In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons explores a widespread
ideological crisis concerning poverty that emerged in the aftermath of
the plague in late medieval England. She identifies poverty as a central
preoccupation in texts ranging from Piers Plowman and Wycliffite
writings to The Book of Margery Kempe and the York cycle plays.
Crassons shows that these and other works form a complex body of writing
in which poets, dramatists, and preachers anxiously wrestled with the
status of poverty as a force that is at once a sacred imitation of
Christ and a social stigma; a voluntary form of life and an unwelcome
hardship; an economic reality and a spiritual disposition.
Crassons argues that literary texts significantly influenced the
cultural conversation about poverty, deepening our understanding of its
urgency as a social, economic, and religious issue. These texts not only
record debates about the nature of poverty as a form of either vice or
virtue, but explore epistemological and ethical aspects of the debates.
When faced with a claim of poverty, people effectively become readers
interpreting the signs of need in the body and speech of their fellow
human beings. The literary and dramatic texts of late medieval England
embodied the complexity of such interaction with particular acuteness,
revealing the ethical stakes of interpretation as an act with direct
material consequences. As The Claims of Poverty demonstrates, medieval
literature shaped perceptions about who is defined as "poor," and in so
doing it emerged as a powerful cultural force that promoted competing
models of community, sanctity, and justice.
