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Preface

Any history of Langland studies must for the most part tell the history of its textual controversies. Is Piers Plowman the work of one, or of five? How much emendation of the B archetype is justifiable? Is the Z text authorial, or scribal? Has the power of the alphabet blinded us to the true order in which the versions of the poem were composed? What is the value of John But’s testimony, in A 12, to William Langland’s poetic career? Middle English scholars are intimately familiar with such questions, because they are so important in defining, not to mention interpreting, Piers Plowman. But a problem I take to be more important than any of these has barely registered in critical consciousness. It is deceptively simple: what is the date of the archetypal B manuscript? On its face the question might seem unduly technical and particular. Surely the real issue is when Langland had completed the B version—that, at least, is what critics have focused on in attempting to determine the relation between Piers Plowman and, say, the Rising of 1381, or the ideas of John Wyclif. Most if not all offer 1377–78 as the date of that event.¹ Yet the entire surviving record of the B version descends from Bx (as I call this document, following A. V. C. Schmidt), so its dating is the crucial one. If the two individuals we will call the RF and W~M scribes, so called for the manuscripts they in turn generated (R and F in the former case; WHmCrGYOC²CBLM in the latter),² did not use Bx as an exemplar till, say, 1393, then the history of Piers Plowman needs to be rewritten, beginning to end. It would be difficult to maintain, for instance, that the C version was prompted by the public’s reception of B, or that John Ball or Geoffrey Chaucer knew the B version by 1381, to take two major cases.

There are good reasons to pursue this possibility. One of those reasons inheres in the elegant program of textual affiliations, over the course of entire passages of up to forty lines long, between a C-character manuscript and the W~M group where the RF group has nothing or is spurious. Much of this book will present and analyze that and related programs, arguing that they are the result of contamination of Bx by the C text as now attested only in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS 733B, a witness to the earliest stage of Piers Plowman C (sigil N²). No one has noticed this because the evidence, which can be presented in relatively simple charts, is dispersed over hundreds of lemmata spread over the three Athlone editions and thus published over a span of some thirty-eight years. Previous assumptions that nothing like this could have occurred had the effect of burying the evidence that undermines those very assumptions. But we do not need to go through all that material to assess the plausibility of the idea that Bx was contaminated by C—indeed, to see that it is likely, perhaps even as certain as the evidence will permit. This instance, while not nearly as complicated as the indications upon which this book focuses, has likewise flown entirely below critics’ radar, the reasons for which are as important as the indications themselves. The next few paragraphs will thus not only establish some important groundwork for my argument as a whole, but also serve as a miniature copy of that argument and of the phenomena that have rendered it so contrarian.

Both the local and large-scale cases reveal themselves upon examination of small items that just do not fit the usual narratives of Piers Plowman’s production. We need to put on our Sherlock Holmes hats to figure them out. The clues to the local mystery did not become apparent until J. A. Burrow’s 2007 essay on the rubrics of the B-version manuscripts, in which, somewhat hidden beneath all the data presented there, we find this little gem: “MS R lacks the whole of Passus XIX and the beginning of XX, but at the end of XX R has ‘Passus ii^us de do best’. Remarkably, L has the same heading (but in its guide only) also at the end of the poem, suggesting perhaps expectation of a further, twenty-first passus. Agreement between L and R here may imply that this anomalous heading was present in the B archetype.”³ Burrow is pulling together various strands of discussion from the previous two decades-plus: MS R’s rubric came to light in an essay published in 1985 by Robert Adams;⁴ L’s in David Benson and Lynne Blanchfield’s 1997 catalogue of the B manuscripts;⁵ and the import of LR agreements (though of course voiced in ignorance of this instance) in another Adams study, of 2000: “When L agrees with R, even in the face of massive dissenting evidence from the other witnesses, the odds are always quite good that what R and L are mirroring is Bx (albeit the readings of that prototypical copy can never be simply equated with authorial text).”⁶

But Burrow omits to mention a crucial piece of information that would have answered the question of how this bizarre rubric got into Bx in the first place: “Almost certainly it was laterally imported, perhaps into an ancestor of R,” wrote Adams, “from a C manuscript (where an identical rubric occurs in the XU family at the beginning of the final passus and a very similar one at the end of the same passus in the majority of all C manuscripts).”⁷ In light of his later work and the newly apparent presence of MS L in the picture, we need now to substitute “into Bx” for Adams’s “perhaps into an ancestor of R.” The B archetype, in sum, was contaminated by the C tradition. Any other explanation for LR’s agreement in this error would have an extraordinarily difficult row to hoe.

