The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 1: Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS 201 (F) ed. by Robert Adams et al. and: The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 2: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (W) ed. by Thorlac Turville-Petre, Hoyt N. Duggan (review)

REVIEWS Robert Adams, Hoyt N. Duggan, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna III, John Price-Wilkin, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. William Langland, The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 1: Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS 201 (F). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, for the Society for Early English and Norse Texts, 2000. $65.00. Thorlac Turville-Petre and Hoyt N. Duggan, eds., The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, Vol. 2: Cambridge , Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (W). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, for the Society for Early English and Norse Texts, 2000. $65.00. Piers Plowman poses one of the most intractable editorial problems in Middle English. The poem survives in well over fifty medieval manuscripts and early prints. These witnesses attest to the circulation of the poem in various versions, and also to widespread local variation in the text. The desire to edit Piers produced one of the great monuments of twentieth-century Middle English scholarship, the Athlone Press edition made by George Kane, E. Talbot Donaldson, and George Russell. Although monumental, the Athlone edition has not been accepted as definitive without demur. Perhaps its most enduring importance will prove to be the way it has kindled vigorous debate about how to edit a poem like Piers. The aim of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive project is to apply the resources of the new information technology to the problem . It seems likely that these first electronic editions, and the editorial aims and principles adopted by the editors, will quicken the debate. The subject of the first volume of the new electronic edition is one of the most intriguing of Piers manuscripts. Oxford, Corpus Christi College , MS 201 is a B-version manuscript with many substantive, unique, variant readings. Volume Two offers an edition of Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17. This manuscript was used as a base text by several previous B-version editors. Both disks offer a full-color facsimile of the manuscript, a transcription, and an edition of the text. But the edition of the Corpus MS attempts something more. The editors follow their Athlone predecessors in positing that this manuscript is a copy (at an undecidable number of scribal removes) of a scribal redaction of the 355 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:36:44 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER poem. The scribe who made the redaction may have had access to a manuscript that was closer to the poet’s original text than the archetype of all surviving B-version witnesses. The disk offers an edited reconstruction of the redactor’s text. The decision to attempt this meant that the editors had to ask of each and every variant ‘‘at what level of copying did this feature originate?’’ The editors admit that they ‘‘are now convinced ’’ that the redactor’s text ‘‘cannot be distinguished from that of the immediate scribe with sufficient consistency to claim that [their] critical text is his.’’ What they claim to offer instead is ‘‘as close an approximation of his text as the technology permits.’’ If one were to judge according to the criteria associated with printed editions, probably one would decide that publishing tendentious reconstructions was not advisable. Furthermore, even setting aside the reconstruction , it is improbable that these editions of the manuscripts would have been published in printed form. This is because they represent output from what is only the first stage of the work of transcription and textual analysis: the transcriptions are intended to be used as a basis for later machine-assisted collation of the variants in all of the witnesses. But the new electronic format opens up for reconsideration questions of what can be attempted, and what should be published. With electronic resources giving us the ability to store and manipulate so much data, it could be argued that this kind of first-stage publication, along with reconstructions and the like, is now justified. And these editions do more than to make available interim publication. Links from the disks to the project’s website allow readers to intervene in the editorial process by offering comments, suggestions, and corrections. Interim publication and interactivity between users and producers of the edition are imaginative...