Social Conscience and the Poets.

Sees the close relationship of Wycliffite reform and the larger penitential movement stressing individual conscience in a direct relationship to God reflected in PPl where Conscience joins Reason in advising the King concerning Meed, where Conscience guides Will on his journey to discover his soul, and where Conscience helps Will after the vision of the Passion to understand the degenerative processes within Christianity. Wyclif s defense of royal authority against the temporalities of nobility and clergy are noted especially in C-text revisions. Wycliffite elements of PPCrede include attacks on avarice, simony, and temporalities; the many points of satire which it shares with Chaucer’s works suggest that by the early fifteenth century the separate literary traditions of Langland and Chaucer were being blended by penitential and political writers.