Scholar

²² Augustine, , Confessions 10.30.41–31.47, trans. Pine-Coffin, R. S. (New York, 1961), 233–37; and elsewhere.Google Scholar

²³ Mollat, Michel, The Poor in the Middle Ages, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (New Haven, 1986), 22.Google Scholar

²⁴ Reference to the Canterbury Tales is to fragment and line numbers in the edition by Benson, Larry D., ed., The Riverside Canterbury Tales (Boston, 2000).Google Scholar

²⁵ Jerome, , Epistle 120.1 (PL 22:985), trans. in Jarrett, Bede, Medieval Socialism (London, 1913), 86.Google Scholar

²⁶ Aquinas, Thomas, Summa theologiae , II–II q.118 a.l, trans. in Saint Thomas Aquinas on Law, Morality, and Politics, ed. Baumgarth, William P. and Regan, Richard J. (Indianapolis, 1988), 210.Google Scholar

²⁷ Bynum, , Holy Feast, 33–39, 44, 46.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., e.g., 114, 126–27, 134, 135–36, 138, 142, 145, 148.Google Scholar

²⁹ Henry of Lancaster, The Livre de Seyntz Medicines, ed. Arnould, E. J. (Oxford, 1940), 48 and 19–20 respectively.Google Scholar

³⁰ See for example Hoare, F. R., trans. and ed., The Western Fathers (New York, 1954).Google Scholar

³¹ For discussions of the context of Christian charity and moral redemption in which Langland idealizes Piers's manual labor, see Pearsall, Derek, “Langland's London,” in Written Work (n. 4 above), 185–207; Kirk, Elizabeth D., “Langland's Plowman and the Recreation of Fourteenth-Century Religious Metaphor,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988): 1–21; Barney, Stephen A., “The Plowshare of the Tongue,” Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973): 261–93.Google Scholar

³² While Langland scholars have suggested that the spiritually degraded status of Activa Vita indicates Langland's moral preference for the contemplative life over the life of labor, I see it not as a downgrading of the ideal of meritorious labor but as an illustration that morality is a vital component of productive work in Piers Plowman. For a discussion of the moral condition of Activa Vita, see n. 194 in passus 15 in Pearsall's edition of the C-text. Most scholars who comment on Activa Vita or his counterpart in the B-text, Haukyn, agree that Langland does not idealize this character but seeks to portray the failings and limits of a life totally immersed in “getting and spending” (Pearsall, , Piers Plowman [n. 1 above], 255 n. 194) in contrast to the spiritually higher, contemplative life. There is a connection between Piers and Activa Vita, but where the former represents a spiritual ideal, the latter is spiritually flawed. Activa Vita “serves Peres, but does not understand Peres's ideal of service” (ibid.). The most important articulation of such an interpretation of Activa Vita (or Haukyn in the B version) is by Maguire, Stella, “The Significance of Haukyn, Activa Vita, in Piers Plowman,” Review of English Studies 25 (1949): 97–109. A more recent articulation of this view, in relation to Langland's discourse on labor and eremitism, is by Godden, Malcolm, “Plowman and Hermits in Langland's Piers Plowman” Review of English Studies, n.s., 35 (1984): 129–63, esp. 148–49. Aers, David also points out that honest hard work without spirituality “is no solution. On the contrary, the poem has claimed, in present society it fosters boundless desires which rupture the webs of community. … In its own idiom, the poem asserts against Haukyn, that economic growth will not in itself even eliminate poverty, let alone create anything Langland could recognize as a just society” (Community, Gender [n. 4 above], 59–60). For other comments on Haukyn or Activa Vita that express a similarly critical view of this character, see Godden, Malcolm, The Making of Piers Plowman (New York, 1990), 11; Simpson, James, Piers Plowman (New York, 1990), 164–65; Bowers, John M., The Crisis of Will in Piers Plowman (Washington, DC, 1986), 204; Carruthers, Mary, The Search for St. Truth (Evanston, IL, 1973), 118; Kirk, Elizabeth D., The Dream Thought of Piers Plowman (New Haven, 1972), 157–58; Lawlor, John, Piers Plowman (New York, 1962), 123–36. For scholarship on Activa Vita as a representation of the mundane individual who must be renewed and redeemed spiritually through the practice of penance, see Harwood, Britton J., Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief (Toronto, 1992), 99–100; Raabe, Pamela, Imitating God (Athens, GA, 1990), 91–93; Anderson, Judith J., The Growth of a Personal Voice (New Haven, 1976), 91–93.Google Scholar

³³ In contrasting Winner and Waster against Piers Plowman, Stephanie Trigg suggests that Langland's unconditional condemnation of Waster indicates his identification with Winner. Yet Trigg's observation that Langland “would accord the superior position to Winner” must be qualified here (Trigg, Stephanie, “The Rhetoric of Excess in Winner and Waster” Yearbook of Langland Studies 3 [1989]: 97). Langland does not celebrate labor uncritically in and of itself, but what labor means, or represents, in moral and religious terms.Google Scholar

