Interpretation in Piers Plowman treats the poem as the work of a fourteenth-century intellectual--that is, as the work of a litteratus, one obsessed with written texts, who interprets all human experience on the model of textual interpretation. But instead of providing a theory of interpretation, Langland shows what happens when incommensurable interpretive systems collide. The dreamer in the poem learns that the intellectual's lust for self-justification on the model of textual argument is futile and self-destructive, and yet that the intellectual must approach God, if at all, through texts. Literacy turns out for the intellectual to be itself instrumental like sin: an understanding of the wrongness of wanting to master texts in order to justify oneself provides the stimulus for a necessary refocusing of one's life.Rogers' philosophical and theological investigation of the unifying themes of Piers Plowman argues that the structure of the text reflects William Langland's view of the world and human experience.
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