Sabotaged Text or Textual Ploy?: The Christ-Knight Metaphor in Piers Plowman.

Although WL appears to undermine his allegory by over-valuing the concrete in the metaphor of the Christ-Knight at the expense of its combinative functions as expression of the theological, social, and liturgical, he is in fact extending the chivalric metaphor along familiar fourteenth-century lines: he modifies the erotic element, develops the motifs (present in the Ancrene Riw1e) of the response to the suffering knight as an image of the redemption, and stresses the recognition of Christ’s lordly status in the repeated patterns of kneeling and naming that are structured around a textual concordance supplied by Phil. 2:5-11.