Response [to Richard Barnes “Langland’s Stance and Style”], “Langland’s Stance and Style”]

Barnes identifies WL’s “pressure of motivation” in his compassion and relentlessness; his insistence on the present experience in the world; and his fidelity to fact, faith, and language that eschews eloquence. In a way not analyzed in Barnes’s paper, however, writing for WL must have been a gaudium as well as a suffering.