Langland's Early Modern Identities (The New Middle Ages)

THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studie...

Author: Sarah A. Kelen

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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges

The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone

Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho

Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition by Sherry J. Mou The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W. Rosemann For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a TwelfthCentury Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Amtower Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr.

Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney

The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel

Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries by Anne Bagnell Yardley

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen

The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer by Robert R. Edwards

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel

Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman

Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns

Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers

Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?: The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech

Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady

Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan

Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth-to-Twelfth Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball

Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles by Jeremy Jerome Cohen

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson

Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski

The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500: Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt

Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson

Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney

Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing by Lara Farina

The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by Patricia Ranft

Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura

On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula M. Rieder

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman

Lonesome Words: The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-American Blues Song by M.G. McGeachy

The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome

Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh

Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages by Noah D. Guynn

The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Jane Chance

England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges edited by María Bullón-Fernández

Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature by Scott Lightsey

The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process by Albrecht Classen Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature by Cary Howie

American Chaucers by Candace Barrington Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton

Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature by Heather Blurton

Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies Edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz

The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture by Christina M. Fitzgerald

The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava by Elizabeth Drayson

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker

Langland’s Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. Kelen

LANGLAND’S EARLY MODERN IDENTITIES

Sarah A. Kelen


Copyright © Sarah A. Kelen, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–6517–2 ISBN-10: 1–4039–6517–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelen, Sarah A., 1968– Langland’s early modern identities / Sarah A. Kelen. p. cm.—(New Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1–4039–6517–X 1. Langland, William, 1330?–1400? Piers the Plowman. 2. Langland, William, 1330?–1400?—Authorship. 3. Langland, William, 1330?– 1400?—Appreciation—History. 4. Authors and readers—England— History. 5. Manuscripts, Medieval—England—Editing. 6. Manuscripts, English (Middle)—Editing. 7. Middle Ages in literature. I. Title. PR2015.K45 2007 821.1—dc22

2007010238

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated to the memory of two wonderful friends and respected colleagues, Claudia Rattazzi Papka and Rebecca Gershenson ( ). Their best work remains unwritten.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Langland as an Early Modern Author

xi xiii 1

Chapter 1 The Birth of Langland

17

Chapter 2 A Proliferation of Plowmen

43

Chapter 3 Langland Anthologized

77

Chapter 4 Langland Recontextualized

101

Chapter 5 Fictions of Authorship, Fictions of English Literature

127

Notes

151

Works Cited

197

Index

213


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

arlier versions of some of the material in this book have appeared elsewhere. Some of the details included in chapters 1 and 2 appeared earlier in “Plowing the Past: ‘Piers Protestant’ and the Authority of Medieval Literary History,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 13 (1999): 101–136. Some of chapter 4 appeared in “Peirs Plouhman [sic] and ‘The formidable array of black letter’ in the early nineteenth century” in Illuminating Letters: Typography and Interpretation, ed. Megan Benton and Paul Gutjahr (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 47–67. My thanks to Pegasus Press and the University of Massachusetts Press (respectively) for permission to republish this material. Financial support for my research came from the Huntington Library, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of UCLA, Oberlin College, the Erasmus Institute of Notre Dame University, the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University, and Nebraska Wesleyan University. Over the past dozen years, I have had help and support from friends, colleagues, and mentors at several institutions. I would like to thank Robert W. Hanning and David Scott Kastan for encouraging my interest in work that links together medieval and early modern studies. I also owe a great debt to all those who patiently read and commented on earlier versions of this text (some many times!): Sarah Chinn, Andrew Galloway, Ruth Nisse, Derrick Pitard, Kellie Robertson, Jana Schulman, Eve Salisbury, Fiona Somerset, and Elizabeth Teviotdale. The helpful suggestions of Bonnie Wheeler and those from the anonymous peer reviewer of my manuscript also made the book immeasurably stronger. Thanks also to my family, both Kelens and Blooms, for believing me when I said that I really would finish this book someday. This book is dedicated to the memories of Claudia Rattazzi Papka and Rebecca Gershenson. I missed their professional advice and personal support as I worked on this volume. Their scholarly fields are the poorer because of their deaths, and they are remembered with love by colleagues and friends.

E


LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

500 Yrs

Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900. 3 Vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925; New York: Russell & Russell, 1960.

BibMan

Hammond, Eleanor Prescott. Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual. New York: Peter Smith, 1933; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1908.

DNB

Stephen, Sir Leslie and Sir Sidney Lee, eds. The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900. 22 Vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1885–1901.

K-D

Kane, George and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. Piers Plowman, the B version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best. London: The Athlone Press, 1975.

OED

Simpson, J. A. and E. S. C. Weiner, eds. The Oxford English Dictionary. Second edition. 20 Vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989.

RivCh

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Third edition, ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987.

SAC

Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

STC

Pollard, A. W. and G. R. Redgrave, compilers. Revised by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katherine F. Parker. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475– 1640. Second edition. 3 Vols. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991.

YLS

The Yearbook of Langland Studies.


INTRODUCTION LANGLAND AS AN EARLY MODERN AUTHOR

f asked to describe contemporary literary culture, most of us would answer in reference to living writers, perhaps those whose works are best sellers or those who have won recent literary prizes. Nevertheless, many works from earlier centuries (Hamlet, for example) retain an important place in our literary culture. It would be hard to explicate the sociology of reading, particularly as it intersects with the practice of education, without understanding the totemic status that Shakespeare’s plays have within our cultural notions of literary authority, even four centuries after their composition. To that extent, Shakespeare (though not our contemporary) still exerts a measurable force on twenty-first-century literary culture.1 On the other hand, despite the importance of Shakespeare in our understanding of literary history, no one would contend that Venus and Adonis is an integral part of the English canon. Understanding the contemporary importance of Shakespeare also includes knowing which particular Shakespearean works twenty-first-century readers still read, and how. The same holds true for later periods’ conceptions of medieval literature. To read early modern works without simultaneously paying attention to the classical and medieval works that were (or were not) reprinted alongside them produces an incomplete picture of early modern literary culture. Knowing which works from earlier periods early modern readers thought were worth preserving is part of understanding how those readers conceptualized the English literary tradition. This is particularly true for the early modern period, during which English literature first began to have a culture of print alongside a tradition of manuscript circulation. When William Caxton established his press at Westminster in 1476, he made a business decision unusual among fifteenthcentury European printers, to focus his efforts on works either written in or

I

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translated into the national vernacular, whereas humanist and classical Latin texts accounted for the majority of Continental early printed books.2 When Caxton printed English works, they were works by authors already part of the historical literary tradition, but his successors began to print the work of living authors as well. By the turn of the sixteenth century, contemporary English works were competing with Middle English works in the literary marketplace, which reduced the number of medieval works that still had an audience in this new context.3 A thorough analysis of the literary culture of early modern England will attend to the intersections between that period’s contemporary and historical literature, and thus to the place of medieval texts in the early modern literary canon. Although Piers Plowman was not written in the early modern period, it did have a continuing influence on early modern readers, as I outline in the following chapters. It is therefore only somewhat jokingly that I refer, in the title of this introduction, to Langland as an early modern author. At the time of its composition in the late fourteenth century, Piers Plowman was a work very much of its moment. Most obviously, it was of its moment generically, as an alliterative work that enjoyed widespread circulation in the brief period during which Middle English alliterative verse flourished in England.4 The poem also contains a number of allusions to particular people and events. For example, the Prologue of the poem includes the story of the belling of the cat, in which the mouse cites Ecclesiastes: “Ve terre ubi puer rex est” (woe to the land where the king is a boy). This is a pointed reference to England’s boy king Richard, who was crowned in 1377 at the age of nine. More broadly and pervasively, Piers Plowman was of its moment insofar as it satirizes current theological, cultural, and political abuses, even if its satire often describes its targets in generalized terms, so that it does not stand as a record of events in one particular year. Despite its necessary connection to its own sociohistorical context, satire always looks outside of its own historical period as well; it is in the nature of satire to contrast the present with some other time (either an idealized past or a hoped for future). If the vices a satirist depicts transcend their age, they cannot be corrected, and the satire would lose its functional urgency. Satire is therefore always about “the now,” as it is distinct from other historical periods, even when that represented present is not limited to a specific year. Langland’s poem clearly struck a nerve with its original audience. Its numerous early manuscripts as well as its influence on its alliterative poetic successors attest to its literary importance in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Not surprisingly, the majority of the research on the transmission of Piers Plowman deals with the history of the poem’s manuscripts around the end of the fourteenth century (those manuscripts surviving as well as those posited). Scholars have worked to reconstruct the lineages of

LANGLAND AS AN EARLY MODERN AUTHOR

3

the different manuscript traditions, have puzzled over whether the poem circulated in three versions or four, and have attempted to analyze the demographics of the poem’s first audience.5 Such studies are no doubt important to our understanding of Piers Plowman as a medieval poem, but they leave unquestioned the status of Piers Plowman as an early modern poem. Manuscript evidence proves that all versions of the poem were in circulation by the turn of the fifteenth century, but the poem’s circulation did not stop in the generation after its composition.6 In addition to the latefourteenth-century manuscripts of the poem, and the even greater number from the early fifteenth century, manuscripts of Piers Plowman continued to be produced and read into the sixteenth century. Piers Plowman clearly continued to have some cultural value well into the early modern period, not just as an antiquity but as a resonant literary text that engaged its later readers, making it, if only metaphorically, an important early modern text. Seven sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts of Piers Plowman, or fragments of the poem, survive. Bodleian Library MS Digby 145, a combined A and C text of the poem (sigil K of the A text and D2 of the C text), Toshiyuki Takamiya MS 23 (sigil S of the B text), Cambridge University Library MS Gg.iv.31 (sigil G of the B text), and British Library MS Royal 18 B.xvii (sigil R of the C text) all preserve sixteenth-century copies of the poem, while British Library Sloane MS 2578 contains two short extracts from the B text. Fragments of the B text of the poem are also contained in two seventeenth-century manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: MS James 2 and MS Wood donat. 7.7 Even allowing that people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had different reasons for copying Piers Plowman and different intellectual contexts for reading it than had their fourteenth-century predecessors, the poem’s handful of late manuscripts suggest that Piers Plowman retained its currency specifically as a poem in manuscript, not just after its time of composition, but even after 1550, when the poem first began to circulate as a printed text. Further evidence that the manuscripts of Piers Plowman remained influential in the sixteenth century is the number of sixteenth-century annotations in earlier copies. Medieval manuscripts that have survived until the twenty-first century obviously must have been somewhere relatively safe in the intervening years. Still, the fact that someone owned these books would not, in itself, guarantee that anyone actually read them. The field of medieval literature is full of works that were only rediscovered centuries after their composition, poems that have no known early modern readership. The poem’s unfamiliar verse form (the alliterative long line), its potentially difficult dialect (fourteenth-century Midlands), its extreme allusiveness and complexity, and the old-fashioned script of a fourteenthcentury manuscript all must have presented some level of challenge to the

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early modern readers of Piers Plowman. It is therefore noteworthy how many of the existing manuscripts preserve evidence of having been read in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In some cases, later readers have left extensive manuscript annotation, responding to the poem consistently throughout. More frequently, sixteenth-century readers add only a few marginal notes to the text, perhaps identifying which character is speaking or what topic the poem is concerned with in a particular passage. Even such limited annotation proves that these later readers did read the poem carefully, and perhaps also that they intended to reread it, or portions of it, with the help of their own earlier marginalia.8 Some manuscripts have sixteenth-century annotations in more than one hand, suggesting either that successive owners read and marked up the poem, or that one owner passed a copy around to multiple readers. The late-fourteenth-century B text manuscript that bears the sigil R (now divided in two, with four leaves in British Library MS Lansdowne 398 and the rest in Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 38) is a case in point. C. David Benson and Lynne Blanchfield’s edition of the B text annotations categorize the later marginalia in this manuscript as those of three fifteenthcentury hands and five unidentified sixteenth-century hands, as well as a single marginal note by a known sixteenth-century reader: John Stow.9 Although each of these later readers contributed only a few notes to the volume, together their annotations demonstrate a history of engaged close reading of the poem into the sixteenth century. The annotation by Stow in this manuscript is the place name “Stratford” in the margin at B.13.266 (manuscript fol. 63r), where Activa Vita refers to Stratford bread being shipped to London.10 There are similar marginal notes in Stow’s hand in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17 (sigil W), a late-fourteenth-century copy of the B text.11 In this copy, Stow both identifies the reference to “stratford” and marks with the date “1350” the poem’s reference to a famine so great that the bakers’ carts from Stratford did not come to London with bread.12 Stow later uses this information in his Survay of London, quoting Langland’s allusion to the bread carts from Stratford as a historical record that proves the fact that Stratford bakers had previously furnished the city of London daily with bread. After citing a reference to a Stratford baker being punished in 1310, for selling underweight loaves, Stow adds Moreover, in the 44. Of Edward the thirde, Iohn Chichester being Mayor of London, I reade in the visions of Pierce Plowman, a book so called as followeth. There was a carefull commune, when no cart came to towne with baked bread fro Stratford: tho gan beggars weep & workemen were agast, a little this will be thought long in the date of our Drirte [sic] in a drie Auerell a thousand and three hundred, twise thirtie and tenne &c.13


