The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 2
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The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century, the Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the work's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement with its social world is unrivaled in medieval English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Volume 2 , by Ralph Hanna, deliberately addresses the question of the poem's perceived «difficulty,» by indicating the legitimate areas of unresolved dilemmas, while offering often original explanations of a variety of textual loci. Perhaps more important, his commentary indicates what has not always appeared clear in past approaches—that the poem only «means» in its totality and within some critical framework, and that its annotation needs always to be guided by a sense of Langland's developing arguments.
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The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman Volume 2
VOLUME 2
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clemencia non constringit, given the preceding tag “And elsewhere (it is written),” presumably also cites a text, but one I have failed to identify; one should probably read constringitur. Pearsall aptly associates the statement “Clemency is not constrained” with Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained” (Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice 4.1.179). However, the valences of Portia’s claim and that here are not quite similar. One should compare two standard definitions of the virtue Clemency (a “part” of the cardinal virtue Temperance) widely cited in the Middle Ages, Cicero, De inventione 2.54.164; and Seneca, De clementia 2.3, the latter of which reads: “Clementia est … lenitas superioris adversus inferiorem in constituendis poenis” (Clemency is a superior’s lenience in inflicting punishment on an inferior). Clemency “is not constrained,” because it voluntarily avoids what is constrained, the proper penalty assigned to a criminous action. Equally, by its nature, it is the virtue of a noble man, a superior or eyre, who displays meekness, not a desire to impose punishment. See further Seneca’s discussion, De clementia 1.7.1–5. The remark is obviously double-edged: Will directs Reason’s attention to his potential lack of clemency, while claiming his own pure intentions.
The two criteria Will invokes are of different degrees of plausibility. On the one hand, Gratian is clear that slaves, unless freed by their lord from servitude, are debarred from ordination (Decretum 1.54; CJC 1:206–14). But the discussion of whether a priest’s child, and by extension any product of an unsanctified union, may be ordained (Decretum 1.56; CJC 1:219–23) offers a range of views. These include a series of attacks on the proposition that parental sin descends to the offspring, and the authors generally would allow ordination on a showing of the candidate’s virtuous merits (succinctly Jerome in c. 8). These discussions may come as some surprise to proponents of genetic predestinarianism elsewhere in the poem, notably Holychurch at 2.24–42 and Wit at 10.203–35. (The latter, in the form of B 9.121–57, as Justice 1994:105–11 points out, is a plausible source for John Ball’s views; note the subsequent 236–55, unique to C.)
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