"The book not only offers an insightful reframing of Langland’s interest in the law and penitence, but also makes an original and persuasive contribution to scholarship on the text in general. What helps considerably here is Thomas’ careful negotiation of the link between literariness and legality. Rather than simply taking their kinship as read, his study takes the time to think through the specific points of connection between the law and Langland’s poetics."
Ben Parsons, Review of English Studies
"Thomas reminds us of the complexity of the poem, the way its call for radical reform and its desire for restoration can co-exist in ways that produce sudden shifts and unexpected results. Indeed, this is an ambitious and rewarding book that reveals Langland’s sustained and profound commitment to reinventing canonist thought."
Conrad van Dijk, Studies in the Age of Chaucer
"This book offers a rich and provocative account of the way an allegorical poem might participate in the discourse of canon law and make its own, distinctive contributions to canonist thought."
Alastair Bennett, Royal Holloway, University of London, Journal of British Studies
"Elegantly written and persuasively argued, this book merits persistent return for its suggestive insights and careful attention to Langland’s intricate poetic experiments."
Jamie K. Taylor, Bryn Mawr College, Yearbook of Langland Studies
"This study is an excellent resource for readers ready to invest the time and mental energy required to understand the complex dialectics both moving ecclesiastical jurisprudence and provoking late-medieval English authors to engage with it. Moreover, because this deeply learned and detailed analysis focuses on one strand of that engagement, Thomas has set the stage for many other studies to follow."
Candace Barrington, Canadian Journal of History
"This is a deeply learned work which draws upon underused sources like the Corpus iuris canonici and penitential manuals to read Piers Plowman. It is interdisciplinary in its method as well as its sources; Thomas thinks about how literary tropes might reformulate legal authority and about how the language of law contributes to the form of a literary work."
Conor McKee, Reformation
"This book will be of interest to scholars of Piers Plowman and the law. The second chapter, in particular, is a noteworthy addition to the scholarship."
Ian Cornelius, Anglia
"This is a brilliant book, as complex and multi-layered as the medieval poem it deals with."
Robert Ombres O.P., New Blackfriars
"The book is a wonderfully nuanced approach to long-standing issues surrounding the contextualization of Piers Plowman, and a much-needed addition to the field."
Gwen Ellis and Alexandra Domeshek, Dies Legibiles, First Edition
"Few scholars could have written a book like this. Canon law is difficult enough to decipher when it is translated to English, but most of those texts Thomas was working with are in Latin. In general, Thomas’s linguistic expertise is truly extraordinary."
Sara M. Butler, Ohio State University, Modern Philology
"In applying canonist writing to Langland’s poem, Thomas offers a deeply informed survey of church law on penance, and he moves through a wide range of Latin sources with enviable agility and ease."
Kate Crassons, Lehigh University, English Studies
"Morton Bloomfield famously remarked that reading Piers Plowman ‘is like reading a commentary on an unknown text.’ In this erudite and carefully argued book, Thomas persuasively demonstrates that in many places, that text may be canon law."
Fiona Somerset, University of Connecticut, Law & Literature
"Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages establishes that there is much profit in investigating the canonists’ complex debates to produce striking new readings of knotty passages in the poem."
Wendy Scase, University of Birmingham, Medieval Sermon Studies
"I expect that Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages will be the book of record on its topic for a long time to come. It is obligatory reading for those interested in penance in Piers Plowman as well as all those invested in the radically humane possibilities of late medieval European religious cultures."
Eric Weiskott, Boston College, The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures
"Ultimately, this book is especially helpful for reassessing the role of canon law and the function of allegory in Piers Plowman and its wider effects for not only the narrative and characterization, but as potential models and sources of inspiration for contemporary legal practices in late medieval England."
Curtis Runstedler, Tübingen, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch
"All readers will find much of interest in this erudite study. Thomas has enriched the scholarly community’s understanding of so many (in some cases quite little studied) episodes in the poem."
Chase Padusniak, Princeton University, Comitatus
"The book is a tremendously impressive and important contribution to Piers Plowman studies: robust in scholarship, thorough in close analysis of Langland's poem, and blessed with the gift of Thomas's crystal clarity of expression."
Jennifer Sisk, Anglistik
"In this fascinating, beautifully crafted book, Thomas teaches us the value of ‘law and literature’ for ‘law and religion’; in it, law, religion, and literature are fully linked in a medieval poem which is ‘productive of, not just derivative from, the discourse of canon law (p. 10)."