This conclusion incidentally undermines the argument in whose service Burrow had mentioned it, for if the earliest possible stage of the B-tradition rubrics took shape under the influence of the C tradition, and was erroneous at that, it becomes quite difficult to argue for their authorial nature except on purely literary grounds (and in fact only Burrow and, more recently, Hanna have attempted to do so).⁸ Its implications, though, extend far beyond such arcane topics as the authority of the rubrics. For one, the only evidence for the B tradition’s existence before the later 1380s or early ’90s inheres in the indications of the existence of at most two copies, the C reviser’s B manuscript and possibly the document to which a scribe in MS F’s line of transmission had access.⁹ And it also means that Bx was the product of an era in which readers of Piers Plowman began to become “jealous for the completeness of their copies,” in George Kane’s words.¹⁰ This should immediately prompt us to wonder, for instance, whether this mistaken rubric was the only item that came into B from the C tradition: might, say, the entire final two passus have been part of this contamination? And to what extent should we assent to the editorial assumption that this could not have occurred?

The Lost History of “Piers Plowman” follows up on these questions, answering with a resounding “yes” and “not at all” respectively. It has two major aims: to lay out the evidence leading to this conclusion, which is far more extensive than what is found in LR’s final rubric, and to show that the previous silence about that possibility is not an index to its plausibility, but, rather, the product of the assumption that B was integral. That the only information regarding the LR situation offered by the Kane-Donaldson and Schmidt editions is that MS R has a distinctive rubric on its final folio—nothing about what the rubric says, or L’s role—shows that we need to go beyond their analyses and methodologies as we assess the earliest production and transmission of the poem.¹¹ Chapter 1 examines in some detail the claims made in the service of the beliefs that B was widely available by c. 1380 and its converse, that Piers Plowman A did not achieve substantial circulation until well after its own composition, perhaps even until some decades into the fifteenth century. Some of these popular claims rely on a few codicological indicators, and others, on assumptions concerning supposed allusions to B around 1380. The chapter mines a body of evidence all but neglected in such discussions, that of the textual affiliations, which leads to the opposite conclusion: the A version was widely available, while its immediate successor, B, might not even have gone beyond the poet’s immediate circle till the 1390s or so.

Chapter 2 opens by querying the assumptions, first, that each of the three major textual traditions of the poem was at its origin integral and unaffected by the others, and second, that any indications that suggest otherwise are the result of convergent variation, the means by which unrelated manuscripts attest unauthorial variants not sourced from a mutually exclusive ancestor. Only slightly less powerful is the conviction that conflation—which is what I will argue was a major force in the production of our received B version—always manifests itself in scribal officiousness, such as inconsequence, bad sense, or repetition. None of these is well founded, as the pattern of affiliations summarized above reveals. This chapter examines the means by which MS N^2’s “B” readings have been exiled from the B edition—or, to be more accurate, how W~M’s “C” ones have been kept from the C edition.

The primary mode of this “contamination,” Chapter 3 shows, was via the movement of passages on sheets of loose revision material that could go easily from Langland’s C papers to Bx as copied by the W~M subarchetypal scribe. The converse notion, that such loose papers went in the opposite direction, stumbles for a number of reasons, not least the fact that there is no evidence (unless this pattern is the sole exception) that the B continuation comprised such materials while the C additions, as E. Talbot Donaldson said, “were probably written on separate sheets and their position in the text indicated by one of those complicated systems of arrows and carets that every reviser finds himself adopting.”¹² This chapter demonstrates the point via a focus upon the fortunes of a passage whose textual state serves as a litmus test for any belief in such an integral “B version”: the forty lines in which Langland inveighs against “the poison of possession” and calls for clerical disendowment (received B 15.533–69). (All references to passus, line numbers, and sigils are to the Athlone editions, whose conventions I apply silently to those quotations and references to other schemes—e.g., different line numbers in Schmidt or passus numbers in Skeat’s; see further below on my policies. I do not reproduce editorial brackets.¹³) It is already well known that these lines are misplaced in W~M and absent from RF. What no one has known before is that N² attests them in precisely the “B” form, and the only viable solution to this mess is ur-C > Bx contamination.

