David Aers, ‘Langland and the Church: Affirmation and Negation’

I have chosen to write about David Aers’ ‘Langland and the Church: Affirmation and Negation’, one of three closely interconnected chapters in his Langland, Chaucer and the Creative Imagination. Here, and throughout the three chapters, David formulates in wonderfully lucid terms an early version of the dialectical view of Piers Plowman that shapes much of his work on the poem – a view that has in turn come to shape my own reading of it. He sees the dialectic that he identifies in this chapter as a pervasive tension that runs through the poem between Langland’s imaginative engagement with the fast-evolving social and economic forces of his period and his simultaneous desire to endorse what David calls a more ‘traditional’, stable vision of medieval society. David here explores how this contradiction affects the church, arguing that the poet’s acceptance that the church should be ‘a centralised, hierarchical community, led by its clergy, united by doctrine, sacraments which only the clergy dispensed, rituals and institutionalised structures of authority’ sits at odds with his ‘brilliant realisation of the energies of churchmen immersed in the world of production, consumption and competitive exchange’ (pp.38, 48). Elsewhere David writes, ‘even as [the received paradigms that Langland cherishes] are affirmed…they are also negated in the poem itself’. He tracks in vivid detail what he identifies not just as an inadvertent side effect of the poem’s political self understanding, but a fundamental structure – ‘the dialectical movement of the poem (pp.42, 53). What David has already identified in this early essay, in other words, is a deeply embedded structure that tells us something about the way that Langland thinks.