We equally concurred in omitting any extensive treatment of the socalled Z-text (although it occasionally appears in notes, e.g., that to B 5.226). This rendition of the poem, unique to MS Bodley 851, we find the work of an enthusiastic (and not always very savvy) admirer of William Langland, but not Langland himself. Kane’s showing in 1985, to which our various researches have presented a host of further analogous examples (e.g., Hanna 1996:195–202), seems to us compelling. Reading the text in detail constantly reveals the Z-reviser’s misprisions of what Piers Plowman was about; a small but telling example of such obtuseness appears at Z 2.56. There “meble” is legally inept, since the following charter describes real property (as the legally literate poet was certainly aware).
We further believe with the Athlone editors that the poem was promulgated thrice, and thrice only (ignoring the issue of what the term “promulgation” would mean in Langland’s case, and whether all versions were subject to identical procedures). We regard a variety of other proposals, notably Scase 1987 (a D text?) and Warner 2002/2007, as unconvincing. We agree that these arguments rest only upon an inability to conceptualize appropriately the vicissitudes of texts in manuscript transmission (see Hanna 1996:204–14, 2010; Adams and Turville-Petre 2013).
We also agreed to adapt a traditional approach to the problem of versions. Our commentary, perhaps unhelpfully, has been predicated on the method of parallel texts laid out by Skeat (and now followed in Schmidt). This choice in many ways was driven by our conception of the textual problem, the view that Langland had begun with A, worked A into B and then B into C, and that our task was to outline this ordered development. As we have worked, at times we have come to feel that this may be a weak point in our procedures; certainly, considering the poem as a developing entity has often led us to believe that versional revisions may not always most usefully be predicated upon passages immediately congruent in parallel-text structure. Revision may, in a number of situations, reflect the poet’s responses to loci very distant in the texts (a point raised by Wood 2012). Our chosen form of presentation may well have precluded our noticing a great many such instances.
Decisions like these provided our annotational group a framework within which we might proceed. It did not, however, resolve the issue of our relationship to our predecessors, to how we would handle the rich variety of suggestions about Langland’s meaning thrown up over a century and more of active scholarship since Skeat. We discussed at considerable length various rhetorical modes in which our commentary might be situated. At a relatively early stage, we rejected the possibility of a variorum commentary (which might include our own additions). Here we were especially cognizant of Pearsall’s excellent bibliography (1990) and its annual continuations in YLS. Access to a relatively complete listing of interpretative and annotational suggestions is available elsewhere.
Further, variorums are fraught with rhetorical difficulties that we hoped our annotation might avoid. A true variorum, since it requires citing everything ever said, forms something of a rubble heap, every suggestion duly noted, regardless of value. At the other extreme, what one might call a “critical variorum,” would require a potentially ceaseless stream of negative commentary (e.g., even the customarily amiable Pearsall describes one study as offering “cues for misreading” [1990:96]). We agreed that we were not interested in engaging in dogfights over the value of individual contributions; equally, we found an unannotated variorum hopeless in its failure to discriminate things any interested student should read from all things, e.g., Pearsall’s dismissal of a book-length study above (or his comment on another book, “surely exaggerates the mystical element” [1990:243], a thorough rejection of the thesis argued in the work so described).
We determined not to pursue exhaustiveness in favor of some more pointed goal, while affirming that we would offer references to all discussions of the point under consideration from which we had drawn useful knowledge. Unless it seemed a view thoroughly entrenched in need of detailed refutation, we agreed to allow views we did not find helpful to pass in silence. This decision may place an undue burden upon our readers, in the absence of overt statements of disagreement. However, the general arguments here pursued will implicitly indicate why we have found some statements about the poem of minimal helpfulness.
Thus, we ultimately concurred in a program that would support an eclectic method, a well-defined medieval compendiary pursuit of “gathering flowers,” the best that has been thought and written, that might be most useful to a reader. (Cf. Thomas of Ireland’s prologue to his Manipulus florum, Rouse and Rouse 236.) We further agreed that, while eschewing exhaustiveness, we would not simply report the best from materials already available in the formal annotation and scholarly literature of Piers Plowman. Some past notes might be fruitfully extended, and many passages that remained problematic to us had never received any thorough treatment. Thus, we would rely to some extent on our own research-based knowledge, to identify the many valuable contributions of past scholars, as well as to pursue additional helpful materials.
We also discussed, and were able to resolve fairly quickly, the issue of our target audience. The most recent models (or competitors) for what we envisioned, Bennett and Schmidt1were composed for neophyte readers in undergraduate teaching contexts. (This did not mean, particularly in the case of Bennett, a wise master of the uniquely Oxbridge exercise known as “critical commentary,” that there were not notes in these volumes edifying to any reader of the poem, no matter how experienced.) However, we were agreed that we wished to address a more sophisticated cadre, to offer annotation for colleagues and graduates. Thus, our model would differ from the most contemporary annotational modes and would follow those we found in Skeat, probably in Pearsall1 (originally composed for an extraordinary group of graduates at the University of York, many now prominent professors), and, in a volume that has appeared in the course of our work, Schmidt. And we remained acutely aware of a narrowing of focus in Piers Plowman studies, in which what were the basic interpretative commonplaces guiding readers as recently as the 1980s might require some form of reassertion.
However, the broader issue—what a commentary was and what ends it sought—remained unresolved, and often a contentious issue among us. At the same time, we felt there was an ample arena in which work could proceed. We remained conscious of the fact that Skeat’s labors were more than a century old. Many more texts, particularly examples of devotional prose, had appeared since his time. Moreover, particularly in the years since 1949, when Donaldson had laid the vitiating “authorship controversy” to bed, the poem had appeared as an object of criticism, analyzed within any variety of provocative contexts. These had, of course, suggested new ways of explaining its contours and implicitly identified a rich surround of discussions available to Langland across a range of languages and discursive sites. And when we began, in the absence of Schmidt, no one since Skeat had attempted annotation of “the poem Piers Plowman’ ” in all its versions. The variations in explanatory technique that mark the various volumes of The Penn Commentary largely are predicated upon our laissez-faire decision made at this point—and the specific difficulties each of us found in his or her portion of the text. The explanation of procedures I have offered above seeks to explicate the form of this volume alone.
As I have indicated, the commentary team agreed on these guiding procedures by sometime in spring 1990. However, because coming to completion has proved such a protracted process, our work now emerges, a prospect we could not have envisioned when we began, in a context in which Carl Schmidt’s