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For Stow, the historian of London, Piers Plowman functioned as a historical record; he does not even identify the alliterative lines as verse. Other sixteenth-century annotators offer more extended and readerly commentaries on the poem, responding to it as a work of literature not simply as a repository of information about a particular time and place. They read it, that is, exactly as Langland intended them to: as Christians whose salvation was bound up in the way their own lives answered the question of what it is to Do Well. Annotations of this kind pay attention to Langland’s narrative as well as his theology, for example by keeping track of which character is speaking and by recording important lessons in the margins. As Tanya Schaap observes about the sixteenth-century annotator of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102 (C text sigil Y), “[o]ne might expect the content of the annotations of the sixteenth-century reader to differ radically from those of the scribes working sixty-five to seventy-five years earlier, but this is not the case.”14 Like early scribes, sixteenth-century commentators used their marginalia to guide future readings (their own or others’) and to help make the poem more accessible. This kind of engaged and explanatory commentary to the fourteenth-century poem by a sixteenth-century reader is most obvious in Cambridge, University Library MS Ll.iv.14 (sigil C2 of the B text). This annotator, writing in what Benson and Blanchfield term “an elegant and set mid-16th-century Secretary hand,” wrote more than 100 glosses, summaries, and character names in the margins of the manuscript.15 For the annotator of this manuscript, Piers Plowman was a living work, one that still had a theological message. For example, the annotator summarizes the agreement between Conscience, Clergy, and Patience at B.13.205–215: “Conscience Clergy and pacience be able to make pees betwixte all kyngis,” and next to B.10.62, part of Dame Study’s complaint that the wealthy abuse the poor at their gates rather than relieving their needs, the annotator remarks: “Riche men hathe litle mercy.”16 These present tense gnomic utterances apply the allegorical characters’ words to the reader’s own world. At B.10.17, when Dame Study laments the fact that “[w]isdom and wit now is no{t worth a kerse,” this sixteenth-century annotator explicitly conflates the “now” of the poem’s characters with his or her own, remarking that Study’s complaint describes “[w]ho is nowadaies called to counsaille.”17 Similar applications of the poem’s details to the reader’s present day are evident in the marginalia of British Library MS Additional 35157, a fourteenth-century copy of the C text (sigil U). This manuscript preserves extensive annotation by Francis Ayscough, its owner in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At C.9.255, where Langland criticizes

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bishops for not protecting the laity from false hermits, Ayscough comments: “bisshopes the Cause of ignoraunt pasters at this day.”18 In fact, imposters more than ignorant pastors are directly condemned in this passage. Ayscough’s detailed comments throughout the manuscript suggest that he was perfectly competent to read the medieval text, so it is unlikely that he simply misunderstood Langland’s Middle English. Ayscough’s shift from false hermits to ignorant pastors seems therefore to demonstrate his own cultural concerns as projected onto Langland’s poem, an interpretation reinforced by Ayscough’s use of the phrase “at this day.” For Ayscough, the poem’s social critique is still applicable to English society, even if it takes some liberal interpretation of Langland’s text to suit Ayscough’s particular interests. Ayscough makes an even more direct connection between his own historical moment and the text of Langland’s poem in his remark on line 95 of the C text Prologue. Here Conscience berates those priests who abandon their parishes to seek more financially rewarding positions in London. Ayscough notes in the margin that: “This conscience is now supposed to be Kinge James ye Sixt to punish the couitousnes of the clergie of Brittaine.”19 Another one of Ayscough’s notes in this manuscript is dated 1603; presumably this note is also from 1603, after the death of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps in the four months between Elizabeth’s death and the coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I of Great Britain. Ayscough’s marginal references to his contemporaries includes those less elevated than the king, too. When the narrator identifies the hypocrisy of the Doctor of Divinity who has preached a rejection of earthly pleasures, but who feasts excessively, Ayscough’s marginal annotation identifies “Doctor Robinson Doctor Barfout of Lincoln with many mor.”20 When, in the battle between Lyf and Elde, Elde hits “a fisician with a forred hoed,” Ayscough singles out “[the] vicare of Bindbrocke,” presumably as one who (like the Physician) glories in earthly possessions and hopes that medicine can stave off mortality.21 Although a number of the manuscripts of Piers Plowman have sixteenthor seventeenth-century annotations as well as owners’ signatures, there are relatively few early modern readers’ marks that can be conclusively attributed to known individuals. One famous early modern figure known to have been the owner of a Piers Plowman manuscript is Archbishop William Laud, who owned Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 581 (sigil L of the B text).22 Laud’s arms are tooled on the front and back covers of the book; however, he does not seem to have made any marginal annotations to the text. Although it is clear that Laud owned the book, he may or may not have read it. Still, it is intriguing to think that the anti-Calvinist archbishop might have appreciated this poem, with its central character


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Will who tries to understand the agency of the individual in his or her salvation through an allegorical quest to find Do-Well. Early modern manuscript ownership is not the only measure of the importance of Piers Plowman in later centuries. The poem was alluded to by later writers, and it was printed a number of times through the early modern period, both as a whole and in excerpts. The impulse to preserve and disseminate works from earlier periods can be thought of as a kind of canonization process, although the use of that particular term for events before the eighteenth century is controversial.23 The English literary canon was, in the nineteenth century, widely accessible, as books became increasingly affordable to a diverse reading public. Moreover, as English literature moved from the drawing room to the classroom, the received canon exerted increasing force on popular thought. Sixteenth- or seventeenthcentury “canonizations” of earlier works do not have the same cultural centrality as later literary canons; however, they do construct a discrete body of literature, the importance of which is deemed transhistorical. In so doing, they embody a particular notion of literary value. This reification of a particular aesthetic is, of course, the grounds for many of the recent challenges to the received literary canon. If literary value is culturally produced rather than immanent, the canon reflects an ephemeral ideology and thus tells us less about the works in question than about later centuries’ interests. What critiques of canonization sometimes miss, however, is the fact that a canon might well include works that are valued for quite different reasons. A canon does, certainly, manifest the ideology of its makers, but that ideology is not necessarily univocal or internally coherent. The simultaneous canonization of Chaucer’s and Langland’s works in the early modern period demonstrates this. Both were copied or printed from the fifteenth century onward, and both remain central to the field of Middle English literature, as defined by both teaching and scholarship. However, as the following chapters demonstrate, even though Chaucer and Langland were both praised by sixteenth- through nineteenth-century readers, the two were often valued for different reasons. The early modern reception of Piers Plowman frequently manifested different ideologies or different understandings of literary history than did contemporary Chaucer reception, but scholarship on early modern literary medievalism has most often been written with Chaucer as a focal point. As a result, there is a wealth of criticism on fifteenth- through eighteenthcentury readings of Chaucer, but little on the postmedieval reception of other Middle English literary works.24 The Chaucer-centrism of research on early modern medievalism reflects the extent to which Chaucer has long functioned as a synecdoche for the field of Middle English in the modern academy. Other Middle English writers and literary traditions have

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slowly come to prominence in contemporary scholarship, but as recently as 1997 David Lawton remarked that “the medieval enterprise in England and even more America has long been, and is little less now than ever before, tilted towards Chaucer.”25 Chaucer is the medieval English writer most familiar to nonspecialists and most studied by medievalists, perhaps because Chaucer’s identity as the “father of English literature” was already established within a century of Chaucer’s death. Seth Lerer notes that “Chaucer—as author, as ‘laureate’, and as ‘father’ of English poetry—is a construction of his later fifteenth-century scribes, readers and poetic imitators.”26 It is thus logical for scholars to ask why Chaucer came to be constructed so early and so lastingly as the central figure in the received canon of medieval English literature. Although the scholarly focus on Chaucer reception is understandable, early modern medievalism was not always analogous to early modern Chaucerianism. The reception of Piers Plowman in the early modern period sometimes parallels early modern Chaucerianism, but just as often diverges from it. In particular, early modern readers of Chaucer and Langland differed in the uses to which they put their antecedent texts. Chaucer’s works were directly imitated or translated by later writers from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, but the early modern readers of Piers Plowman, particularly those after the fifteenth century, rarely found in Langland’s work a stylistic inspiration. More often they found political rhetoric, theological propaganda, linguistic evidence, and a milestone in the development of English literary history. Chaucer’s importance as a literary antecedent for Shakespeare is well known, as are the Chaucerianism of Skelton and Spenser. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Chaucer had a considerable influence on the literary tradition. In 1700, John Dryden published the Fables Ancient and Modern, which included translations of three Canterbury Tales and of the pseudo-Chaucerian “Floure and the Leafe”; in 1713, John Gay’s comedy The Wife of Bath appeared on the London stage. Chaucer clearly continued to function as a literary model for writers through the eighteenth century, while Langland’s direct literary influence essentially ended within a 100 years of his poem’s composition. As I discuss in chapter 2 below, the figure of Piers Plowman is a model for later writers through the sixteenth century, but without direct reference to Langland’s distinctive poetic idiom or to the narrative form of his poem. Piers Plowman was a literary historical reference point, not a literary exemplar, for Langland’s early modern readers.27 The fact that Langland’s work, unlike Chaucer’s, did not provide a literary model for writers after the fifteenth century is particularly noteworthy because Piers Plowman was imitated a number of times in the generation immediately after its composition. A handful of poems from that period


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borrow directly from the imagery and language of Piers Plowman. Helen Barr has coined the phrase “the Piers Plowman tradition” for this body of literature.28 Moreover, Steven Justice argues that even the actions of the 1381 rebels are, in a sense, “works in the Piers Plowman tradition,” as the rebels mobilized the poem’s iconography in their own texts as well as in a series of symbolic actions influenced by Langland’s work.29 Thomas Walsingham’s late-fourteenth-century chronicle preserves the text of a letter, putatively by John Ball, a leader of the Rising of 1381, which “biddeQ Peres Plou{man to go to his werk.”30 Henry Knighton’s late-fourteenthcentury Chronicon preserves four rebel letters, including one that claims authorship by “Iack Carter” and similarly invokes Piers Plowman as the name of an actual person who participated in the Rising.31 Justice argues that the continuing belief that the rebels were peasants (as medieval chroniclers describe them) has obscured the evidence that they were a diverse and often literate group, and that their references to Piers Plowman could well indicate that they had read, not just heard of, the poem.32 Later followers of Langland, those discussed in this book, make reference to Langland, but not in the manner of the 1381 rebels or the authors of poems in the Piers Plowman Tradition, all of whom absorbed Langland’s rhetoric into their own literary productions. Early modern Langlandians are in this way distinct from both late medieval followers of Langland and from early modern Chaucerians.33 The different values of Chaucer’s and Langland’s works as models for later authors is part of a larger distinction between how the two medieval poets were perceived by early modern readers. Responses to Chaucer’s poetry often identified him as transcending his age, as being somehow “unmedieval.” When Chaucer’s works were first printed together in a single volume, Thynne’s 1532 edition, the volume’s dedicatory Preface to Henry VIII says that it is moche to be marueyled, howe in his tyme, whan doutlesse all good letters were layde a slepe throughout [the] world. . .suche an excellent poete in our tonge/ shulde as it were (nature repugnyng) spryng and a ryse.34

This Preface was printed in every subsequent early modern edition of Chaucer’s works for the next two and a half centuries, from 1532 until 1793.35 Thynne’s sense that Chaucer’s poetic ability is unnatural to his era (with “nature repugnyng” excellent verse in the Middle Ages) therefore shapes the early modern understanding of Chaucer as somehow unrelated to other writers of his era. Given the fact that early modern readers saw Chaucer as uncharacteristic of his age, it is ironic that the history of early modern medievalism has been written with Chaucer reception at its center.

