Abstract This essay investigates personification as a means of grappling with lived complexity, beginning with the author’s own experience of serving as chair of a large academic department. It goes on to sketch a sliding scale of embodiment, using a series of case studies from Piers Plowman to examine the ways in which different degrees of physicality are attributed to characters in literary texts. While one might expect a medieval dream vision to assign an attenuated embodiment to virtuous characters and an earthy physicality to vicious ones, Piers Plowman complicates that assumption. Personifications such as Piers Plowman and the sisters Truth and Righteousness are especially effective teachers because their comparatively greater degree of physicality facilitates an embodied pedagogy that includes learning from one’s mistakes. A final series of comparisons between Piers Plowman and modern texts including Pride and Prejudice , the Harry Potter series, and Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle suggests that patterns of embodiment for novelistic characters are broadly similar to those of medieval personifications.
Katharine Breen (2025) studied this question.