The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive by Lawrence Warner (review)

Lawrence Warner's book is no standard reception history, for he has at one and the same time surveyed the history of Piers Plowman's readership and scholarship, while simultaneously challenging our most basic assumptions about what we mean by the very terms "Langland" and "Piers Plowman." Warner does away with the a prioris that would typically constitute a reception history, instead showing that we have not really understood the poem we think we are studying. Warner's Introduction, channeling Derrida, contends that "the archive is both the repository of those remnants of the past from which history can be written and an indelible reminder, precisely on account of its selectivity, of how much must be excluded, burned, if it is to exist at all" (p. 1). Thus, the main thrust of this book's investigation into Piers Plowman is to question how the poem as we now construe it came to be construed that way—what selective processes were at play in admitting some things to the Langland archive, while excluding others.

The first case study is Chapter 1, "William and the Werewolf: The Problem of William of Palerne," which asks if William Langland could have authored the anonymous romance William of Palerne early in his career. Warner, wisely equivocating, shows that scholars have circularly assumed that they knew what Langland wrote and hence tend not to look for things that do not fit their predetermined idea of what the things that Langland wrote look like. But, as Warner shows, using many different forms of evidence (dialectal, manuscript, linguistic, literary-critical), the parallels are striking enough that scholars ought to have dwelt on the question more intensively than they have. Chapter 2, "Localizing Piers Plowman C: Meed, Corfe Castle, and the London Riot of 1384," revisits the familiar narrative that the Langland of the C-text must have returned to his native Malvern, or at least split time between the countryside and London. Warner zeroes in on C.III.141–43, in which the king threatens to imprison Lady Meed in the Castel of Corfe, a reference Warner shows to be toponymically significant: Corfe Castle was central to the Brembre-Northampton dispute of the early 1380s, and Langland was commenting explicitly on these events for an audience that was similarly enmeshed in London civic politics. If Warner is right, we would have our strongest evidence yet that the author of the C-text was installed in London, writing for a London audience, so late as the C-text. The subsequent chapter, "Latinitas et communitas Visionis Willielmi de Langlond," challenges our assumption that Langland wrote all the Latin bits that appear in our critical editions today. Again, Warner studiedly equivocates, merely trying to point out that we cannot be so confident that we know what we think we know.

The rest of the book pivots to the postmedieval life of Piers Plowman, beginning with "'Quod piers plowman': Non-Reformist Prophecy, c.1520–1555." Here, Warner reveals a series of post-1534 manuscript quotations from Piers that do not try to recover the poem as a heterodox challenge to Catholicism, but rather treat Piers as a source for popular prophecy. Thus, Warner shows, Robert Crowley's famous editorial efforts in his 1550 print edition of the poem, which sought to align Langland with Wyclif, and to turn Langland into a bookish, learned poet, "in fact constituted a rearguard attack on the predominant approach, which was decidedly non-reformist and oral" (p. 72). In Chapter 5, "Urry, Burrell, and the Pains of John Taylor: The Spelman MS, 1709–1766," Warner shows that, contrary to received wisdom, the eighteenth century was not at all indifferent to editing Piers Plowman. To make this case, Warner presents several case studies, the most fascinating of which involves Huntington Library, MS Hm 114, which Warner can demonstrate was in the...