The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, vol. 7: London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 398 & Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (R) ed. by Robert Adams (review)

The appearance of Robert Adams’s edition of MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (a few leaves are now in Landsdowne 398), one of the most important manuscripts of Piers Plowman, is a most welcome event. MS R is the only reliable witness to the alpha group’s 170 lines of the B tradition, but this is not the limit of its significance, for, Adams claims, “more than any other surviving evidence, it validates the authority and primacy of [Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 581; MS L],” the beta-group manuscript whose language and layout, Adams claims, are closest to those of the poet. These two manuscripts, “with only two documents probably separating them from a holograph, inevitably reflect better than any other B copies the mixed usage and dialect of William Langland himself” (Introduction, II.2.6). The movement from the tentative “probably” to the conviction of “inevitably” and “Langland himself” is representative of Adams’s mode of scholarship. While some might not agree with the map (and I, along with many others, do not grant even the “probably” here), it is always an interesting, and often exhilarating, ride.

This edition instantiates the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA)’s well-deserved reputation for producing electronic facsimiles and TEI-marked-up transcriptions to the highest standard. This project enables scholars to shift their paradigm from the editorial apparatus to the manuscript itself and to discover things they could never have imagined in earlier scholarly paradigms. As such, though, it highlights the inherent tension between editions of major poems on the one hand (this is Piers Plowman) and those of particular manuscripts on the other (this is Rawlinson Poetry 38). The relationship of any given manuscript with the poem it embodies cannot be determined apart from the full corpus of variants, but the very nature of the PPEA—its single-manuscript focus, at this stage of the project at least—does not enable such an approach. Readers interested in that relationship, which is where the bulk of the “editing” here resides (aside from the mark-up of the text), must trust the editors of PPEA volumes to an extraordinary degree.

The question, then, is whether Adams lives up to the standard set by George Kane and his colleagues, who, as he says, “have laid out in their detailed introductions—with an explicitness and transparency unparalleled in editions of Middle English texts—their reasons for hundreds of their editorial decisions,” and, more than is usually the case, “have played fair with their readers” (Preface). So far as the presentation of MS R itself goes, this edition is exemplary: most everything we might want to know about its decoration, punctuation, binding, language, and so forth is here. At first I thought that the paleographical information was the only let-down, since I.6, “Script,” is so slight, but I later discovered that Adams supplies this, somewhat bizarrely, instead in II.4, “Presentation of Text: Transcriptional Policy.”

But users of this edition might have justifiably expected more with regard to the presentation of R’s affiliations and its status in the history of Piers Plowman’s production. The major textual issue in which R is implicated concerns the relationships among the alpha group of B (of which R is the only reliable witness), the beta group of B, and MS N² of C. Each B group, as is well known, has over 170 lines not in the other, and beta and N², as became apparent about a decade ago, share about eighty of the lines (and dozens of other individual readings) not in alpha or for which alpha has spurious lines. Summarizing an essay of 2002 (II.2.5), Adams...