SOURCE: Mander, M. N. K. “Grammatical Analogy in Langland and Alan of Lille.” In Notes and Queries 26, no. 6 (December 1979): 501-04.

[In the following essay, Mander argues that Langland's use of grammar as a metaphorical representation of divine order in Piers Plowman finds precedent in Alan's representation of grammar in The Complaint of Nature.]

In his article on the grammatical metaphor for mede and mercede in Piers Plowman (C text Passus IV, 335-409), A. V. C. Schmidt¹ shows its general resemblance to a passage in an early work of John Wycliffe. Having described this resemblance, he concludes “the differences also need to be stressed. Wycliffe is referring to modes of logical prediction (univocal, equivocal, etc.), Langland to grammatical relations as an image of natural moral and metaphysical relationships.” This seems to me an important difference. Surely it would be more fruitful to compare the passage with one in which grammatical relations are referred to as Langland refers to them? By such a comparison, I hope to support my disagreement with Schmidt's earlier statement: “In the imagery, Langland seems to be drawing on a type of analogy unfamiliar to his audience.”

I am not alone in wishing to show Langland to be writing in a mode familiar to his contemporaries. Amassian and Sadowsky² express their intention “to place William Langland within a well-established literary fashion, and to offer evidence that, like his predecessor Alanus de Insulis, Langland uses grammatical metaphor for far more serious purposes than merely to complain of love, or to lampoon Curial corruption”. With this end in view, Amassien and Sadowsky meticulously relate Langland's argument to rules of Medieval Latin grammar, so that their account reads as justification of Langland's use of the metaphor, or as affirmation of its accuracy. I feel that Langland can more effectively be placed “within a well-established literary fashion”, by more detailed comparison with a representative of that fashion, and by appreciation of the contemporary view of grammar which made such analogy meaningful. As “representative”, I shall take Alanus de Insulis, to whom Amassien and Sadowsky briefly refer.³

Alanus opens his De Planctu Naturae by lamenting sexual perversion in man. He soon resorts to grammatical terms:

Femina vir factus, sexus denigrat honorem,
          Ars magicae Veneris hermaphroditat eum.
Predicat et subjicit, fit duplex terminus idem,
          Grammaticae leges ampliat ille nimis.

Metrum Primum⁴

“Man is made woman, he blackens the honour of his sex, the craft of magic Venus makes him of double gender. He is both predicate and subject, he pushes the laws of grammar too far”

(Metre I, 17-22⁵).

By the nature of his reference to grammar here, Alan shows a faith in its essential truth. Its laws clearly have for him an intrinsic value comparable with those of number and proportion for earlier medieval writers.⁶ Alanus later uses the analogy of grammar in more detail.

Eorum siquidem hominum qui Veneris profitentur grammaticam, alii solummodo masculinum, alii femininum, alii commune, sive genus promiscuum, familiariter amplexantur. Quidam vero, quasi hetrocliti genere, per hiemem in feminino, per aestatem in masculino genere, irregulariter declinantur. Sunt qui, in Veneris logica disputantes, in conclusionibus suis subjectionis praedicationisque legem relatione mutua sortiuntur. Sunt qui vicem gerentes suppositi, praedicare non norunt …

(Prosa IV).⁷

[“Of such of these men as profess the grammar of love, some embrace only the masculine gender, some the feminine, others the common or indiscriminate. Some, as of heteroclite gender, are declined irregularly, through the winter in the feminine, through the summer in the masculine. Some, in pursuit of the logic of love, establish in their conclusions the law of subject and the law of predicate in proper relation. Some, who have the place of the subject, have not learned how to form a predicate …

(Prose IV, 130-41).]⁸

In view of the direct relation of grammar to truth, the serious nature of Alanus's censure can hardly be over-emphasized. Of course, gender is being used by Alanus as euphemism for sex, but the metaphor of grammatical rule is carried farther than euphemism requires.

It will be remembered that in Piers Plowman it was Kynde⁹ who provided the pen which enabled man to use creatively that parchment in his possession:

Riȝte as a lord sholde make lettres and hym lakked parchemyn,
Though he couth write nevere so wel ȝif he hadde no penne.

(B, IX, 38-9)

In Prosa V, Alanus uses strikingly similar terms to show how Natura instilled the creative impulse in man. Both writers, by using this analogy, ascribe importance to man's gift of the use of language, and dignity to the writer. There may be a sexual implication in Alanus's image of the reed pen, but this in no way detracts from its relation to the art of writing:

Ad officium etiam scripturae calamum praepotentem eisdem fueram elargita, ut in compentibus schedulis ejusdem calami scripturam poscentibus, quarum meae orthographiae normulam, rerum genera figuraret, ne a propriae descriptionis semita in falsigraphiae devia eundem devagari minime sustineret. Sed cum ipsa genialis concubitus regula, ordinatis complexionibus, res diversorum sexuum oppostione dissimiles ad exequandem rerum propaginem conectere teneretur, ut in suis connexionibus artis grammaticae constructiones canonicas observaret, suique artificii nobilitas nullius artis ignorantia suae ferret gloriae deterimentum, curialibus praeceptis sub mea magistrali disciplina, eam velut disciplinam instruendam docui quas artis grammaticae regulas in suarum constructionum unionibus artificiosis admitteret; quas velut extraordinarias nullius figurae excusatione redemptas excluderet …

(Prosa V).¹⁰

[“But for the office of writing, I provided her with an especially potent reed-pen, in order that, on suitable leaves desiring the writing of this pen (in the benefit of my gift of which leaves she had been made a sharer), she might, according to the rule of my orthography, trace the natures of things, and might not suffer the pen to stray in the least measure possible from the path of proper description into the by-track of false writing. But since for the production of progeny the rule of marital coition, with its lawful embraces, was to connect things unlike in their opposition of sexes, I, to the end that in her connections she should observe the orthodox constructions of grammatical art, and that the nobility of her work should not mar its glory by ignorance of any branch of knowledge, taught her, as a pupil worthy to the taught, by friendly precepts under my guiding discipline, what rules of the grammatical art she should admit in her skilful connections and constructions, and what she should exclude as irregular …”

(Prose V).]¹¹

She proceeds to describe the same ordering process in terms of the rules of logic.