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The early modern reading of non-Chaucerian Middle English works sometimes does, but just as often does not, replicate that of Chaucer; recognizing this allows for a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the literary historiography of early modern England. In fact, the intersections between Chaucer reception and Langland reception were often articulated in terms of contrasts not similarities. In many ways, later readers constructed Langland as the “anti-Chaucer” in the medieval literary canon. For example, where Chaucer was valued for his alleged naturalism, Langland was criticized for his use of the artificial form of personification allegory. In praising Chaucer’s invention of the tale-telling fiction for his Canterbury pilgrims, the eighteenth-century critic Thomas Warton remarks: “[F]or a number of persons in their situation, so natural, so practicable, so pleasant, I add so rational, a mode of entertainment could not have been imagined.”36 On the other hand, Langland’s nineteenth-century editor Thomas Dunham Whitaker opines that allegory of the sort used by Piers Plowman is “the most insipid for the most part and tedious of all vehicles of instruction.”37 As literary realism was becoming the dominant fictional mode, Chaucer’s narrative strategies could be assimilated into contemporary aesthetics, but Langland’s could not. Focusing on Chaucer reception, at the expense of Langland reception, has elided the diversity of early modern medievalism. Moreover, such Chaucer-centrism presumes the very canonization that Chaucer’s works underwent during that period. Considering how, when, and by whom Piers Plowman was read in the early modern period entails a question of how those later readers understood the medieval author, William Langland. Every later reader, editor, and critic of Piers Plowman defined Langland’s identity in terms that enabled particular readings of the poem. Some sixteenth-century Protestant polemicists saw Langland as their theological forerunner, whereas some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators presented him as a practitioner of an early linguistic nationalism. In the chapters that follow, I discuss the early modern reception of Langland, the poet, alongside the reception of Piers Plowman, the poem. More than most other authors, Langland is inextricably linked to his work, because, in a sense, the poem is Langland for his audience. Not only is there no evidence of any other works by William Langland, there is no evidence of William Langland himself. The only surviving biographical information on William Langland is a note in Dublin, Trinity College MS 212 (a manuscript of the C Text of Piers Plowman) that “Stacy de Rokayle” was the father of William “de Langlond.”38 Scholars have been unable to find clear evidence of William Langland in any extant historical documents. C. David Benson is the most recent scholar to attempt to construct a biography of Langland from external sources, and he too had to admit failure.39 Although certainly someone


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wrote Piers Plowman, the William Langland so confidently referred to by medievalists is, in effect, a product of his poem, a poet whose biography has been extrapolated from interpretations of his work. John Bowers argues similarly that when editors of Piers Plowman write “the Life of the Poet,” they construct “Langland’s” biography as a back-formation of their editorial theories.40 These pseudo-biographies are themselves then used to explain the poem from which they were derived. Such biographies of William Langland may be circular, but, within the past 500 years, the poet has found himself traveling in many different circles. In chapters 1 and 2, I discuss the way both Langland and his title character are presented as participating in sixteenth-century arguments about Reformation theology. From the middle of the eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century, Langland’s identity as a theologian was downplayed in favor of his place in linguistic and poetic history. During this period, as I discuss in chapters 3 and 4, the status of Piers Plowman as a linguistic curiosity fought for priority with its status as a work of literature in its own right. In chapter 5, I discuss the explicit fictionalization of Langland’s biography by looking at works in which Langland literally became a character in imagined narratives. “Who was William Langland?” was a question answered slightly differently through the period covered by this book, not because new information about him came to light, but because the existing information (primarily the poem) was interpreted differently. The changing understanding of Langland’s identity through the early modern period is about more than the author’s biography, however; it also has to do with his cultural status, what Langland stands for. The editors of The Arden Shakespeare recognize that an author’s identity (particularly in the case of Shakespeare) has a social meaning beyond simply the originator of a written work. They ask: What is “Shakespeare?” A worldwide cultural phenomenon, a brand-name, a logo, an image that appears on T-shirts and credit cards, a mainstay of theatre, film and video production, a compulsory component of education, a label that sells thousands of books, a household name.41

Langland did not have these particular cultural meanings during the early modern period (not least because there were neither credit cards nor T-shirts), but his name and his poem were indeed used by later writers to do various kinds of ideological work in their respective historical contexts. All these different early modern Langlands, and the associated interpretations of Piers Plowman, have in common their utility for various conceptions of English national identity. In the sixteenth century, one of the central debates about British history was whether or not the historical record

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justified Henry VIII’s break from the Church of Rome. Evidence on behalf of the Reformation was gathered from chronicles, legal sources, and even literary texts.42 Piers Plowman played a role in this debate, with most sixteenthcentury readers of Langland’s poem describing both its author and its title character as proto-Protestants. These Reformation readers understood Langland’s identity (as well as Piers Plowman’s identity) in light of their own experience of England’s religious break from Rome. Sixteenthcentury uses of Piers Plowman and of the Piers Plowman figure were, as chapters 1 and 2 demonstrate, important in the political and theological debates surrounding the English Reformation. Despite the humanist embrace of classical culture, the very status of medieval literature as historical gave it a particular discursive value for later editors and commentators. As documents from England’s past, medieval texts could do ideological work different from that done by more recent writings; the very “obsolescence” of medieval literature therefore gave it a political currency. In the sixteenth century, uses of medieval texts tended toward the theological; in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the uses of medieval texts were more sociological. Histories of English poetry from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries use a language of racial or national continuity linking medieval and modern England. Simultaneously, where sixteenth-century readers of Piers Plowman argued for Langland’s theological similarity to his early modern readers, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury commentators on the poem called attention to the changed doctrinal context. Although eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers were interested in the constancy of Englishness across historical periods, they also insisted on the political and religious distance between England’s past and its present. Although the English were still of the same race as their forebears, the English nation had a different religion and a different constitution. One political arena in which those historical differences mattered was the early-nineteenth-century debate over Catholic Emancipation, which I discuss in chapter 4. Early-nineteenth-century opponents of Catholic Emancipation warned that a relaxation of the laws meant to control Britain’s Catholic subjects would collapse the divide between the past and the present, opening England’s Protestants once again to the persecution they had suffered under Queen Mary. Despite the passage of time, and the changed political climate, Catholicism retained the same threat to Protestants, according to the antiCatholic propaganda of this period. On the other side, proponents of greater rights for English and Irish Catholics sought to distance England’s present from its past by emphasizing the changed attitudes and behaviors of Britain’s Protestants as well as its Catholics, for example by reference to the cultural shift manifested in England’s recent withdrawal from the slave


13

trade. Political claims on both sides of the Catholic Emancipation debate were thus based on the same premise of a sociocultural distance between the present and the past. The opponents of Emancipation saw in the past a model of persecution that they did not want to see repeated; supporters of Emancipation considered the sixteenth-century conflicts between England’s Catholics and Protestants to be dependent on a particular political environment now superseded, and therefore as irrevocably past. In different contexts, Piers Plowman was used by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators to demonstrate both continuity and change. Philologically and theologically, Piers Plowman manifested for these later readers the differences between fourteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. These critics repudiated the earlier attempts to make Langland an advocate for the English Reformation, instead presenting him within his historical context as a Catholic writer. At the same time, Piers Plowman was identified as an originary document in the history of English poetry, a literary tradition seen as continuous (unlike England’s religious tradition). As a poet, Langland transcended history, since the poetic record was identified as linking England’s past and its present, and as manifesting a literary sensibility inherent in Britons of all times. The English language had changed, as had the cultural climate, but the English people were more alike than different over time. Langland could thus mingle with later authors in the context of a literary anthology, despite their poetic and historical differences. As a representative of the poetic ability native to Britain, Langland was often explicitly compared with his contemporary Chaucer. Another identity that Langland had for early modern editors and commentators was, then, as a foil for Chaucer. In chapter 5, I analyze the most extreme form of these juxtapositions between the two Middle English authors: narratives that fictionalize the two authors as characters and imagine literary and personal exchanges between them. Such fictional narratives are often designed to explain the stylistic and linguistic differences between Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s works. Nineteenth-century biographies of Langland sometimes cast him as rejecting Chaucer’s fashionable Gallicisms and London dialect in favor of a nationalistic adherence to a traditional English form and language. This explanation has a double utility, insofar as it acknowledges the fact that Chaucer’s works appeal more to the modern reader, but without disparaging Langland in the process. The more difficult poetics of Piers Plowman are not due to Langland’s deficiencies as a poet, then, but rather to the fact that Langland, like so many early-nineteenth-century Englishmen, obviously despised the French. In studying Piers Plowman reception, I pay particular attention to the editions in which the poem appeared, either whole or in part, during the

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early modern period. Editions of works from earlier periods are explicitly and inherently anachronistic. They transport words from the past into a presentist context. In doing so, they reconfigure not only the meanings but also the potential uses of their texts. Tim William Machan asserts that “an edition is. . .simultaneously two ontologically distinct entities: a contemporary work—an edition—that is itself a site of interpretation and, in effect, the historical work it presumes to recuperate.”43 In my analysis, I am less concerned with the second of his two categories of meaning, the content of the edition as it represents the original work. Thus, although my work is related to, and very much indebted to, the criticism on the successive editions of Piers Plowman, it is not, strictly speaking, editorial history.44 My interest in the editions of Piers Plowman is more metatextual than textual. The textual history of Piers Plowman can help later scholars understand the editorial, as well as authorial, origins of the texts we read. However, in the usual narrative trajectory of textual history, earlier editions, which were based on editorial theories and methods since superseded, figure mainly as foils to their later (and better) successors. The subtitle of Charlotte Brewer’s Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text demonstrates this attitude toward editorial history. Later editions of Piers Plowman are, undoubtedly, based on a more thorough comparison of manuscripts and on an increasingly rigorous editorial theory. In this regard, their texts of the poem are better. Nevertheless, when considering the textual history of a medieval poem in centuries long after the medieval period, I prefer to set aside the question of how each editor prepared the text for publication, and focus rather on why that editor chose to publish the text at all. With the exception of Chaucer’s works, most Middle English literature was in very limited circulation throughout the early modern period. In the fifteenth century, William Caxton and his earliest successors printed a number of late medieval works by Gower, Lydgate, Hoccleve, Malory, and others.45 During the early modern period, most Middle English works (including some now widely taught in college courses) all but disappeared from circulation. To take a case in point, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis survives in fifty-seven complete or partial manuscripts, and it was published in 1483, 1532, and 1554, but then not published at all in either the seventeenth or the eighteenth century.46 Piers Plowman, however, remained relatively available to readers throughout the early modern period, and it is therefore worth examining how later readers made sense of Langland’s text and what meanings it had for them. To differentiate what a publication means to an editor from what a work means to its author, the text must be analyzed within two discrete social contexts of production and reproduction. These two meanings (authorial and editorial) together produce a third kind of meaning: that for the reader of an edited work.47 Editors and


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commentators on literary works function as “super readers”: they make public their personal interpretations and thus influence future readings of the text, shaping its meaning for new audiences.48 In doing so, they also perpetuate their particular beliefs about Langland. Piers Plowman has, for the past 450 years, been a poem notoriously difficult for its readers. In genre, language, theology, and sociopolitical context, the poem was foreign to its early modern audience. Nevertheless, it continued to have an audience, an audience whose responses still retain some residual influence on how the poet and his poem are understood by modern readers (whether they agree with those earlier interpretations or argue against them).49 The early modern identities of Langland manifest the ways ideology puts pressure on interpretation, encouraging readers to see (or not see) very particular meanings in texts. Although Piers Plowman has had a continuous readership for the past 600 years, those readers have, in a sense, been reading “different poems,” as the common understanding of the poem and of its author have shifted through the years, While early modern beliefs about Langland may not always correspond to those current today, the different roles Langland played for his early modern audiences do help us understand the ideologies and medievalisms of those past Langlandians.


