The Lost History of Piers Plowman: The Earliest Transmission of Langland’s Work by Lawrence Warner (review)

In this brief, densely evidenced, and self-consciously provocative book, Lawrence Warner tells three stories. The main story, the one pointed to in the book’s subtitle, is a radical revision of the standard account of the transmission of Piers Plowman before 1400. To support this new story of textual transmission and to suggest its consequences, he tells two other stories, one about how Langland wrote and revised his poem through A, B, and C versions, another about how scholars reconstructed what Langland did and what copyists did. In the course of this narration, Warner argues that there is little evidence for the circulation of B versions before the 1390s (chap. 1), that the editorial policies of the Athlone editors “buried the evidence” (p. 16) undermining their conclusions about the poem’s three forms (chap. 2), that there is evidence that revised sections of the poem circulated independently of complete manuscripts (chap. 3), that the patterns of attestation in the text of B 19–20 suggest this material circulated differently than did the rest of the poem (chap. 4), and that the passages he hypothesizes migrating from the C version into Bx cohere around discernible themes (Conclusion). Warner naturally hopes to persuade readers to adopt his stories—and he may find readers both dogged enough to follow his evidence and pliable enough to accept his interpretations. But even those who remain unconvinced will do so having rethought, in useful—and perhaps revised—ways, the foundations for their own preferred versions of these three stories.

Warner’s central claim in the book is that Langland ended the B version of Piers Plowman with Passus 18 and that later copyists imposed the ending (along with other material) of the C version onto the B version. In other words, Warner argues that Bx (the archetype from which all existing B version copies descend) was a text that combined distinct authorial versions of the poem. Such nonauthorial conflations are well-attested among surviving manuscripts of Piers Plowman, leading scholars such as George Kane and others to suppose that readers of the poem were “jealous for the completeness of their copies” (quoted by Warner, p. xi). In order to explain Bx as the product of such “jealousy,” Warner argues for a relatively limited circulation for a shorter, Langlandian ur-B version and for an increased appreciation for the role of the C version in the fourteenth-century cultural reception of Langland’s poem. He also argues that his account of the authorial forms of B and C versions reveals a specific agenda for Langland’s revision from B to C: “[O]ver the course of the 1380s Langland put together a program that associates friars, illicit sexuality, and the question of fynding (that is, livelihood or endowment)” (p. 62).

As Warner himself acknowledges at several points in the book, these claims involve such a startling revision of orthodox scholarly consensus that their novelty demands some explanation of how so many fine scholars could have been so wrong for so long. In taking up this important question, Warner’s book comes to be as much about what editors do as it is about what Langland did or what fourteenth-century producers of copies of Piers Plowman did. In fact, Warner’s new account of the relationship between B and C versions arose when he sought to explain the presence of material normally attributed to the B version of the poem in a manuscript of the C version, MS 733B at the National Library of Wales, referred to as N² in the shorthand of critical editions. Warner eventually concluded that the proper task was just the reverse: to explain how C-version material came to be found in Bx. In order to work through the manuscript evidence that might support such a reversal of perspective, however, Warner had to confront a tough reality: while in theory...