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The Arts of Disruption
The Arts of Disruption
Allegory and Piers Plowman

N I C O L E TT E Z E E M A N
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
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© Nicolette Zeeman 2020
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
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reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933841
ISBN 978–0–19–886024–2
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–260410–1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only.
Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website
referenced in this work.
 OXFORD STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND
CULTURE
General Editors:
Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon

Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the

plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and
promotes work that not only focuses on the whole array of subjects
medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, philosophy, social,
political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art,
and the history of science—but also work that combines these
subjects productively. It offers innovative and interdisciplinary
studies of every kind, including but not limited to manuscript and
book history, linguistics and literature, post-colonial and global
studies, the digital humanities and media studies, performance
studies, the history of affect and the emotion, the theory and history
of sexuality, ecocriticism and environmental studies, theories of the
lyric, of aesthetics, of the practices of devotion, and ideas of
medievalism.
This book is for Jonathan, with all my love.
 Acknowledgements

In my head, this book is still part of an ongoing conversation with

Elizabeth Salter. She and my two fathers, Christopher Zeeman and
David Salter, showed me what the intellectual and teaching life
should be. Some of this book was written during a year at the
Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and some on a Leverhulme
Fellowship: I am very grateful for both. I thank Ingo Guildenhart,
Peter Jones and Michael Schoenfeldt for advice on chapters 7 and 8;
and James Carley, Simon Gaunt, Jill Mann, Derek Pearsall, and the
YLS readers for their responses to an earlier version of chapters 9
and 10. I thank Marco Nievergelt for generously sharing several
unpublished essays on Guillaume de Deguileville with me. I
especially thank Christopher Cannon, Rita Copeland, and Vance
Smith for their marvellously helpful responses to the book
manuscript. For other stimulating discussions of Piers Plowman and
related topics, I must also mention Alastair Bennett, Mishtooni Bose,
Ardis Butterfield, Christopher Cannon, Cristina Cervone, Simon
Gaunt, Kantik Ghosh, Sarah Kay, Derek Pearsall, James Simpson,
Vance Smith, Paul Strohm, David Wallace, Katie Walter, Nicholas
Watson, and my recent doctoral students Conor McKee, Arabella
Robinson, and Johannes Wolf. My understanding of Piers Plowman
has been transformed by emails and talk in the University Library
tearoom with David Aers. Although I knew I wanted a Francis Bacon
‘van Gogh’ for the cover, Rita Copeland found me the right one; she
has been the most supportive interlocutor on most of these matters
for just about as long as I have been working on them. Above all, I
thank my family for their tolerance, wisdom, and brilliant wit -
Jonathan Burt, Eleanor Choudhury, Stefan Zeeman, and Tilly
Zeeman.
 Contents

List of Abbreviations
List of Plates
Introduction: Allegory and Undoing
Excursus: Personifications in Dialogue and Debate

PART 1

1. The Hypocritical Figure

2. Ethical Adjacency in Piers Plowman

PART 2

3. Animate Oppositions
4. Opposition and Debate in Piers Plowman

PART 3

5. Anger, Insult and Rebuff

6. Sharp Words and Violent Gestures in Piers Plowman

PART 4

7. Natural Entropy and Piers Plowman

8. The Sad Vices
 PART 5

9. Piers Plowman and the Grail Romances

10. Tales of Piers and Perceval: Langland, Romance Aventure, and
Doing Well
Conclusion: Undoing Well

Appendix: Langland and Marguerite Porete

Bibliography
Index
 List of Abbreviations

CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis

CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina
EETS [OS] Early English Text Society [Original Series]
ELH English Literary History
JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
MED Middle English Dictionary
OED Oxford English Dictionary
PG Patrologia Graeca
PL Patrologia Latina
RES Review of English Studies
YLS Yearbook of Langland Studies
 List of Plates

1. Sapientia and the Seven Liberal Arts, late eleventh century, Paris, Bibliothèque
Nationale, MS lat. 3110, fol.60r.
2. Master and student debating, c.1460–70, London, British Library MS
Additional 37049, fol.96r © The British Library Board.
3. Viellesce (Old Age), Roman de la rose, fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Douce 332, fol.4r © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of
Oxford.
4. Viellece (Old Age), Pierre Remiet, Deschamps, Double lay de la fragilité de
l’humaine nature, 1380–90, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS français 20029,
fol.10r.
5. Discord, Stone relief roundel, early thirteenth century, Cathedral of Nôtre
Dame, Paris. © Caroline Rose.
6. Wrath, Misericord, Norwich Cathedral, Norwich. © Paul Hurst.
7. Wrath, Caxton Master, The Mirroure of the Worlde, 1470–80, Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Bodley 283, fol.42r © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of
Oxford.
8. Ira (Wrath), Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last
Things, c.1500, Madrid, Prado Museum, detail © Museo Nacional del Prado.
9. Envy, Caxton Master, The Mirroure of the Worlde, 1470–80, Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Bodley 283, fol.38v © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of
Oxford.
10. Gluttony, Misericord, Norwich Cathedral, Norwich. © Paul Hurst.
11. Sloth, Caxton Master, The Mirroure of the Worlde, 1470–80, Oxford, Bodleian
Library, MS Bodley 283, fol.48v © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of
Oxford.
12. Man and the Vices, Pierre Remiet, Deschamps, Double lay de la fragilité de
l’humaine nature, 1380–90, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS français 20029,
fol.11v.
13. Tritesce (Sorrow), Roman de la rose, fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian MS
Douce 332, fol.3v © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
14. Invidia (Envy), Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last
Things, c.1500, Madrid, Prado Museum, detail © Museo Nacional del Prado.
15. Gula (Gluttony), Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last
Things, c.1500, Madrid, Prado Museum, detail © Museo Nacional del Prado.
16. Haine (Hatred), Roman de la rose, fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Douce 332, fol.1v © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
17. Haine (Hatred), Roman de la rose, c.1490– c.1500, London, British Library,
MS Harley 4425, fol.8r © The British Library Board.
18. Avarice, Roman de la rose, fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS
Douce 332, fol.2v © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
19. Envie (Envy), Roman de la rose, fifteenth century, Oxford, Bodleian Library,
MS Douce 332, fol.3r © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
20. Envie (Envy), Roman de la rose, second half of the fourteenth century, Paris,
Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS Arsenal 5209, fol.2v.
21. Souls on their way to hell, ‘how þai ar deformed & mischapyn’, extract from
Guillaume de Deguileville, Pelerinage de l’ame, c.1460–70, London, British
Library MS Additional 37049, fol.74r © The British Library Board.
22. Envy, Piers Plowman, 1427, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol.25r ©
The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
23. Wraþe, Piers Plowman, 1427, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol.26r
© The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
24. Gloton, Piers Plowman, 1427, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol.29r
© The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
 Introduction
Allegory and Undoing

Perhaps there is something to be learned from that

Christian theological tradition which consciously organised
a strategy of disarrangement as a way of life, as being
that in which alone God is to be found.
Denys Turner1

