The Alterations to Piers Plowman C

Dear Sirs,

I write to correct some of the errors of fact and misrepresentations in Sarah Wood’s essay in the December 2016 issue of this journal. Wood faults my interpretation of the extensive number and patterning of agreements between MS N² of Piers Plowman C (in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 733B; A-portion MS N) and the beta family of the B text overwhelmingly where the alpha B family (MSS RF) is absent, spurious, or agrees with Cx, the C archetype.¹ I had argued that N² attests an ‘ur-C’ version featuring, first, some new passages on loose sheets that then went to Bx as copied by the beta scribe but which were not available to the alpha scribe, and second, some readings that had not yet been revised from B.² Wood considers it ‘obvious’ that this manuscript is ‘an A-C splice contaminated by a B manuscript’ (p. 375), which she, like Robert Adams and Thorlac Turville-Petre in their nearly identical assault on my work, calls ‘the traditional view’ of the phenomenon I brought to light a few years before that view came about (pp. 375, 380).³ But that interpretation turns out not to be obvious after all. Her main argument is that, while ‘the argument for contamination of [NLW 733B] involving both a beta and an alpha manuscript points to a very complex and perhaps irrecoverable sequence of events’, which might be ‘impossible to recover’, the impossibility of that sequence’s recovery does not mean that it ‘simply could not have occurred’ (p. 380). She does not offer any positive interpretation of the substantial body of evidence at issue.

Wood’s primary method is to isolate any of my given objections to Adams and Turville-Petre, simplify it, and then find a parallel elsewhere for that simplification. A typical instance: those critics posited a scenario in which a scribe followed a main exemplar (A-C) but substituted for certain of its passages and readings those of a second copy (beta of B) that were not in a third copy on his desk (alpha). To that I responded: ‘his use of alpha, that is, was entirely negative, a situation unprecedented, so far as I know, in the history of medieval vernacular scribal contamination’.⁴ Rather than identifying a precedent, as she seems to be saying she will do in her essay, Wood changes this to one in which Warner merely ‘casts doubt on the idea that N[²]’s text could have been produced by contamination involving both a beta and an alpha copy’ (p. 386), identifying a possible instance in the transmission history of another manuscript, and in which in any case the possible evidence is positive, not negative, and amounts to a single phrase. All this is the opposite of what I am discussing.

Likewise, Wood cites London, British Library, MS Royal 18 B. xvii (R of C), which, so she says, ‘also in part attests one of Warner’s N[²]+beta-only passages [B.3.51–63] at a point where RF have spurious lines based upon the equivalent A-text section’. This copy, she claims, ‘inserts, after C.3.52, the first line of the relevant passage and the line immediately preceding it, B.3.50–51’. Warner cites this instance, she says, but

does not mention, however, that R also contains three other lines from B passus 3 in what is otherwise a C text, B.3.37, 107, and 109. These cannot represent ‘ur-C’ lines, since RF also attest them.⁵ The existence of an ‘ur-C’ text whose new passages were loaned to the beta but denied the alpha scribe does not explain how R of C, too, incorporates part of one of the passages involved in the ‘pattern’ Warner observes in relation to [N²] and alpha …The phenomenon of parallel versional switches in several manuscripts awaits full explanation.

(p. 379)

Yet MS R, a sixteenth-century copy, does not ‘insert’ or ‘contain’ lines B.3.37, 50–51, 107, and 109, whose presence therein is the result...