Piers Plowman and the Grail Romances

The previous chapter showed how the large narrative structures of both the Gospel of Nicodemus and the French grail romances, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Perlesvaus, permeate the poetic diegesis and thought of Piers Plowman, albeit reformulated in Langland’s distinctive terms. This chapter homes in on three particular structures that Langland shares in varying degrees with the grail romances: first, travellers in a landscape, whose discovery of imperfect forms of understanding is imagined as ‘news’ transmitted across the landscape; second, multiple quests, seekers and absent objects of desire—some of them seekers who are sought by other seekers; third, narratives that are predicated on a crucial and usually involuntary mistake, often committed unknowingly by a main protagonist. These intertwined narrative structures focus with a distinctive emotional intensity on instances of inadequacy and loss, all of which contribute to the inculcation of desire—both for the protagonists, and for the reader. The chapter tracks these structures in the later parts of Piers Plowman (B.16–20) and then across the poem as a whole. It also explores possible connections between the protagonists Perlesvaus and Piers Plowman, noting the syllable ‘Per’ shared in their names. The last part of the chapter revisits two passages of Piers Plowman to focus on how romance structure is here both intertwined with, and at odds with, ethical instruction.