David Aers has been publishing on William Langland's Piers Plowman for over forty years and his newest book, Beyond Reformation?, is clearly a product that only a scholar who had been thinking deeply about that poem for such a long time could have produced. It is, as Aers avers at its opening, a ‘somewhat idiosyncratic’ book (p. ix), but it is also an important contribution to Piers Plowman criticism, a sustained engagement with Langland's work that produces a unified vision of a poem deeply concerned with the way in which the Church ideally conceived interacts with wordly affairs, what Aers calls ‘Constantinian Christianity’. As such, Aers's book provides its readers with more than a detailed close reading of Langland's beautiful and complex poem, although it does provide that; it also shows the important place that Langland's poem has in the history of late medieval dissent and early modern reform, all the while detailing Langland's vision of what an ideal Christian Church would look like.

It is this last point on the book's aims – its desire to speak to those interested in the history of the Reformation as well as those invested in different models of ecclesiology – that explains certain idiosyncrasies of the book itself, but not all of them. Its ambition in this regard, for instance, explains certain aspects of the book's presentation. Langland's Middle English, somewhat more difficult than Geoffrey Chaucer's but not as hard as that of someone like the Gawain Poet, is translated throughout. In addition, Aers provides readers with Derek Pearsall's summary of the ‘story Langland tells’ in Piers Plowman (summary, pp. xvi–xix; quotation at p. xvi). These decisions mean that even readers with very little familiarity with the poem can engage with Aers's argument about it. The ambition for a wide audience, one that does not consist exclusively of Middle English specialists, does not explain the most obvious idiosyncrasy of the book, however, the fact that Aers eschews chapters for passūs, those ‘steps’ that make up the formal divisions of Langland's poem, here used to signal the reader's progress through the book's argument. That idiosyncracy seems to be less a product of the book's desired audience and more a function of Aers's ease with his object of study.

That ease produces wonderful results. Aers places Langland's poem in its historical and intellectual context, reading the poem as a response to the way in which the late medieval Church engaged with the world around it. As he does, though, Aers also traces the formal movement of Langland's poem as it dialectically revisits, challenges and rearticulates different moments of the Church's history and its theology. Aers finds that ‘in the culmination of Langland's dialectic, we encounter Christian tradition and its institutions participating in the forces of de-Christianization’ (p. 138). In the final passūs of Langland's poem, the reader witnesses a series of ‘Christological, pneumatological, and ecclesial events’ that establish a Pentecostal community, in which the Holy Spirit, working with ‘the legacy of Christ's Incarnation’, builds the Christian Church (p. 167). Langland imagines such a Church under the guidance not of a priest or a pope or cardinals, but of a layman, Conscience. As Aers finally argues, such a vision ‘eschew[s] institutionalization’ and recommends instead ‘a strange church of fools who will not be drugged into [the] oblivion of the reconciliatory gifts of God manifested in Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the martyrs’ (pp. 171–2). Such is the main argument of Aers's book and what he sees as Langland's vision of the Church: a non-institutional, lay-driven, Pentecostal community of believers guided by the Christ's history and their own consciences. Aers's argument is a powerful reassessment of the way in which the poem's dialectical development successfully ties the poem together, allowing us to see a coherent vision arising from its ruptures and discontinuities

Two possibly related aspects of Aers's book, though, merit further attention. First, the ‘unified vision’ that I mentioned at the opening of this review is no mean achievement in Piers Plowman criticism and it is achieved here by Aers's focus on later points in the poem in order to make sense of earlier ones. A good deal of criticism about Piers Plowman emphasises the poem's discontinuities, its tendency to run an argument or mode of investigation into the ground and to start over, creating an interative, even disjointed narrative. Aers, in contrast, sees the final acts of the poem as a fulfilment of issues that arise in its earlier moments. In part, his emphasis on the poem's ending is why he begins his argument there, freed to do so by Pearsall's summary of the poem. The tendency also explains such argumentative exhortations as ‘we must remember the details of passus viii and it historical allusiveness when we explore its allegorization in passus xxi’ (p. 28), or the way Aers argues that lines in the Prologue ‘anticipate’ later ones in passus xxi (p. 38), or even the way that the Holy Church of passus i is transformed into the late medieval Church of passūs xxi and xxii (pp. 165ff). These things have seemed to some scholars to be so different as to be almost unrelated, but tying them all together is part of what Aers identifies as ‘Langland's dialectical work’ (p. 58). This emphasis on the dialectical fulfilment of Langland's vision is also why the book, depite paying close attention to the poem as a whole, spends most of its time with the final two passūs.

The attention to the way in which Langland ends things might also account for the second notable feature of Aers's work: his focus on the C text of the poem. Langland scholars will know that the poem exists in three versions, called in chronological order A, B and C. The C text is the last one that Langland wrote, and is in most places – except, interestingly here, for the last two passūs – a thorough revision of the B text. But scholars have historically favoured the B text. Most articles cite from B and the introductory companions and guides to Langland's poem all use B, largely because the B text is believed to be the most aesthetically pleasing version, the most poetically ambitious with the richest use of language. The C text supposedly flattens the B text by trying to clarify all of its ambiguities and has largely been an object of interest for those scholars concerned with placing the poem within its larger cultural milieu, like those who wish to discuss Langland's interaction with Wycliffism. However, the logical conclusion of Aers's methodology, which holds that Piers Plowman is not a reiterating and open-ended series of questions but a developing argument with a definite conclusion, would necessitate doing as he does, focusing on the C text as the fulfilment of Langland's dialectical process; we would continue to turn to B, to be sure, but we would have to keep in mind the way in which C alters the material that we find in the earlier version. It will be interesting to see if scholars find Aers's book convincing and move from a focus on B to one on C. Given the fact, however, that the last two passūs remain largely unchanged from B to C, even scholars unwilling to switch versions will find many of the points of Aers's argument relevant and useful.