Norman Doe, Cardiff University, Journal of Religious History
"Thomas’s work is a thoroughly researched study of literature and law, engaging with complex ecclesiastical legal thought and its practical implications on the practice of law. He also effectively demonstrates why Piers Plowman came to be considered alongside great canonist material."
Matthew Cleary, University of Edinburgh, Ceræ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
"Arvind Thomas has made a case for Langland’s use of canon law in his penitential thinking, and indeed for his creation of a poetics of the law that seeks to redirect accepted legal discourse. This challenging book offers a new and resonant framework for understanding the problems of representation in Piers Plowman."
Elizabeth Allen, University of California, Irvine, Poetics Today
"Thomas’ book should be read widely by anyone interested in the complex interrelations between poetry and cultural production in the late middle ages…Thomas provides an excellent model for his dialectical method of reading the poem and the contemporary tradition of canon law in order to further substantiate the claim of poetry’s capacity to produce—rather than merely react to—its surrounding culture."
Cullen G. McKenney, Duke UniversityCullen G. McKenney, Duke University, The Medieval History Journal
"Arvind Thomas has written an account of Piers Plowman that should set the agenda for years to come in any attempt to investigate the poem’s rich engagement with law, ecclesiology, and the penitential process."
William Rhodes, University of Iowa, Philological Quarterly
"Arvind Thomas offers an insightful and eloquent study that weaves together the poetics of Piers Plowman with the language and concepts of canon law…It is a valuable revision to the law and literature movement. Not only is his study lucid and methodical, but it is also approachable even for a non-specialist audience."
Laura Godfrey, Arthuriana
"In a poem that has so much to say about penitence, this monograph offers invaluable insights that will undoubtedly enrich one’s understanding of Piers Plowman and its readers."
Patrick Outhwaite, McGill University, University of Toronto Quarterly
"This monograph is an incisive, intricate, and stunningly original intervention in Langlandian scholarship, with an extensive range of historical background, language, and intertext to offer its reader. Though most accessible to readers long familiar with Langland, the detail and care of Thomas’s scholarship will be exemplary to scholars at all stages who seek to work on Piers Plowman and indeed the canonist literature that surrounds it."
Hope Doherty, South Atlantic Review
"Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law exhibits the core attributes of the best and most durable humanistic scholarship: it provokes as many questions as it answers, questions which are themselves more interesting than most answers."
Zachary E. Stone, JEGP
“The body of readers having a prior engagement with medieval thought and Piers Plowman, in particular, will find that Thomas’s study opens up unconsidered territory of essential importance. It is not a book that should be missed.”
R. F. Yeager, University of West Florida, History of European Ideas
"For historians generally, this book contributes to open up ever further the sophistication and vibrancy of medieval thought and text, and in particular suggestively points to other ‘possible reformations’ imagined and sketched out by late medieval thinkers."
The Rev’d Dr Arabella Milbank Robinson, Team Parish of Louth, The Historian
"Langland’s capacity for change and reinvention is one of the compulsions of his poem. It is subjected to an extremely interesting scrutiny in this lively and absorbing study."
Bernard O’Donoghue, Wadham College, Oxford, Peritia
"The scholarship in this book is impeccable. Thomas’s choice of passages from the canonists is surgical and his analyses of the encounter between these passages and Langland’s poetry is painstaking and thorough."
Lawrence Scanlon, Rutgers University, Law, Culture and the Humanities
"What Arvind Thomas’s analysis produces is a remarkable concordance of discordant genres, together with an astute isolation of Langland’s own particular note of canonical disharmony."
Richard Firth Green, The Ohio State University, Archiv
“In total, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages is a masterful study, perceptive in its poetic analyses and deftly historicized. It is a significant contribution to scholarship examining the intersections of canon law and literary invention in Piers Plowman and essential reading for any scholar of the poem.”
Dr. Sharity Nelson, Texas A&M International University, ZAA
"This book offers an important excavation of how much canon law is part of the ‘dialogic’ range of discourse in and around Piers Plowman, both showing how the poem’s originality extends to how it refashions canon law and following implications that might have been treated by a prosaic canonist but that, fortunately, were instead unfolded by a brilliant poet. Arvind Thomas’ study thus also offers a new way to appreciate some of the range and depth of canon law itself."
Andrew Galloway, Department of English, Cornell University
"In this excellently argued study, Thomas builds on the work of scholars like Andrew Galloway, John Alford, Anne Middleton and Emily Steiner to apply sensitive readings of penitential discourse, canonist treatises, and legal documents to show that canon law does not merely provide Piers Plowman with a genre of intertext, but informs its methods for interrogating the world that it describes."
Stephen Yeager, Department of English, Concordia University