Denys Turner’s remark speaks vividly to the project of this book,

which is about five types of medieval allegorical narrative that exploit
some form of diegetic tension, conflict, or internal contradiction.
Each of these allegorical narratives brings together diverse or
opposed descriptions of spiritual process—however surprising the
conjunctions may seem—in order to develop new forms of
understanding and excite moral or devotional change. Although
these allegorical narratives and their internal tensions are all very
different, they are linked by the fact that in each case some kind of
slippage or dissonance, either between juxtaposed elements of
narrative, or between the narrative and some other neighbouring
element of the text, demands attention from the reader. A degree of
disorientation is inevitably part of their effect.
Along with its distinctive conceptual materials and problematics,
each of these allegorical narratives (for which I will also use the term
‘allegory’2) is also reflected and reworked in Piers Plowman, a text
where nothing is quite the same as it is in any other.3 Despite the
fact that Langland’s poem is entirely sui generis, in other words,
there remain recognizable traditions with which it is in conversation.
In Piers Plowman these five traditions do a variety of work: they
explore the manifestations of spiritual, theological and institutional
decline; they structure the poem’s dialogues, dialectical oppositions,
angry language and even its iconoclastic gestures; and they
contribute to the poem’s exploration of the tension between the
mechanics of the active life and the earthly or divine powers that
shape that life. These different allegorical narratives sit unstably
alongside each other in the poem; they intersect, sometimes
corroborating each other, but often producing between them further
forms of tension and discrepancy. Much of the spiritual work of the
poem occurs at the points where elements within these narratives,
or these narratives as a whole, come together. This book will locate
these five traditions of allegorical narrative and situate Piers
Plowman in relation to them; in the course of this process, it will
offer a series of new readings of the poem itself.
But this is also a book about allegory more generally. However,
with the exception of the tropes of personification and
personification debate, it will not devote much attention to the
rhetorical techniques and structures more traditionally associated
with allegory (or with medieval allegory in particular), such as ‘other
speaking’, sustained metaphor, the literal, exemplarity, scriptural
exegesis or typology. That is not to say that these techniques and
structures do not appear in the texts I discuss—for of course many
of them do. However, this is a book about how the work of allegory
is always about links and adjacencies, but also about conflicts and
disruptions. Insofar as I discuss these traditional allegorical figures,
it will therefore be to stress their conflictual and disruptive aspects—
and even to note how what look like distinctively medieval figures
share much with allegorical narrative in general.
Allegory and its narratives occur at the intersection of two or
more identifiable, though sometimes just implied, discourses; they
depend on the juxtaposition of heterogeneous languages, structures
and concepts. This means that, although there may be elements
within the allegorical text that lay claim to discursive corroboration
or synthesis,4 the allegorical text will also inevitably be characterized
by oppositionality, disjuncture, and dissonance. A central part of the
work of allegory is thus the questioning of claimed continuities
between its various components. Indeed, the thesis of this book is
not just that there are distinctively disruptive ‘arts’ that occur in
allegory, but rather that allegory itself is a disruptive art. Disruption
is the métier of allegory, not because allegory denies the possibility
of making meaning, but because it acknowledges the difficulty of
doing so. Qualification and even negation5 must be its mode,
because all descriptions exclude even as they include, every
formulation is capable of becoming a complacency, and words
always demand more words. Allegory is a response to the
contingency and multi-dimensionality of being in the world.
The book will develop this claim by focusing on five particular
conflictual structures that are found both in medieval allegorical
tradition and in Piers Plowman. As part of this project, it will
investigate the conceptual and disciplinary hinterlands that
contribute to these five allegorical structures. Each structure involves
a distinct narrative iconography but also an identifiable body of
thought: pastoral ideas of paradiastole and the hypocritical virtue;
the elementary Aristotelian logic of opposites; the rebarbative
methods of medieval pedagogy and spiritual apophasis; Galenic
medicine on old age and sin and its appearance in medieval pastoral
teaching; and the paradoxical paradigms of quest in grail romance.
Each of these bodies of thought is really quite different from the
others, and my exploration of each of them forms a study in its own
right, some of them diachronic, some less so, but all of them
focused on what that body of thought might have looked like to the
fourteenth-century poet. Each of them will be shown to underpin a
particular tradition of allegorical narrative that also appears in Piers
Plowman.
The book is divided into five separate parts, each containing two
chapters. Each part will investigate one allegorical tradition and a
related body of thought, and then track the forms in which they
appear in Piers Plowman: parts 1 to 3 will treat Piers Plowman in the
second chapter of the pair, but, due to more detailed local overlaps,
parts 4 and 5 will discuss Piers Plowman in both chapters. With one
exception, I do not claim that any of the individual texts that I
discuss was known to Langland. Rather what I claim is that he had
some knowledge of the broad traditions I will trace—and that he
might have thought that at least some of his audience did too. For
this reason, I will document the pervasiveness of these traditions,
and the variety of ways that Langland and his readers might have
encountered them. I hope that each of these studies will be a
contribution to the wider cultural history of the Middle Ages and will
cast light on other texts than Piers Plowman. Nevertheless, the fact
that these diverse allegorical narratives all find their way into
Langland’s poem—albeit usually in modified shape—is also an index
of the extraordinary richness of the conceptual matrix of the poem.
Part 1 addresses an under-recognized but pervasive set of tropes
found in medieval pastoral, devotional, and satirical writings and
allegory; together, I call these the ‘hypocritical figure’. They involve
the rhetorical technique of paradiastole (whereby vices are
redescribed as virtues, and vice versa),6 but also theories about
vices that masquerade as virtues, as well as personifications
structured round an internal paradiastolic contradiction so as to
signal hypocrisy. The hypocritical figure is marked by various forms
of tension, discrepancy, or slippage so as to reveal hidden
corruption, but also other more insidious problems of decline,
formalism, or complacency. Langland makes these techniques his
own in an especially disorienting way, rarely commenting on them or
resolving them. In Piers Plowman, the hypocritical figure takes the
form of devastating satire; it is used to raise moral and spiritual
questions about institutions and protagonists, but also to throw into
question phenomena and positions central to the poem’s thought. I
argue that the hypocritical figure is one of the most crucial disruptive
allegorical tropes in the poem and that Langland makes highly
original use of it.
But there are other, equally disruptive allegorical structures in the
poem too. Part 2 investigates the logic of opposition in
personification debate, and its consequences for the fundamentally
oppositional modes of allegory.7 Although oppositionality has long
been recognized as a feature of debate literature, I use the
Aristotelian heuristics of ‘opposites’ widely available in elementary
medieval logic to argue that we need to think harder about the
nuanced work that logical oppositionality can do in personification
debate. According to Aristotle, opposition is also a form of relation. If
this means that even the most extreme forms of oppositionality can
be a way of exploring mutual dependence, identity, and hierarchy, it
also means that these same phenomena are often in the ‘dialectical’
Middle Ages examined by processes of dissection and fragmentation.
I then read four medieval debate texts in light of this claim, before
moving on to the supremely dialectical poem Piers Plowman, where I
focus mainly on a sequence of debates that span the full length of
the poem and involve the personification Conscience.
Part 3 explores the aggressive aspects of personification debate,
focusing on expressions of anger, verbal abuse, and even
repudiation—again features pervasive in allegorical narrative. I focus
on these forms of verbal violence particularly as they seem to have
been developed in elementary or ‘grammatical’ forms of pedagogy,
though the rebarbative legacy of such early schooling techniques
can also be seen in a variety of educational and literary texts aimed
at adult readers. I propose that in the Middle Ages verbal violence is
used not just for disciplinary purposes but also for catalytic ones; it
is a surprising and sometimes humorous technique of shocking
others into alertness, but also a means of expressing dialogic
engagement and investment. Interestingly, however, related forms of
verbal violence are also sometimes co-opted in spiritual and
contemplative writings: here, it seems that aggressive language and
the forms of repudiation can be used to produce startling effects of
spiritual reorientation, devotional advancement, and even apophasis.
I will argue that we can see in Piers Plowman not only the sharp
tongues of the grammatical pedagogic ‘scene’, but also, at moments,
elements of a more extreme spiritualizing and allegorical rhetoric of
oppositionality and rejection.
 Parts 4 and 5 turn away from the strongly dialogic and debaterly
emphasis of the first three parts of the book. Although elements of
dialogue and debate do appear in the allegorical structures discussed
here—and certainly continue to intersect with them—these
structures have a more narrative orientation, which means that their
tensions and contradictions tend to occur at the level of narrative
diegesis. At issue here are conflicting perspectives on human agency
and the forces, whether earthly or divine, that influence or
determine it. Part 4, for example, focuses on a body of thought that
stands at odds with Christian beliefs about the will and freedom of
the subject. It considers medieval medical and pastoral theories and
narratives of bodily or psychic ‘decay’ through age and sin. Drawing
on medieval medical material, pastoral texts, visual arts and
narrative allegory, it claims that, according to many medieval
theorists, both old age and sin could have the effect of physically
incapacitating the body for sin. Although a strictly ethical position
would argue that the incapacitation of the body should make no
difference to the fundamental requirement that a rational will should
choose not to sin, it seems clear that many writers, including
Langland, are prepared consider the possibility that the involuntary
effects of bodily decline may play a role in the spiritual life. Once
again, however, the poem’s allegorical narrative juxtaposes and plays
out these contradictory perspectives, but does not resolve them.
Part 5 argues that many of the most urgent and enigmatic
aspects of the narrative of Piers Plowman can be associated with the
iconography of quest to be found in thirteenth-century French grail
romance, an iconography that traces itself back to apocryphal
narratives of the harrowing of hell and the claim that Joseph of
Arimathea brought the grail to Britain. I look at a number of features
of this tradition, in particular the pursuit of (and dialogues about)
uncertain news in an unreadable landscape, the motif of ‘the seeker
sought’, an emphasis on the work of grace, and a tendency to
attribute to protagonists seemingly unintentional and thus
unavoidable forms of guilt. If, however, Piers Plowman draws on this
tradition, with its emphasis on unknowingness, grace and
involuntary guilt, this once again stands in tension with the poem’s
ethical teachings, its apparent voluntarism and its preoccupation
with active personal and political ‘doing well’. Piers Plowman is not
alone among Christian writings in recognizing the theological
problem of the relation between works and grace. But the poem’s
juxtaposition of the discourses of pastoral care and instruction with
those of grail romance is an unusually challenging formulation of this
enigma.
This is a book about both Piers Plowman and allegory more
generally. The arts of disruption at issue here are all allegorical arts.
The allegorical simulation of the vices of hypocrisy, formalism, and
complacency undermines apparent surface continuities and poses
the most serious hermeneutic challenges, throwing into question
categories of ethical, political, theological, or spiritual thought.
Personification debates that involve logical opposition or verbal
rudeness may work imaginatively to express and bring about forms
of relation and investedness; but they do this by repeatedly seeming
to deny the possibility of intellectual exchange and mutual
recognition—by staging narrative friction, difference and even
outright violent rejection. It is allegory that enables these conflictual
structures to sit side by side in the narrative. It is also allegory that
allows authors to problematize their tales of volition and agency,
whether by exploring the naturally debilitating effects of age and sin,
or by introducing the mysterious grail romance figures of grace and
unintended guilt. If theories about the effects of age and sin suggest
that the Christian life might actually be aided by the cessation of the
very powers that should enable it, the grail romances describe that
life as shaped by the possibility of divine gifts, but also by disabling
conditions of failure and confusion: for any text that involves ethical
injunctions for the good life, both these models raise the most basic
questions and contradictions. They all initiate versions of what
Stanley Fish, quoting Milton, has called ‘saving by undoing’, a
narrative manoeuvre that ‘thrusts the forms of language before us
so that we may better know their insufficiency, and our own’. They
do so with a view to initiating spiritual change, but also in the hope
of encouraging deeper reflection on the difficult conditions of any
such spiritual change.8 It is, I reiterate, the disruptive art of allegory
that allows them to do this.
In what remains of the Introduction I will discuss some
theoretical frameworks for the book’s emphasis on narrative
disruption in allegory.

