A version of this paper was presented at the third conference on Piers Plowman at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2007. I thank the organizers, Andrew Cole, Fiona Somerset, and Emily Steiner, for the chance to speak, and the audience, especially Anne Middleton, Carl Schmidt, and James Simpson, for their trenchant comments. I first essayed my view of Patience and Hawkyn in a paper given at Northwestern University in December 2005, and I thank Barbara Newman for her hospitality and thoughtful responses to work then still at a difficult early stage. Finally, I thank Vincent Gillespie and Fiona Somerset for searching readings of a penultimate draft. William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C, and Z Versions, 1 ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Longmans, 1995), I: Text, B.1.79–84. All references to Piers Plowman are to this edition. P IERS P LOWMAN, PASTORAL T HEOLOGY, AND S PIRITUAL PERFECTIONISM: H AWKYN’S CLOAK AND PATIENCE’S P ATER NOSTER Nicholas Watson Thanne I courbed on my knees and cried hire of grace, And priede hire pitously to preye for my synnes, And also kenne me kyndely on Crist to bileue, That I myate werchen His wille þat wroate me to manne: ‘Teche me to no tresor, but tel me þis ilke — How I may saue my soule, þat seint art yholden.’ 1 T his essay uses the meeting of Hawkyn and Patience in Piers Plowman B.13–14 as the culmination of a meditation on the intricate relationship in late-medieval thought between spiritual perfectionism and the universalist mandate of pastoral theology: or, to put this another way, between the purity Will associates with Holy Church, ‘þat seint art yholden’, in the passage quoted above and the applicability of his request to know ‘[h]ow I may saue my