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Pedagogic and Dramatic Roles of the Liturgy in Piers Plowman

This essay proposes that William Langland exploited the didactic potential of the liturgy when expounding the Church’s theology in Piers Plowman. After discussing Langland’s knowledge of the liturgy, the focus is on passages where the poem appears to follow liturgical analogues closely, using their rhetorical potential to address complex points of theology and to convey them with clarity. It then discusses how the liturgy influenced literary techniques in Piers Plowman, focusing on narrative, allegory and mnemonic structures. It concludes with a consideration of how liturgical concepts of time make sense of the poem’s meandering course if we think of the dreamer’s inner debates as a network of devotional introspection connected with the services of the Church year over the course of a lifetime.