The Disruptive Art

I will illustrate the discussion that follows with brief examples from
Piers Plowman, but also from the Roman de la rose. This is partly
because of the huge originality of the Roman and its influence on
both the secular and religious allegory of the later Middle Ages, and
partly because the Roman is so well known to modern readers of
medieval allegory.9 However, I will not be returning to the Roman de
la rose in the body of the book in any significant way; and, towards
the end of this section, I will suggest some of the reasons why the
disruptive features that interest me here may be particularly
prominent in religious allegory.
In his important book on the topic, Jon Whitman characterized
the allegorical text as both concealing and revealing, as a
combination of myth and elucidation that plays ‘compositional and
interpretative strains off each other’.10 The risk entailed by even this
subtle formulation, however, is that it still seems to accept that there
is a controlling discourse in narrative allegory, and that this must
ultimately be the one identified as ‘interpretative’. It is certainly true
that interpretative discourses—those that tend towards the explicit,
analytical, abstractive or instructional—usually lay claim to
hermeneutic primacy in allegorical narrative, masking their own
rhetorical productivity by claiming merely to explicate other, anterior
languages.11 Perhaps the most negative version of the assumption
that such discourses control meaning in the allegorical narrative is
the view that this kind of textuality is biased towards didactic or
intellectualist concerns; this is a view that (paradoxically) often also
takes it for granted that allegorical narrative is relatively simple, clear
or ‘readable’.12 This traditional emphasis on the interpretative also
underlies Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence, though Teskey
gives it a provocative spin by describing the relation of interpretation
to narrative as agonistic, as a form of epistemological ‘violence’.13
Writing under the influence of Teskey, Jason Crawford also writes in
exciting ways about the oxymoron of ‘allegorical narrative’ and its
dynamic dialectic of ‘this and that’; and yet for Crawford too,
allegory’s tendency to ‘orchestrate its own repudiation’ turns out
frequently—and disappointingly—to involve ‘its own dissolution or
clarification in commentary’.14
But there are other ways of describing allegorical narrative that
do not formulate it in terms of a binary opposition of ‘myth and
elucidation’. I would prefer to think about allegorical narrative as
occurring at the confluence of any two or more relatively distinct and
mutually commenting discourses, each of which nuances, refigures
and redirects, but may also unpack, critique, and even contradict,
the others present. Given that allegorical narrative by definition
involves some kind of diegesis, it probably always needs to contain
some kind of narrative, mythic or ecphrastic element, though—in
theory it least—this could be very minimal. At the other end of the
equation, however, there are really not many rules about the nature
of the other discourses involved in allegorical narrative: there might,
after all, just be two or more mythic or ecphrastic discourses. The
crucial point to make about this interplay is that, whatever
languages are at work in an allegorical narrative, they are used to
comment on each other. While many allegories do use the language
of overt explication to comment on their narratives and ecphrases,
they also use their narratives and ecphrases to comment on the
language of explication. As Maureen Quilligan writes, ‘the allegorical
author simply does what the allegorical critic does; but he writes a
commentary on his own text rather than someone else’s. And his
“commentary” … is not discursive, but narrative.’15
 None of the languages of allegorical narrative necessarily has
hermeneutic primacy. Nor is there any limit to the number or type of
languages that can appear, or to the way they interact. While
allegorical narrative is indeed sharply focused on issues of
interpretation and re-interpretation, the reader has to pay just as
much attention to the hermeneutic work of figurative discourse as to
that of analytic discourse. Narrative tropology can take many forms,
moreover—it can be metonymic, exemplary, metaphorical, oblique,
fantastical, ironic; the sophisticated theories of narrative figuration
available in the Middle Ages mean that writers are alert to the many
ways in which narratives and their imagery can comment on each
other and on any other discourse present. In many cases, they do
indeed use narrative or imagery to throw the language of
commentary into question: stories can overdetermine a protagonist
and actions can delimit a scene. Any of these languages, in other
words, can ‘do violence’ to another—as Teskey puts it elsewhere,
speaking of ‘the rift’ that is at the centre of allegory, ‘for allegory …
there can be no balance of extremes or uncontested middle way’.16
One of the unrecognized features of the hermeneutic or
intellectualist view of allegorical narrative, after all, is that it
underestimates the power of narrative to wreak havoc with the
terms used to explicate that narrative.
This kind of ‘narrative commentary’ could be illustrated from
many parts of the Roman de la rose. Guillaume de Lorris’ section of
the poem, for example, allegorizes the pursuit of desire with a series
of internally and mutually contradictory narratives: the rose, the
object of desire, is both unique and also like every other rose in the
garden; the lover is ‘internally’ or ‘psychologically’ motivated by
curiosity and desire, but he is also hunted in the landscape and
attacked by the God of Love with his bow and arrow; is love the
pursuit of the rose or being shot by a god? Not only is the lover’s
desire apparently intensified by delay, but the mechanisms of delay
are also themselves the object of fetishistic attention. The poem’s
subtle psychological analysis derives from these multiple,
superimposed and contradictory narratives (well analysed by many
commentators), and any kind of commentary offered from within the
text would be hard put to sum them up. Indeed, if we turn to the
text’s self-commentary, we find that it is played out in a series of
pseudo-rational discourses—those of Jean de Meun’s continuation
famously structured chiastically round their own internal
contradictions.17 There are in the poem nearly as many un-
reconciled glossatory discourses as participants, and the discrete
categories represented by the personifications who speak them, not
to mention the fact the speakers (even Raison) are substantially
determined by the ‘non-rational’ categories of desire, throw into
question the possibility of any kind of epistemological common
ground or intellectual exchange.18 Above all, however, the
complexity of the Roman’s epistemology and the seeming
impossibility of identifying any overarching hermeneutic has much to
do with the fact that all the poem’s commentaries are embedded
within a narrative that is constantly at odds with—and doing violence
to—them. The Roman makes meaning out of overlaps but also
tensions and aporias between narrative and gloss, narrative and
narrative, and even gloss and gloss.
A similar analysis could be offered for Piers Plowman, with its
disorienting narratives of social corruption, its dialectical and often
tangential argumentative progressions, its aggressive gestures of
repudiation, its layering and juxtaposition of conflicting narrative
structures, and its overriding sense that interpretation is always
determined by institutions and subject positions. In this text too, it is
unwise to take the self-glossing at face-value: indeed, the very
simplicity or accessibility of the poem’s many explications or self-
glosses sometimes acts as a sort of temptation, revealing that the
easy acceptance of intellectual or moral complacencies is something
about which the lover of God might be especially anxious: we will
see something of this in later chapters. Although these features take
highly distinctive forms in Piers Plowman, it is also true that the
poem may be less unusual in this respect than is often claimed.
None of this is news in allegory studies more generally. Inspired
by German baroque allegorical drama’s ‘multiplicity of meaning’, its
constant self-glossing, and its recourse to many languages and
perspectives, Walter Benjamin argued long ago that allegorical texts
are always ‘fragmentary’, characterized by ‘antinomy’ and the denial
of ‘the false appearance of totality’.19 Angus Fletcher’s interest in
anthropological ritual and psychoanalysis led him to characterize
allegory in terms of a preoccupation with social or psychic power
relations; according to Fletcher, allegory tends to ‘split’ or
‘compartmentalise’ phenomena into polarized, discontinuous and
extreme (‘daemonic’) forms, with the result that it is always
‘dynamic’ but also ‘ambivalent’. Its narratives are characteristically
‘symbolic power struggles’.20 Maureen Quilligan stressed the
linguistic multiplicity of allegory; according to her, allegory is an
epistemological mode in which understanding derives from close and
‘literal’ attention to words, particularly at the intersection points of its
different discourses, which she illuminatingly describes as ‘puns’.21
Paul de Man’s claim that all language is ‘allegorical’ was in fact also
based on intricate studies of the discursive incompatibilities present
in even the most seemingly simple denominative language;
accumulating ever more complex, invested, and rhetorical examples
of linguistic conceptualization and figuration, de Man argued that
allegory always involves ‘the structural interference of two distinct
value systems’; according to him, language is ‘allegorical’ precisely
because words’ participation in multiple, heterogeneous linguistic
systems always makes referentiality problematic.22
More recently, Sarah Kay’s study of ‘monologia’ in later medieval
allegory (‘didactic literature’) addresses her texts’ hypothetical
preoccupation with ‘the one’. But Kay’s argument turns out to be for
‘the complexity of one’: discrepancies and contradictions in the
knowledge ‘trees’ of the Occitan Breviari d’amor, for instance,
‘manifest the complexity of the work’s unitary purpose by
superimposing different orientations and entry points from which it
might be approached’; of Deguileville’s portrait of the narrator of the
Pelerinage de vie humaine she asks, ‘is he a single being or a
twofold one?’23 Revisiting the history of the term ‘allegory’, Michael
Silk has recently insisted that what ancient, medieval and modern
theorists of allegory share is a sense that this is a mode always alert
to the ‘hidden’; it is this, he claims, that makes it allegory’s ‘urgent’
business to ‘evade the straitjacket of the representational’.24 Indeed,
if the mode of allegory is fundamentally defamiliarizing and
instigatory of an ‘awareness of otherness’, according to Lynette
Hunter, it is not so much ‘a thing’ as ‘an event that happens’.25
Comparing Spenser’s Fairie Queene with Hegel’s Phenomenology,
Joe Moshenska has described them as allegories of ‘error’; in a
manner reminiscent of Fish’s ‘saving by undoing’, he claims that in
both texts the reader is ‘given a powerfully exemplary sense of how
the work in question is going to function, and … a series of reasons
to doubt the coherence or consistency of its functioning’.26 It is a
description that works rather well for Piers Plowman.
Many of the discursive junctures of allegorical narrative are not so
much interlaced as sequential, experienced by the reader as
argumentative development or as narrative change. Deborah
Madsen, among others, has commented on the ‘markedly episodic
and hypotactic’ nature of allegorical narrative, with its ‘minimum of
causal linkages between episodes, as between sentences’. Narratives
that comment on each other may appear sequentially, in other
words, rather than alongside each other. Madsen has also claimed
that in allegorical narrative the threat of incompletion generates
suspense: ‘knowledge as the object of desire is a mechanism
exploited by all narratives but exaggerated by allegory’;27 the
corollary of this is the constant potential for sequential rupture, as
newly introduced materials intrude on those that precede them—
what may come after may reveal that what has come before is
incomplete.
In the Roman de la rose, for example, various descriptions of a
single phenomenon often occur in a sequence. The narrative of
falling in love is repeatedly reworked: does the lover fall in love as
he looks in the pool of Narcissus, as the God of Love shoots him, or
when he sees the rose? The speakers within the poem return
endlessly to the phenomenon of desire from their different
perspectives. In Jean de Meun’s continuation, Guillaume de Lorris’
courtly images of love, such as the rosebud or the business of
amorous ‘worship’, are finally reinterpreted in terms of a desire
described in graphically sexual terms, along with its ‘objects’ and its
‘tools’; Jean de Meun’s teleological vision of reproductive Nature with
her sexual hammer and anvil, and Genius’ description of the garden
of sexual procreation, directly contradict Guillaume de Lorris’
unfinished (and perhaps by definition unfinishable28), vision of the
