The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman, Volume 4: C Passūs 15–19; B Passūs 13–17 by Traugott Lawler (review)

When the first two volumes of the five-volume Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman came out (volume 1, edited by Andrew Galloway, and volume 5, edited by Stephen A. Barney, both in 2006), they were the first reference works to tackle all three versions of Piers Plowman at once since Walter Skeat’s edition in the nineteenth century. Since then A. V. C. Schmidt’s extensive notes accompanying his parallel-text edition have appeared, but the Penn Commentary remains distinctive and essential. Volume 4 continues the strengths of the series while showcasing the particular expertise that readers of this most intricate poem have learned to expect from Traugott Lawler.

As Ralph Hanna explains in his generous preface to volume 2 (2017), the team of authors shared from its start in 1990 a set of aims including what he calls “mapping” the poem (p. ix) and bringing out its various kinds of “implicit connectives” (p. xi). Further, the team agreed that, despite the poem’s notorious discontinuities, they would, “like medieval commentators,” assume “the capacity of the author” and “the plenitude of the text” (p. xiii). Thus, while these volumes give plenty of line-by-line, philological commentary, their great achievement, on full display in volume 4, is to enable interpretation of each part of the poem in light of a vision of the whole. (Volume 3, first undertaken by Anne Middleton but delayed by her untimely death, is being completed by her UC Berkeley colleague Steven Justice.)

Like the other volumes, Lawler’s is laid out according to the poem’s “nested structure” (ix). There is commentary at every level, from long headnotes for each passus (the chapter-like units marked in manuscripts of the poem) down through several levels to single lines. Subheadings, picked up as running titles on right-hand pages, indicate a middle level of organization and provide a helpful map. For the full commentary on any given passage, a user must consult the commentary that might be given in multiple entries devoted to different-size chunks of text. Lawler helps with a little repetition, such as brief discussions on the local level of larger issues treated more fully at a broader level. Even when read straight through, however (as few but reviewers are likely to do), Lawler’s lively dialogue with scholarship and his genial wit keep the commentary engaging. Most important, this approach keeps the overall tensions and movements of Langland’s thought in view during line-by-line treatment.

Extensive cross-references bring out another crucial aspect of Langland’s art and a maximal sense of its continuity beneath apparent discontinuity. The famous pardon sent to Piers by St. Truth, for example, which is in the section of the poem covered in volume 2, continues to reverberate through the sections covered here in ways both obvious and subtle, as Lawler’s frequent references show—especially in light of the important argument he has made before and advances here that repentance is the pardon’s “silent middle term.” Such references to patterns of narrative, ideas, and wording across the poem create a rich sense of the many threads liable to be tied into any passage, beneath whatever is momentarily at the surface of its tapestry.

The collaborators’ vision also gives each one room to pursue particular emphases. Lawler’s preface draws attention to two of his: Latin sources and comedy. The comic potential of sections covered here, especially in the scene between Abraham/Faith, Moses/Hope, the Good Samaritan/Love, and Will the narrator (pp. 371–72), is easily lost in the seriousness of the issues at stake and the intricate use of biblical allegory. Bringing it out is a revelation—though of course, as Lawler also notes, it is fully in keeping with the poem’s...