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  • Langland's Early Modern Identities
  • Lawrence Warner
Sarah A. Kelen . Langland's Early Modern Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xiii, 225. $79.95.

When Palgrave publishes a book with a title such as Langland's Early Modern Identities, one expects another theoretical dismantling of the author function or a foray into identity studies. However welcome such studies would be, though, they would falter in the absence of any comprehensive study of the reception history of Piers Plowman. Notwithstanding its Palgravesque title, or that publisher's lack of much interest in producing books with a reasonable price; decent font, margin, or page size; and running heads indicating what chapter or page numbers the endnotes refer to, Sarah Kelen's book fills this gap. Langland's Early Modern Identities skillfully weaves the major strands in the reception of the poem from the sixteenth century's sustained interest in its author's identity, through Florence Converse's 1903 juvenile novel Long Will. The result is a careful, solid, and engaging work of scholarship that all Langland scholars, not to mention anyone interested in reception history, Chaucer, sixteenth-century religious controversies, editorial history, and Augustan antiquarianism, ought to read. At a mere 150 pages of main text, this is a more slender volume than one might have wished, but Langland's Early Modern Identities does not miss a note of the tune it plays. The surprises here are to be found in the contexts that Kelen establishes as the most productive for analysis of the material. Students of the poem's history might have known about Elizabeth Cooper's extracts [End Page 435] in her Muses Library of 1737, for instance, but how many have known how fully situated Cooper's project was in contemporary scientific rhetoric, especially concerning geological datings of the earth (83-85)?

Langland's Early Modern Identities proceeds in roughly chronological order, but the primary structure is thematic. Kelen lays the groundwork by citing evidence for Piers Plowman's continued popularity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when, she says, seven extant manuscripts containing the poem in part or full, and annotations of a handful of medieval manuscripts, appeared. True enough, and widely rehearsed; but what of Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 201/107, a complete manuscript, apparently copied from Rogers's 1561 edition; or two manuscripts, Trinity College, Cambridge R.3.14 and London, British Library, Additional 34779, in which Tudor-era readers added missing lines; or the scores of annotations of surviving Crowley and Rogers editions (cf. 34)? Obviously these supplements to Kelen's evidence only bolster the argument that Piers Plowman was vital in this era, but they point to unexplored worlds particularly worthy of attention given their absence from the conversation to date.

Chapter 1 surveys the beginnings of "the idea of Langland as the author (and authorizer) of the poem" in the Tudor linking of the poet with Wyclif (41), an idea Kelen connects with the presentation of Langland as a prophet of the Reformation. While obviously this, long the default approach to the topic, works well in general terms, only a single figure, John Bale, fits it without qualification. Robert Crowley in fact said that Langland was not a prophet; his denials are "not entirely convincing" to Kelen (34). Most of the other materials that do take Piers Plowman to be prophetic evince no interest in its author's identity. Then we turn to a few Catholic readers, who can figure only as exceptions to the dominant trend. This is the one chapter in which I feel Kelen's overarching claim—that this era's dominant mode was to identify Langland as prophet—is not borne out by her careful individual analyses.

Chapter 2, which concerns the ways in which the figure Piers the Plowman, rather than Piers Plowman or its author, "provided an authorizing model for the literature of complaint" (45), will be the starting point for all future scholarship on these many "plowman texts": The Plowman's Tale, I Playne Piers, and the rest. The phenomenon is major, is almost exhaustively treated here (George Gascoigne's 1576 The Steele Glas is the only obvious omission I noted), and...

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