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C Passus 6; B Passus 5; A Passus 5

Headnote

Reason (with Conscience) now disappears, having through his sermon brought the folk to contrition. He will not reappear until 13.194 (B 11.376), and following his second skeptical examination of the dreamer’s credentials there, will vanish from the poem. Conscience only returns in 15.25 (B 13.22). Similarly, de Deguilleville’s Reason exits in the presence of a sacrament at PLM 793–814 (although here it is the avowedly inexplicable and “unnatural” transsubstantiated eucharist).

These two personifications are abruptly and vibrantly replaced by a new one, Repentance. His activity, as Alford points out in the only extensive study (1993), is considerably expanded in the two later versions. In C, passus 6 is entirely devoted to (but, unlike the earlier versions, does not complete) the confession of the Seven Deadly Sins. At the end of this scene, when it is time for acts associated with the third “part” of penitence, satisfaction (pilgrimage), Repentance, in turn, will surrender the pilgrims to a new guide, Piers Plowman, in the sequence 7.155–82 (A 5.251–6.25, B 5.510–37).

Although widely admired for its liveliness, the confession scene (in C extending through 7.154) is perhaps that portion of the poem least analyzed in detail. Scholars seem to have found it a rather inert, if amusing, handling of a fixed theme, a view belied by L’s perceived “lapses” in presenting the topic in A, his persistent expansions, and considerable C version tinkering (cf. Russell 1982). Exceptional studies, all engaged in close attention to this portion of the poem, include Dunning 1980, Gray 1986a, Kirk 1972, and Stokes 1984.

Bloomfield 1952 provides the standard historical study of the Seven Deadly Sins, together with a very full survey of published English uses (PP discussed at 196–201). In addition to the discussion here (which incorporates B’s reprise, B 13.271–459), briefer listings of the sins occur at 2.87–108 (A 2.59–68, B 2.80–101), B 14.216–61, 22/B 20.70–164, 215. Discussions with exemplary selections from the seven, dependent on distinguishing the sins of the world, flesh, and devil, appear at 7.261–64n (A 6.95–98, B 5.609–12), 18.31–52 (B 16.25–52).

Bloomfield demonstrates that the Seven Sins developed within the tradition of apotheosis, the raising of the dead hero (or pilgrim?) through the planetary spheres, “In convers letyng everich element,” as Chaucer has it (T&C 5.1810, cf. 1807–27). Along with the elements, the hero in this tradition leaves behind worldly contagion. A fully formed schema of seven or eight principal sins appears in writings of later Desert Fathers; its formative transmission to the West occurs at Gregory’s Moralia in Iob 31.45.87–89 (PL 76:620–22). There Gregory identifies “superbia” as the “radix” of an “exercitus” (source/root of an army) comprised of seven further sins (including “inanis gloria,” later dropped from the list as simply doubling “superbia”). (The language relies upon the metaphor of battles between virtues and vices exemplified in Prudentius’s Psychomachia or Benedict’s Regula 1, battles to which L vaguely alludes at 16.43 [B 14.202], 22/B 20.215.) Influentially, Gregory lists each sin’s constituent “partes,” since they are taken to be “capitalia” (chieftains in an army, “head-sins”). (This is their proper designation, as opposed to the usual mortalia “deadly”; cf. 19.253–300 [B 17.185–320], including extensive discussion of issues first bruited in this passus.) See further Steadman 1972, Tuve 1966:esp. 57–143; and Wenzel 1968. Bennett suggests antecedents for and analogues to L’s voiced portrayal (for which, see further below) in several medieval dramas. Pearsall refers to the other outstanding ME examples and to ME descriptions of the practice of confession (some cited passim below).

In depicting the Seven Deadly Sins, L draws upon a ubiquitously dispersed discourse, catechetical, homiletic, and confessional. It is obviously futile to attempt any detailed survey of such literature here; Bloomfield et al.’s bibliography of medieval discussions (extended in Newhauser and Bejczy), after all, lists something over two thousand potentially relevant titles in Latin alone. Hence, the following notes document L’s reliance upon discursive commonplaces on an extremely selective basis. I have sought parallels in only two sources. Frère Lorens of Orleans’s Somme le roi, the most popular of all vernacular manuals of instruction and translated into ME on at least fifteen separate occasions (including SV, which L knew), provides a lengthy analysis of the sins; I cite from the literal ME translation, BVV. As a balance to Lorens, I also regularly cite a text that offers materials derived from sophisticated Latin traditions, the Franciscan preachers’ manual FM; the author of this work structures his discussion around the sins and their remedies. Schmidt provides extensive parallels from Ch’s ParsT, although his claim (524) that it is “a work close to PP in thought and phrasing and may reflect knowledge of it” should be ignored. See, for example, 170–95n, where the Parson is anglicizing, like L, a well-known Latin verse.