William Langland and Maximianus on impotence

Authors

• Eric Weiskott Boston College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51814/nm.148533

Keywords:

William Langland, Maximianus, impotence, Piers Plowman, old age

Abstract

Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower are known to have borrowed images of death and decrepitude from Maximianus’s sixth-century Latin Elegies, a work studied in fourteenth-century English grammar schools. Fleshing out one of David R. Carlson’s obiter dicta (2017: 75), this essay confirms the place of the third major named Ricardian poet, William Langland, on the roster of fourteenth-century poets whose reading of Maximianus informed their own poetry in English. As Carlson suggested in passing, Langland’s representation of the dreamer’s impotence in Piers Plowman B.20 owes much to the racy, morose, self-pitying, but always elegant and frequently sublime Latin elegiac couplets of Maximianus. Rather than identifying direct parallels of phrasing, the essay explores the revealingly similar tonality of both authors’ descriptions of impotence.