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Opposition and Debate in Piers Plowman

The chapter investigates the various work that insult and verbal violence can do in medieval dialogue and debate texts, arguing that aggressive language is not a carrier of fixed meanings, but a technique that can do many kinds of work—excitatory, catalytic, repudiatory, or apophatic. The chapter opens by looking at medieval rhetorical theories about the psychological and affective impact of sharp language. It then explores three traditions of agonistic dialogue and debate; in all three there is a conceptual dimension to the debate, and the speakers tend to be personifications or generic prosopopoiae. The first tradition is elementary pedagogical texts in grammar and rhetoric, and the second is a wider range of allegorical debate writings written under the influence of medieval schoolroom practice. Here it is clear that verbal rudeness is a mechanism with which writers stimulate response, highlight oppositionality, and sharpen the contours of difference. The third tradition is a series of spiritual texts that describe contemplative progress by using highly rebarbative language to cast aside ‘lower’ stages of experience and devotion. Here insult and verbal violence are used for the more extreme purposes of iconoclasm and apophasis. If the authors of some medieval debates use violent words to stimulate exchange, others use them to throw all such exchanges into question.