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  • The Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman. Vol. 5: C Passus 20–22; B Passus 18–20, and: The Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman.” Vol. 1: C Prologue–Passus 4; B Prologue–Passus 4; A Prologue–Passus 4
  • George Shuffelton
Stephen A. Barney. The Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman. Vol. 5: C Passus 20–22; B Passus 18–20. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. xvi, 309. $65.00.
Andrew Galloway. The Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman.” Vol. 1: C Prologue–Passus 4; B Prologue–Passus 4; A Prologue–Passus 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 491. $95.00.

The foundations for these first two volumes of the Penn Commentary on “Piers Plowman” were laid over the last three decades: the Athlone editions (including Joseph Wittig’s Concordance), the annotated editions of Derek Pearsall and A. V. C. Schmidt, and John Alford’s heroic efforts to identify the poem’s quotations and legal vocabulary. And looking back over this recent history, the Penn Commentary seems a natural outgrowth of the scholarly industry built up around the poem, which has tended to concentrate on the poem’s textual cruxes and historical contexts, and whose work has most often taken the form of focused readings of particular episodes, rather than expansive, monograph-length readings of the entire texts.

From this perspective, the first two volumes of the Penn Commentary appear merely as further steps toward a more comprehensive apparatus. Like so much Piers Plowman scholarship, this project would seem to confirm that a text crafted out of pieces—exegesis, quotation, homiletic tropes, etc.—is best read in pieces. Or in Barney’s words, the Commentary follows a “conviction that Piers Plowman, more than most poems, yields its riches to close examination of its individual passages and lines, and correspondingly less in its larger movements” and thus pays closest attention “to the detail of the poem” (xiii). Reading the poem as “sequential lemmas” in this way has a very long history.

Yet this familiar approach produces genuinely novel results when applied with the remarkable thoroughness of these Penn Commentary volumes: they are triumphant examples of close reading, not just learning. Barney declares that the aim is “to perform literary criticism,” and both authors show keen attention to repetition, figurative language, and the [End Page 301] evolution of verbal tropes (xiii). This has tangible rewards. For example, in the head note to Passus 4, Galloway notes that the shift from the controversy surrounding Meed’s marriage to the trial of Meed and Wrong seems abrupt, but that the theme of trials as a means of inquiry “has been present explicitly from Holy Church’s speech” in Passus 1: “When alle tresores ben tried, treuthe is the beste” (372). In his note on the distribution of graces in Passus 21, Barney points out the carefully controlled grammar and the scene’s willingness to complete a catalogue of social categories that had been left unfinished elsewhere in the text (139). Previous scholarship has of course tracked some of the poem’s verbal formulas—for example, “kynde knowing” or “love and leaute”—but Galloway’s and Barney’s notes take this kind of reading further.

Another example, Galloway’s discussion of lines 230–34 of the Prologue (the cooks crying “Hote pyes, hote!”), is a masterpiece of scholarship and close reading (143–46). This extended note looks into the contemporary controversies surrounding cooks before diving deep into the history of vendors’ street cries. Galloway then considers the satire possibly intended here, before stepping back and appreciating the way the Prologue begins with sight and ends with noise. Barney shows similar sensitivity to the end of Passus 20, pointing out the way Peace’s piping and Truth’s trumpet blend into Will’s waking recognition of the bells ringing on Easter morning. These kinds of readings remind us that Piers Plowman is poetry, not merely an intersection of various contexts. The authors never make the mistake of reducing the text to its sources or analogues; instead, a careful review of the sources behind Holy Church’s intriguing description of love as “the plant of peace” leads to an elegant recognition of the poem...

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