Book Review: Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons

Abstract

the narrowness of focus that contributes to the rigor of his readings leads to oversimplification when he tries to make them stand for Langland’s larger motives. The canonists’ teachings were hardly restricted to penance. Likewise, penitential tradition in the later Middle Ages was not fully represented in the canonists alone. Thomas readily acknowledges the first point. He ignores the second. But that also means largely ignoring Langland’s most obvious engagement with penitential tradition, the confessions of the Seven Deadly Sins in B.5 and C.6 (from which Thomas takes his discussion of Covetise). The taxonomy of the deadly sins comes to Langland from the treatise on virtues and vices, especially the many English adaptations and translations of the immensely popular Summae on the Vices and Virtues of Willam Peraldus and the Somme le Roi of Frère Laurent. The taxonomy itself originally comes from Cassian, who offers it as an aid to the monastic practices of supervised, therapeutic self-examination that would ultimately evolve into the ritual of confession. Although more dominant in earlier medieval penance this monastic impulse never disappears. The laicized quest for spiritual perfection celebrated in the pastoralia outside of canon law, and aimed specifically at vernacular audiences, clearly held its own attractions for the fiercely anti-clerical Langland. It would have helped Thomas’s case had he at least acknowledged them. That is not to say Thomas’s larger claims are wrong; just that they are insufficiently demonstrated. There is no disputing Langland’s intense engagement with canon law in the episodes Thomas analyzes. It may now lie to Langland scholarship as a whole to reckon with their importance.