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At the very least, “The Gang of Five” were attempting to update and supplement a sequence of scholarly classics. There was a great deal we could amplify—much of it summary of past discoveries, some of it the results of our own scholarly investigations. But beyond such modernization, some of us were struck by a further problem. Skeat’s annotation, and indeed all annotation of the poem we knew, did not seem to at least some of us particularly rationalized in its procedures. That is, Skeat had approached the poem in a traditionally partitive manner, inherited from nineteenth-century German Philologie (and the regimen of classical studies that lies behind it). His notes, grand as they are, address the poem as a series of bits—the difficult word, the potentially untranslatable line, the subject of a verse paragraph. In a certain sense, he addresses Piers Plowman as if it were a document, but never quite as a poem.
At least one of our hopes, when we assembled, was to identify, and to argue out a theory for, some other mode of procedure. This would address the (now perhaps old-fashioned) concern that a poem forms “an organic unity”—in the full consciousness that we were working with a literary object always considered particularly problematic in this regard (e.g., Lewis’s sneering reference to “fragments but not a poem,” 1936:158–61 passim). We could rather readily agree to two basic gestures in this regard, both generically forms of “mapping.” First of all, our annotation should include a division of “parts,” progressing through the entire poem. These divisions would indicate those units of sense by which the poet prosecutes his argument, a great number of them considerably longer than simply the “verse paragraph.” We did agree in finding in the work’s frequently remarked episodic structure and fragmentation a model for how to go about reading and explaining it.
Yet such mapping was scarcely any invention of our own, but at least one model provided us by medieval commentative regimes (where Langland may well have learned it as a compositional technique). One might exemplify such a move from the first entry in Bartholomew of Brescia’s standard gloss to Gratian’s Decretum, an example we owe to Howard Bloch:
This [first] distinction is divided into two parts. In the first he proves by four canons.… In the second part, which begins, “There is, however… ,” he gives seven differences. (Gratian 1993:3a [s.v. D.1])
Every serious commentator begins with a “divisio textus”; this provides a reference system predicated upon what might be described as “argumentative stages” of the text. Simultaneously, these may be seen as providing the contextual limits that govern some normative reading. But it is a naïve reading of what we have written that presupposes that this step exists as authoritative end-all. Having found in the poem tranches that we consider self-consistent formulations, we agreed that we would attempt to refer these units to the discursive structures from which they had emerged, and to use that information to guide our detailed annotation. As is manifestly obvious, segmenting the text intrudes our sense of its contours upon our readers and is a thoroughly interpretative decision.
Divisions address the poem as an ongoing narrative whole. In these terms, textual division may have been a sufficient gesture for medieval commentators, largely concerned with texts “proscriptive” or “argumentative” (Holy Scripture, Gratian, the Lombard). We, in contrast, were dealing with a poem, a verbal structure presumed to be integrative. Thus, we argued, reducing the limits of annotative attention to a single textual chunk had always to coexist in oscillation with integrative moments, to which we planned to give special attention.
We could all agree that Langland’s poetic narrative is persistently crossed by a sort of division different from the narrative chunk, one broadly thematic. That is, as all its readers know, Piers Plowman often seems distinctive because it is engaged with, not a plot, but a vast mélange of conflicting voiced opinions. Skeat’s partitive annotation occasionally attends to such repetitions of (often violently bruited) topics or subject matters. We thought these oscillations into reiterated nodes of contention should receive rigorous notice. Indeed, the further all of us proceeded with our work, the more forcefully the importance of such linkings among congruent discussions (and with them, an interest in both their developing terms and the nature of those figures enunciating these) was borne in upon us.
To achieve this integration, we agreed, first of all, that we would strive for a system of extensive cross-references. This would draw together comparable discussions elsewhere in the text—highlighted by having distinguished their unique status as central within individual passages. This effort would map the poem’s development, not just vertically, through a sequence of versions, but longitudinally as developing argument, one in which later passages may qualify or extend earlier ones—and thereby reveal their perhaps unique confirmations. Not all such linkages, it seemed to us, are obvious or even overtly marked in the text. For example, see 8.341–52n; the dreamer’s prophecy of dearth has received extensive and constructive critical notice qua prophecy. Yet overlooked in all discussions is a major point of integrative connection: this is the the second vision’s second appeal to the corrective force of natural disaster (cf. 5.115–22), not to mention this passus’s second example of “houping after hunger” (8.168), the dreamer trying to voice Piers’s frustrations at non-feasant workmen.
This example also highlights a further issue germane to Piers Plowman that Bartholomew’s logically ordered “divisio textus” ignores. Unlike Gratian’s presentation, textual segmentation or division in Piers Plowman seems frequently characterized by utter logical discontinuity, largely the collision of voices representing disparate discursive sites. In this example, at the end of passus 8, the dreamer angrily interjects himself into the narrative he has allegedly only dreamed passively. Yet equally, one might feel that the transition between “parts” of Langland’s poem involved some segue or another (in this case highlighted by the repetitions noted in the last paragraph).
In our study of past writing about the poem, this issue of implicit connectives has come to represent perhaps the greatest difficulty it has presented to its readers. One might state as one of our annotational postulates that Langland’s juxtapositions customarily represent, not anacoluthon but connection. As a preliminary annotational goal, we determined that we should attempt to supply such implicit connectives. Doing so would indicate what we all believe, that whatever the difficulties of modern readers, Langland was engaged in trying to write a coherent and “smooth” narrative (even if addressing a subject that resisted coherence). We thus, while acknowledging its fashionable imbrication in early twenty-first-century literary practices, would reject such an argument as that of V. Smith 2009, that the poem’s inexplicitness about its own procedures keeps the text open to continual interpretation. Even in his generosity toward all views, we are sure Smith would agree that some proposed connectives might be less plausible and compelling than others.
To these initial steps, we could concur unanimously. At this point, I turn to consider my take on the elephant that still remained in the committee room, largely a consideration of what “the commentable” might consist of. For it remained variously clear to all of us that what we were undertaking was imbedded within an essentially Victorian model of textual practice that had grown up with Philologie, in the process of recovering and presenting pre- and early modern texts. This, like the foundational textual studies of that period, had developed within a “scientistic” model, predicated upon the presumption that it was the job of the textual sciences to present “objective information” so that others might have a text on which to practice “interpretative” activities. The edited text had to be presented, it was argued, in a form arrived at through logical rigor and a scientific process (Lachmann’s recension preferred). Correspondingly, as the accompaniment to such an “objective” document, the annotator should offer only objective information—linguistic data culled from fruits of Philologie,