Typological Time in Piers Plowman

Abstract This essay uses Giorgio Agamben’s idea of ‘the time of the end’ to reflect on the paradox of William Langland’s Piers Plowman as an apocalypse that refuses to envision the end. The poem’s apocalyptic features create an experience of time that works against the progression of history to its end and beyond. Considering especially the final passūs of the final version of the poem, C.18–22, the essay argues that the poem is characterized by a dilated now that incorporates the past but insists on perpetual beginning. This dilated now is created by the poem’s political theology but also, and primarily, by its poetics: by its resistance to closure and its idiosyncratic use of typology and repetition.