erotics of unconsumed desire. Piers Plowman too has long been
characterized as both episodic and cyclical: local sections of
narrative, which may or may not coincide with a dream, produce
their own inner dialectics or mutual ‘commentaries’, and whole
sections of narrative in turn stand in dialectical and glossatory
relation to each other. The poem is criss-crossed with imaginative
conversations and arguments, both between speakers and between
narratives. These are the frictional terms in which the conceptual
work of narrative allegory narrative is performed, as stories and
terms are reworked, extended, overlaid, or contradicted in textual
(or inter-textual29) ‘time’. In the end, the job of working out how all
these elements relate to each other falls to the reader.30
An extreme instance of discursive contrast occurs in ‘ironic’
allegorical narratives that bring together under a shared rubric
phenomena that are somehow unlike; such allegories might use a
particular word, language, image or narrative to refer to different
things, one of them usually a degraded version of the other (this is a
version of what Quilligan calls the ‘punning’ of allegory). This
particularly difficult, but also paradigmatic, form of allegorical conflict
or contradiction is probably worth some attention here. For Benjamin
such irony (though he does not use the word) is a feature of all
baroque allegory, with its dialectical capacity both to ‘devalue’ and to
‘elevate’, both to refer to dead ‘convention’ and yet to ‘express’; it
simultaneously makes mortificatory reference to the world of time
and history, and, Benjamin says, metaphorical and ‘sanctifying’
reference ‘to something else’.31 De Man’s temporal view of both
allegory and irony owes much to Benjamin; if allegory is the
‘repetition … of a previous sign with which it can never coincide’,
irony is a form of doubling, according to which the ironist both
identifies with an ideal or fantasy and simultaneously objectifies and
reflects critically on that ideal or fantasy; the ironist can ‘know’ her
‘inauthenticity’, but ‘never overcome’ it, only ‘restat[ing] and
repeat[ing] it on an increasingly conscious level’.32 Honig uses the
term irony to describe ostentatiously discordant forms of allegory:
‘irony is felt immediately through the rapid conversions and the
startling juxtapositions of dissimilars … The absurd possibility of
similarity, or even of equivalent and interchangeable identities, is
momentarily taken as a serious fact.’ Ironic allegory can work, he
says, satirically or even ‘apocalyptically’, undermining facile or
complacent formulations, but also producing some of ‘the richest
allegorical paradoxes … the transfiguration by Dante of the courtly
ideal of love, Arthurian symbolism interlaced with Revelation
symbolism.’33 Fletcher sees irony as the extreme form of
ambivalence, a ‘compressed’ version of the polarizations that he
considers endemic to allegory, whether they are sublime,
pathological, or caricatural.34 Of Piers Plowman, Simpson notes with
brilliant succinctness that the effect of using the same word to refer
both to a spiritual phenomenon and to a corrupt worldly version of it
‘is simultaneously one of exhortation and satire’.35 The effect of such
verbal and narrative ironies is disruptive, precisely because it
involves the often simultaneous perception of both likeness and
unlikeness, the possibility of an elevated version of a phenomenon
and also of its deflation; it is a technique that can be used to query
or undermine a text’s most central—and hitherto seemingly valued—
elements. Enacted in narrative form, it can be particularly
destabilizing.
Examples of this sort of ironic play and critique from the Roman
de la rose might include Guillaume de Lorris describing the lover’s
pursuit of the rose in terms of the problematic Fountain of Narcissus,
or the predatory violence of the God of Love, or, indeed the poem’s
over-arching ambiance of wealth, leisure, and solipsism. On the one
hand, such narrative elements seem to throw the pursuit of the rose
into question; but, given the exquisite perversities of courtly desire,
these same elements may in fact be laudatory, an index of desire’s
sublimation and a sign of the text’s fantasy and knowingness about
its own claims to aristocratic social status.36 More extreme examples
of such ambivalent effects occur throughout Jean de Meun’s Roman.
On the one hand, the continuation can be read as an all-round
satirical debasement of Guillaume de Lorris’ poem, whose witty and
metaphorical language of amors is now reinterpreted as a
euphemism for sex, and whose god of love is transformed from a
master of courtly deferral into the leader of the military campaign
whose end is a predatory act of sexual appropriation. Similarly, when
Jean replaces Guillaume de Lorris’ garden of amorous pursuit with
Genius’ cosmic park of procreation, in which salvation is assured by
indiscriminate copulation, this can be read as the ultimate in
obscene (and sexually immoral) jokes. And yet Jean’s continuation is
simultaneously a ‘philosophical’ vision of the reproductive world as
God has made it, a vision of sexuality underpinned by elements of
medieval natural science and creation theology. From one
perspective unethical and theologically confused, Genius’ parc is also
arguably a provocatively clear-eyed description of the divinely
ordained necessities of reproductive life. Kay argues that Genius’
mastery of the techniques of didacticism combined with his multi-
layered intellectualism make his parc ‘an instance of that uncanny
phenomenon … the parody that is consubstantive with its model’.37
Can these various visions and perspectives be held poised in some
kind of double, or multiple, vision? Or are they all narratives
performing acts of violence on each other?
Inflationary and deflationary dynamics also occur in Piers
Plowman: Carruthers and Simpson are, amongst many others, right
that there are moments when terms such as mede, which refers in
its most extreme forms both to heavenly reward and to material
bribe, and thus possesses a ‘dangerously unclear double meaning’,
oscillate between clear opposites.38 But on the whole, in Piers
Plowman, these deflationary contrasts are not so much absolute
oppositions as subtle forms of verbal or narrative slippage; here
phenomena and concepts turn into linked but degraded versions of
themselves, though the precise moment at which these slippages
occur is often quite difficult to pinpoint. This is a feature of
Langland’s satirical wordplay, whereby terms such as pees, wit,
truþe, pardon, dowel, rechlessnesse, or nede can be used in both
elevated and ‘lesser’ senses.39 But related deflations are also
enacted by Langland’s personifications, whose names may remain
the same while their actions and words degenerate: long-recognized
examples include Conscience in B.3, when Mede reveals that he too
has accepted mede, Pees in B.4, when he accepts compensation
rather than justice, (a different?) Pees in B.20 who allows Frere
Flatterere into the barn of Unitee—along with Contricion, who
forgets to be contrite.40 In Beyond Reformation? David Aers has
discussed aspects of this process as they occur at the end of the
poem; in part 1 I will argue that the ‘hypocritical figure’ in fact
constitutes a central and near-systematic mode of verbal and
narrative ironic deflation in the poem. But Piers Plowman is also full
of narratives that seem to run down in the course of their own
telling, their apparently positive initial allegorical meanings subverted
by the emergence of discrepancies, fallings off, or complacencies
within their diegesis: the B.5 going-nowhere ‘confessions’ of the
personified sins,41 the B.6 ploughing of the half acre, the B.7 pardon
sent by Truþe, the disastrous tasting of the apples at the tree of
Charite in B.16, the construction of the barn of Unitee in B.19–20—
even the search for dowel and the larger narrative quest that
structures the poem as a whole.
As Madeleine Kasten has argued, these kinds of allegorical
manoeuvre in Piers Plowman may bear some relation to Benjamin’s
problem of ‘convention’, the ruined face of history as seen in the
exhausted discursive forms of baroque allegory.42 We might also
think of the scene noticed by Fish in Pilgrim’s Progress, when
Christian, who has been encouraged in his journey by the
personification Faith, catches up with Faith, but then triumphantly
overtakes him and falls over.43 Bunyan’s narrative of Christian’s
journey changes, in other words, as Christian’s relation to Faith
alters from ‘following’ to ‘overtaking’, from humility to pride; his self-
congratulatory advance alters the narrative of progress, introducing
an element of moral complacency into it, so that it no longer
denotes spiritual advance at all. Fish claims that this local
problematization of the figure of progress compromises the text’s
entire narrative—pilgrim’s ‘progress’: Bunyan’s intention ‘is nothing
less than the disqualification of his work as a vehicle of the insight it
pretends to convey’.44 We might further note that this manoeuvre is
conducted not through the language of commentary but through the
self-subversion of the narrative itself. Similar things often seem to
happen in Piers Plowman; indeed, we might argue that the poet has
to keep renewing his largest shaping figure, the quest, which the
poem repeatedly disqualifies ‘as a vehicle of the insight it pretends
to convey’, and then has to reinvent in new terms all over again. At
many of these crisis points, moreover, the language of explicatory
gloss is often unstable or not even present. In the scene from
Pilgrim’s Progress just mentioned, the governing hermeneutic is
signalled first of all not through commentary, but by means of a
narrative in which Christian falls down. Hermeneutic control is
similarly slippery in Piers Plowman. At the end of the poem, when
Conscience welcomes in Frere Flaterere, and again when he leaves
the barn of Unitee and embarks on a new quest, what we see first is
also not authorizing gloss but simple narrative action: if Conscience’s
final references to grace and Piers Plowman give us some clue as to
his (and the poet’s) purposes, the lack of a summatory or
authorizing gloss means that we are again confronted with the
enigma of ‘mere’ deeds.
Langland’s mode of writing is highly characteristic of allegory in
general as I have portrayed it here—slippery, contrastive,
pugnacious, episodic, contradictory—and not always gloss-able. Few
readers now cite Rosemary Woolf to the effect that Piers Plowman’s
lack of continuous surface narrative makes it ‘non-medieval’;45 but
the degree to which narrative disruption is the stuff of medieval
allegorical narrative has perhaps not been fully appreciated. If the
texts that will interest me in this book operate a number of
discursive balancing acts, they often make meaning by seeming to
undo it.
These forms of strategic discontinuity and dissonance may be
particularly common in religious narrative allegory. This might be
because in religious allegory the reader is so frequently asked to
look beyond the material world and its artefacts: many forms of
religious discourse tend towards critique, anti-materialism,
iconoclasm and apophasis. It is here that the connection made by
Benjamin between allegory’s semantic fluidity and its ‘destructive
verdict’ on what he calls ‘the profane world’ has greatest purchase.46
Similarly relevant is Madsen’s description of disenchanted modernist
allegorical narrative, in which the predominance of metaphor, with
its structuring lack of identity, means that it always points to the lack
of any unitary semantic content. What Madsen describes as
modernism’s attempt ‘to represent the unrepresentable, to present
the existence of the unpresentable’ in fact remains the central
project of much medieval religious allegorical narrative, where the
‘anticipated plenitude of meaning—a mystical reconciliation of tenor
and vehicle … does not come’.47
But this is not just some purely cerebral or high ‘mystical’
apophaticism: in the Middle Ages, as Turner says, ‘apophaticism was
no mere intellectual critique of discourse, but was in addition a
practice which was expected to be embodied in a life’.48 We are
talking here about textual strategies designed both to analyse and
catalyse spiritual transformation—moral and psychological change.
Fish’s ‘self-consuming artifact’ is a philosophical or religious text that
subverts its own apparent assumptions—and those of the implied
reader—by means of what he calls a ‘dialectical’ method, a
disorienting and conversionary interplay of ‘two positions’.49 The
religious allegorical narratives that I shall discuss here perform
similar functions, though I shall argue that they do so primarily
through narrative forms and textual actions. Their fictions are
shaped by internal discrepancy, opposition, aggression,
contradiction, and enigma, and they are characteristically high-
handed, even iconoclastic, with the expectations engendered by
their own narratives. Quilligan is right about the difficulty of talking
‘about the substantive statements made by a poem when it changes
its form’; but she is nevertheless clear that when such change occurs
in an allegorical narrative, it suggests that the modes of
interpretation previously in operation are under question.50 Such
ruptures are not disasters, but catalysts for new forms of thought
and living.