Chapter 4 argues, primarily on the basis of textual affiliations—this time not so much N²/W~M as that pattern’s converse, RF/C—that the final two passus were among the C-tradition materials that intruded into B. Again, the assumption that the archetypal texts, Bx and Cx, could be established without regard to the evidence of the other tradition has hampered recognition that, whatever the reason, something very odd is going on in these passus. There is no way that accident could explain the extent to which RF and C agree in this portion of the poem alone. To date, though, no one has been able even to suggest a solution to the problem because our ways of thinking about Piers Plowman have prevented recognition of the problem in the first place. If my own solution—that these passus were not in any “B-version” manuscripts that might have circulated prior to the appearance of C—is viable, then some of the central objects of Middle English studies, ranging from the character of the C revision to the beginnings of “lollardy,” look much different from what we have assumed.

The patterns of affiliations that give rise to this argument confirm the interpretation of the LR “passus ii^us de Dobest” rubric given above, which already would be very difficult to explain otherwise. Yet this idea that Bx was contaminated by the C tradition, while it might seem surprising or even iconoclastic, has in fact already made its mark upon the received B version. For the Athlone editors themselves assumed Bx’s contamination by C, though they buried their statement to that effect in a subordinate clause, in support of a very minor emendation of the C archetype, discussed on the 557th of their 572 pages of prose.¹⁴ Schmidt judges their discussion “incomprehensible,”¹⁵ and indeed they do not see the need to present any evidence of the claim beyond their judgment that a single line in Bx came from C. If, though, they had been explicit about this belief in their earlier, long analysis of the character of the B archetype, and had drawn out the clear implications, Langland studies’ embrace of the assumption of B’s early and wide readership might not have been quite as fervent as it has turned out to be.

Nor, perhaps, would the authority with which critics have invested the surviving manuscripts have had such a firm hold on the field. Much of the controversy surrounding the Athlone edition was in effect a manifestation of this desire to collapse the work (i.e., what we mean by “Piers Plowman B”) into the text of a given document (e.g., the words as presented in Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, MS W, copy-text for the Kane-Donaldson and Schmidt editions). Langland studies are not alone in struggling with the effects and difficulties of this desire. Paul Eggert’s book Securing the Past is helpful to those negotiating this dilemma via its proffering of a new definition of “the work” as an entity “constantly involved in a negative dialectic of material medium (the documentary dimension) and meaningful experience (the textual), and as being constituted by an unrolling semiosis across time, necessarily interwoven in the lives of all who create it, gaze at it or read it.”¹⁶

An earlier generation of editors assumed that “the work” existed quite apart from their own interventions, prompting some recent commentators to react by dispensing altogether with the editorial enterprise, preferring to celebrate, rather than analyze, scribal variants, or to urge a return to manuscripts and the abandonment of author-driven textual reconstruction. I am all for greater emphasis on manuscripts in the study of Piers Plowman, but do not see the need to reject editions as part of that project. Complicit in certain idealist fantasies Middle English textual editing may be; but, as Lee Patterson says, “if the humanist premises that have underwritten textual criticism in the past are now to be dismissed, what is to take their place?” As he points out, “the refusal to edit—which is part of the larger refusal to interpret—is an all too tenacious tradition within medieval studies.”¹⁷

