3 - Legends and Lives

Summary

This matere is merk for many, ac men of holy chirche,

The legenda sanctorum yow lereþ more largere þan I yow telle

(B.11.160–1).

Langland’s readers often find his matter murky, but few of them can have followed Trajan’s suggestion in these lines that they might improve their understanding by immersing themselves in The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, or in other saints’ lives. Even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reform-minded Catholics were already attacking The Golden Legend for its sensationalised tortures and miracles of the saints, and about the best that Derek Pearsall could find to say about the roughly contemporary South English Legendary in his history of Old and Middle English poetry was that the authors show a good understanding of their readers’ intellectual limitations. More recently, Traugott Lawler proposes that Piers Plowman can be approached as a commentary on the Bible and The Golden Legend. But even he sounds a bit apologetic about the latter, inferior source.

Yet evidence in the manuscripts implies that some, at least, of Langland’s medieval readers saw Piers Plowman precisely as a kind of commentary on the lives of saints as well as on the Bible, or at least as a suitable companion piece for such works. In his survey of the surviving books, Ian Doyle remarked on their resemblance to ‘some of the South English Legendary, the Prick of Conscience and the Speculum Vitae’, pointing out that the hands that copied these several vernacular works are in some cases identical. As well as sharing some of the same scribes, the manuscripts of the South English Legendary also resemble those of Piers insofar as they are typically workmanlike ‘reading copies’ rather than deluxe productions. As I will discuss further below, a copy of the South English Legendary offers one of the few parallels to the contemporaneous marginal illustrations in the only Piers with a complete picture cycle. Further manuscripts of the same work point to the general milieu in which Piers Plowman was originally composed: Ralph Hanna associates two copies of the South English Legendary produced by the same scribe c. 1365–75 with a ‘London literature’ of romance and biblical writing that provides the immediate context for the composition of Piers Plowman B.