A Will with a Reason: Theological Developments in the C-Revision of Piers Plowman.

The C revisions are characterized by a greater concern for theological accuracy (removal of the tearing of the Pardon and of Piers’s throwing the prop that represents the Son of God) and by a greater importance given to reason and comparatively less importance given to will. Love and learning are brought closer in the revision of Study’s remarks (C. 11; cf. B. 10), and the fourteenth-century cognitive meanings of truth, e.g., that which is grasped by reason, may be reflected in the revisions of the Trajan episode. Liberum Arbitrium, added in C, is understood to be a facultas rationis et voluntatis, as in C. 16.176. The C text is more a poem of the common man; WL’s sympathies “have become more inclusive, his idealism less headstrong. . . .”