CHAPTER 1 THE BIRTH OF LANGLAND

he sixteenth-century readers of Piers Plowman who first attempted to make public the poet’s identity had little evidence to go on. Despite this, they did attempt to transmit a biography of the poet as an adjunct to his poem. Medieval authors sometimes named themselves in their works, but when they did so, it was by way of autocitation more than autobiography.1 Authors might name themselves in their works, but without much psychological detail.2 To take one well-known example, Geoffrey Chaucer refers to his weight in the House of Fame, and to his works in both the Legend of Good Women and the so-called Retraction of the Canterbury Tales.3 However, his works never refer to either his professional or emotional life. We know of Chaucer’s marriage, as well as his services as a customs official, clerk of the king’s works, and a member of parliament, but not because he mentions any of them in his poetry. One medieval author who includes some autobiographical detail in her works is Christine de Pizan, who explains in her Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune her transformation from the happy life she lived when Fortune was kind to her, before the death of her husband. This event was instrumental in her pursuit of poetry as a means to support herself. In Christine’s discussion of the changes in her status after her husband’s death, she explains that Fortune changed her gender not just her economic status: “I. . .was transformed from a woman into a man by Fortune who wanted it that way. Thus she transformed me, my body and my face, completely into those of a natural man.”4 Christine’s transformation story is obviously metaphorical, but all autobiographical literature is to some extent fictionalized by the act of composition, even if not as overtly as Mutacion de Fortune. Readers’ interpretations of first-person narratives therefore tend to be influenced by external evidence about the people or events described. For contemporary authors, that evidence appears on book jackets or in promotional interviews, and it is usually easily accessible to be read in conjunction with the

T

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texts. It is an often unspoken principle of contemporary hermeneutics that knowing more about an author allows the reader to understand more about her or his works. Unlike modern psychologizing readers, medieval readers did not seem to take much interest in an author’s life (beyond her or his role specifically as an author), and biographies of medieval authors do not tend to circulate alongside their literary works. During the early modern period, however, individual authors began to take on increasing importance as determinants of textual interpretation. Roland Barthes’s statement that “[t]he author is a modern figure” no doubt overstates the difference between modern and premodern notions of subjectivity, but the figure of the author does become increasingly central to literary interpretation in the sixteenth century.5 The first English writer to benefit from this new importance of the author was Chaucer, whose poetry was published together in a volume of Workes almost a century before Jonson’s self-canonization in his Workes of 1616 or the publication of The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames, also printed in 1616.6 Although Chaucer’s poetry had been in print in England since the time Caxton set up his printshop in the late fifteenth century, the collection of his works in a single volume was a new format, and it demonstrates the fact that the Chaucer name (not just the names of the individual works) was marketable in the sixteenth century. Chaucer’s name was already attached to his poetry in some medieval manuscripts of his works, but many medieval poems did not circulate under a particular authorial name. In the many instances when a poet’s name was unknown, medieval scribes were content to transmit works without explicitly designating them “Anonymous,” whereas modern readers feel compelled to append that designation to works by unknown authors. In contrast to the frequent disregard for authorial identity in the Middle Ages, sixteenth-century literary theory began to shift more toward the author than the work. For modern readers, even anonymous works have a single, nameable, even if yet unnamed, author whose due must be acknowledged. It is a measure of the degree to which anonymity of authorship was a nonissue in the premodern period that the word “Anonymous” did not enter the language until the close of the sixteenth century, for only then was the author’s name so necessary that the absence of that name was worthy of discussion.7 Although the poet William Langland (if that was his name) lived and wrote in the fourteenth century, the idea of “William Langland” as the poem’s explanatory function did not come into being until the sixteenth century. In the case of Piers Plowman, the poem’s early anonymity may indicate something more than a literary culture that did not prioritize authorship. The subject and tone of Piers Plowman, a poem that criticizes

THE BIRTH OF LANGLAND

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hypocrisy among the clergy and those in government, might also account for the poet’s reluctance to name himself directly. If being the author of Piers Plowman was not a controversial public identity before 1381, when the poem’s discourse was taken up as a rallying cry for rebellion, it seems likely to have been so afterward.8 Even in the passages of Piers Plowman where Langland ostensibly identifies himself, it might not be by his actual name. The authorial self-reference most visible in the poem is the dreamer’s statement that “I haue lyued in londe,. . .my name is longe wille” (B.15.152), which is taken to be an anagram of “Will[iam] Longe-Londe.”9 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steve Justice have pointed out that “Long-land” might well be a punning pen name, given that “a ‘longland’ is a long strip of ploughland,” and “Langland is a very rare surname.”10 Anne Middleton too notes this use of “longe launde,” but without the implication that it might be a pen name. Middleton takes the poet to be exploiting the symbolic value of his actual surname: “though formally a proper name or surname, the ‘long land’ designates what he possesses in common with all mortals, his unsatisfied desire or will.”11 If Kerby-Fulton and Justice are right that the poem initially circulated among a coterie, the original audience would know who the real author was and would, moreover, get the joke of the pseudonym. Once the poem circulated outside of that original audience, which it did very quickly, its authorship may not have been known. For a twenty-first-century reader who comes to the poem knowing the name William Langland, the mixed syllables of B.15.152 are not hard to decode, but, for a reader not yet aware of the name Langland, it is unlikely that this juxtaposition of “londe” and “longe” would be sufficient for decoding the poet’s surname. As George Kane has pointed out, although a number of manuscripts have annotations marking “longe wille” as the poet’s name, none apparently solve the “longe londe Langland” riddle.12 One early acknowledgment of the “longe wille” name is the omission of the nickname from Cambridge, Newnham College MS 4 (sigil Y of the B text) from the early fifteenth century; the scribe of this manuscript has left blank the space where the name belongs so that it could be rubricated later.13 In Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17 (sigil W of the B text) a late-fourteenth- or early-fifteenth-century copy of the poem, the nickname is ruled around.14 In Oxford, Oriel College MS 79 (sigil O of the B text), a fifteenth-century manuscript, the poem’s scribe has written “longe wille” in the margin to mark this line.15 A similar note was probably intended by the scribe of Huntington Library MS HM 114 (sigil Ht of the B text) as well. The scribe of this mid-fifteenth-century manuscript has rubricated the words “long Wille,” and has written “lw” in the margin, which Benson and Blanchfield interpret as the guide mark for a

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later, unexecuted note, “long wille.”16 The scribes of the Oriel College and Huntington Library manuscripts were consistent annotators of the poem.17 In contrast, the fourteenth-century scribe of Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poetry 38 (sigil R of the B text) made only two annotations to the poem. The first was a “nota” marking lines 14.134–139, Patience’s warning that the wealthy, who have their reward on earth, seldom earn a heavenly reward as well. The second is a marginal repetition of the name “Longe Wille,” in what Benson and Blanchfield identify as a “red display script.”18 There are also a handful of manuscripts in which the “longe wille” name was marked by a later reader but not by the scribe. In the most heavily annotated of the B text manuscripts, the early-fifteenth-century British Library MS Additional 35287 (sigil M), the name “longe will” has been underlined by a later reader.19 The mid-fifteenth-century Cambridge, University Library MS Ll.iv.14 (sigil C2 of the B text) is annotated throughout in a mid-sixteenth-century secretary hand. This reader has written “Longe will” in the margin next to line 15.152.20 Two manuscripts contain annotations explicitly interpreting the “long wille” name of the poem’s first-person narrator as that of the author. A fifteenth-century note in British Library Additional MS 10574 (sigil Bm of the B text, itself from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century) says “Nomen auctoris huius libri est longe wille.”21 Similarly, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 581 (sigil L of the B text), an early-fifteenth-century manuscript, contains a number of annotations by a sixteenth-century annotator writing in a secretary hand. At B.15.152, this annotator has marked the “long will” passage with: “nota the name of thauctour.”22 The scribes and annotators of manuscripts Y, W, O, Ht, R, M, C2, Bm, and L all mark the name “longe wille” in some way. In some cases, this is one among many names highlighted, but in other cases (like that of MS R), the marginal repetition of the name stands out as unusual. Kane takes the various scribal and readerly recognitions of the “longe wille” signature as evidence that B.15.152 is, in fact, an authorial signature, even if it is couched in such a form that the William Langland name was obscured from those who did not already know it.23 These scribes and readers are, in this argument, aware of a tradition that this identification of the narrator is also that of the author. The number of manuscripts that mark this alleged signature does seem significant, but, at the same time, none of the scribes or later readers who marks the “longe wille” name attempts to look past what is clearly a nickname to derive the author’s proper name, let alone any biographical details about him. Clearly the medieval scribes and early modern readers do not share the modern interest in defining precisely who “longe wille” really was, and thus decoding the cryptic signature.


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Of the different ways manuscripts mark line B.15.152, only five of these indications of the name seem to be scribal (those in MSS Y, W, O, Ht, and R). Thus, most of the scribes of B text manuscripts copied the poem without noticing or without calling attention to this authorial signature. It was a fairly common practice for authors to sign their work in acrostics and puns in the Middle Ages, and Langland was not the only medieval English writer whose self-referentiality went unnoticed or unremarked by scribes.24 Ranulf Hidgen “signs” his fourteenth-century Latin Polychronicon using an acrostic of the first letters of the chapters of book I. Read together, these chapter initials spell: “Presentem cronicam compilavit Frater Ranulphus monachus cestrensis.” Of the five manuscripts discussed by the Rolls Series editors, only two have annotations explicitly indicating this signature, and both are late manuscripts (one is in a sixteenth-century hand; the other is in a seventeenth-century hand).25 The coded signature of B.15.152 does not appear in the C text of the poem. Nevertheless, two C text manuscripts contain references to the poet (and not just the poem’s central character) as “Will.” The explicit of Liverpool, University Library MS F.4.8, a combined A text–C text manuscript from the early fifteenth century (sigil Ch) reads: “Explicit liber Willielmi de Petro le Plow{man”26 Similarly, a group of five related C text manuscripts contain the note “Explicit visio Willielmi W. de Petro le Plouhman” after Passus 9.27 The scribal Conclusion appended to the poem in one manuscript of the A text also records that “‘Wille. . ./. . ./’” wrou{the Qat here is wryten and oQer werkes boQe/ Of Peres Qe Plowman and mechel puple also.”28 These annotations ascribe to the poet the narrator’s given name, Will, but they do not offer any surname for the poet, nor do they give any biographical detail that might elucidate who this Will is, other than the author of this work (and of other works, according to the scribe who wrote the A text Conclusion). Dublin, Trinity College MS D.4.1, a fourteenth-century C text manuscript is the earliest attempt to give a full name to the poet, let alone any biography. A note in this manuscript reads : Memorandum quod Stacy de Rokayle pater Willielmi de Langlond qui stacius fuit generosus & morabatur in Schipton’ vnder Whicwode tenens domini le Spenser in comitatu Oxon’ qui predictus Willielmus fecit librum qui vocatur Perys ploughman.29

The writer of this note records first that “Stacy de Rokayle” was the father of “William de Langlond,” and that this “Stacy” [Eustace] lived in Shiptonunder-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, holding land of the Despenser family. Only after the identification of his father is William Langland cited as the

