Many readers have seen Piers Plowman as a poem of crisis, a poem that fractures under the weight of its own ambivalence. I argue here that the demonic ambiguity of debt offers a plausible explanation of the conflicting impulses at work in this text. For Langland, monetary exchange, along with the careful accounting practices it demands, as long as it is conducted honestly and fairly, serves as a metaphor of penitential exchange, not paradoxically, not in spite of its corrupting power, but because it is conducive to balance and order, to the practice of virtue and the ethical habits of self-regulation required for true and effective penance. On the other hand, for Langland, the unpayable and infinitely reproducible nature of debt, manifest precisely in the ascesis instituted by grace, produces a troubling limitlessness. The ascesis of debt is, in this way, self-undermining. The debt that cannot be repaid correlates to needs that cannot be measured, and thus to desires that cannot be checked and boundaries that cannot be known.

Doing away with cervical cancer worldwide turns out to be far more nuanced and difficult than it first appears. Despite the body’s ability to shed itself relatively easily of HPV and cervical pre-cancer, hundreds of thousands of persons with cervixes are dying and will continue to die. Too many have suffered already. The losses of these individuals strike a devasting blow, reverberating beyond families and through the heart of communities, tearing gashes in our social fabric – we are not built to lose so many women in the prime of their lives. Thankfully, we have what it takes: enough insight and tolerance to shift priorities and beliefs about preventing and treating a “woman’s cancer.” We have enough skills, resources, and determination to educate the world about the importance of cervical cancer prevention. We have enough disease-fighting resources to share with the people and places that need them most. We have enough to stop wasting women’s lives and begin treasuring them instead. We can take the exasperated cry of “enough” and use it to fuel our collective capacity to free the world of a disease that need no longer exist. We have enough to stop cervical cancer.

Chapter 12 focuses on modal intensifiers in Q’eqchi’-Maya – the forms tz’aqal and num(tajenaq), which are similar in function to English ‘enough’ and ‘too’, respectively. In particular, one of the functions of such forms is to indicate that the degree of some dimension is above or beyond an acceptable range, such that a key condition for an action or event is, or is not, met. These last two forms are particularly important because they link together significant degrees of salient dimensions, and hence intensity, and relate it to acceptability, and hence modality. Such forms are particularly salient in the context of an institution like replacement because speakers routinely use them, in conjunction with the temporal operators discussed in chapter 9, to represent and regiment various possibilities. For example, at what age does a boy acquire the requisite competence (strength and skill) to an adequate degree, such that it is normatively permissible that he may stand in for, or replace, his father in a labor pool.