The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles the Secretum philosophorum, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman

Latin riddles found in a number of late-fourteenth and fifteenth-century manuscripts as well as in a contemporary English treatise, the Secretum philosophorum, offer a partial solution for Patience’s riddle to the Doctor of Divinity (B.13.151-57), and the revised riddle presented by Conscience in the C text (C.15.158-65a). Changes in the C-text version, which omits any hint of a specially intimate interpretative community, may show that an awareness of his own political risks in riddling was forced on WL by the rebels’ use of riddles in 1381.