The Sign of Labour: Craft, Symbol, and Theology in Late Medieval England, 1348–1470

Abstract

This dissertation argues that in the century-and-a-quarter following the Black Plague’s initial outbreak in 1348, the labourer blooms in art and literature as a multifaceted theological sign. During this period artists and authors devise new and unexpected theological meanings for the tools, motions, and bodies of those who perform manual work. These meanings frequently transcend the categories within which symbolic depictions of labourers in the middle ages have been commonly understood. Previous analyses of labour as a symbol in medieval England focus primarily on two categories of meaning: 1) particular crafts signifying pre-established and stable metaphorical or allegorical meanings (e.g. shepherds signifying priests, or particular crafts signifying months of the year); or 2) rural labour signifying the possibility of societal reform (e.g. tilling one’s plot as representative sign for going back to work within one’s divinely allotted station). I argue, however, that full consideration of the realm of religious symbolism should prompt us to expand our categories for understanding labour as a sign well beyond these traditions of reformist or biblical signification. In the late medieval period, the gestures, tools, practices, even the sweat and blood, of bodily travail were growing rapidly and unpredictably as signs of lofty theological realities. This growth is evident across a wide sphere of late medieval writing and art, appearing prominently both in minor texts produced for private engagement and major works or productions such as Piers Plowman and the York Corpus Christi Plays. In the sampling of works analyzed the signs of labour expand in their meaning to a variety of fields of theological thought: most prominently (but not limited to) the realms of theological ethics, devotional pedagogy, and eucharistic theology.