of “the work” as an entity “constantly involved in a negative dialectic of material medium (the documentary dimension) and meaningful experience (the textual), and as being constituted by an unrolling semiosis across time, necessarily interwoven in the lives of all who create it, gaze at it or read it.”16
An earlier generation of editors assumed that “the work” existed quite apart from their own interventions, prompting some recent commentators to react by dispensing altogether with the editorial enterprise, preferring to celebrate, rather than analyze, scribal variants, or to urge a return to manuscripts and the abandonment of author-driven textual reconstruction. I am all for greater emphasis on manuscripts in the study of Piers Plowman, but do not see the need to reject editions as part of that project. Complicit in certain idealist fantasies Middle English textual editing may be; but, as Lee Patterson says, “if the humanist premises that have underwritten textual criticism in the past are now to be dismissed, what is to take their place?” As he points out, “the refusal to edit—which is part of the larger refusal to interpret—is an all too tenacious tradition within medieval studies.”17
This impasse between pure idealism and pure Aristotelianism, as it were, needs breaking if we are not simply to recycle earlier critical paradigms by default. As Eggert concludes, “securing tangible and intangible works from the past, whether historic buildings, paintings or literary works, means facing up to (and often differentiating) their intertwined documentary and textual dimensions.” He stresses “agency and chronology, especially as they inflect and determine the production-consumption spectrum,” as the closely related themes that emerge at points of crisis in the work of conservation. “Together they point towards the need for a broader understanding of the work than the 1960s bequeathed us.”18 Eggert’s approach, while it takes the Gabler-Kidd debate over Ulysses and the concept of the “materialist Shakespeare” as its primary literary instances, provides a robust framework for future thinking about the Piers Plowman situation. Indeed, in many ways it applies to Piers Plowman more than to almost any other “work,” given the importance of chronology and nonauthorial agents in the production of the various versions. The basic goal of this book, then, is to face up to the intertwined documentary and textual dimensions of the work we call Piers Plowman by identifying, as precisely as possible given our historical distance, the modes of its production at given times and places. The subject of the “lost history” I am narrating is not just the newly identified, “ur-B” version of the poem, but also the well-known stages of text whose histories have been lost as well. The received “B version,” which I identify as owing its shape as much to scribal or readerly desires for “complete” texts as to its author’s aesthetic vision, is no less authentic a part of the “work” Piers Plowman than is the earlier, previously unknown one, but its character, and its place on the production-consumption spectrum, have remained obscure.
Langland studies’ wholesale embrace of Adam Pinkhurst rather than William Langland as the figure in whose language we quote its most canonical version already elevates the status of scribal responses to the poem. There is no problem with that policy in itself: Pinkhurst’s work on Trinity B.15.17 is just as much part of the work Piers Plowman as is any other text.19 But a sharpening of our awareness of what it means to quote “the B version,” that is, Langland’s poem (as most critics continue to say they are doing), in his language will only bolster our understanding of that work’s production and consumption. Kane-Donaldson and Schmidt chose MS W as copy-text, the text that determines spelling only and never choice of lection, because Pinkhurst was consistent in his language, made it more inviting to modern readers reared on the Chaucer manuscripts he also copied, and was fortunate that no other surviving B copies surpassed his in those regards.20 It also bolstered Pinkhurst’s impact that Kane and Donaldson were working “in default of any evidence about the original dialect of the poem,” believing that “there is no evidence that [Langland] wrote Piers Plowman in that native dialect, any more than that he retained this in adulthood.”21
But our knowledge of dialects has increased substantially since 1975. M. L. Samuels has shown that the reconstruction of Langland’s dialect, at all stages of his career, “could probably be best achieved by adopting X [of C; San Marino, Huntington Library MS Hm 143] as the basis and modifying it in a conservative direction.”22 This was the language “that he used in his holographs,” including those of the A and B traditions.23 Remnants of this fact sometimes appear in places where the copy-text overextends its reach and forces editors to treat its readings as substantives in need of emendation, as at W’s B 20.198, “So Elde and she hadden it forbeten,” which appears in Kane and Donaldson as “So Elde and [heo] hadden it forbeten,” so as to restore alliteration by adopting the C tradition’s dialectal form of the term she. R. W. Chambers observed about the Piers Plowman manuscripts in 1935, well before Greg’s famous rationale said the same thing, that “we are dependent, in the matter of dialect and spelling, to a much greater degree than we are in the matter of wording, upon our basic manuscript, and it is therefore all the more vital to select a well spelled manuscript, containing no spelling which we have reason to think the original writer would not have used.”24 If he was right—and the entire premise of copy-text theory that the Athlone editors follow suggests he was—then we ought now, if seeking to print the poem in Langland’s language (by no means the only option, but the one I am adopting in this book), to stop doing so in Pinkhurst’s and begin doing so in that of MS X.
Some critics have thus criticized Kane and Donaldson’s choice of Trinity as copy-text,25 but that seems both unfair, given when they were working, and beside the more important point that we are not bound to adopt their approach in our own quotations of the poem. Thus, when I am not quoting directly from a manuscript, I quote from C as presented in Russell and Kane’s edition, which uses X as its copy-text, because that suits my own purpose of representing Langland’s poetry in a language closer to his own than any otherwise available. And to remain true to that purpose, and consistent in my practice, I translate the language of the published editions of the A and B versions (i.e., of MSS T and W) into the language of MS X as well. If the translation of the language of received A and B into that of C strikes any readers as too intrusive, they should remember that the Athlone editions are full of such “translated” passages—B 20.198 as cited above is one instance in which they do exactly on a local level what I will do throughout. Indeed one of the main purposes of a copy-text is precisely to guide editors on the presentation of lines and passages absent from that text; among the 170-odd lines not in MS W that Kane and Donaldson translate into that text’s language are B 15.511–28, which will play an important role in this book. Before the appearance of Joseph Wittig’s Concordance in 2001 my approach would have been almost impossible; now, though, it is relatively painless, even rather enjoyable, and productive of a more intimate knowledge of the cited A and B passages than simple transcription of the edited texts would have permitted.26
It seems quite possible—almost certain, if we are to assume that Kane would have followed his own convictions to their logical conclusions—that Kane, alone and with Donaldson, would have adopted this approach had he had access to Wittig’s invaluable work. Twenty years after the B edition, collaborating with Janet Cowen, he wanted to edit Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women in part because doing so “would illustrate the problem of copy text in the instance of fourteenth-century poetry preserved only in fifteenth-century or late fifteenth-century manuscripts.”27 The problem was that, whereas “there are manuscripts of both Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales admirably suited to serve as copy text in Greg’s sense”—that is, as provider of language, not as “base text” that supplies the most correct readings—the same does not apply for Chaucer’s other works.28 His conclusion is bold: he chooses the text in Oxford, Bodleian MS Tanner 346 because “it represents authentically what run-of-the-mill fifteenth-century scribes made of, did to, Chaucer’s language. For editors of Chaucer’s minor works use of such a manuscript is one alternative. The other is to rewrite the poem in the language presumed to be Chaucer’s. This would bring to the fore new issues of rationale.”29
In suggesting that copy-text is only one of two viable approaches to this