Prostitutes in the C-text of Piers Plowman

by MICHAEL CALABRESE

At the end of passus 5 in the B-text of Piers Plowman, a "comune womman" starts off with a pardoner who is going to fetch his "breuettes & a bulle with bisshopes lettres" for fear that otherwise he will not be recognized when the pilgrims reach Truth. The woman, for her part, suggests that she should pretend to be his sister. Will admits that he does not know what finally became of the pair, as the miscreants vanish and the passus ends: "I ne woot where pei bicome" (B 5, 639-41). This compelling moment disappears from the C-text, replaced with a catalogue of men who weakly excuse themselves for not undertaking the journey, dramatizing part of Luke's parable of the banquet (C 7, 285ff.; Lk. 14:18-20.). The C passage is, on the one hand, comically Langlandian, particularly in the new husband's fear that his wife will think he is cheating if he were too long out of her sight: [she would] "loure on me and lihtly chyde and sygge y louede another" (C 7, 302). Despite this highlight, the revision may be called one of those prosaic passages in C that overexplain things, characteristic of C's inability to leave well enough, or even stunningly good, alone. B's tale of the pardoner and his "sister" makes the same dramatic point without resorting to the obvious parable allusion. Observing this omission in C, we might conclude that William Langland had no particular desire to depict prostitutes or to explore their distinct relations to Truth in this, the final manifestation of his great poem. The common woman in B was not essential to the indictment of unrepentant folk who refuse God's call, and so the C-text carries on without her. But this revision, like any one line or passage in any of the texts of Piers Plowman, may be misleading. The part does not stand very well for the whole in these poems, and aside from this moment at the end of passus 7, we can indeed trace in the C-text a comprehensive pattern of revision in which Langland specifically develops the B-text's portrayal of common women, the money they earn, and the effect of their trade on Christian society. In fact, in the C-text Langland revised nearly every passage in B that mentions prostitutes, including several episodes featuring Mary Magdalene and the adventures of Lady Meed.