A Note on Texts and Translation

In this book, I compare Piers Plowman with a number of large
textual traditions. I am not claiming that Langland knew all the
particular texts I discuss. What I do suggest is that he knew
something of the traditions of which they are part—including
writings in both Latin and French51—and may have assumed that
some members of his audience did too. For this reason, I make
some effort to document the wide availability of these traditions,
with a view to hypothesizing some of the textual conversations that
may have informed Langland’s distinctively rebarbative, iconoclastic,
and dialectical modes of writing. Like my earlier Piers Plowman and
the Medieval Discourse of Desire, this is a book about textual
conversations, not sources in the narrow sense, and, like that book,
this one makes no claim that the texts with which Langland was in
dialogue determined what he did with their materials.
There are a couple of exceptions to my claim that Langland did
not necessarily know particular texts that I cite. Part 5 depends on
the argument that Langland knew something of the grail romances,
and for this reason I lay out the evidence for this claim at the
opening of chapter 9. In part 3, I explore the case for comparing
Piers Plowman with Marguerite Porete’s Mirouer des simples ames,
but the argument of this section does not hang on the connection;
for this reason the evidence for the availability of Porete’s text in
England in the period that Langland was writing (whether in French
or in English) is contained in an Appendix at the end of the book.
I have used the B Text of Piers Plowman in this book because a
number of its distinctive features reflect my preoccupation with the
forms of hypocrisy, conflict, and disruption. These features include
several of the B Text’s most striking passages: Studie’s description of
the corrupt forms of studie, Clergie’s descent into riddle reading in
B.13, Piers’ participation at the tree of Charite, and, perhaps most
importantly, the B.7 tearing of the pardon. In this version of the
poem, the distinctive hypocritical and iconoclastic aspects of the
poet’s imaginative thinking and writing are most on show. And yet,
although some of these features are changed or deleted in the C
Text, forms of hypocrisy, conflict and disruption are everywhere
visible in C too; indeed, most of the features of the poem discussed
in this book are still in the C Text.52 Whatever motivated the poet to
revise certain aspects of his text, it seems to me that these aspects
of his thinking and writing did not fundamentally change.
I do not see a problem with using Langland’s different versions to
comment on each other. A good number of scholars have insisted
that the different versions of Piers Plowman reflect various distinct
stages in the poet’s thought and should not be confused or identified
—and they are no doubt right.53 The C Text tries out new
articulations of several of the poem’s problems (I am reluctant to use
the language of ‘solutions’), especially around questions of
penitentialism, ecclesiology, and poverty. Nevertheless, the dialogic,
oppositional, dialectical, and (therefore) allegorical nature of
Langland’s thought means that all his theological and poetic
formulations are part of an ongoing, revisionary, even ‘negating’,
dialogue with himself. They are almost all situation-specific and
perspectival, and have to be read as part of a sustained and restless
engagement between the many different elements that make up the
poet’s moral, political, and spiritual landscape. Michael Calabrese is
right that ‘Langland was not trying to refine his work, get it right, so
to speak. Rather he strove to reinvent, reimagine, rethink …’54 Even
Christ’s triumphant and apparently synthesizing speech in B.18, after
all, is a fine balancing act between claims about how his redemptive
work satisfies justice and yet how it also springs from overwhelming,
living kinship with humanity. I am not for a moment suggesting that
the different versions of the poem can be conflated; but what I do
assume is that, insofar as the different versions of the poem often
illuminate each other, this is because we can see them working out
different ways of tackling the challenges that the poet set himself.
I provide a translation for all medieval text quoted that is not in
Middle English. Most of the time I consider that is it is important or
illuminating also to be able read the text in the original language and
I provide this as well; but in the interests of saving space I do not
provide the original in every case. I provide local glosses for Middle
English texts. Here I also use the characters ‘þ’ (equivalent to
modern ‘th’) and ‘Ȝ’ (‘g’, ‘gh’, ‘y’) where they appear in the editions;
however, I have regularized ‘i’ and ‘j’ and ‘u’ and ‘v’ according to
later usage.

