William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (review)

In these pages, I had the privilege to review Volume II of Professor Schmidt’s edition of Piers Plowman, which completed that great effort begun with the 1995 publication of the parallel text. That 2008 volume promised that the entire enterprise would soon be published in paper at a reasonable price, and the book now under review fulfills that promise. Previously, I had discussed the editorial theory and practice that informs the work, particularly in comparison to the famed Athlone versions. I offered samples of text and gloss and displayed how the book is engineered and can be used by a variety of readers and audiences. I hope, as well, to have expressed some of the grand majesty of Schmidt’s accomplishment. Therefore, I will now describe what’s new in this 2011 publication, while trying to convey more of the total experience of Piers Plowman that this landmark edition now enables.

Volume I is the second edition of the 1995 Longman publication, which has now been “revised and corrected” (Vol. I, p. ix) for 2011. The corrections to the text (both “misprints” and “altered readings”) and also to the apparatus that had been listed in Appendix IV of Vol. II (pp. 945–48) have now been applied to the newly printed text (that appendix, accordingly, is omitted from this edition). In the course of spot checking some of these applied changes, I noticed other changes to the apparatus not apparently listed in that appendix. Few readers are going to seek and compare these hidden changes from 1995 to 2011 (you need both editions to do so), but readers should be aware of how the notes at the foot of the text do generally function. Schmidt provides variants “only where the given version’s archetypal text is in doubt.” Working by “selection” rather than “inclusion,” says Schmidt, the apparatus “interprets, instead of simply recording [variants]” and “textual information with no bearing on the establishment of the adopted text is usually not included” (Vol. II, pt. 1, p. 12). Schmidt’s economy of presentation strives to “avoid cluttering the Apparatus with information of no value for establishing the text” (Vol. II, pt. 1, p. 262); rather than a total record of manuscript data, as in Athlone, the notes record the evidence generated in the processes recounted in “Editing the Text” (Vol. II, pt. 1, pp. 231–68).

This new Volume I begins with a list of manuscripts, indicating the Piers content of each. Then follows the full parallel edition of the four texts, A,B,C, and Z (the status of which Schmidt labors convincingly to establish, passim). Schmidt had edited the texts in parallel, establishing a base of “core lines” that the poet wrote. Following the example of Skeat, he presents the texts in parallel as well. Though not demanded by a parallel method of editing, a parallel presentation does succeed in “highlighting the manner in which the texts have been edited” (Vol. II, pt. 1, p. 12). And, as in Skeat, here too, “material that occurs substantially unaltered in different parts of the four texts is reproduced a second time in slightly smaller type-face at the point of closest parallelism” (Vol. I, p. xvi). The visual clarity, beauty of type, and the wide margins in the parallel presentation invite readers to engage in one of the most dynamically exciting and critically productive aspects of Langland studies—comparing the changes and wondering who made them, when and why. In Volume II, pt. 1, p. 165, dense, double-columned pages of Textual Notes describe the scribal circumstances (when discernable) that produced variant readings and explain the work of modern editing that has determined the printed reading. In Volume II, pt. 2, the Commentary section offers historical gloss and literary-critical exposition. To note one...