Conscience and the Composition of Piers Plowman provides a detailed account of
one of the central personified figures in William Langland's Piers Plowman.
Previous critical accounts of Conscience either focus on discussions of the
faculty conscience in scholastic discourse, or eschew personification allegory
as a useful category in order to argue for the figure's development or education
as a character during the poem. But Conscience only appears to develop as he is
re-presented, in the course of Piers Plowman, within a series of different
literary modes. And he changes not only during the composition of the various
episodes in different modes that make up the single version,