Piers Plowman: The A Version (review)

Míċeál Vaughan’s edition of the A version of William Langland’s Piers Plowman will be appreciated by both students and scholars. It is the most recent “classroom” edition of the earliest (and shortest) of the three authorial versions (A, B, and C; some propose a fourth, Z). The A version, probably written between 1365 and 1370, precedes the B and the C versions that revise, or, as some have it, complete it. It is extant in eighteen manuscripts, all of which vary not only in diction but also in their inclusion of passūs. Which of the versions best represents Langland’s intentions—rather than, that is, scribal intrusions—is a primary subject of contemporary critical debate and is an issue that an editor of Langland must navigate carefully. Vaughan, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, has written extensively about Piers Plowman and is a contributor to the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. Thus far, the available editions for students of the poem have been the Athlone edition by George Kane (1960, reprinted in 1988) and the critical edition by Thomas A. Knott and David C. Fowler (Johns Hopkins, 1952). Parallel texts of A, B, and C by W. W. Skeat and A. V. C. Schmidt are available as well. Vaughan’s edition departs from its predecessors in its choice of base-text and presents a near-documentary version of the Bodleian Library’s MS. Rawl. poet. 137. It is extensively glossed and gorgeously rendered on the page.

The A version comprises, depending upon the manuscript consulted, eleven or twelve passus of dream visions, plus a prologue. In the visions, the dreamer, Will, embarks upon a soteriological quest for Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest. Along the way, he both finds and loses the poem’s eponymous Piers Plowman. More precise summary than the above presents difficulties; the poem eludes summation and resists conclusion, a tendency that is found even in its manuscript tradition. Generally speaking, students in American classrooms who encounter Langland on a course syllabus encounter the B or the C texts, which are accepted as more complete than A; they are dated later as well. Vaughan’s audience is, as he figures it, is the “new generation of undergraduate students and general readers of late Middle English literature and history,” for whom “this more compact text of A may fit more easily into a course syllabus introducing Middle English literature” (6). His edition enables the A version of Piers Plowman to shape a student’s first experience with the poem—the first version, of course, that Langland’s contemporary audience would have encountered.

Vaughan’s introduction, at once broad and detailed, is one of the edition’s greatest achievements. It will prove an invaluable resource to students of the poem for years to come. Vaughan provides a clear summary of the A text’s structure and content and a guide to its alliterative verse, and he illuminates its literary, historical, and cultural contexts. His detailed discussion of editorial practices and the challenges of manuscript selection that Piers presents for modern editors, unusual for an edition geared toward the student, introduces students to the contingencies of textual production in fourteenth-century England. It presents an argument for and an explication of Vaughan’s own editorial practice, as well as a justification of Rawlinson as base-text. According to Vaughan, this departure from Knott and Fowler indicates a decision to “present the poem in a form that has not been published before” (10). For Vaughan, Rawlinson includes not a superior version but another version of the poem, one that “is less affected by readings from B and C manuscripts and does not ‘complete’ its texts…with passūs from the C version” (40). Another deviation from Knott and Fowler, as well as from Kane, is the inclusion of Passus Twelve, the third passus describing Will’s search for Dowel. While the authorship of the passus has been contested, Vaughan’s rendering...