Vaughan Míceál F. - Piers Plowman the A version

PIERS PLOWMAN: THE A VERSION

The A Version

Edited by Mel F. Vaughan

2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Langland, William, 1330?1400?

[Piers Plowman]

Piers Plowman : the A version/edited by Mel F. Vaughan.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

One text of the Piers Plowman poems is found in the Bodleian Librarys Rawlinson Poetry MS 137. This manuscript presents an important witness to the A version, and it is on that text that the present edition is basedText.

ISBN -13: 978-1-4214-0-0139-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN -13: 978-1-4214-0-0140-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN -10: 1-4214-0139-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN -10: 1-4214-0140-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimagesPoetry. 2. Christian poetry, English (Middle) I. Vaughan, Mel F. II. Bodleian Library. Manuscript. Rawlinson Poetry 137. III. Title.

PR 2013. V 38 2011

821.1dc22

2010050255

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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My deepest scholarly and personal debts are to my late colleague David C. Fowler (to whom I dedicate this edition) and to my former doctoral student Gerald Barnett, who have each provided me with stimulating commentary and conversation about editing Piers Plowman for decades. Without their encouragement and critical engagement, I would never have undertaken the editing of this (or any) version of the poem. When he learned of the project, Professor Andrew Galloway (Cornell University) encouraged me to shift my base manuscript from that used by Knott-Fowler (and Kane and Schmidt), and I was happy to acknowledge the insight of his suggestion, and to adopt it, even when this caused some delay in my completing the edition.

My interest in Piers Plowman (the B version, needless to say) was fostered by another Cornell scholar-teacher, the late Robert Kaske, whose wit and insight into the poem set a high standard for me and all his graduate disciples, and indeed for all readers of Piers. I owe Hoyt Duggan, and all our colleagues in the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, an immense debt for their critical attention to transparent editorial principles and their respect for the minutiae of the extant texts of Piers. Their commitment to sustaining lively debate about what some have called an uneditable poem is a witness to the importance of this fourteenth-century work and a promise of its continuing influence on our understanding of the later Middle Ages in England.

I am particularly grateful to my University of Washington colleague Terry Brooks for his many hours assisting me with producing a well-structured and marked-up XML text from which the many presentations of this text and its notes have been derived. I also owe much to students in my Spring 2008 seminar and to participants at an Information School session organized by Professor Brooks in May 2008: they helped me sharpen my thinking about the practical requirements for a modern printed, and electronic, edition of a medieval poem.

An anonymous reader for the Johns Hopkins University Press provided careful and helpfully detailed comments on a wide range of matters involving both the substance and the form of this edition. Without all of them, and the active encouragement of Associate Editor Michael Lonegro and Editor-in-Chief Trevor Lipscombe, this edition would not be in your hands in anything approximating the form it now takes. Other editorial staff at Johns Hopkins, in particular Humanities Editor Matthew McAdam, as well as Brian MacDonald, took exceptional care in the final production of this book.

I especially acknowledge the permission granted me by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for use of the text of its MS. Rawl. poet. 137 as the basis for this edition. My thanks go to the Bodleian Librarys keeper of special collections and associate director, Mr. Richard Ovenden, and to Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield, senior assistant librarian,

Finally, although she has always been baffled by my abiding interest in Piers Plowman, my wife, Sheila Dietrich, has provided me with immeasurable encouragement and support over the protracted years of my evolving engagement with what long ago began on a May morning in the Malvern Hills.

The Middle English poems collectively titled Piers Plowman (or Piers the Plowman) come down to modern readers in distinct versions, dating from the second half of the fourteenth century. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when Piers was being seriously studied for the first time, most who have studied the poem have agreed with its great early editor, W. W. Skeat, that the surviving manuscripts attest to the existence of three distinct authorial versions, which he titled A, B, and C, indicating his view of the poems chronological development by that alphabetic order (Kane, The Text). Each of these versions of Piers is witnessed by a dozen or more manuscripts (seventeen for A, thirteen for B, eighteen for C). In addition, there are fragments of A and C, and hybrid or composite versions.

Until the work of Skeat and his contemporaries and successors, no one had advanced the view, at least in print, that there were indeed distinct poems, each claiming to be Piers Plowman. But the clarity of these groupings, and their status as representing discrete sequential stages in the development of a single work, may be more apparent than real, and a complete inventory of manuscript and early printed witnesses to a poem Piers Plowman reveals (unsurprisingly for a vernacular text transmitted over the course of more than a century by hand copying in separate locales in the British Isles) not an altogether controlled process of authorial revision and publication but rather a less centralized transmission of a popular and influential text, one that many writers (and no doubt readers) made their own in both smaller and larger ways.

Among the surviving manuscripts there are, of course, the inevitable variations in spelling and word choice that attend hand copying of any but the most canonical and official texts in the period before printing. Because copying by hand is seldom if ever exact, each of these manuscripts offers its readers a literally unique Piers Plowman. Words, phrases, and whole lines are misread, miscopied, or left out; passages are actively revised; and substantive corrections, continuations, and additions alter the effect and emphases of the surviving witnesses to all versions of the poem. In the more open-text culture of premodern textual production, these may count as unsurprising variations. The addition of a twelfth passus (pl. passs; Latin for step) in three manuscripts of the A version may indicate that the original author, or some early reviser, considered the conclusion of A weak or unfinished or unsatisfactory and chose to continue the dream (which in As Passus 11 is not explicitly ended). And a similar response to A can be inferred from the lengthy B continuation that nearly triples the size of the A version. In the one manuscript (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS. Rawl. poet. 137) that contains allor, more properly, the most we haveof the additional Passus 12 of A, the final lines (internally attributed to one Johan But) refer apparently to the death of the author (Wille) of what here is wryten, and other werkes bothe,/Of Peres the plowman... (12. 9899).