The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman. Nicolette Zeeman, Oxford
University Press (2020). © Nicolette Zeeman.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198860242.001.0001

1 Turner, Darkness of God, p.8.

2 My object of interest here is narrative allegory, but because a long post-
medieval critical tradition has also used the term ‘allegory’ for such texts, I use this
term too. Throughout the Middle Ages, of course, the term allegoria primarily
denotes a mode of interpretation: medieval writers would not have used allegoria
or its cognates for narrative allegory. See Copeland and Struck, ‘Introduction’, p.2;
Silk, ‘Invoking the Other’.
3 Some who have insisted on this in strong terms include Aers, Piers Plowman,
pp.48–9, 63–131; and Mann, ‘Langland and Allegory’; ‘Allegory and Piers
Plowman’, p.80; for a much earlier version of the claim, with whose terms I would
nevertheless take issue, see Woolf, ‘Some Non-Medieval Qualities’.
4 An extreme version of this position is Van Dyke’s claim that there is a
philosophically ‘Realist’ allegory that refers to identifiable metaphysical entities;
Van Dyke also claims that ‘the apprehension of disjunction’ is ‘a less complete
response to allegory, albeit an easier one’ (Fiction of Truth, pp.38–46; citation
p.44).
 5 It is in this sense that in ‘Negative Langland’ Smith is also describing the
characteristic modes of allegory; see also the discussion of dialectical structure in
Piers Plowman below, chap.3, pp.121–3.
6 The presence of paradiastole in the poem was first identified by Aers in
Beyond Reformation? (pp.64–90): I am much indebted to this important book.
7 On medieval personification dialogue and debate, see the excursus below,
‘Personifications in Dialogue and Debate’.
8 Fish, Self-consuming Artifacts, pp.2, 75.
9 Seminal texts on the Roman de la rose that have influenced my thought
include: Poirion, Le Roman de la rose; Hult, Self-fulfilling Prophecies; Huot, From
Song to Book; Kay, Romance of the Rose; Gaunt, ‘Bel Acueil’.
10 Whitman, Allegory, p.9.
11 See Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, pp.28–31; also Copeland and
Melville, ‘Allegory and Allegoresis’.
12 See Honig, Dark Conceit, p.91; de Man, ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’, p.189; Silk,
‘Invoking the Other’. For a recent example of this claim, see Greenfield, The Ends
of Allegory.
13 Teskey, Allegory and Violence; for a forceful critique of Teskey’s work, see
Scanlon, ‘Personification and Penance’, pp.8–10; and, more mutedly, Moshenska,
‘Why Can’t Spenserians Stop Talking about Hegel?’; also Zeeman, ‘Personification
and Alienation’.
14 Crawford, Allegory and Enchantment, pp.14–21.
15 Quilligan, Language of Allegory, p.53; see also Honig, Dark Conceit, pp.14,
53–4; Mann, ‘Langland and Allegory’.
16 Tesky, Allegory and Violence, p.30, where he also describes ‘the disorder out
of which allegory works’.
17 Poirion, Le Roman de la rose, pp.124–33; Kay, Romance of the Rose, pp.60–
5.
18 On the many ‘places’ from which the personifications of the Roman speak,
see Kay, Place of Thought, p.180. Although Raison purportedly personifies
rationality, her speech is a dazzling display of paradox, and she presents herself to
the lover as an alternative beloved: ‘I have no wish for you to remain without a
sweetheart. If it please you, fix your thoughts on me …’ (lines 5791–3; trans. p.89;
see also lines 5791–5834).
19 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp.175–7; on Benjamin’s
revaluation of the mortificatory and fragmentary in allegorical drama as a reaction
to the romantic critique of allegory, see Silk, ‘Invoking the Other’; also Caygill,
‘Walter Benjamin’s Concept’.
 20 Fletcher, Allegory, p.23; also pp.24–68, 221–306; making a simpler, but
valid, point about the role of binary oppositions in much medieval allegory, see
Strubel, La rose, pp.63–6.
21 Quilligan, Language of Allegory, pp.22–8. Quilligan notes that not all of
these linguistic levels or registers need actually be present within the text, which
may well invoke culturally dominant texts, narratives or iconography without
actually mentioning them; she calls these ‘pre-texts’ (chap.2).
22 De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp.206, 145 (also all of chaps 7–9; and Silk,
‘Invoking the Other’).
23 Kay, Place of Thought, pp.35, 84.
24 Silk, ‘Invoking the Other’.
25 Hunter, ‘Allegory happens’, pp.266–7.
26 Moshenska, ‘Why Can’t Spenserians Stop Talking about Hegel?’.
27 Madsen, Rereading Allegory, pp.72–3; also Fineman, ‘The Structure of
Allegorical Desire’; on episodicity, see also Quilligan, Language of Allegory, pp.28,
60–2; and on Piers Plowman, Middleton, ‘Narration and the Invention of
Experience’.
28 See Hult, Self-fulfilling Prophecies.
29 On allegorical ‘pre-texts’ and their temporal implications, see Quilligan,
Language of Allegory, chap.2; and de Man, ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’, pp.207–8.
30 The fact that much medieval romance, especially interlaced prose romance,
is also highly episodic and prone to think through comparative parallels and
variants, may affirm the pervasiveness of this semi-allegorizing episodicity even in
medieval texts not usually described as allegorical.
31 Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.175; earlier Benjamin has spoken similarly
of the ‘baroque apotheosis’ as ‘dialectical one … accomplished in the movement
between extremes’ and the ‘baroque, secular explanation of history as the passion
of the world’ (pp.160, 166).
32 ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’, pp.207, 222.
33 Dark Conceit, pp. 129–30, 107; also pp.104–8, 129–37.
34 Allegory, pp.229–30.
35 ‘Spirituality and Economics’, p.93.
36 Susan Stakel’s determination to identify Jean de Meun’s Roman with irony
leads her oddly to underplay that of Guillaume de Lorris’ part of the poem (False
Roses).
37 Kay, Place of Thought, p.184.
38 Citation from Carruthers, Search for St Truth, p.45; Simpson, ‘Spirituality and
Economics’.
 39 Carruthers discusses verbal instability and its relation to narrative disorder in
the poem in Search for St Truth, chap.2; see also Simpson, ‘Spirituality and
Economics’; on punning in the poem more generally, see Quilligan, Language of
Allegory, pp.21, 58–79, 162–5; Davlin, A Game of Heuene.
40 Langland, Piers Plowman. A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. Schmidt; unless
otherwise marked, I will be citing the A and the B Texts from this edition.
41 See Scanlon, ‘Personification and Penance’, p.26; Hanna, Penn Commentary
2, p.78.
42 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp.175–82; see Kasten, In Search
of ‘Kynde Knowynge’.
43 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p.66.
44 Self-consuming Artifacts, pp.224–9 (citation p.225).
45 Woolf, ‘Some Non-Medieval Qualities of Piers Plowman’, pp.112, 117–18,
121.
46 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.175.
47 Madsen, Rereading Allegory, pp.124–5. Madsen argues that medieval
allegory is either figural (that is, in pursuit of ‘normative meaning’, pp.77, 86) or
that it stands in a ‘fallen’, questioning or ironic relation to figuralism (see the
readings of Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun, pp.68–72).
48 Darkness of God, p.8.
49 Self-consuming Artifacts, pp.1–3, 227.
50 Language of Allegory, pp.77–8.
51 A broad consensus seems to have emerged on Langland as a reader of
French in recent years. Middleton several times gave an unpublished paper on
Langland as a man who came of age in the strongly Anglo-French culture of the
1360s, entitled ‘Langland and the French Tradition’. In print, see Hanna, London
Literature, chap.5; Burrow, Langland’s Fictions, pp.113–18; Zeeman, ‘Tales of Piers
and Perceval’ (and now chaps 9 and 10 here); Davis, ‘Piers Plowman and the
Querelle’; and the cluster of essays by Perry, Strakhov, Nievergelt, Watson,
Galloway, and Zeeman gathered in YLS under the heading ‘Langland and the
French Tradition’.
52 When citing the C Text, I shall use Pearsall’s revised edition; as noted above,
for the A and B Texts I shall cite Schmidt’s revised parallel-text edition.
53 See Piers Plowman … C-text, ed. Pearsall, p.3; also Donaldson, Piers
Plowman; Middleton, ‘Acts of Vagrancy’; Godden, The Making; Hanna, William
Langland, pp.14–17; ‘The Versions’; Wood, Conscience, especially pp.13–19;
Calabrese, Introduction, especially pp.xiv, 20–2.
54 Calabrese, Introduction, p.31.
 Excursus: Personifications in
Dialogue and Debate

Parts 1–3 of this book focus strongly on personifications, often in

dialogue or debate. In this Excursus, I therefore investigate the
history of the combination of personification and dialogue or debate;
I am interested in what this combination seems to mean for
medieval writers, but also for the history of allegory more generally.
Allegory and personification do not always go together—neither
one necessarily implies the other;1 nevertheless, personifications are
common in medieval narrative allegory, where they also often talk or
argue with each other.2 Personification dialogue and debate thus
represent a particular version of the division and opposition that,
according to Angus Fletcher, is a shaping feature of narrative
allegory more generally: according to Fletcher, allegorical narrative,
with its tendency to imagine ideas as discrete images or
anthropomorphized figures, but also to represent them interacting
with each other, is both frictional and polarizing. He says:

the Ideas remain philosophically distinct (they seem not to dare touch each
other), almost in inverse proportion to the degree of interaction they exhibit
… This means that along with a complicating movement there goes a
simplifying movement … the Ideas are presented, each one in turn, as
entities capable of the most refined and narrow delineation.3

At one level, Fletcher’s comments suggest that we might define

personification dialogue and debate philosophically, as ideas (or
concepts or categories) in conversation. Yet his psychoanalytic
orientation and the centrality that he accords to psychic and
conceptual ‘ambivalence’ also allows him to acknowledge the human
and affective investedness of all such oppositional engagements—
their element of ‘person’. For him, personification inevitably entails
interaction and mutual fascination (‘they seem not to dare touch
each other’). In giving human form, animation, speech and at least
the effect of psychology to a concept or word, personification is thus
a primary illustration of his claim that allegory is oppositional and yet
psychically charged. Fletcher also provides us with some guidelines
for understanding why the speaking personification, along with
personification dialogue or debate, play such a central part in
medieval allegory. The speaking personification is a means of
imaginatively locating and embodying the divisions and oppositions
of the narrative; it articulates them verbally and argumentatively,
giving voice to allegory’s analytical drive, its dialogic tendencies, and
its combative animus. At the same time, the fact that it is a
personification who speaks means that any claims to hermeneutic
control are inevitably placed under question or marked as partial.
These must be at least some of the reasons for the omnipresence of
the speaking personification and personification debate in medieval
allegorical narrative.4

