The Lost History of “Piers Plowman” (review)

The ABCs of Langland studies keep getting challenged. In the 1980s, we had the Z-text; in the 1990s the idea that the A-text came last; and then in 2002 Lawrence Warner’s argument, on the basis of manuscript evidence, that B did not circulate before C, and that the last two passus might have come into B from C (“The Ur-B Piers Plowman and the Earliest Production of C and B,” YLS 16 [2002]: 3–39). Warner’s star witness was N² (National Library of Wales, MS 733B), an A manuscript with a C continuation, and manuscripts R and F, in the B family but forming a separate group against the fifteen others (W~M). He argued that N² is witness to an earlier stage of C transmission than all other C manuscripts, and that its putative ancestor Nx is the source of a number of readings in the B tradition, readings not in the RF line. That is, from the many places where N² agrees with W~M and RF is absent or substitutes clearly spurious lines, places that seem to show that N² had access to a B manuscript in the W~M family, Warner insisted that the solution is instead that that family had access to an ancestor of N², that is, an early C manuscript. His major exhibit was the forty-line “poison of possession” passage in B.XV; he argued that it was composed for C on a loose sheet that went to “the guardian of the ur-B exemplar,” who copied it into B, but that it had been returned for the final C-revision before the ancestor of R and F (“RF”) was produced—a rather detailed scenario, I must say. And, more detailed yet, the RF scribe likewise adopted many ur-C readings as corrections to his manuscript (some of which were apparently rejected by R, some by F, for the original B reading). That is, though Langland probably wrote ur-B in 1378 or so, it had little circulation; and Bx (the putative latest common ancestor of the B manuscripts) shows C influence, perhaps even owing to C its entire last two passus. Those passus are of course nearly identical in both versions, and Langlandians have supposed that Langland died before revising them, or else that he was satisfied and left them alone. Warner thinks that both originated in C and were then copied into ur-B. He introduced it in 2002 as a “startling new possibility” (“Ur-B,” 24) and argued it fully in a further article, “The Ending, and End, of Piers Plowman B: The C-Version Origins of the Final Two Passus” (MÆ 76 [2007]: 225–50).

Small parts of the argument also appear in “Becket and the Hopping Bishops” (YLS 17 [2003]: 107–34) and in “Piers Plowman B XV 417–428a: An Intrusion from Langland’s C-Papers?” (N&Q 51 [2004]: 119–22). The present book gathers together all the strands—and there is some new material as well. In Chapter 1, Warner presents the evidence for his belief that the A version circulated early—he argues that the affiliations imply a total of nineteen now-lost copies, and eventually treats them (with imperfect logic, since they need not all have been pre-1400) as “plenty of evidence for Piers Plowman A’s substantial fourteenth-century readership” (4) in addition to the three pre-1400 manuscripts we actually have—while ur-B “remain[ed] dormant until readers and scribes had embraced the final, C version” (1). He dismisses the “evidence” that B was available by 1381, particularly John Ball’s “Peres Plouᵹman” and “do wel and bettre,” since they need not be allusions to the poem but, if they are, can be to the A version (though I think he slights Steven Justice’s appealing argument that the line “Proditor est prelatus cum Juda qui patrimonium Christi minus distribuit,” in B only, lies behind...