Plowboy Trope

The plowboy trope appears in Christian rhetoric and literature in the form of various bucolic, lowly, pious or even unsavoury characters who would benefit from being exposed to Scripture in the vernacular. The plowboy trope is an anti-elitist trope dating back at least 1600 years.

Appearances

Jerome (386)

The trope starts with St. Jerome's letter eulogizing the region of Bethlehem, where he lived, remarking on how the local popular songs' lyrics were from the Psalms:

John Chrysostom

St. John Chrysostom () invokes a related set of characters who can understand Christ's few and plain words to love God and neighbour:

Amalarius

Amalarius's ''Liber officialis'' () does not supply a cast of characters, but makes the cantor of the Mass, by analogy, into a ploughman, and so utilizing the trope's the other elements of ploughing, singing and simple sincerity:

Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen (1393)

Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen was one of the first of the Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer.

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1516)

The opening exhortation of the first edition of Erasmus' Novum Instrumentum omne pleads for vernacular use of the Gospel texts, especially memorized and vocalized versions, and with an emphasis on women:

This was expanded in the third edition of 1522 (and re-used in Dominican friar, Marmochino, 1638 Italian Bible's preface):

Erasmus combined Jerome and Chrysostom's cast, and added more characters in his ''Paraphrase of St Matthew'' (1524):

In the same material, Erasmus noted with approval that Jerome encouraged "virgins, wives and widows" to read but spoke against the mangled, unfit interpretations of "the garrulous hag, the delirious old man, the loquacious sophist."

Note the vocal rather than mental emphasis:

A French Carthusian opponent of vernacular translation, Petrus Sutor, in 1524 wrote of the dangers that a woman engrossed in the Scriptures would neglect her domestic duties, and a soldier would be slow to fight.

Middle English Plowmen

The plowman was independently a literary figure in Middle English poetry with an anti-elitist, anti-simonatical and even political edge. The high societal value of ploughing was given in such songs as ''I-blessyd Be Cristes Sonde'' (''God spede the plough''), and their misfortune in ''Song of the Husbandman''.

Initially this was a solid peasant who could articulate their faith. Chaucer wrote of a good and pious ploughman. Margaret Deanesly quotes a poem (before 1400), of an (illiterate) ploughman, taught orally by the community, going to his annual confession where the priest had to check his knowledge of the Creed and Gospel:

In Lenten times the parson him did shrive:
He said "Sir, canst thou they believe?"
The ploughman said unto the priest
"Sir, I believe in Jesu Christ
which suffered death and harrowed hell,
as I have heard mine elders tell."

At times, the plowman was a religious radical who speaks the plain truth for the poor, godly commons against corrupt elites and hypocritical English clergy. The most famous is the late 13th century alliterative allegorical poem ''Piers Plowman''. The figure re-arrears in a work perhaps from the turn of the 15th century, the Lollard satire '' Piers the Ploughman's Creed''; a related work '' Mum and the Sothsegger'' features and ancient gardner (c. lines 976.)

In the early Tudor period, the play ''Gentleness and Nobility'' features a plowman debating a knight and a merchant, about the social disruption of enclosure.

A Late Middle English or Scots work "''The Prayer of the Ploughman''", perhaps of Lollard origins, says "a lewd man may serve God as well as a man of religion; though that the ploughman ne may not have so much silver for his prayer, as men of religion."

William Tyndale (1520s)

The versions attributed to William Tyndale come from a much later report by John Foxe of a squabble at a dinner party and may be apocryphal. There are various versions in circulation:

The version attributed to Tyndale combined Erasmus' trope of the devout worker with the English popular image of the protesting pious plowman. It maintains the anti-elitist stance, but not characteristic of singing/devotion of the Jerome-Erasmus thread.

Some LDS commentators see Tyndale's purported statement as a prophecy of Joseph Smith, who had been a ploughboy.

Rheims New Testament (1582)

The Douay–Rheims Bible's preface pointed out that when the scriptures (or New Testament, at least) were written and circulated, the books were never in private, uneducated hands and used casually. In place of that anachronism, it posits what some might consider another: the characteristic Catholic emphasis of a liturgy-centred Christian life, in which scripture is experienced through the liturgy (or the Mass or of the Hours):

Other uses

The plowboy trope has also been attributed, perhaps in confusion with Tyndale, to John Wycliff and Martin Luther

A 16th-century Catholic controversialist Johann Cochlaeus also weighed in:

A modern variant, with a different singing motif, is

In Hilary Mantel's fiction ''Wolf Hall'', her character Thomas Cromwell adopts the antagonistic mode of Tyndale:

Notes

References

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Tropes
Religious rhetoric
History of Christian theology