Sarah Wood - Piers Plowman and Its Manuscript Tradition

Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition

York Manuscript and Early Print Studies

Volume 5

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

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Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition

Sarah Wood

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

2022 Sarah Wood

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First published 2022

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Cover Image: Piers ploughs his half-acre, Piers Plowman A Passus 7. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS Eng. poet. A. 1, fol. 399r. Reproduced by kind permission. Cover Design: Toni Michelle

Illustrations

Figures

1. Patiences distinctio on poverty, C.16.11753.

2. Cain.

3. The Life of Adam and Eve and Piers Plowman.

4. St Gregory, The South English Legendary.

5. Slothful bishop.

6. Trajan.

Tables

1. Original marginalia in The Wars of Alexander and in Piers Plowman C, sigil Vc.

2. Comparison of marginal rubrics in Ht, O and C2, Prologue-Passus 2.

3. Prophecy rubrics in the margins of Ht and the p-group of the C version.

Appendix Tables

I. Marginal rubrics of selected A-text copies.

II. Comparison of marginalia in W, Hm, L, M, R and F of the B version.

III. Original marginalia of p-group manuscripts PEcVcAcRcMc.

IV. Original marginalia of p-group manuscripts QScFcZWaGcKcNc.

V. Original marginalia in Prol-Passus 3 of HcXCotBmBo.

VI. Original marginalia of YcIPUcDc.

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements

Part of Chapter 1 appeared previously as Sarah Wood, A Scribal Edition of Piers Plowman C in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 293, Scriptorium 72 (2018), 93106; I reuse the material here with thanks to the Institut de Recherche et dHistoire des Textes.

Tables II and V of the Appendix, discussed in Chapter 2, are expanded versions of tables that first appeared in Sarah Wood, Two Annotated Piers Plowman Manuscripts from London and the Early Reception of B and C, Chaucer Review 52 (2017), 27497. Copyright 2017 The Pennsylvania State University Press. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.

For access to their books, I thank the Bodleian Library; the British Library; Cambridge University Library; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Corpus Christi College, Oxford; the Honourable Society of Lincolns Inn; the Huntington Library; Lambeth Palace Library; the London Metropolitan Archives; Liverpool University Library; Newnham College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries; Trinity College Dublin; Trinity College, Cambridge and the University of London Library. For the supply of images for research, I thank the Morgan Library.

Two short-term research fellowships from the Huntington Library in the summers of 2013 and 2014 allowed me to begin my research on the manuscripts of Piers Plowman. My work on the project was subsequently advanced by two terms of research leave provided by my current institution, the University of Warwick, where I thank especially for outstanding leadership and deep humanity my Head of Department, Emma Mason.

The two directors of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Jim Knowles and Tim Stinson, shared various manuscript images with me. Paul Broyles and Amanda Broyles kindly sent me their extensive notes on a copy otherwise inaccessible. I am grateful also to those who offered responses to various parts of my work in progress at the Warwick English and Comparative Literary Studies Research Seminar and Medievalists at Warwick Research Seminar; at two conferences of the Medieval Association of the Pacific in 2018 and 2019; at the day conference Editions and Manuscripts of Middle English Poetry organised by Ian Cornelius at Loyola University Chicago in October 2019 and at the Oxford Medieval Research Seminar in December 2020. I thank especially Ian Cornelius and Vincent Gillespie for invitations to speak and Michael Calabrese for his encouragement of my project.