The Desire for Knowledge and the Experience of Conversion

Abstract

The chapter begins with an overview of scholarly work on Langland and the French allegorical tradition, and suggests important modifications of our approach to Langland’s use of such ‘sources’. The chapter then moves on to discuss how what arguably is the central event of the poem—Will’s crisis in the third vision, culminating with the first inner dream in B passus XI—grows out of Langland’s protracted and reiterated engagement with Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine and its own internal tensions and contradictions. Langland’s anxious exploration of the salvific potential of learning in particular, as well as his treatment of Will’s ‘conversion’ in this section, must be read as elaborate responses to the aporias of the French poem. I begin by considering the events in passus XIII and XIV, which may be read as an extended rewriting, renegotiation, and ultimately disavowal of the closing sections of Deguileville’s poem, where the pilgrim abandons his quest and seeks refuge in a monastic enclosure. Indeed, the sustained development of the alimentary metaphors during the Feast of Patience suggest that Langland is here refashioning the ending of Deguileville’s poem: there, the pilgrim is converted to a radically contemplative life of monastic devotion, oration, and liturgical performance, characterized by a new, sapiential understanding of the inner Word. Langland, by contrast, once more exposes the limitations of institutional structures in preserving the living Word made flesh, and concludes this extended section with the departure of Conscience, signalling a transition to yet another stage in Will’s wanderings.