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author of the poem. In this lone early identification of the poet, most of the note is taken up by a discussion of Stacy de Rokayle’s economic and social position. For the annotator of the Dublin manuscript, identity is pedigree. The profession, residence, theology, or political faction of the poet himself is, implicitly, less important than his father’s name and affiliations. Langland’s father gives the poet a social identity, connecting him (if indirectly) to a powerful family in a known social milieu.30 Although most early scribes and readers (with the exception of the author of the Dublin manuscript note) are content not to record the poet’s biography, the authorship of Piers Plowman seems to have become important to readers in the sixteenth century. Authorial identity was, in general, more important as a hermeneutic category to sixteenth- than to fifteenthcentury readers, and in the case of Piers Plowman, the poet’s alleged political and theological affiliations seem more interesting to some later readers than did the poem itself. The biographical information by which sixteenthcentury writers define William Langland’s identity frequently manifests those writers’ desire to cast Langland as a critic of the Church of Rome, and thus as a proto-Protestant. Such a creation of a prehistory for English Protestantism was just one of the rhetorical strategies used by English Reformation theologians to justify their break with the papacy.31 In the context of these two early modern developments—the “Birth of the Author” and the reinterpretation of England’s history as protoProtestant—it is to be expected that the study of Piers Plowman entailed an interest in its poet’s ideology. The annotation in the Dublin manuscript identifies William Langland by his family history, whereas sixteenthcentury attributions of the poem tend to focus on Langland’s theology, not his parentage. The antiquary John Bale published his first overview of English writers, the Illustrium maioris Britannia scriptorum. . .summarium, while on the Continent during the reign of Mary.32 In this work, Bale listed British writers chronologically in five groups of 100 (called “centuries”). Although 500 authors is a sizable collection, Bale did not intend the Summarium to be a complete and definitive listing but rather a “makeshift interim report” until John Leland published his own more extensive collection.33 Leland, who had been collecting sources for a dictionary of British writers, a description of Britain, a history of Britain, and a history of British noble families, unfortunately went mad before he could publish any of them.34 When Bale returned to England after the accession of Edward VI, he expanded and revised the Summarium, publishing the Catalogus of British writers in 1557.35 The Catalogus expanded the list of writers from five to nine “centuries”; two years later, Bale added the Posterior Pars, including five more “centuries” of authors.36


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After Leland lost his sanity, Bale became his literary executor. In 1549, under the title The laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leyland, Bale published an annotated edition of Leland’s “New Year’s Gift,” which Leland had given in manuscript to King Henry VIII in 1546.37 By the time he compiled the Catalogus, Bale had access to Leland’s materials on the history of British authors, and he used them to expand and correct his own work. The title page to the Posterior Pars identifies Bale’s debt to Leland as a major source of materials; the subtitle of the Posterior Pars is: “qvas avthor, Ioannes Baleus Sudouolgius, Anglus, ex Lelando Antiquario, alijsque probis authoribus, non paruo labore collegit.”38 When Bale was working on his first collection, the Summarium, he seems to have not yet seen Leland’s notes, as his information differs from Leland’s in a number of places.39 One such difference is in Bale’s original (mis)attribution of the authorship of Piers Plowman. In the Summarium, Bale lists “Petrum Agricolam” as one of the works of John Wyclif, linking the poem to a theologian understood in the sixteenth century to be a forerunner of the Reformation. It is clear from this attribution that the social meaning of Piers Plowman changed between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Anne Middleton has surveyed the works that accompany Piers Plowman in medieval manuscripts, concluding that early readers seem to have understood Piers Plowman “as a compendiously didactic work, whose literary mode is narrative or historical.”40 Bale’s original attribution of Piers Plowman to Wyclif suggests that he understood the poem primarily as a work of theology. This was to remain the dominant interpretation of Piers Plowman through the sixteenth century, although Bale soon changed his theory of its authorship removing Piers Plowman from his list of Wyclif’s works in the Catalogus. Interestingly, even when he no longer credits Wyclif with the authorship of Piers Plowman, Bale continues to identify Wyclif as an author of vernacular satire. The Catalogus lists among Wyclif’s writings “Ioannem à rure, contra fratres”: that is, Jack Upland, an anonymous Wycliffite anti-fraternal treatise in Middle English prose.41 Bale’s attribution of Jack Upland to Wyclif was unusual; in the sixteenth century, Jack Upland was usually ascribed to Chaucer, and it was printed as one of Chaucer’s works in Speght’s 1602 edition and Urry’s 1721 edition.42 In the 1557 Catalogus, Bale attributed Piers Plowman to “Robertus Langelande.”43 How and when he came to change his attribution is unclear. Bale’s notebook, written between 1549 and 1577, includes four references to Robert Langland that he cites as having been gathered from the collections of Nicholas Brigham (ex collecties Nicolai Brigam), from the house of William Spark (ex domo Guilhelmi Sparke), and from Dr. John Widsom (Ex Ioanne Wysdome medico).44 Although Bale records the names of

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those who supplied him with materials, it is not always clear what particular materials they lent him, so his immediate source for the Robert Langland name remains uncertain. In 1935, R. B. Haselden and H. C. Schulz argued that the manuscript of William Sparke that Bale had seen was Huntington Library MS HM 128.45 Certainly HM 128 was a manuscript that Bale had used at some point, as it preserves on a pastedown an inscription in his hand: “Robertus langlande natus in comitatu salopie in villa Mortymers Clybery in the claylande, within viij myles of Malverne hylles, scripsit peers ploughman li. 1.” This note on Langland is followed by a copy of the poem’s first line as it is given in this manuscript.46 Bale’s brief biography of Robert Langland in this note is, in shorter form, the one given in his Catalogus (quoted in full below). Presumably, then, HM 128 is one of the sources that Bale used while working to compile the Catalogus. It is also possible that Bale used HM 128 after the publication of the Catalogus and that he added the short biographical annotation to the manuscript while he was using it, having already published a longer version of the same. However, Haselden and Schulz note that HM 128 is the only one of the surviving manuscripts of Piers Plowman that preserves the reading “set” rather than “soft” in the poem’s opening line: “In a someres seysoun whan set was the sunne.” Bale’s notebook similarly transcribes the William Sparke copy of the poem as using the adjective “set.”47 In the Catalogus, Bale translates the poem’s opening line to the Latin: “In aestiuo tempore cum sol caleret.”48 No surviving manuscript preserves the reading: “when hot was the sun.” Presumably “hot” was Bale’s attempt to correct the nonsensical reading “set” in the poem’s opening line, as no pilgrim would set forth after nightfall. Bale’s preference for the reading “hot” is shown also in his notebook reference to the manuscript “Ex collectis Nicolai Brigam,” where Bale quotes the poem’s opening line as: “In a somer sonday whan sote was ye sunne.”49 Poole notes that above the word “sote” Bale has written “warme.” A modern reader would be more inclined to correct “sote” to “softe,” rather than attempting to gloss it as Bale does. Immediately preceding the note by Bale on this pastedown is another sixteenth-century note on the poem’s authorship: “Robert or william langland made pers plowman.”50 Given their prior conclusion that HM 128 is the manuscript Bale claims to have seen “Ex domo Guilhelmi Sparke,” Haselden and Schulz argue further that this inscription may be by William Sparke himself.51 This is certainly quite possible, but in this case the name of the poet mentioned in the inscription seems as interesting as the name of the author of the inscription. Whoever wrote this note clearly knew both the William Langland and Robert Langland names, but was not willing to make a choice between them. Bale and the author of the HM 128 note are not alone in the attribution of Piers Plowman to Robert Langland. Five other


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manuscripts of the poem preserve sixteenth-century notes identifying the poet as “Robertus Langlande.”52 The name “Robert” is generally agreed to derive from a scribal misreading of line B.8.1: “Thus yrobed in russet I romed aboute.” In two unrelated manuscripts (one each of the B and A texts) “yrobed” is replaced by some form of “I, Robert.”53 These two readings of “Robert” may be witnesses to coincidentally similar errors in transmission, or they may have been suggested to their originators by an independently circulating tradition about the poet’s name. Although the name “Robert” is attested twice by the first quarter of the fifteenth century, the names “Robert” and “Langland” are not put together until the sixteenth century. It is possible that a now-lost manuscript contained both the poet’s surname and the “I, Robert” reading; it is also possible that the originator of the Robert Langland name knew the name William Langland but doubted that Will was the poet’s name as well as the allegorical dreamer’s. In this case, the “I, Robert” misreading of B.8.1 might have sufficient persuasive force to suggest the emendation of William Langland to Robert Langland. The Catalogus attributes Piers Plowman to Robert Langland (rather than John Wyclif), but Bale still ascribes Wycliffite theology to Langland. His Catalogus entry on Langland reads: Robertus Langelande, sacerdos, ut apparet, natus in comitatu Salopiae, in uilla uulgo dicta Mortymers Clibery, in terra lutea, octauo à Maluernis montibus milliario fuit. Num tamen eo in loco, inconditio & agresti, in bonis literis ad maturam aetatem usque informatus fuerit, certo adfirmare non possum. ut neque, an Oxonij aut Cantabrigiae illis insudauerit: quum apud eorum locorum magistros, studia praecipue uigerent. Illud ueruntamen liquido constat, eum fuisse ex primis Ioannis Uuicleui discipulis unum, atque in spiritus feruore, contra apertas Papistarum blasphemias aduersus Deum & eius Christum, sub amœnibus coloribus & typis edidisse in sermone Anglico pium opus, ac bonoru[m] uirorum lectione dignu[m], quod uocabat Visionem Petri Aratoris,

Lib. I. In aestiuo tempore cum sol caleret.

Nihil aliud ab ipso editum noui. In hoc opere erudito, præter similitudines uarias & iucundas, prophetic[ae] plura prædixit, qu[ae] nostris diebus impleri uidimus. Compleuit suum opus anno Domini 1368, dum Ioannes Cicestrius Londini praetor esset.54

Despite Bale’s certainty about the date of Piers Plowman (1368, during the mayoralty of John Chichester), many of the details in this entry are things about which Bale is uncertain: whether Langland was a priest, whether he was educated in Mortimers Cliberry; whether he attended Oxford or

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Cambridge; whether he wrote other works. One thing that Bale says he can affirm with certainty (“ueruntamen liquido constat”) is Langland’s identity as a disciple of Wyclif. Bale’s evidence for Langland’s Wycliffism is in an anti-Catholic idiom that Langland, a “papist” himself, surely would have rejected had he lived to read it.55 Bale’s (erroneous) assertion that Langland was a follower of Wyclif clearly gained some currency for later English readers. Bale’s biography is paraphrased over a century later by Thomas Fuller in his 1662 Histories of the Worthies of England. Fuller says that Robert Langland “was born at MortimersClibery in [Shropshire], eight miles from Malvern-Hills; was bred a Priest, and one of the first followers of John Wickliffe, wanting neither Wit nor Learning, as appears by his Book called ‘The Visions of Pierce Plowghman.’” 56 Other than the assertion that Langland “want[ed] neither Wit nor Learning,” which is implicit but not stated in the Catalogus biography, all of the details of Fuller’s biography are those as given by Bale. The arrangement of writers in Bale’s Catalogus reinforces his claim that Langland was a Wycliffite. The “centuries” into which Bale divides his authors function thematically, not merely enumeratively. Whereas the fifth century of writers highlighted the perversity of scholastic theology, and thus that of the Catholic Church, the sixth century, beginning with John Wyclif, displays for Bale the doctrinal struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism.57 By including Langland in the sixth century, Bale aligns Langland with Wyclif and against Catholicism. Bale’s new understanding of Piers Plowman as the work of an anti-Catholic poet named “Robert Langland” may be related, whether directly or indirectly, to the similar interpretation of Langland’s first editor, Robert Crowley. Bale’s claim that Langland was a follower of Wyclif, his claim that he was a prophet, and his naming as “Robert” are all paralleled by the biographical information given in Robert Crowley’s editorial Preface to the three 1550 editions of Piers Plowman, the poem’s first appearance in print.58 All three of Crowley’s editions were based on a B text manuscript, now lost.59 Crowley’s three 1550 editions all begin with the same Preface “From the Printer to the Reader” on fol. *iir–v. This Preface opens with a discussion of the author’s name and biography: Beyng desyerous to knowe the name of the Autoure of thys most worthy worke. (gentle reader) and the tyme of the writynge of the same: I did not onely gather togyther suche aunciente copies as I could come by, but also consult such men as I knew to be more exercised in the studie of antiquities. then I my selfe haue ben. And by some of them I haue learned that the Autour was named Roberte langelande, a Shropshere man borne in Cleybirie, aboute viii. myles from Maluerne hilles.60


