Appleford, AmyWatson, NicholasCruz Kelly, Liam2025-09-172025-09-172024https://hdl.handle.net/2144/512302024This dissertation analyzes agricultural images in late medieval literature and pastoral care, primarily the image of the plowman and his plow. I argue that tracing and interpreting plow images illuminates changing conceptions of what constituted valuable and productive labor in medieval English literature. This imagery intends, above all, to create conceptual links between the realities of lay agricultural work and the spiritual work of priests or other professional religious. Representations of the plow image in medieval English literature function as metaphorical images of the medieval church’s education of the laity. As the role and cultural value of clerical labor was a topic of great interest and debate in late medieval England, this dissertation considers how the plow image relates to the religious catechesis and controversies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.The introduction outlines instances of the plow image found in the Bible and considers the historical development of the plow object in medieval England, providing crucial context for conceptions of the plow in medieval English literature. Chapter one, “The Plow Image in Early English Literature,” examines the various early medieval literary representations of the plow image, with a focus on concepts of self-sufficiency in Bede’s Vita Sancti Cuthberti. Chapter two, “The Lay Folks’ Catechism and Late Medieval Pastoral Care,” suggests how the content of pastoral care in late medieval England developed the concept of preaching as metaphorical plowing through vernacular commentary, remediation, and enumerations of doctrinal formulas. Chapter three, “William Langland’s Catechetical Plow,” brings together the concerns of the previous two chapters by interpreting the plow image in William Langland’s fourteenth-century allegorical dream vision, Piers Plowman. This long alliterative poem connects agricultural imagery, catechetical discourse, contemporary religious controversies, and concerns over productive divisions of labor. Langland’s text synthesized earlier and arguably simpler medieval depictions of the plow in order to create a complex allegory for social cooperation. This dissertation argues that the crucial importance of the plow image for medieval English writers was that it facilitated commentary on both religious education (spiritual direction of the laity through preaching and the instruction of catechetical formulas) and agricultural labor (the material conditions of lower classes) at the same time. Chapter four, “Three Plow Images in Piers Plowman,” continues the analysis of Langland’s catechetical plow by looking at the central examples of the plow image throughout the text. Langland constructs his new plow image around themes of charity, pilgrimage, and evangelization in order to propose a new model for mutual cooperative labor. In the conclusion and coda, “How the Plowman Taught his Paternoster,” I propose areas for further study of the medieval plow image by considering the Piers Plowman tradition as well as other instances of the Middle English plow image.en-USAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Medieval literatureReligious historyAgricultureCatechesisLaborLanglandPlowPreachingThesis/Dissertation2025-09-16