Andrew Cole

Religious forms and institutions in Piers Plowman

Which comes first: institutions or selves? Liberal democracies operate as if selves preceded institutions. By and large, pre-Reformation culture places the institution before the self. The self, and particularly the conscience as the source of deepest ethical and spiritual counsel, is intimately shaped, by the institution of the Church. This shaping is both ethical and spiritual; by no means least, it ensures the soul’s salvation, though administering the sacraments especially of baptism, penance, and the Eucharist. The conscience is not a lonely entity in such an institutional culture. It is, rather, the portable voice of accumulated, communal history and wisdom: it is, as the word itself suggests, a ‘con-scientia’, a ‘knowing with’. These tensions generate the extraordinary and conflicted account of self and institution in Langland’s Piers Plowman.