Piers Plowman and God's thought experiment

Book section

No matter whether one consults the B- or C-text of Piers Plowman, the word experience appears only once, a fact that contrasts provocatively with its significance as a keyword in some studies of the poem. Thus, in the wake of Anne Middleton’s crediting Langland with nothing less than ‘the invention of experience as a literary category’, James Simpson has identified ‘the discourses of experience and morality’ as being fundamental to the poem, and describes the vernacular in which such discourses are fashioned as one whose domain is typically that of ‘the experiential, the new, the contingent’. More recently, Emily Steiner has interpreted the poem’s engagements with logic and rhetoric, intellect and affect as serving the conviction that contraries are ‘the ground of experience’. Emphasizing the word’s medieval association with the gathering of sensory information, Maggie Ross observes that ‘[e]xperience is the way self-consciousness interprets the world’. In this context, no less than the metrical choices of the Gawain-poet, the crammed alliterative lines of Piers Plowman could be described as often insisting on ‘the sheer impact of phenomena on the consciousness to which they are exposed’, thereby furthering the poem’s continuous invitation to experiential engagement. Such engagement is also the main theme of this essay, in which I will show how a thought experiment in Piers Plowman facilitates critical reflection on a fundamental parallel between its revisionist poetics and its representation of the Incarnation as the manifestation of God’s desire to learn about his creation.

Authors: Bose, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Brepols Publishers
• Journal: Medieval Thought Experiments
• Volume: 31
• Pages: 71-97
• Series: Disputatio
• Publication date: 2018-07-01
• Acceptance date: 2017-07-28
• DOI: 10.1484/M.DISPUT-EB.5.114692
• EISSN: 2294-8481
• ISSN: 1781-7048
• EISBN: 978-2-503-57622-0
• ISBN: 978-2-503-57621-3
• Language: English