Learning from Langland: theo-poetic resources for the post-Hind ...

competing discourses and definitions of learning and which finds ways of both
acknowledging them and transcending them.
The heart of the thesis is therefore a dialogue between two different texts and two different
contexts – the textual and socio-cultural worlds of Hind and Langland. As the Hind reports
reflect the discourse of a certain section of western culture in late modernity, so Piers
Plowman draws on, re-defines and resists certain languages of learning which were current
in late fourteenth century England. The differences between these two periods are
considerable and need to be respected, and I am not suggesting that fourteenth century
ideas can be transposed into a twenty-first century context. 4 Nevertheless, the fact that there
are certain similarities between the materials with which Piers Plowman settles and the
material with which the Hind process settles allows the conversation to proceed. The fact
that the poem does not settle in the same way that Hind does calls the inevitability of the
Hind settlement into question, and challenges us at least to ask whether an alternative, more
Piers-like route towards settlement might be possible in the present.
I will begin in Chapter One with an analysis of the context in which Hind One was written
and the ways in which its use of the word ‘learning’ is both caught up in, and tries to
remain distinct from, contemporary definitions. An understanding of the report’s
educational and theological underpinning will then emerge. Three aspects of the Hind
4 David Lawton writing on literary history and cultural studies, puts it thus:
‘Absolute cultural relativism is a hermeneutic impossibility: we help construct the Others
of the past, not only the medieval Other but the medievalist Other, and they cannot
therefore be exclusively Other. If this is so, our best resource may be a version of the
hermeneutic circle in which we consciously bring our modernity into dialogue with our
understanding of the medieval.’ David Lawton, ‘Analytical Survey 1: Literary History and
Cultural Study’, in Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (eds.), New Medieval
Literatures 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, pp. 237-269, p. 240.
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