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Crowley’s biography of Langland parallels Bale’s to a great extent, and the two seem in some way related. The direction of transmission is, however, not obvious: although Bale’s biography was published seven years after Crowley’s editions, the notebook entries about “Robert Langland” are undated. It is also unclear whether the transmission occurred directly between Bale and Crowley or through other texts, including, perhaps, the aforementioned manuscripts that preserve annotations about “Robertus Langlande.” The undated sixteenth-century manuscript notes may themselves derive from either a common manuscript source or from the poet’s biography as given in Crowley’s edition. In a study of Piers Plowman manuscript marginalia, Carl James Grindley has observed that it was not uncommon for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript marginalia to be copied from printed versions of texts, and there is one known annotator who copied marginalia from one of the Crowley editions of Piers Plowman: Thomas Thyrnbeke, a sixteenth-century annotator of British Library Additional MS 35157 (sigil U of the C text).61 Unlike Bale, who was himself a parish priest and eventually bishop of Ossory, Crowley does not seem interested in the question of whether or not Langland was a priest. Crowley does nevertheless emphasize the spiritual import of the poem: “There is no maner of vice, that reygneth in anye estate of men, whyche thys wryter hath not godly, learnedlye, and wittilye, rebuked.”62 Absent is any discussion of Langland’s vocation; he seems in Crowley’s account to be a layperson who has dedicated his literary practice to the spiritual correction of his readers. He seems, that is, much like Crowley himself, whose own writings were exclusively religious: a verse translation of the Psalter and a number of anti-Catholic polemical tracts.63 John Bowers has pointed out that Crowley was born in Gloucestershire, a few miles from the Malvern Hills, and that Crowley’s report of Langland’s birth comes from an identification between editor and author. If so, this identification extends beyond their respective birthplaces and into their literary vocation. About half of Crowley’s Preface is taken up with a discussion of Langland’s time of composition. Crowley gives the year 1409 as the poem’s terminus ad quem, claiming that he has seen a manuscript that gives that date of copying. Crowley’s terminus a quo for Piers Plowman is 1350, since: in the seconde syde of the .lxviii. leafe of thys printed copye, I finde me[n]tion of a dere yere, that was in the yere of oure Lorde M. iii. hundred and .L. John Chichester than beyng mayre of London.64

In fact, Chichester was mayor of London from 1369 to 1370, not 1350. The line that Crowley refers to here is Activa Vita’s discussion of the effects

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of a recent famine. As printed by Kane-Donaldson, the lines are In Qe date of oure dri{te, in a drye Aprill, A thousand and Qre hundred, twies [Qritty] and ten, My wafres were gesene whan Chichestre was Maire.65

As the brackets around [Qritty] indicate, most of the manuscripts of the B text of the poem read “twies twenty” in line 269, resulting in the 1350 date that Crowley mentions. Only Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 581(sigil L) and Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson poet. 38 (sigil R) contain the chronologically accurate date (1370) as produced by the “twies thritty” reading. The manuscript variants of this line show different attempts to reconcile the received reading with the actual dates of Chichester’s mayoralty, from a replacement of the “twies. . .ten” directly with “syxty and nyne” in Huntington Library MS HM 128 (sigil Hm) to “thries twenty” in British Library MS Cotton Vespasian B.xvi (sigil M).66 Bale, like Crowley, uses Chichester’s mayoralty to date the poem, but he gives the terminus a quo as 1368, a date given in no surviving manuscript. Of the three sources given in Bale’s notebook, only the information from John Wisdom attempts to date the poem, but the date is given correctly as 1369: “Claruit A.D. 1369, dum Ioannees chichestre pretor esset Londini.”67 Perhaps Bale thought that Chichester was elected in 1368, or perhaps Bale had the date correct and 1368 is an error in the printing. This difference in dating, amid the other similarities in their author biographies, might indicate that Bale’s and Crowley’s texts are only indirectly rather than directly related.68 Despite the difference between their hypotheses about the poem’s date, both Crowley and Bale use their dates to correlate Langland with Wyclif. This is particularly striking in Crowley’s case, because his emphasis on the termini a quo and ad quem leaves a wide range in which the poem could have been written. Crowley determines that the poem “was fyrste made and written after the yeare of our lorde. M. iii. C. L [1350] and before the yere. M. iiii. C. and ix [1409] which meane space was lix yeres.”69 Although Crowley gives more than a half century in which the poem could have been written, he immediately limits the possible time of composition: We may iustly co[n]iect thefore [that] it was firste written about two hundred yeres paste in the tyme of Kynge Edwarde the thyrde. In whose tyme it pleased God to open the eyes of many to se hys truth, geuing them boldenes of herte, to open their mouthes and crye oute agaynste the workes of darckenes, as dyd John Wicklyfe, who also in those dayes translated the holye Byble into the Englishe tonge, and this writer who in reportynge


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certayne visions and dreames, that he fayned hym selfe to haue dreamed, doth most christianlie enstructe the weake, and sharpleye rebuke the obstynate blynde.70

By ascribing the poem to the reign of Edward III (1327–1377), Crowley silently rules out thirty-two of the fifty-nine years in which the poem could have been written. One could give a textual justification for this decision: the further after 1350 (in Crowley’s dating) the poem was composed, the less force Activa Vita’s reference to the dearth would have. As discussed in chapter 3, some eighteenth-century readers of Piers Plowman would take Langland’s “archaic” (actually non-London) dialect as evidence for dating the poem before the works of Chaucer; a similar interpretation of the poem’s difficult language could also have provided Crowley with a justification for his early dating. In fact, Crowley does not offer any rationale. His belief that the poem was written in the third quarter of the fourteenth century seems to take implicit justification only from the analogy between Langland and Wyclif. The name of Edward III also seems important to Crowley. If Crowley’s only purpose was to make Langland contemporaneous with Wyclif, he could have done so without reference to the ruler (as, for example, Bale does). Moreover, England had three different monarchs in the fifty-nine year span during which Crowley locates the composition of Piers Plowman: Edward III, Richard II (r. 1377–1399), and Henry IV (r. 1399–1413). Crowley describes Edward’s reign as a time of spiritual awakening and religious protest, a time when men not only “saw [God’s] truth” but had the “boldenes of herte” to speak against “the worckes of darckenes.” To a midsixteenth-century reader, this description of a general reformation of religious sentiment in England would look quite familiar. In Crowley’s telling, the reign of Edward III looks very much like that of Edward VI, the reigning monarch when Crowley edits Piers Plowman. Just as Crowley describes Langland in his own image, he also describes Langland’s era in terms he might equally have used to describe his own. Moreover, Crowley’s edition of another work he printed in 1550, Wyclif’s Prolog, has some verbal echoes of the Piers Plowman Preface, supporting the interpretation that Crowley consciously aligns Langland with Wyclif. The title page of the Prolog says that it was “wrytten about two C. yeres paste.” This is the same phrase Crowley uses when dating Piers Plowman in his Preface to the reader. The Prolog is preceded by a portrait of Wyclif and a rather painful fourteen-line verse biography, presumably by Crowley. The poem begins Kyng Edward the .iii. did Wicklife defe[n]d Werbi he did florish in Oxford lo[n]ge while

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But Richard [the] .ii. King did something bend To papistis bi whom Wicklife was in exile.71

For Crowley, the defining characteristics of kings Edward III and Richard II were their respective defense of and opposition to Wyclif; the early dating of Piers Plowman makes sense in this context, for the poem then fits with the spirit of Edward III’s reign. In Crowley’s Preface to his edition of Piers Plowman, the life of Langland slides seamlessly into the life of Wyclif. Although Bale’s 1549 attribution of the poem to Wyclif does not have any direct influence on later sixteenthcentury discussions of the poem’s authorship, the link between Langland and Wyclif is central to the sixteenth-century understanding of the Piers Plowman. This connection is so self-evident to Crowley that he asserts it with no explicit justification and uses it as the premise for his dating of the poem. Although Crowley’s biography identifies Langland as the “Autore” of Piers Plowman, Wyclif is a kind of shadow “author” as well, insofar as the conjunction of the two writers grants Wyclif’s authority to Langland’s text. In 1550, “author” still maintained a range of now lost meanings having to do with authority and authorizing as well as merely writing. In his attribution of Piers Plowman to Langland, Crowley uses the word “author” in the modern, narrow sense as the person who composed a given work. Simultaneously, Crowley’s paragraph tying the poem to Edward III and Wyclif operates in the realm of these other non-compositional meanings of “author.”72 Thus Wyclif, Edward III (and perhaps also Edward VI by implication) all authorize Langland’s literal authoring of Piers Plowman. Although Langland’s biography in Crowley’s edition turns out to be as much about others as about the poet himself, it is significant that Crowley chooses to Preface his text with the author’s life. Such a choice might seem natural to modern readers, but a discussion of the author’s biography was neither necessary nor common in sixteenth-century books. As a point of comparison, Chaucer’s biography did not enter his published works until Speght’s edition of 1598.73 Caxton’s second edition of the Canterbury Tales explains his acquisition of the manuscript from which he corrected his first edition; Thynne’s and Stow’s editions include a dedication to Henry VIII and some Prefatory Verses.74 When this early prefatory material engages in biography, it is the biography of the editor or dedicatee, not that of the author. The absence of author biography in Chaucer editions is not because it was not there to include. Both Leland and Bale had written extensively about Chaucer by mid-century.75 Who wrote a work was, in the sixteenth century, significant only insofar a known author’s aura devolved onto the text. My use of the term “aura” reapplies (and reverses) the model proposed by Walter Benjamin. As more poems come under the


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sign “Chaucerian,” the aura inherent in “being Chaucerian” expands to encompass the larger canon. The proliferation of works increases the value of the Chaucerian aura—rather than erasing it (as the proliferation of reproductions does in Benjamin’s analysis).76 The aura of Chaucer’s name accounts at least in part for the expansion of the Chaucerian canon through the century.77 Despite the importance of Chaucer’s authorial name, the particular events of his life were not part of the authorizing apparatus of early modern editions before the end of the sixteenth century. Chaucer’s works were available to early-sixteenth-century readers in manuscripts, printed editions, poetic imitations, and in miscellanies; John Watkins has argued that all of these formats “[embody] divergent notions of what an author was,” and thus all of the different formats “[carry] a different political valence.”78 Certainly the change in format when Speght includes a Chaucer biography gives his edition a new hermeneutic valence. In the cases of both Chaucer and Langland, the publication of an authorial biography appended to their poetic works manifests a belief that the author’s identity is a key to understanding the poetry. Readers of Piers Plowman who encountered the poem in Crowley’s edition, rather than in one of the manuscripts extant in the sixteenth century, found in it not only the literary characters of Piers and the narrator, Will, but also the historical character of Robert Langland who appears in the edition’s prefatory biography. In 1550, when Piers Plowman was first published, Crowley’s inclusion of even limited detail about Langland was an unusual editorial decision. The fact that Crowley chose to publicize Langland’s life (insofar as he knew it) demonstrates clearly that Langland’s theological commitments and affiliations mattered to Crowley. Crowley did not invent the notion of a Wycliffite Langland, but he certainly popularized it. Most sixteenthcentury readers of the poem in print would encounter Crowley’s biography and would thus read the poem in its light.79 Crowley’s editorial annotations to the text of the poem, particularly those in his second edition, further reinforce the idea that Langland’s anticlericalism was Wycliffite (and thus, for a Reformation reader, proto-Protestant).80 Unlike the first edition, the second edition begins with a passus by passus summary of the poem, and its running heads indicate which passus is printed on each page, unlike those in the first edition which ran: “The vision of ” and “Pierce Ploughman” in rather inexact alternation.81 In addition to this more detailed locational apparatus, Crowley greatly increases the poem’s interpretive apparatus, expanding the first edition’s fifty-six marginal notes to 488 in the second edition.82 Both the marginal notes and the passus summaries direct the reader to places where Langland’s poem is subject to Protestantizing interpretations.

