Glossing Piers Plowman: The New Penn Commentaries

When the co-editors of the Penn Commentary began this vast project in the 1980s, no comprehensive set of notes on the three versions of Piers Plowman had been issued since the work of W. W. Skeat one hundred years earlier. These two volumes, published in 2006, represent approximately forty percent of the entire project, with three remaining volumes to appear shortly under the guidance of Ralph Hanna, Anne Middleton, and Traugott Lawler. Meanwhile, A. V. C. Schmidt has just published the long-awaited notes to his widely admired edition of the poem's three versions, so we will soon be confronted with an embarrassment of riches.¹ Certainly a competition is likely to develop between these two attractive reference tools covering what is essentially the same body of material in such expansive (and expensive) detail. What this competition will eventually reveal is whether typical users (mostly Middle English scholars and their doctoral students) will prefer the coherence and sharp focus produced by a single mind or the more varied perspectives of these new Penn commentaries, produced by a team of specialists.

As would be the case with any traditional volume of notes subjoined to a critical edition, Schmidt's work need not attempt a broad inclusiveness in its citation of other scholars: all he is responsible for giving us is a clear explanation of his own judgments on issues concerning the primary text and authorial intentions, regardless of how few or many sources he uses to arrive at these conclusions. By contrast, the Penn editors explicitly aim to supply experienced medievalists with a carefully selected and balanced summary, passus by passus and verse paragraph by verse paragraph, of all the best modern scholarship on every aspect of the three versions of Langland's life work. In doing this, they will, of course, be revealing their own biases and framing assumptions by what they choose to highlight or ignore, to applaud discretely or describe dismissively. But no fully inclusive format would have been practical for such an endeavor. Speaking for the group in the preface to Volume 5 (which was the first one published), Stephen Barney explicitly delineates the shared vision of the group and disclaims any intention to provide the pseudo-objectivity of an old-fashioned variorum (V, xiii) with its undigestible masses of trivia and its tedious descriptions of long-discarded hypotheses. Even if such a non-judgmental, "collector" approach were practicable (after more than 120 years of Langland scholarship), it would fail to serve current users effectively, since we would still be required to do all the filtering of trivia for ourselves.

Outlining the approach of the Penn group, Barney explains several other key assumptions that have shaped their work. One of the most important of these (because it may end up limiting the appeal, if not the utility, of the finished work) is their belief that the notes should be keyed to the C-version. If this were merely an issue of convenience, there would be no room for quibbling; such a choice might appeal to any editor since C has more lines to account for than either A or B. However, Barney seems to concede, in passing, that more was at stake in this decision than mere tidiness, observing that it is "against the usual preference." Then he reiterates the group's choice of C "as representing the author's latest thoughts, and by no means, in our view, inferior" (V, xiv). The defensive tone of this conclusion underscores its author's awareness that many scholars would dispute the Penn group's estimate of C's preeminent literary value. And C must be, for Barney and his associates, "preeminent," not merely "not inferior," to justify the role assigned to it...