Repurposing Piers Plowman: Literary Geography and the Codicological Remaking of Langland's Work

Langland scholars have long divided Piers’ complex manuscript tradition into four distinct versions: the A, B, C, and Z texts. Yet, despite the continued value of these four “versions” for discussing an immensely complex poem, the rise of reception and manuscript studies in recent decades highlights the actual diversity within each version’s individual manuscript copies. In particular, studies of single manuscripts and their scribal versions reveal individual audiences and responses as the scribes of each copy tailor their editions and revisions to specific audiences, whether or not their copies end up with the same intended and actual readers. These scribes, acting similar to Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s “professional readers,” repurpose Langland’s work by editing, correcting, revising, annotating, compiling, and designing their manuscripts conscientiously. This project examines a selection of these professional readers’ individual versions and their audiences for the manuscript and historical evidence they each provide about Langland’s late medieval and early modern reception. These professional readers, I argue, compose a series of responses to Langland that push beyond simple textual reproduction into the murkier realm of scribal argumentation. The four case studies presented here emphasize these manuscripts’ exploration of England’s political and ecclesiastical administration. Each manuscript witness reshapes Langland’s historical and geographical perspectives in order to highlight or tone down particular criticisms of the corruption present in religious and bureaucratic circles, and they do so in ways contingent upon the scribes’ and readers’ own geographical and social contexts. Thus, these scribes adapt their copies of Piers to the local, global, or even cosmological scope they adopt as they adjust their compilations to the demands of individual reading communities situated in urban, intellectual, and religious centers throughout England.