Piers Plowman: The B-Version Archetype (Bx) by William Langland (review)

John Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre's edition, an updating of a 2014 online version, is not of Langland's putative, if in their account incomplete, holograph of Piers Plowman B but rather of its descendant, the archetype behind all extant manuscripts, MS Bx. They speculate that the later part of this copy "was in a much more rough and ready state" than the earlier, "having revisions entered in margins and on loose sheets"—hence its ur-B ancestor's incompleteness (p. 7). Sometimes these revisions, which were not confined to the later part of the poem, prompted changes in the original state of the copy. In Passus 3, alpha, one of the two B-version families, "has three lines garbled from two lines of A," the editors note: "The Bx archetype may have had the cancelled A lines which had been rendered illegible, with an expanded passage on a separate sheet, followed by beta [the other manuscript family] but for some reason not available to alpha" (p. 75). (All this, we might note, indicates the misleading character of any claim to reconstruct "the B-version archetype.") Burrow and Turville-Petre also believe that during its life Bx accommodated C revisions, presumably everything from individual words to entirely new passages on loose sheets (p. ix), and they are the first editors ever to attend to the remarkable pattern of agreements between MS F of alpha and the C version where the more reliable alpha MS R is deficient (implicitly rejecting Ralph Hanna's 2010 attempt at an explanation). Hanna deems this edition "certainly the most significant contribution to Piers Plowman studies in the last twenty years, perhaps in the nearly sixty years since George Kane's A-text" (back cover blurb). I am gratified by these remarks, since the above claims—Bx's inclusion of matter available to beta but not alpha; its accommodation of C passages; MS F's attestation of C readings—which make up both the core of the edition and its most notable features, diverging radically from anything found in earlier editions of Piers, are mine, even if Burrow and Turville-Petre nowhere mention any of my work on the poem. Whatever explains this failure to give credit where it is due, there is no returning to the notion that an integral B version, produced in the 1370s, generated a widely disseminated canonical text that ruled the day until the final, C version appeared a decade later.

Burrow and Turville-Petre's establishment of the text relies on what they call Robert Adams's "demonstration" that agreements between MS L of beta and MS R of alpha almost certainly attest Bx (p. 5). Yet in my judgment their citation of "an extreme case of this" reveals instead the extremity of their willingness to pursue this policy beyond reasonability (see also 10.291, 10.456, 17.82; all line numbers are of Bx unless specified). More successful are their tallying, derived from Burrow's important essays, of Bx's alliterative patterns (e.g., 291 aaa/ax lines, 219 ax/ax, etc.), and their attention to the poem's rubrics, paragraph marks, and use of the punctus, which they rightly see as an integral part of Bx. They also rightly accept that the Passus ijus de dobest rubric at the conclusion of the poem is "authentically Bx" (p. 22), its absence from the text clearly the result of an error in the production process (see p. 23 top and the online edition). But there is little question that its existence, which as they say "made no sense" to the MS L scribe (p. 22), presents an embarrassment to their conviction that the rubrics are authorial (p. 20); as Robert Adams first pointed out, "[a]lmost certainly it was laterally imported . . . from a C manuscript" (YLS 8 [1994...