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At the end of Passus 3 of the B text of Piers Plowman, Conscience looks forward to a time when Reason shall reign and Mede shall no longer hold sway. When Mede responds with a scriptural citation in her own defense, Conscience criticizes Mede for quoting her text incompletely, and thereby erroneously (B.3.335–352). Mede says: “Honorem adquiret quia dat munera, &c,” “One who gives gifts shall purchase honor” (Prov 22: 9). Conscience replies that Mede has omitted the ending of the proverb, thus reversing its sense. The second clause of the cited text is: “animam autem aufert acipientium,” “but he carries away the souls of the receivers” (Prov 22: 9). This dialogue between Mede and Conscience hinges not only on the advantages and disadvantages of gift giving but on the need for care in citing biblical texts. Crowley’s summary of Passus 3 identifies the dispute between Mede and Conscience as demonstrating What mischefe [the] wicked mede hath wrought, What perfite state the worlde shall be in, in the tyme of renouation, and howe scripture muste be reade whole.83

Conscience’s lecture about the proper use of scriptural quotation becomes, in Crowley’s summary, a more generalized (and implicitly Protestant) lesson about the necessity of textual access to God’s Word: the assertion that “scripture muste be reade whole.” The importance of this lesson is indicated by its repetition in the marginal note to Conscience’s dialogue with Mede: “That scri/ pture sho=/ ld be read/ whole.”84 Crowley’s most famous textual analysis is his claim that Langland’s poem refers to Henry VIII’s suppression of the abbeys. Crowley evidently thought that the reference to the suppression was one of the poem’s most important elements. He mentions it explicitly at the end of the epistle “to the Reader,” with reference to its page number so that the reader could locate the passage easily: Nowe for that whiche is written in the .l, [punctuation sic] leafe co[n]cernyng the suppression of Abbayes: the Scripture there alledged, declareth it to be gathered of the iuste iudgment of God, who wyll not suffer abomination to raigne vnpunished.85

The passage that Crowley refers to here is Clergy’s threat: And there shall come a king, and co[n]fesse you religious And beate you as the bible telleth, for breki[n]g of your rule.86

Crowley’s second edition (although not the first) marks this passage with a marginal gloss: “The sup-/pressio[n] of/ Abbayes.”87


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John Bowers takes issue with the common claim that Crowley identifies Langland as a prophet of the Reformation, noting that Crowley explicitly directs the reader to take the poem’s exhortations personally rather than historically:88 Loke not vpon this boke therfore, to talke of wonders paste or to come but to emend thyne owne misse, whych thou shalt fynd here moste charitably rebuked.89

It is true that Crowley does not use the word “prophecy” to describe Piers Plowman, though he does remark on its fourteenth-century reference to a sixteenth-century event. On one occasion Crowley explicitly denies the poem’s prophetic value. In the discussion of Hunger’s effect on laborers, Langland remarks that “[t]hrough floudes and foule weder, fruite shal fayle.”90 Crowley adds the marginal gloss: “[t]his is/ no prophe/ cy, but a/ pronosti / cation.”91 Crowley’s Preface notes that this prediction of a dearth “is spoke[n] by the knoweledge of astronomie as may wel be gathered bi that he saith, Saturne sent him to tell.”92 As an astrological forecast, then, the prediction is a prognostication, not a prophecy. Crowley uses the word in the sense of the second definition given by the OED: “An astrological or astrometeorological forecast for the year.” “Prognostication” and “prophecy” did have some amount of semantic overlap in the sixteenth century: the fourth definition of “prognostication” is “[s]omething that foretells or foreshadows and event,. . .a sign, token, portent”; the fifth definition (current already in the fifteenth century) is: “foreshadowing; prediction; prophecy.”93 To the extent that this passage of Piers Plowman looks prophetic, Crowley denies that it is authorial: “that whych foloweth and geueth it the face of a prophecy, is lyke to be a thynge added by some other man than the fyrste autour, for diuerse copies haue it diuerslye.”94 In explicitly denying that Langland’s description of famine is a prophecy, Crowley seems to be refuting a preexisting theory that Piers Plowman does contain prophecies. When Bale publishes his Catalogus, he will make such a claim explicitly: “In hoc opere erudito, præter similitudines uarias & iucundas, prophetic[ae] plura prædixit, qu[ae] nostris diebus impleri uidimus.”95 In Bale’s notebook, the notes given as “ex Ioanne Wysdome medico” similarly claim the poem as prophetic, calling it “opus eruditum ac quodammodo propheticum.”96 Bale’s earlier Summarium did not claim “John Wyclif’s” Piers Plowman to be prophetic; in 1550, Crowley may already have known of Bale’s unpublished claim that the poem was prophetic, or he may have known such a claim from another source, such as the one Bale himself cites. Even aside from the possibility that the poem’s reputation for prophecy circulated independently of its printing, Crowley’s denials of the prophecies

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in Piers Plowman are not entirely convincing, given his claim that Langland predicted the suppression of the abbeys. One sixteenth-century reader who chose to ignore Crowley’s instruction to take the poem as personal, rather than historical or prophetic, was the anonymous annotator of British Library shelfmark C.122.d.9. This is the copy of Cr2 used for the UMI microfilm, so its extensive sixteenth-century marginalia are easily accessible.97 The reader responsible for these notes consistently interprets the poem as prophetic. In fact, the same passage in Passus 6 that Crowley deems a prognostication rather than a prophecy is marked by this annotator as “pearcys P[ro]facye.” The annotator’s marginal note here acts as a refutation of Crowley’s attempts to steer interpretation. Already in the poem’s Prologue, the annotator marks as “[the] fyrste p[ro]fycy” the narrator’s claim that Many ferleis haue fallen, in fewe yeres But holy church and they [the friars], hold better togither The most mischiefe on mould, is mou[n]tinge well fast98

The numbering of prophecies in this annotation suggests that this reader imagined the poem as containing a series of prophecies to be gathered. Despite the fact that Crowley does not use the word prophecy in describing the poem’s references to future events, his Preface does carefully itemize lines of the poem that could be seen as predicting the future. The annotator of British Library C.122.d.9 has written a lengthy manuscript note on the half page below the end of Crowley’s preface; this note lists a series of important prophecies in the poem: xxxvj lefe or vi sones & a shype & halfe a sheffe of ar an other p[ro]fycye of desoluyng of abayes, in [the] xlx lefe wher he spekythe of [the] mydyll of a mowne in [the] lxvij lefe wher he spekythe of a nother p[ro]fycye to begyn in a dry aparyll in lxviij lefe.99

Since the second and fourth items on the list are both called “another prophecy,” presumably the first and third items are prophecies as well. The first item on the manuscript list, the prophecy of the six suns, derives (though somewhat indirectly) from Crowley’s Preface, where Crowley notes that different manuscripts cite Saturn’s prophecy of a dearth differently, and that it is therefore likely to show scribal interference: [it] is lyke to be a thynge added by some other man than the fyrste autour, For diuerse copies haue it diuerslye. For where the copie that I folowe hath thus. And when you se the sunne amisse, & thre monkes heads And a mayde haue the maistrye, and multiply by eight,


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Some other haue Three shyppes and a shefe, wyth an eight folowynge Shall brynge bale and battell, on both halfe the mone.100

Differentiating the manuscript readings is a careful piece of textual scholarship by Crowley, but he is wrong in his conclusion that it is due to scribal rewriting. The first version of this passage that Crowley offers is the B version (hence his reference to “the copie that I folowe”): B.6.326–327. The second version is an accurate representation of the equivalent lines in the C text, where the prophecy is articulated somewhat differently: C.8.350–351. Because Crowley was not aware of the consistent differences between the B and C texts of the poem, he imagines this particular difference as scribal. The sixteenth-century annotator seems to have been confused by Crowley’s reference to the unfamiliar C text version of these lines. The annotation begins by referring to the “xxxvi lefe,” but does not give the reading Crowley prints on that leaf. Instead, the annotation gives a different reading, marking it as a variant (“or. . .”). The line the annotator gives in the manuscript note is the very similar prophecy from earlier in the poem (in both B and C texts): “By sixe sones and a ship and half a shef of arwes.”101 Not recognizing the C variant given by Crowley, the annotator has substituted the known “ship and sheaf ” line from earlier in the poem. The third passage mentioned in this manuscript note is from Patience’s riddling discussion of Dowell: I bare therin aboute, faste bounde Dowell In a sygne of the saturday, that set first the kalender And al the wyt of the wenisday, of [the] next weke after The middle of the mone, is the myght of bothe And ther with I am welcome, there I haue it w[ith] me.102

The annotator has also highlighted this section of Patience’s speech in Passus 13 and marked it with the marginal comment “a goudly not” (a goodly note), although without calling it a prophecy.103 The final “prophecy” identified by the annotator is Haukyn’s reference to the dearth of 1370 (or, as Crowley’s text erroneously reads, 1350): In date of oure drighte, in a drye Apriell, A thousand and threhundred, twyse twenty & ten.104

Crowley’s printed gloss to these lines reads: “A deare/ yere.” The annotator has underlined these words and added above them: “a p[ro]fycye of,” but this is certainly not a prophecy.105 Haukyn reports the dearth as something

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that is past, as Crowley explicitly mentions when he gives 1350 as the terminus a quo for the poem’s composition.106 The annotator’s conviction that the poem is prophetic extends even to this passage that clearly reports the past rather than offering a prediction about the future. The annotator of this British Library copy of Crowley’s Piers Plowman edition is not the only early modern reader who interpreted Langland’s poem as a collection of prophecies. One sixteenth-century reader of Cambridge University Library MS Gg.iv.31 (sigil G of the B text) has written “the prophecies of Piers Plowman” on the first leaf of the manuscript, and another sixteenth-century reader has written the same after the text of the poem.107 When this early sixteenth-century manuscript was bound in the seventeenth century, “The Prophecies of Piers Plowman” was taken to be the work’s title and was written on the spine of the manuscript’s new binding. The later readers who were responsible for the annotations and binding may have been influenced by the manuscript’s scribe, who also saw prophecies in Langland’s poem.108 This copy of the poem is followed by a four page long scribal table of contents, which identifies a number of the poem’s episodes as prophecies, and cross references them to specific folio numbers and marginal annotations as finding aids. For example, the table of contents says that “ye thyrd chapter declarethe ye profycye off ye catt ye ratt & ye mysse/ att thys marke,” with the phrase “a profesy” in the left margin and the appropriate folio number in the right margin.109 Within the body of the poem, the parable of the belling of the cat is marked by the marginal annotation: “ye profycy off ye catt.”110 In all, the table of contents of this manuscript identifies five different prophecies within Piers Plowman, and the scribal annotations to the text of the poem mark all five of these alleged prophecies. The poem’s five prophecies, as identified by the scribe, are: the belling of the cat (B.Pro.147), Conscience’s riddling reference to six suns and a ship (B.3.326), the narrator’s warning of a future famine (B.6.324), Clergy’s warning of a king who shall come to chastise the religious orders (B.10.309), and the king’s claim to be ruler and judge over all the commons (B.19.471).111 Moreover, an early note by someone whose annotations are signed “W. H” marks a sixth prophecy in both the table of contents and in the margins of the poem itself; W. H. identifies as a “prophecie of Byschoppes” Anima’s warning that the bishops should pursue truth rather than wealth or they will forfeit their rule (B.15.541).112 Francis Ayscough, an early seventeenth-century owner and annotator of British Library Additional MS 35157 (sigil U of the C text), also interprets Piers Plowman as a prophetic text, and he notes that only some of the poem’s prophecies have been fulfilled. In the C text Prologue, the narrator refers to a time when “holi chirche and charite choppe adoun suche shryuars” (C.Pro.64). Ayscough writes in the margin next to this line: “famous Kinge


