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he ways in which tudor Protestants appropriated Piers Plowman and turned William Langland’s work to their own purposes have increasingly gained scholarly interest in recent years. Piers has proven to be a remarkably adaptable character: first presented in the mid-fourteenth century by Langland as a primarily orthodox figure through which to criticize abuses within the church, he was quickly adopted by the rebels of the 1381 uprising as a representative figure of social and economic justice.The Lollards of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries pushed Piers’s radical religious views over the edge into heterodoxy, in texts such as Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. by the sixteenth century the plowman was sufficiently recognizable as a figure of rustic wisdom that the convention could be mocked in Wynkyn de Worde’s 1510 print How the Plowman lerned his pater noster.1 For the reformers of the mid-sixteenth century, the advertising power of Piers’s name was so evocative that it was used in titles of works in which the character himself plays only a minor part, such as Pyers Plowman’s Exhortation, printed by Antony Scoloker in the 1550s.2 Langland’s more radical figure merges with Chaucer’s plowman when the spurious Plowman’s tale is introduced by William Thynne into the Canterbury Tales in 1542.3 Finally, The Vision of Pierce Plowman was printed by Robert Crowley in 1550, who was interested in establishing Langland ’s medieval credentials and using those to support the Protestant cause.4 The Protestants of the sixteenth century pointed to Piers as a kind of pre-Lutheran Protestant in order to counter Catholic claims of Protestant “new-fangledness,” and to prove that Protestant beliefs, not Catholic, were the more ancient and hence more authoritative ones.5 Piers also became a symbol of “englishness” and english Protestantism in the face of Continental Catholicism, and so his status as a symbol of an earlier, english reforming movement catered to feelings of english nationalism as well. When PolemicTrumps Poetry: Buried Medieval Poem(s) in the Protestant Print I Playne Piers Kathy Cawsey T 37 because of these many transformations, Piers the plowman is a good figure through which to study not only the early modern understanding of medieval Lollardy and other reforming movements but also the early modern and Renaissance understanding of medieval literature and poetry. In the introduction to his edition of Piers Plowman, Robert Crowley explains to his tudor audience the unfamiliar medieval poetic form of the alliterative long line: “[Langland] wrote altogether in miter: but not after the maner of our rimers that wryte nowe a dayes (for his verses ende not alike) but the nature of hys miter is, to haue three wordes at the leaste in euery verse which begyn with some one letter.”6 Crowley’s explanation of this medieval poetic form is significant. other editors in the Piers Plowman tradition had insisted on the antiquity of their texts: Wendy Scase writes of Pyers Plowman’s Exhortation that “to authenticate the old age of the text, the editor has ostentatiously retained the old orthography and vocabulary, providing a glossary of obsolete words.”7 Crowley, however, was unique in his attention to the poetic form of the medieval text. His desire to make Langland’s text accessible to his readers seems to be warring with his desire to retain as many of the work’s markers of antiquity as possible, thus bolstering the Protestants’claim to be representatives of an older tradition. Crowley therefore retains the obscure poetic form and explains it for his readers; likewise he modernizes Langland’s spelling and grammar but does not update the by-now archaic vocabulary.8 After Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman appeared, Reynald Wolfe printed an edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede in 1553. Like Crowley, Wolfe needed to balance his reader’s unfamiliarity with medieval vocabulary and form with a desire to avoid obscuring the indications of the text’s medieval origin, and so printed a glossary of “certayne hard wordes used in this booke”to make the medieval work more accessible to his sixteenth-century readers.9 not all of the printers of Protestant plowman texts were as learned as Crowley about medieval poetic forms and styles, however. In the mid-sixteenthcentury print I Playne Piers, a rhyming, alliterative long-line, medieval poem has been combined with several other poems (along with long sections of prose) to produce a polemical work that draws on the antiquity...

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