Langland and the "Merit of Faith"

Prof. Justice's talk offers to identify the motive and bearing of the "inner" dream that is central (in all available senses of the adjective) to Piers Plowman. Deep revisions to this section of the poem worked out increasingly audacious narrative devices meant to anatomize a conceptual problem and to set its parts into motion-the problem about the mechanics of belief implicit in the maxim, "Faith has not merit when human reason supplies proof."