Personification/Prosopopoeia
The speakerly aspect of personification—or what Classical and
medieval theorists often called prosopopoeia—has been in many
ways occluded by the post-medieval term ‘personification’, along
with a post-medieval tendency to define the trope of this name
almost exclusively in terms of the animation of abstractions or
inanimate phenomena.5 However, more recently several modern
theorists have stressed this speakerly aspect. As we have just seen,
Fletcher insists on the importance of debate and dialogue as
articulations of allegory’s tendency towards conceptual polarization;
according to this view, in allegory speech and conceptualization are
closely linked. An emphasis on speech is also central to James
Paxson’s important study of personification. According to Paxson, ‘a
primary taxonomic point must be the presence, absence, or varieties
of speech’, and much of his analysis depends on the idea that,
whatever the referent of the personification, in its speech we always
see in potentia ‘the signature of the vital, sentient mind’.6 According
to Paxson, then, personification certainly involves a type, category,
or concept, but is also a potentially speaking ‘person’. In other
words, the trope of personification—understood as both category
and person, but also possibly as a speaker—shares in the multiple
discursivity that characterizes allegorical narrative more generally.
This discursive hybridity is reflected in the fact that antique and
medieval grammatical and rhetorical theorists do not agree on a
name or a description for the trope (we might note the interesting
and perhaps connected fact that medieval theorists do not have a
name for the genre we call ‘allegory’ either).
It is true that throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages many
theorists describe personification as a substitutive and animating
figure, one that ‘stands in for’ and animates something that is often
(but not always) originally inanimate. In De oratore, for example,
Cicero describes it as a form of metonymy, the substitution of one
term (often a proper name) for another ‘for the sake of ornament’,
and his examples include gods’ names employed to refer to the
phenomenon over which the god has jurisdiction (‘Ceres’ for corn),
but also place names that refer to the people that are in them
(‘Rome’ for its people, ‘the curia’ for the senate), or objects that
refer synecdochically to a related state of being (‘the toga’ for peace,
‘arms’ for war); Cicero also mentions ‘the use of the names of the
virtues and vices to stand for the people who possess them …
“where avarice has found its way”, or “loyalty has prevailed” ’.7
Descriptions of personification in terms of animating substitution can
also be seen in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, and also—even more
important for the Middle Ages, perhaps—in the fourth-century Ars
minor of Donatus, which divides metaphor into four types depending
on how it combines categories of the inanimate and animate.8 This
type of description of personification bears a clear relation to the
post-medieval view of ‘personification’ noted above; it does not
necessarily assume that this is a speaking figure, although animation
and the option of using a proper name certainly imply that speech is
possible for it. This substitutive, animating view of personification
also occurs throughout the Middle Ages.
However, other antique and medieval terms for this trope, such as
prosopopoeia, conformatio, ethopoeia, and adlocutio, along with
their definitions, give much more weight to the idea that this is a
speaking figure.9 These terms and the associated definitions do not
map neatly onto those mentioned above. This is due to the fact that,
although they might denote the substitutive, animating type of
personification, they refer primarily to historical or mythological
individuals (in so doing, of course, they may still have some kind of
generic or conceptual quality associated with the historical or
mythological individual in question). However, in this second cluster
of definitions what is primarily at issue is the attribution of character
and speech. The term prosopopoeia, for instance, was from an early
period associated by rhetoricians with the endowment of life and
‘energy’ of style via speech:

Another figure of thought which may be used to produce force is the figure
called prosopopoeia, for example, ‘Imagine that your ancestors are rebuking
you and speak such words, or imagine Greece or your country in the form of
a woman …’10

This passage from Demetrius, On Style (possibly second century bc),

makes clear that prosopopoeia certainly can have a substitutive
dimension (‘your country in the form of a woman’), but
simultaneously emphasizes that this is a figure capable of speech
(‘your ancestors’), engaging the attention, interest and feelings of
the reader or hearer through the use of words. In Orator, as in De
oratore, Cicero does not use the term prosopopoeia, though here he
notes the ‘stronger lungs’ needed for stylistically elevated figures of
thought such as representing the state as speaking, or calling up the
dead, or ‘making mute objects speak’.11 Here, in other words,
although continuing to emphasize the substitutive or animating
aspect of these figures, Cicero gives equal emphasis to their
speaking nature. Conformatio is the term of choice in the influential
rhetoric Ad Herennium (attributed in the Middle Ages to Cicero).
Once again, this can be either ‘a mute thing or one lacking form’
made articulate or an ‘absent person’ made present. But the Ad
Herennium also makes clear that, for the rhetoricians at least, the
crucial feature of this figure is speech—which is supposed to be ‘in
character’, that is in some way clarifying and descriptive of the
speaker:

Conformatio est cum aliqua quae non adest persona confingitur quasi adsit,
aut cum res muta aut informis fit eloquens, et forma ei et oratio adtribuitur
ad dignitatem adcommodata aut actio quaedam … Proficit plurimum in
amplificationis partibus et commiseratione.
([Conformatio] consists in representing an absent person as present, or in
making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a
definite form and a language or behaviour appropriate to its character … It
is most useful in the divisions under ‘amplification’ and in ‘appeal to pity’.)12

Although it was less widely read in the Middle Ages, Quintilian’s

Institutio oratoria corroborates this emphasis on the speaking aspect
of this figure, as seen from the perspective of the ancient world; the
Institutio may well reflect the wider assumptions and textual
practices associated with the figure inherited by the Middle Ages.
Quintilian speaks of ‘fictiones personarum, quae prosopopoiiai
dicuntur’ (‘impersonations, or prosopopoiiai as they are called’), and
says that they include both things and persons—gods, the dead,
cities, nations, historical and fictional people: ‘puerorum, feminarum,
populorum, mutarum etiam rerum adsimulamus adfectus’ (‘we
simulate the emotions of children, women, nations, and even things
which cannot speak’) and cites Virgil’s Fama, Prodicus’ Voluptas and
Virtus, and Ennius’ Mors and Vita, personifications whom Ennius
represents ‘debating with each other’ (‘contendentes’).13 However,
insisting that such figures must speak in character, Quintilian also
notes that prosopopoeia is used to display ‘adversariorum
cogitationes velut secum loquentium’ (‘the inner thoughts of our
opponents as though they were talking to themselves’), as well as to
introduce ‘nostros cum aliis sermones et aliorum inter se’
(‘conversations between ourselves and others, or [conversations] of
others among themselves’). Here, in other words, Quintilian seems
to insist on a close connection between prosopopoeia and dialogue
or debate.14

Ac sunt quidam, qui has demum prosopopoiias dicant, in quibus et corpora

et verba fingimus; sermones hominum adsimulatos dicere dialogous malunt,
quod Latinorum quidam dixerunt sermocinationem. Ego iam recepto more
utrumque eodem modo appelavi …
(some confine the term prosopopoeia to cases where we invent both the
person and the words; they prefer imaginary conversations between
historical characters to be called dialogues, which some Latin writers have
translated sermocinatio. I follow the now established usage in calling them
both by the same name …)15

Although Quintilian also notes that prosopopoeia can take narrative

form (‘vertitur … in speciem narrandi’),16 by and large for him
prosopopoeia is a figure that speaks from an identifiable position; its
words are both self-articulation and self-gloss, and it is
fundamentally associated with speech and verbal exchange. The
Praeexercitamina of Priscian (c.500 ad) gather the various forms of
this trope and the rhetorical exercises associated under the term
adlocutio, ‘the imitation of speech accommodated to imaginary
situations and persons’. The category is variously subdivided, and
includes eidolopoiia ‘when words are put in the mouths of the dead’,
and prosopopoeia understood as a substitutive, animating figure, as
when ‘rei alicui contra naturam datur persona loquendi, ut Cicero
patriae reique publicae … dat verba’ (‘the speaker is given a
personality contrary to its true nature, as when Cicero gives speech
to the fatherland and to the republic’). Priscian also notes that this
speech can be part of a dialogue or an internal conversation: ‘there
are unmixed forms of [adlocutio], as when it is posited that someone
is speaking to himself; and there are double ones, when he speaks
to others.’17
 In Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s early thirteenth-century Poetria nova, the
term used is prosopoeia, and the definition is again substitutive or
animating, but also clearly associated with speech: ‘Personification,
come forth … Give power of speech to that which has in itself no
such power—let poetic license confer a tongue. So the earth, feeling
Phaeton’s heat, complained to Jove; so Rome, with dishevelled hair,
bewailed in tearful voice the death of Caesar’; for Geoffrey too this is
a substitutive or animatory figure, as confirmed by his personally
composed illustrations, which include the lament of the cross and
that of nature at the crucifixion.18 Danièle James-Raoul has argued
that the medieval poetical arts give more systematic emphasis to the
substitutive view of personification than Classical rhetorics; and yet
she too insists that they also lay great emphasis on the speaking
dimension of this figure, and its important role in rhetorical
amplification.19 Speech, in other words, continues to be crucial.
However, I propose that the full significance of the medieval
‘speaking’ trope of personification/prosopopoeia, whether it is a
ventriloquized historical/mythic person or a speaking
object/abstraction, is only fully apparent when we see it as part of a
long medieval tradition of thinking and teaching through textual
forms of dialogue and debate. Here this trope appears constantly.
Personification dialogue and debate certainly also play a major role
in the elaborate allegorical narratives of the later Middle Ages, but
they are not limited to allegorical narrative; they are also central to a
much larger range of pedagogic, philosophical, meditative and
spiritual writings where verbal exchange was understood to be the
most effective and productive way of doing educational, intellectual,
theological and devotional work. Indeed, there is no late medieval
genre, according to Howard Bloch, that ‘is not infused with at least a
smattering of formal debate’.20 In such contexts, of course, it is
inevitable that the personification that is involved will be a speaking
one.
This sense of a connection between personification/prosopopoeia
and all kinds of pedagogic and pastoral ‘talk’ may well have been
reinforced by the idea, which the Middle Ages inherited from
antiquity and continued to develop in its own terms, that thinking is
a form of inner ‘speech’; personification/prosopopoeia can thus be
seen as an embodiment of the ‘animate word’ of the thinking
mind.21 This idea corroborates not only the way that many medieval
dialogue texts simulate the teaching situation, but also the way that
many of them, particularly those in which an ‘I’ voice is in dialogue
with an aspect of the mind, simultaneously describe the mind in
dialogue with itself:

un dialogue intérieur, obtenu, selon Platon et Aristote, par un dédoublement

du penseur lui-même permettant l’acheminement de la connaissance, et la
confrontation in utramque partem des diverses faces d’une pensée, grâce
au débat avec autrui ou, à défaut, avec soi-même.22

The speaking personification or prosopopoeia thus often represents

and dramatizes people and minds in conversation with themselves.
Stock insists that it is no coincidence that these animations of the
thinking mind also appear in ‘allegory’:

The modern reader tends to understand the allegories written between

Prudentius and Dante as a literary genre, but during the Middle Ages
allegory was also considered to be the literary representation of a
contemplative practice, as one sees clearly in Augustine’s … Soliloquies or
Boethius’ … Consolation of Philosophy.23

Unless we recognize the dialogic and thinkerly textual milieux in

which medieval personification/prosopopoeia—and perhaps also
allegory—evolved, we are not going to understand the tremendous
importance of speech in medieval understanding of this trope, or its
role in allegorical narrative.

Dialogue and Debate

Historians of medieval dialogue have always noted its origins in the
pedagogic and philosophical dialogues of antiquity. The Classical
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The face of
China
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: The face of China

Travels in east, north, central and western China

Author: E. G. Kemp

Release date: February 6, 2024 [eBook #72882]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Duffield and Company, 1909

Credits: Brian Coe, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FACE

OF CHINA ***
 Transcriber’s Note
Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-
clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately,
or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.
Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
THE FACE OF CHINA
THE AUTHOR AS CHINESE “FEMALE TRAVELLING
SCHOLAR”
 T H E FA C E O F
CHINA
TRAVELS IN EAST, NORTH,
CENTRAL AND WESTERN CHINA ¶
WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE
NEW SCHOOLS, UNIVERSITIES,
MISSIONS, AND THE OLD
RELIGIOUS SACRED PLACES OF
CONFUCIANISM, BUDDHISM, AND
TAOISM THE WHOLE WRITTEN &
ILLUSTRATED BY E. G. KEMP,
F.R.S.G.S.

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1909
All rights reserved
 THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED TO THE FRIEND

to whose suggestion and encouragement

it owes its existence

PRINCIPAL MARCUS DODS, D.D.

 PREFACE

E
VERY intelligent person that I have met whose good fairy has
led him to the Celestial Empire has fallen under the spell of
that marvellous people and marvellous land. I am fired with
the ambition to cast that spell even on those who have never been
there, by showing them as accurately and vividly as I can, with pen
and brush, what the face of China actually is.
People may describe with success the soul of a people, provided
it is sufficiently near the surface, but the foreigner who has known
and loved China for a lifetime would be the first to repudiate the
possibility of doing this in the case of China. I would rather take
Browning’s view—“Nor soul helps body more than body soul”—and
try to set down faithfully the things I have seen, that they may lead
others to study China for themselves.
It may be objected that the picture is too much couleur de rose,
because I have not dwelt on the dark side of things: but there is a
use for eyelids as well as for eyes.
This book is the result of a year spent in Shansi, 1893–94, and
six months spent in travel through the provinces of Shantung, Chili,
Hupeh, Szechwan, and Yünnan during 1907–8. The former visit was
mainly spent at a medical mission at Taiyüanfu, which was then
remote from Western influences; now everything has changed, and I
travelled from north-east to south-west of the Empire and found no
village untouched by the great awakening. On the first occasion I
was always conscious of a certain hostility in the attitude of the
people towards foreigners; this time it was quite the reverse.
Considering the behaviour of many travellers towards the Chinese,
this seems to me really astonishing; but they are very sensitive in
their appreciation of mental attitude, and they responded
unhesitatingly to the call we made on their chivalry by placing
ourselves unreservedly in their hands. We were repeatedly warned
not to do this, but our confidence was justified by the event. In no
European country could we have been more courteously treated,
and in very few have I travelled so happily and so free from care.
The journey was one long series of pleasant surprises, and my
friend expressed the feelings of both of us when, on crossing the
frontier into Burma, she exclaimed: “If only we could turn round and
go all the way back again!” If any one is induced by reading this book
to make personal acquaintance with China, it will not have been
written in vain.
 NOTE

There is so little in this volume which is drawn from other sources

than personal observation, and information obtained from our
Chinese and missionary friends on the spot, that I have thought well
not to burden the reader with foot-notes. The various details as to
the religions of China are mainly drawn from an interesting little
volume by Giles, “Religions of Ancient China,” Smith’s “Uplift of
China,” and Hackmann’s “Buddhism as a Religion”; while the
account of the railways is from Kent’s “Railway Enterprise in China.”
The spelling of Chinese names is according to the most recent
standard map, giving the orthography of the Chinese Imperial Post
Office.
 CONTENTS
Preface vii
Note ix
I. Shanghai 1
II. Shantung, the German Sphere of Influence 13
III. A Day in the Country (Shantung) 20
IV. Shantung Silk 27
V. Tsinan 31
VI. The Sacred Shrine of Tai Shan 45
VII. The Home of Confucius: Küfow 53
VIII. The Yellow River and Grand Canal 66
IX. Journey into Shansi in 1893 73
X. Taiyüanfu 81
XI. Peking 92
XII. The Péhan Railway: from Peking to Hankow 106
XIII. On the Yangtze: Ichang to Wanhsien 116
XIV. Szechwan High-roads 145
XV. Chengtu 161
XVI. The Min River 173
XVII. Mount Omi 182
XVIII. From Szechwan into Yünnan 195
XIX. The Road to Yünnan Fu 208
XX. Yünnan Fu 218
XXI. Tali Fu 234
XXII. Tali Fu to Teng Yueh 241
XXIII. From China into Burma 252
XXIV. The Present Situation in China 257
Table of Dynasties 271
Index 273
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Coloured Plates
Portrait of Author as Chinese “Female Traveling Scholar”
(p. 236) Frontispiece
Tea-House in Old Shanghai 6
A Suburb of Weihsien 16
A Village School 24
Official (Court Dress) 30
Mountain Chair 46
Tai Shan 48
Private House: Küfow 54
Confucian Temple 56
Mounted Military Escort 64
Our Houseboat, Grand Canal 69
Camel Inn 74
Opium Refuge 80
Theatre Stage 82
Pagoda 84
Tiger Brave 86
Scholar—Southern Servant 91
City Wall of Peking 92
Temple of Heaven 96
A Lady of Quality—An Official 100
Boxer—Kachin Woman (p. 253) 104
Mr. Ku 106
The Brakeman on the Péhan Railway 108
Ancestral Tablet 120
Blue Dawn 122
Yeh Tan Rapid 124
Village and Junk 132
The Look-out on the Yangtze 134
Camel-back Bridge 144
Szechwan Highway 150
Sunlight and Mist in the Mountains 158
Buddhist Monastery 166
Military Yamen 171
House on Min River 179
Otter Fishing on Min River 181
Mount Omi Bridge 187
Summit of Mount Omi 192
Copper Idol, Sui Fu 196
Cormorants on the Cormorant River 198
Laowatan River 201
Wha Miao 206
Bridegroom—Funeral Pagoda 213
Temple of the God of Literature 221
Fellow-Travellers 226
Tomb of a Philosopher among Rice-fields 229
Tali Fu 235
Shan Woman 249
 Sepia Drawings
Cemetery of Confucius 61
Old Examination Buildings 88
Great Wall 110
Chinese Graves 116
River-side Shrine 141
The Chef on the Yangtze 141
City Gate: Chengtu 160
Police Boatman: Min River 181
Signboard of Inn 181
Buddhist Monk beating Fish Gong while Chanting 189
Tiger Shrine 189
Our Military Escort 203
“Orphan Spirit” Shrine 203
Tower of Refuge 204
“Omi to fu” Shrine 204
Miao Woman 206
Upland Village 208
Uh Chai 208
Yünnan Hat 211
Lolo Woman 211
Village Screen Wall 233
Carrying-Chair 233
Suspension-Bridge 243
Bridge made of Creepers 244
THE FACE OF CHINA