This impasse between pure idealism and pure Aristotelianism, as it were, needs breaking if we are not simply to recycle earlier critical paradigms by default. As Eggert concludes, “securing tangible and intangible works from the past, whether historic buildings, paintings or literary works, means facing up to (and often differentiating) their intertwined documentary and textual dimensions.” He stresses “agency and chronology, especially as they inflect and determine the production-consumption spectrum,” as the closely related themes that emerge at points of crisis in the work of conservation. “Together they point towards the need for a broader understanding of the work than the 1960s bequeathed us.”¹⁸ Eggert’s approach, while it takes the Gabler-Kidd debate over Ulysses and the concept of the “materialist Shakespeare” as its primary literary instances, provides a robust framework for future thinking about the Piers Plowman situation. Indeed, in many ways it applies to Piers Plowman more than to almost any other “work,” given the importance of chronology and nonauthorial agents in the production of the various versions. The basic goal of this book, then, is to face up to the intertwined documentary and textual dimensions of the work we call Piers Plowman by identifying, as precisely as possible given our historical distance, the modes of its production at given times and places. The subject of the “lost history” I am narrating is not just the newly identified, “ur-B” version of the poem, but also the well-known stages of text whose histories have been lost as well. The received “B version,” which I identify as owing its shape as much to scribal or readerly desires for “complete” texts as to its author’s aesthetic vision, is no less authentic a part of the “work” Piers Plowman than is the earlier, previously unknown one, but its character, and its place on the production-consumption spectrum, have remained obscure.

Langland studies’ wholesale embrace of Adam Pinkhurst rather than William Langland as the figure in whose language we quote its most canonical version already elevates the status of scribal responses to the poem. There is no problem with that policy in itself: Pinkhurst’s work on Trinity B.15.17 is just as much part of the work Piers Plowman as is any other text.¹⁹ But a sharpening of our awareness of what it means to quote “the B version,” that is, Langland’s poem (as most critics continue to say they are doing), in his language will only bolster our understanding of that work’s production and consumption. Kane-Donaldson and Schmidt chose MS W as copy-text, the text that determines spelling only and never choice of lection, because Pinkhurst was consistent in his language, made it more inviting to modern readers reared on the Chaucer manuscripts he also copied, and was fortunate that no other surviving B copies surpassed his in those regards.²⁰ It also bolstered Pinkhurst’s impact that Kane and Donaldson were working “in default of any evidence about the original dialect of the poem,” believing that “there is no evidence that [Langland] wrote Piers Plowman in that native dialect, any more than that he retained this in adulthood.”²¹

But our knowledge of dialects has increased substantially since 1975. M. L. Samuels has shown that the reconstruction of Langland’s dialect, at all stages of his career, “could probably be best achieved by adopting X [of C; San Marino, Huntington Library MS Hm 143] as the basis and modifying it in a conservative direction.”²² This was the language “that he used in his holographs,” including those of the A and B traditions.²³ Remnants of this fact sometimes appear in places where the copy-text overextends its reach and forces editors to treat its readings as substantives in need of emendation, as at W’s B 20.198, “So Elde and she hadden it forbeten,” which appears in Kane and Donaldson as “So Elde and [heo] hadden it forbeten,” so as to restore alliteration by adopting the C tradition’s dialectal form of the term she. R. W. Chambers observed about the Piers Plowman manuscripts in 1935, well before Greg’s famous rationale said the same thing, that “we are dependent, in the matter of dialect and spelling, to a much greater degree than we are in the matter of wording, upon our basic manuscript, and it is therefore all the more vital to select a well spelled manuscript, containing no spelling which we have reason to think the original writer would not have used.”²⁴ If he was right—and the entire premise of copy-text theory that the Athlone editors follow suggests he was—then we ought now, if seeking to print the poem in Langland’s language (by no means the only option, but the one I am adopting in this book), to stop doing so in Pinkhurst’s and begin doing so in that of MS X.

