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

Piers Plowman offers its students difficult reading, seeming at times almost impenetrable. C.S.Lewis gave popular expression to this common reaction with his remark th a t Langland was “confused and monotonous, and hardly makes his poetry into a poem.” Naturally, not all scholars agreed, and the apologists for unity and coherence have been many. Yet, regardless of how astute the analyses or how convincing the arguments put forth by the “unitarians,” many readers continue to share the experience articulated by Mary Carruthers: