Articles Available Online

In his book Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote, ‘Each evening we see the sun set We know that the earth is turning away from it Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight’ The evidence of our own eyes jars with physical proofs, and we must rely on language to bridge the gap But before we are taught the explanation, the sight of the sun setting over the spinning world exists in a zone of slippage, where seeing something and knowing it to be true are different things   This is the best figure I have to describe the kind of world in which an English medieval dream poem takes place They are wonderful and strange environments, where what we read is not always easy or possible to visualise, and besides, everything means something else   Piers Plowman, the 14th-century multi-dream epic, is particularly difficult to follow It’s written in a tricky dialect of Middle English, and its unknown author tends to yank his ‘camera’ around wildly The poem begins with its narrator falling asleep in the Malvern Hills (he ‘slombred into a slepyng’), before his dream begins To the east, he sees a huge tower rising up to the sun, with a dungeon and deep ditches beneath it But then he sees something more: ‘A fair feeld ful of folk fond I ther bitwene / Of alle manere of men, the meene and the riche’ (‘I found a fair field full of folk, there in between / Of all manner of men, the mean and the rich’) The ‘eye’ of the poem wanders, zooming in and out, from the sun to a huge tower to a close-up of an individual man using a plough to till the earth If it were a movie, the reader would be seasick   Instability, shameless inconsistency, subtle paradox, resistance to visualisation: these are very medieval literary flavours The instability principle applies to medieval poetry but also, vector-like, to the way texts vary from manuscript to manuscript The scholar Paul Zumthor called it mouvance, the way that medieval texts – especially those that