Arvind Thomas: Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2019.

• Richard Firth Green

Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages is first and foremost a historicist study, but it goes well beyond the usual historicist parameters by asking not simply, how does a given aspect of a medieval tradition (in this case, the canon law of sacramental confession) help us to understand the work of a medieval author (William Langland), who was far more familiar with it than we are; but, more intriguingly, how might such an author appraise, qualify, and contribute to the very tradition itself. The second is a far more demanding question than the first, for it cannot be answered by simply evincing a standard boiler-plate account of medieval confession and then explicating Langland’s confessional passages in light of it (a standard historicist procedure). Rather, the scholar must demonstrate a detailed familiarity with all the complexities of the tradition before he/she can confidently decide whether what the author is doing is unusual, eccentric, or unique.