Every specialist in Middle English language and literature knows that the printed texts used in class derive from meticulously scrutinized manuscripts. Many of us thank our lucky stars that, in order to produce a class's textbook, others have devoted their lives to the demands that manuscript studies require. Medievalists appreciate the editions from which they teach at the same time that they honor the startling variation among manuscripts with which editors wrestle in order to publish them, with varying degrees of seamlessness. No one who works in medieval studies ignores the arcana, detail-work, and seemingly endless minutiae of manuscript studies. We owe a great debt of thanks to those who do the heavy lifting required to put a text in a class's hands.
It takes a certain kind of person to make manuscript studies a career's work. Manuscript people--we all know them--find pleasure in recondite obsessions that, with overtones of detective work and espionage, endlessly seduce them. In addition to their joy in sleuthing, some editors also reveal, in introductory or other essays that explain their editorial work, a certain pugilistic attitude. Editors duke it out with one another as soon as at least two of them have made their way into manuscript studies' boxing ring. Editing is about choices, and choice inevitably brings disagreement.
Name the editors of Piers Plowman, and find the giants of Middle English textual studies: Skeat, Donaldson, Kane, Russell, Schmidt. All have devoted their lives to a great enterprise, and none are afraid of a fight. A fair amount of literary lore circles these giants and their famous disagreements. Clearly editing's pleasures lie not only in minutiae but in building a case for one manuscript line's reading against another. Manuscript people combine the relentless logic of the detective with the rhetorical skills of an attorney. Their clients are a manuscript's words; their jury, the reader. Sometimes an execution can seem to hang in the balance, and not just for ancephalous manuscripts. Editors present their opinions as transparent, rational, and eminently balanced, then skewer their opponents' with gentlemanly wit and niceties. Nor are these disagreements limited to minutiae: an editor frequently makes larger arguments about an edition's relationship to literary and social history.
Lawrence Warner has not edited Piers Plowman per se but, having tilled the field of Piers Plowman manuscripts, he has a beef with the poem's editing. His slim volume (67 pages of text, 31 pages of notes) acknowledges its debt to two centuries of Piers Plowman's editors, but his goal is clear: to question long-held opinions about affiliations among the poem's manuscripts. Warner contends that the theory of sequential composition on which the editors' division of the poem into three versions depends--designated A, B, and C--is not only more murky than subsequent editors have suggested, but one version--the B--can't bear very close scrutiny as a popular, independent version at all. Warner questions the status of the B-version, claiming, on the basis of evidence from two families of B manuscripts and revision practices having to do with "loose sheets," that B had very little independent life as a "public" version of the poem. Instead, Warner suggests--and, some will think, proves--that B is an editor's chimera. In Warner's reassessment, the C-version's "contamination" of B reveals the B-version's marginal status. What editors have called B was an interim and scantily published version of Langland's great poem.
Not only did B have little contemporary traction: what flows from Warner's contention is that the Langland community's current reification of B deserves reexamination. The giant textbook publisher W.W. Norton chose the B-version not only for its very popular anthology of English literature, but for its Norton Critical Edition. Moreover, Warner's contention affects recent scholarly opinion concerning the version of the poem that Chaucer or the 1381 rebels would have known, as well as scholarship on Lollardy which has flowed from a B-version orientation.
In one respect, Warner's claim is neither as audacious nor unexpected as those outside the Piers industry might assume. A prior attempt to shake up a sequential A-B-C ordering got a hearing in the 1990s. Jill Mann contended that manuscripts of what scholars call the A-version, usually thought to be the poem's earliest iteration, actually reveal a late version of the poem, created as a kind of Reader's Digest condensation for less-expert readers (footnote 1). Like Warner, Mann reframes the C material's "contamination" of A- manuscripts to support her case. In effect, she consults the poem's manuscript evidence, albeit prior to publication of the Athlone C or a concordance, to achieve a different perspective. Mann's theory about A supports the poem's popularity at the same time that it indicates its vital and dangerous nature. She frames a late, short A-version as almost Tory in its impulse, meant to remove revolutionary complexity (as well as Latin) in order to tame and naturalize a popular poem.
Warner's case is just as radical as Mann's, and his evidence more complex. As he readily admits, the Athlone editions--produced over a thirty-eight year span-enabled his work, as has A.V.C. Schmidt's parallel text edition, along with Joseph Wittig's concordance. As Warner tells the story, his leaps of faith are no greater than those of the poem's editors, and pay attention to features that triangulation of concordance, editions, and manuscripts allows. He's careful to note his exceptions to prior editors' contentions as well as those of other scholars who have treated the issues of manuscripts and versions, chief among them Robert Adams and Ralph Hanna. Warner clearly, if obsessively, walks the reader through big issues- convergent variation and conjectural emendation--as well as the precise sequential steps of his argument. Can readers enjoy these minutiae? You bet, even if, sometimes, various manuscript feature-- RF/Cx/N2and W-M/Nx, as well as Bx-occasionally get tangled. Warner buttresses his argument with more than manuscript evidence: he contends that increasingly coherent thematic concerns--"friars, illicit sexuality, and the question of...livelihood or endowment" (62)--show that "'Piers Plowman B' is a modern amalgam of three traditions brought together in the 1390s rather than a unified and complete poem available for quoting by 1379" (66-7).
Is Warner right? Here's the good news: the book is short enough for a good rousing read ("rousing" as only an academic would define it) so that readers can make up their own minds. Will it set Langland studies on its ear? Probably not, at least not right away. What it will do is spur Warner's students and others who obsessively till this fertile field to continue with manuscript studies and their effect on our understanding of Middle English literature. No doubt the poem's living manuscript experts--Schmidt, Adams, and Hanna--will have their say. But in ten years will our students more likely become acquainted with Langland's poem through a C-version, rather than through a B- version? Or will the B-version retain its (undeserved, according to Warner) place among our textbooks? Stay tuned.
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Notes:
1. Jill Mann, "The Power of the Alphabet: A Reassessment of the Relation between the A and the B versions of Piers Plowman," Yearbook of Langland Studies 8 (1994): 21-50.