Christian Philosophy in Piers Plowman

Cole and Galloway survey both the resistance to idea of ‘philosophye’ in PPl as that parallels other writings in the period, and shows the poem defining its own distinctive form of philosophical inquiry via an overloaded allegory and dialogical use of ideas that circulated in late-medieval scholasticism, but which are not invoked in PPl in forms or with attributions that might allow readers to situate the poem centrally in such materials. Its inquiries seem instead to draw from a more diffused range of such ideas in the London region, though pursuing the ideas themselves with rare intensity.