Some critics have thus criticized Kane and Donaldson’s choice of Trinity as copy-text,²⁵ but that seems both unfair, given when they were working, and beside the more important point that we are not bound to adopt their approach in our own quotations of the poem. Thus, when I am not quoting directly from a manuscript, I quote from C as presented in Russell and Kane’s edition, which uses X as its copy-text, because that suits my own purpose of representing Langland’s poetry in a language closer to his own than any otherwise available. And to remain true to that purpose, and consistent in my practice, I translate the language of the published editions of the A and B versions (i.e., of MSS T and W) into the language of MS X as well. If the translation of the language of received A and B into that of C strikes any readers as too intrusive, they should remember that the Athlone editions are full of such “translated” passages—B 20.198 as cited above is one instance in which they do exactly on a local level what I will do throughout. Indeed one of the main purposes of a copy-text is precisely to guide editors on the presentation of lines and passages absent from that text; among the 170-odd lines not in MS W that Kane and Donaldson translate into that text’s language are B 15.511–28, which will play an important role in this book. Before the appearance of Joseph Wittig’s Concordance in 2001 my approach would have been almost impossible; now, though, it is relatively painless, even rather enjoyable, and productive of a more intimate knowledge of the cited A and B passages than simple transcription of the edited texts would have permitted.²⁶

It seems quite possible—almost certain, if we are to assume that Kane would have followed his own convictions to their logical conclusions—that Kane, alone and with Donaldson, would have adopted this approach had he had access to Wittig’s invaluable work. Twenty years after the B edition, collaborating with Janet Cowen, he wanted to edit Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women in part because doing so “would illustrate the problem of copy text in the instance of fourteenth-century poetry preserved only in fifteenth-century or late fifteenth-century manuscripts.”²⁷ The problem was that, whereas “there are manuscripts of both Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales admirably suited to serve as copy text in Greg’s sense”—that is, as provider of language, not as “base text” that supplies the most correct readings—the same does not apply for Chaucer’s other works.²⁸ His conclusion is bold: he chooses the text in Oxford, Bodleian MS Tanner 346 because “it represents authentically what run-of-the-mill fifteenth-century scribes made of, did to, Chaucer’s language. For editors of Chaucer’s minor works use of such a manuscript is one alternative. The other is to rewrite the poem in the language presumed to be Chaucer’s. This would bring to the fore new issues of rationale.”²⁹

In suggesting that copy-text is only one of two viable approaches to this problem, Kane here added his voice to a growing consensus. Fredson Bowers himself had suggested something like my policy.³⁰ Now Joseph Dane has endorsed this approach with regard to the closest post-medieval equivalent to the phenomenon of Piers Plowman: “That a copy-text must be a version of the text to be edited seems obvious enough, but there could be situations where this might not be the case, e.g., where a ‘version’ of a text is regarded not as a ‘variant’ but as a different text. The Folio King Lear could easily be edited with the Quarto functioning as copy-text, even by an editor who regards them as representing different plays.”³¹ And finally G. Thomas Tanselle has urged that in situations of “radiating authority”—again, such as Piers Plowman, though he does not here say as much—editors should edit without a copy-text.³²

So, too, I would suggest, might critics of Piers Plowman benefit from citing without an edition. The collapse of text into document has been occurring for too long on the level of editions, as well as copy-texts. To grant Kane and Donaldson’s or Schmidt’s editions status as “Piers Plowman B,” the work itself, rather than as one of many ways of representing that entity, is not fair either to that entity or to what they were attempting to achieve. The Athlone editors were working in the absence of knowledge we now have, and upon which we can now act. The decision to print A and B in a language different from that of their respective editions is in keeping with this book’s argument that Piers Plowman is a much more fluid concept than is represented by separate (or parallel) editions each of which assumes that the archetypal origins of the versions are integral.

As such, I hope that this book will go some way towards recuperating “the work” as a helpful, a necessary, category in those constructions of literary history that attend closely to manuscript cultures. The collapse of work into document might have more dramatic consequences in Piers Plowman than it would on, say, Chaucer studies, which probably explains the alacrity with which critics have embraced it in their attempts to downplay or even dismiss the editorial achievements of previous generations. If what survives is a fair representation of what preceded it, why bother to discover any lost past? Indeed. But if, as this book argues, what survives is something else entirely, then we owe it to those extant documents, not to mention to the author or authors, executors, scribes, censors, readers, collectors, editors, and critics to begin again the hard work of reconstituting the work in a form capacious enough to make room for the lost history of Piers Plowman.