Devotional Postures in Piers Plowman B, With an Appendix on Divine Postures

Abstract

Devotional Postures in Piers Plowman B, With an Appendix on Divine Postures Mary Clemente Davlin, O. P. Dominican University River Forest, Illinoismcdavlin@dom.edu As historians of medieval art, drama, narrative, and social life have increasingly emphasized, human posture and gesture, whether spontaneous or ritualized, reveal character, intention, and custom.1 Piers Plowman, filled with images of fourteenth-century life, is a useful source of information on posture and gesture.2 John Burrow, in particular, has illuminated the implications of gestures and looks in the poem.3 Since his works, however, are concerned principally with gesture rather than posture, "the position and carriage of the limbs and the body as a whole,"4 I would like to add here some reflections on those postures of humans and personifications in Piers Plowman that express religious piety or worship of God and thus can inform us about the spirituality of the poem. This spirituality is quite different in style from the affective spirituality so popular in its day, being instead biblical, liturgical, centered not on miracles or saints but on the great Christian mysteries, and inclusive of constituents of lay life seen as forms of devotion, such as physical labor and sexual love between married partners. * * * Recently, historians of art and of spirituality have shown that posture itself was an important form of devotion in the Middle Ages. For example, studies of the so-called Nine Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic show that his thirteenth-century "ways of prayer" were sometimes simply intentional postures such as standing, sitting, falling prostrate, and so forth.5 Medieval people had a large repertoire of postures for prayer.6 Being bodily, such devotional postures reveal deep and sometimes unexpected ways that the body expresses and affects spirit. Some twenty postures are mentioned literally in Piers Plowman as devotional, and a few postures are repented of in the story, or satirized because they pretend to devotion while undermining it. In addition, another dozen postures are used as metaphors of devotion. Taken [End Page 161] together, these are found in a spectrum ranging from the beginnings of conversion to mystical experience. Posture seems to be a staple of devotion throughout this spectrum. Not surprisingly, the most common posture of devotion in this most peripatetic of poems is walking, the posture of pilgrimage and procession, denoted by such verbs as "wente," "romed," "pursueth," "trolled forth," "go/yede," and "walked." I call the poem peripatetic because its framing fiction begins as the protagonist, Will, in the waking world, "Wente wide in this world wondres to here" (Pro.4), and the frame story ends with the character Conscience resolving, "I wole bicome a pilgrym, And walken as wide as the world lasteth, To seken Piers the Plowman." (20.381–83) Most of the conversations take place outdoors, the interlocutors walking as they talk. Even the chapters of the poem are called Passus or steps. Between beginning and end, Will succeeds, as Dee Dyas points out, "in transforming aimless wandering into purposeful pilgrimage."7 His journey, a long walk punctuated by dialogues, is a devoted search not for a shrine, but for Truthe and Dowel. However, like almost everything else in Piers Plowman, walking as an act of devotion is ambivalent. When forgiven sinners are looking for a way to Truthe, a pilgrim implies his ability to help them because of his expertise in walking— "I have walked ful wide in we et and in drye And sought goode seintes for my soule helthe." (5.530–31) —but his claim is undercut comically because, although he has been to many shrines, he does not know who or where Truthe is (5.534–36). Hypocrisy like his has led distinguished commentators to speak of movement in the poem as a sign of "moral instability,"8 and it can be, as when the sinners, not knowing the way to Truthe, "blustreden forth as beestes" (5.514). Movement, however, is the very milieu of the poem...

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