ABSTRACT
One of the things that make Piers Plowman an unusually difficult poem is the fact that it seems organized in so many different ways at once. Piers Plowman seems governed by at least one other large structural pattern, in its way perhaps more vital for the thematic unity of the poem than any of the others. In Piers Plowman, the two subjects dealt with in the first half of Holy Church’s speech—natural goods and artificially contrived goods—are developed in the remainder of the Visio, which thus becomes recognizable as the part of the poem devoted primarily to the problems of natural man. A notable peculiarity in the treatment of the Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman is the continual close association of gluttony and sloth, explained by Siegfried Wenzel as probably resulting from “the fact that in late medieval popular literature acedia came to be reckoned among the sins of the flesh.”