³⁴ Harwood, Britton J. makes brief but useful comments on the difference between the project of Piers Plowman and that of Winner and Waster: “The Plot of Piers Plowman and the Contradictions of Feudalism,” in Speaking Two Languages, ed. Frantzen, Allen J. (Albany, 1991), 102–3, 111. Although Harwood is not concerned primarily with the contrast between Langland's moral framework and the pragmatic orientation of Winner and Waster, his discussion of the different ways in which feudal monarchical authority is conceptualized and treated in the two poems is relevant to my overall point that Langland's religious approach to consumption is a moral critique of secular power.Google Scholar

³⁵ Trigg, , “The Rhetoric of Excess,” 91–108; idem, “Israel Gollancz's ‘Wynnere and Wastoure’: Political Satire or Editorial Politics?” in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature , ed. Krantzmann, Gregory and Simpson, James (Cambridge, 1986), 115–27. My reading of Winner and Waster in this essay largely draws upon Trigg's approach to the relation of consumption and production in the poem. See also Roney, Lois, “Winner and Wasters ‘Wyse Wordes’: Teaching Economics and Nationalism in Fourteenth-Century England,” Speculum 69 (1994): 1070–1100; Reed, Thomas L. Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia, MO, 1990), 261–93; Scattergood, John, “Winner and Waster and the Mid-Fourteenth-Century Economy,” in The Writer as Witness , ed. Dunne, Tom (Cork, Engl., 1987), 39–57; Jacobs, Nicholas, “The Typology of Debate and the Interpretation of Wynnere and Wastoure” Review of English Studies, n.s., 36 (1985): 481–500; Spearing, A. C., Medieval Dream Poetry (New York, 1976), 129–34; James, Jerry D., “The Undercutting of Convention in Wynnere and Wastoure,” Modern Languages Quarterly 25 (1964): 243–58.Google Scholar

³⁶ A. C. Spearing comments that a “decisive victory” is granted to neither Winner nor Waster “because the poet accepts them both as permanent tendencies in human nature. All the king can or need do is to assign them to their proper places, and make use of them himself as seems expedient. The poem's religious implications are not finally brought to bear on its political and economic meaning” (Medieval Dream Poetry, 134). Ordelle G. Hill also remarks that the poet “does not attempt to represent God's point of view at any time” (The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd [Toronto, 1993], 42).Google Scholar

³⁷ The mutually reinforcing exchange between winning and wasting is not, however, as Lois Roney claims, the basis for a tightly conceived program of national economy but alludes to the popular feudal means of generating power and profit, such as the practices of largesse and magnificence, and warfare and plunder.Google Scholar

³⁸ Quotations of the poem are from Trigg, Stephanie, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure (Oxford, 1990). References are to line numbers and appear in the text.Google Scholar

³⁹ For comments on the appreciation of the feudal noble household in Winner and Waster, see Starkey, , “The Age of the Household” (n. 17 above), 245–46.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Stark, W., The Contained Economy: An Interpretation of Medieval Economic Thought, Aquinas Paper 26 (London, 1956), 1–3.Google Scholar

⁴¹ The corruption that Mede practices and supports in an ever-proliferating series of economic exchanges, therefore, contradicts J. Stephen Russell's characterization of Mede as the energy and lifeblood vital to society, and it cannot serve to legitimate worldly activity as parallel to the spiritual, as suggested by James Simpson. See Russell, Stephen, “Lady Meed, Pardons, and the Piers Plowman Visio” Mediaevalia 9 (1985 [for 1982]): 239–57, and Simpson, James, “Spirituality and Economics in Passus 1–7 of the B-Text,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 1 (1987): 83–103. Pearsall's, Derek comment on Simpson offers a cogent criticism of his approach: “It seems to me that this does not signal acceptance of the world of money and profit and new forms of economic relationship but is a characteristic appropriation of its language for the purposes of spiritual paradox” (“Langland's London” [n. 31 above], 199).Google Scholar

⁴² Baldwin, Anna P., The Theme of Government in Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 1981), 17–18.Google Scholar

⁴³ Skeat, Walter W., ed., The Vision of William Langland concerning Piers Plowman in Three Parallel Texts, 2 (Oxford, 1886), 17 n. 165.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Baldwin, , Theme of Government, 17.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Orsten, Elisabeth M. has demonstrated that Langland's version of the rat fable differs conspicuously from contemporary analogues: “The Ambiguities in Langland's Rat Parliament,” Mediaeval Studies 23 (1961): 216–39. See also Baldwin, , Theme of Government, 17; Owen, Dorothy L., Piers Plowman (Folcroft, PA, 1971), 86–87; Jusserand, J. J., Piers Plowman (New York, 1965), 39–48; Huppé, Bernard F., “The Date of the B-Text of Piers Plowman” Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 35–40, esp. 36; Baum, Paull Franklin, “The Fable of Belling the Cat,” Modern Language Notes 34 (1919): 462–70.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Sermon 69. Devlin, Mary Aquinas, ed., The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373–1389), 2 (London, 1954), 315. For a thorough discussion of Brinton's sermon, see Kellog, Eleanor H., “Bishop Brinton and the Fable of the Rats,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 50 (1935): 57–68.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Baldwin, , Theme of Government, 17.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Ibid.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Quotations from the B-text are from Kane, George and Talbot Donaldson, E., eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version (Berkeley, 1988). References are to passus and line numbers and appear in the text.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Baldwin, , Theme of Government, 17.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Ibid.Google Scholar

⁵² 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).Google Scholar

⁵³ See for example Freedman, Paul, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1990), 40–59.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ 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.Google Scholar