Menacing Books: The Prick of Conscience and the Rhetoric of Reproof

Abstract

This essay examines a recension of The Prick of Conscience to investigate how mainstream clerics reproved ecclesiastical misgovernance in vernacular writings circulating alongside Piers Plowman. Adopting Bromyard’s vituperative rhetoric, the text indicts lay and clerical ‘governors’ alike. Bilingual, prosimetric interpolations produce a reformist discourse that expounds the Christian mandate to ‘do well’. As an authorizing strategy, the interpolator posits works of demotic theology as sources of vernacular literary authority and envisions an ambitious programme of scriptural translation. Yet the difficulty of rendering academic theology into English verse foreshadows the generic demise of works like PoC.

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