Referring to the rules of grammar and logic as criteria of law and order, and drawing metaphors from them as from concrete objects, Alanus shows an assumption of their absolute nature which can also be traced in Piers Plowman. The grammatical analogy in the C text for the difficult question of the relation of mede and mercede is so similar to Alanus's analogy for sexual perversion as to suggest that Langland knew Alanus's poem. Whether or not this is the case, a knowledge of Alanus's account is valuable to today's reader of Piers Plowman. It enables him to appreciate a fundamental concept of grammatical law which enhances his understanding of the whole poem, and particularly clarifies conscience's slightly obscure exposition of the relation of mede and mercede:

Thus is mede and mercede · as two manere relacions,
Rect and indyrect · rennynge bothe
On a sad and a syker · semblable to hymselve
As adjective and substantiv · unite asken,
Acordaunce in kynde · in cas and in numbre.

(C, III, 332-6)

Other correct relations are described in the same way:

Relacion rect, quath Conscience · ys a recorde of menthe,
          Quia intelate rei est recordatium
Folwyng and fyndying out · the foundement of strength,
And stynelyche stonde forth · to strength of the foundement,
In kynde and in case and in cours of nowmbre.

(C, III, 343-6)

The metaphor is as concrete for Langland as that which follows, likening an upright king to “a stake · that styketh in a muyre By-twyne two londes for a trewe marke”. C, IV, 384-5.

It is important to remember that the grammar referred to in metaphor by Alanus and by Langland is an ideal abstraction. Speech is the expression of reason, the Divine spark in man. The “word” corresponds to the “Word” and grammar, the method of speech, reflects that process of Creation which originally brought order out of chaos.¹²

John of Salisbury had deplored contemporary neglect of the art:

… qui eam abiciunt aut contemnunt, cecos et surdos philosophicis studiis faciunt aptiores, quam eos quibus nature gratia integri sensus vigorum contulit et conservat (Metalogicon, Lib I, Cap XXI). [“Accordingly those who would banish or condemn grammar are in effect trying to pretend that the blind and deaf are more fit for philosophical studies than those who, by nature's gift, have received and still enjoy the vigour of their senses”.]

(Book I, Chap. 22)¹³

Langland, in his time, complained similarly:

Gramer, the grounde of al · bigyleth now children;
For is non of this newe clerkus · who so nymeth heed,
That can versifye faire · ne formalich enditen;
Ne nouȝt on amonge an hondreth · that an auctor can construe.

(B, XV, 365-8)

Both writers combine with their esteem of grammar, however, an awareness of the inferiority of the poor copy produced by man, to that perfection which it imitates. John of Salisbury explicitly stresses this: “pro ea quoque interpretandum est, eo quod non modo nature obnoxia subiacet, sed voluntari hominum adquiescit” (Lib. II, Prol.). [“grammar is to be judged leniently, since it is subject both to the nature and to the will of man” (Metalagicon, Book II, Prologue).]¹⁴

In Piers Plowman the continually shifting meaning of words is witness to the unreliability of language once it is caught up in the material world and subject to contingency.

The sense of the inadequacy of this mortal counterpart of Divine Order does not detract from the power of the ideal form of grammar as analogy or metaphor. Far from “drawing on an analogy unfamiliar to his audience”, Langland is using a metaphor with rich and immediate implications for his contemporary reader, which can only be discovered for the twentieth-century reader through study of the philosophical and literary context in which he was writing.

Notes

1. A. V. C. Schmidt, “Direct and Indirect Relation”, N. & Q., ccxiv (1969), 285-6.

2. M. Amassien and J. Sadowsky, “Mede and Mercede: A Study of the Grammatical Metaphor in Piers Plowman C. IV, 335-409” N.M., lxxii (1971), 457-76.

3. Derek Pearsall, Piers Plowman (London, 1978), also cites Alanus' De Planctu Naturae as an example of the use of this kind of grammatical analogy.

4. Alanus de Insulis, De Plancta Naturae, ed. T. Wright, Rolls Series 59 (1872, ii, 268-428), p. 429.

5. Alanus de Insulis, The complaint of nature, transl. from the Latin by Douglas M. Moffat. New York, 1908.

6. Cf. Boethius, De Arithmetica; St. Augustine, De. Musica.

7. Wright, op. cit., p. 463.

8. Moffat, op. cit.

9. At this point in the poem denoting the Creator.

10. Wright, op. cit., pp. 475-6.

11. Moffat, op. cit.

12. See Anne Middleton, “Two Infinites: Grammatical Metaphor in Piers Plowman”, ELH, xxxix (1972), 185 and 187.

13. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, transl. D. McGarry (Gloucester, Mass., 1971).

14. McGarry, op. cit.