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Henry Viij fulfillid in his time.”113 In a different note, marked as written in 1603, Francis Ayscough differentiates between Langlandian prophecies that have been fulfilled and those that remain forward-looking. In Passus 4 of the C text, Conscience sends forth Reason, who proceeds to exhort the religious orders as well as secular rulers to emend their way of life (C.4.109–144). At C.4.36a, alongside Conscience’s speech to Reason before Reason’s departure, Ayscough writes: “Thus farr of prophises yet to come all the reste following are past sauing the fall of ye lawe and Bishopps nowe at hand.”114 Ayscough saw in Piers Plowman a prophecy not only of events gone by in the break between the Churches of England and Rome, but of those he hoped to see soon, including the elimination of the episcopacy. Sir Edward Ayscough, the father of Francis Ayscough, had previously annotated the manuscript in the late sixteenth century, although to a lesser extent than did his son. Sir Edward Ayscough also understood Piers Plowman to contain prophecies of the Henrician dissolution of England’s abbeys. Opposite Reason’s warning of a king who will discipline the religious who are breaking their rule, Sir Edward writes: “[a] prophecye. Trulye fulfilled by Kinge henrye.the.viij.th.”115 The line marked by Sir Edward Ayscough as prophetic is part of Reason’s sermon in Passus 5 of the C text. This sermon corresponds to Clergy’s speech in Passus 10 of the B text. The line in the C text is thus the equivalent of the passage marked by Crowley as predicting the suppression of the abbeys (as mentioned above). A third sixteenth-century reader who saw in this line a prophecy of the Henrician Reformation was the anonymous sixteenth-century annotator of Cambridge University Library MS Ll.iv.14 (B text sigil C2). this annotator has made very detailed marginal notes throughout the text of the poem, and alongside this line in B.10 has written: “A prophecy agaynste ye Religious.”116 Tudor readers understood a number of passages of Piers Plowman as predicting the Henrician Reformation, but this line in particular was seen as speaking to their era. As a medieval prophecy of later reforms, in this early modern reading, Piers Plowman had political utility. For at least one later reader, the medieval poem’s prophecies were not dependent on the whole text of the work for their authority; they were useful even separated from their poetic context. Sharon Jansen has recorded the presence of two Piers Plowman fragments among the texts in British Library MS. Sloane 2578, a collection that includes political prophecies among other sorts of polemic.117 The two passages are the description of Hunger’s effects (B.6.321–331) and Clergy’s prophecy of the king who will amend the abuses of the religious orders (B.10.322–325). In the Sloane manuscript, the two passages from different parts of the poem are joined together into one prophecy of both the natural

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world and the social world working together to correct abuses. As Jansen points out, both of these passages could easily be taken to refer to current events, given her dating of the prophecy to 1555.118 The two passages compiled to form this prophecy are among those discussed explicitly by Crowley’s Preface to the poem, and the Sloane manuscript compiler may have been influenced by Crowley. Jansen hypothesizes that the passages were copied from British Library Additional MS 35278 (B text sigil M), although she notes that the text is also similar to Crowley’s printed text.119 If the compiler of the Sloane manuscript, like the annotator of the British Library copy of Crowley’s second edition, was alerted to these prophetic passages in Piers Plowman by their discussion in Crowley’s Preface, then Crowley inspired at least two sixteenth-century readers to look for prophecies in Piers Plowman, despite his surface cautions against reading the poem as prophetic. In addition to publicizing Langland’s name in his Preface, Crowley promulgates a particular role for him as a Wycliffite prophet of the Reformation. Langland was an advocate for reform, and he was identified in the early modern period as a prophet of the Reformation. Evidence from both manuscripts and printed editions demonstrates that Piers Plowman had a consistent readership through the sixteenth century, so the fact that this poem was supportive of such Catholic practices as pilgrimage must not have alienated its later readers. Because the poem’s attacks on clerical corruption and laxity reiterated the discourse of Protestant anti-Catholicism, later readers presumably did not notice the fundamental orthodoxy of Langland’s pre-Reformation poem. Instead, most sixteenth-century readers saw Langland (and his poem) in their own image. Despite this tendency to “Protestantize” Langland, there were a few sixteenth-century readers who did recognize the gap between Langland’s theology and Protestantism. Even Francis Ayscough, who believed Langland to be a prophet of the Reformation, identifies as “a litle taste of poprie” Imaginatif’s discussion of the salvation of the crucified thief, who may not sit so high in heaven as those who performed good works in life.120 Ayscough recognizes Imaginatif’s theology as tending toward a doctrine of salvation by works, and his annotation on this passage serves to moderate his, and his father’s, claims for Langland as their theological forerunner. Ayscough’s marginalia identify Langland as fundamentally an ally but one who is also still tainted with the “poprie” of his time. Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman manifested no such scruples about conscripting Langland for the Protestant cause. Crowley’s Protestant theology was very much of his time. Under the reign of Edward, England’s Protestants extended the break from the Church of Rome begun under Henry, establishing the English Church. For Crowley, Langland’s anticlericalism looked like a forerunner


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of English Protestantism; a generation earlier, however, the reformism of Piers Plowman was seen favorably by a more conservative theological thinker, Sir Adrian Fortescue, who produced his own manuscript of a combined A and C text of Piers Plowman, Bodleian Library MS Digby 145 (A text sigil K and C text sigil D2). Thorlac Turville-Petre has argued that, at the time of his copying of Piers Plowman (1532), Fortescue was loyal to Henry and suspicious of the Church of Rome, if not a Protestant in the later sixteenth-century sense.121 Fortescue’s anticlericalism and support for Henry only extended so far, however, and he was imprisoned and executed in 1539.122 Fortescue, a more moderate supporter of ecclesiastical reform than Crowley, most likely would have disagreed with the late-sixteenth-century understanding of Piers Plowman as Protestant, and Fortescue was not the most theologically conservative member of the poem’s sixteenth-century readership. As a number of critics have noted, a seventeenth-century Catholic named Andrew Bostock argued back against Crowley’s interpretations in the margins of his own copy of Piers Plowman. Bostock corrects Crowley’s claims that Langland opposed the papacy and endorsed the suppression of the abbeys.123 Bostock understands Langland (correctly, according to the most recent Piers Plowman criticism) as fundamentally orthodox in his views. Although Bostock argues to a conclusion different from Crowley’s, he uses the same strategy of finding theological support for a present position in a poem from the past. However, even if Bostock had publicized his interpretation of Piers Plowman in 1613, it would have been too little too late. Langland had already been cast as a fourteenth-century forerunner of the sixteenth-century Protestantism Bostock himself rejected. After nearly two centuries of anonymity, Langland comes to have a name and a public identity in the sixteenth century with the publication of Bale’s and Crowley’s works. Although this is the identity that has proved most influential in Langland reception, an alternate naming tradition arises shortly thereafter, when the antiquary and historian John Stow includes in his Chronicles of England (1580) the fact that in 1342 “Iohn Maluerne, fellowe of Oriall Colledge in Oxford, made and finished his booke entituled The Visions of Pierce Plowman.”124 Stow’s attribution is erroneous, but he actually solves the question of authorship by (what is now considered to be) the correct method: decoding a covert self-identification within the text of the poem. Presumably, Stow knew of a medieval author named John Malvern and thus interpreted the poem’s opening in the Malvern hills as naming the author as well as the location. There were at least three different late-fourteenth-century John Malverns who could be suspected to have authored the poem, two of whom were known to have written other

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works. Stow’s attribution exists alongside the attribution to Robert Langland for over a century, although different commentators identify the poem with different John Malverns.125 The other situation in which Robert Langland’s name and biography do not travel with the poem are the cases in which the poem is explicitly discussed as having unknown authorship. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham lists the author of Piers Plowman among the noteworthy poets from the time of Edward III, but he does not know his name, calling him: “that nameles, who wrote the Satyre called Piers Plowman.”126 Anne Middleton has argued that Puttenham’s definition of Piers Plowman as a satire, an English counterpart to the works of Juvenal, “contrasts sharply with the Protestant ‘prophetic’ views of it.”127 However, Puttenham does invoke the idea that the poem prophesies the Reformation, noting that the poet: seemed to haue bene a malcontent of that time, and therefore bent himselfe wholy to taxe the disorders of that age, and specially the pride of the Romane clergy, of whose fall he seemeth to be a very true Prophet.128

It is not clear if Puttenham knew Piers Plowman directly from a manuscript or only by reputation. Since he does not know Langland’s name, Puttenham apparently did not use Crowley’s edition, but he, like the commentators discussed above, shares Crowley’s interest in the way the poet’s theology manifests itself in (alleged) proto-Protestant prophecies. The sixteenth-century interest in Piers Plowman as an early theological work sympathetic to Reformation goals shows up as well at the end of the sixteenth century in the bookseller Andrew Maunsell’s Catalogue of English printed Books, the first part of which contains those works “Which concerneth such matters of Diuinitie, as haue bin either written in our owne Tongue, or translated out of anie other language. . .”129 Maunsell designed the catalogue in three parts: works concerning divinity; works of science and related fields; and works of “Humanity,” by which he meant rhetoric, law, literature, and history. The first two parts were printed together in 1595; the third part was never produced, although Maunsell does describe his proposed third part: it resteth that I should procede to the thirde and last part, which is of Humanity, wherein I shall haue occasion to shew, what we haue in our owne tongue, of Gramer, Logick, Rethoricke, Lawe, Historie, Poetrie, Policie, &c. VVhich will for the most part concerne matters of Delight and Pleasure.130

Maunsell addresses the first part of the Catalogue to stationers and booksellers, that they may know what books are available, and also to “The


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Reverend Diuines, and Louers of Diuine Bookes, true knowledge of God, and a good Conscience” who would be interested in purchasing such works.131 Among the works of divinity that Maunsell cites is: “Pierce plowmans vision, reprehending the abuses of the Clergie, and all estates, prin. after the authours olde Copie, by Owen Rogers. 1561. in 4.132 Given that Maunsell projected a third part that would have included books of “Poetrie,” it is significant that Maunsell includes Piers Plowman in his first part; for Maunsell, the poem’s theological content is more important than its poetic form. The one feature of Piers Plowman that Maunsell discusses explicitly is its anticlericalism. Maunsell claims to have included in his Catalogue no works “but such as I haue seene,” but he may not have actually read through Rogers’s volume, since he does not mention its inclusion of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, a poem that clearly fits his subject matter.133 Because Maunsell’s source is the 1561 edition, which omits Crowley’s Preface, he does not name the poem’s author. He presumably was not familiar with any of Crowley’s 1550 editions. Despite the errors, variations, exaggerations, and gaps in the different sixteenth-century biographies of the poet now known as William Langland, those early attempts to write the life of the author behind Piers Plowman mark an important stage in the poem’s reception. In some sense, the sixteenth-century reformers’ attempts to make Piers Plowman support their own cause is continuous with the 1381 rebels’ appropriation of the poem’s discourse. Unlike the fourteenth-century rebels, however, Bale, Crowley, and their followers look explicitly to the poem’s author, rather than its language, in their appropriations of the poem. Anne Middleton identifies the fourteenth century as the high point of interest in the poem’s argumentative voice, although fourteenth-century readers take the poem’s voice to be that of “Piers himself”; the rebels who alluded to Piers Plowman named Piers, not Langland, as their ally. Middleton notes further that in the 200 years after its composition, “Langland himself, in a near-vacuum of external biographical documentation, virtually vanished from public notice as a known English author.”134 The idea of Langland as the author (and authorizer) of the poem only begins in the sixteenth century, when the authorial biography begins to be appended to the literary text. For John Ball, Piers Plowman authorized the 1381 rebels; for John Bale, “Robert Langland” authorized the Reformation. Once Langland’s name was associated with the poem in the sixteenth century, it remained the dominant attribution (with occasional challenges by John Malvern) until the multiple authorship controversy in the twentieth century.135 At the end of the eighteenth century, Joseph Ritson (who first hypothesized that the substantive differences between manuscript

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versions of the poem were the evidence of multiple “editions”) noted in his criticism of Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry that “There is, I can assure you, more reason against LONGLANDS title to the authorship of Piers Plowman than you are aware of.”136 Presumably, Ritson means the claim that the author was John Malvern, but he does not reveal what particular evidence he has in mind. Given the overall tenor of Ritson’s response to Warton’s work, it is quite possible that he is simply looking for one more error to ascribe to Warton. Twenty years later, in his own Bibliographia Poetica, Ritson mentions but does not lend credence to the John Malvern hypothesis, attributing the poem to Robert Langland. Ritson also notes Tyrwhitt’s argument that the poet’s first name was William, since that is the name of the poem’s speaker and because of the manuscript designation of the poem as “Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman.”137 Sixteenth-century readers’ interest in the authorship of Piers Plowman should be differentiated from later models of literary analysis that take the author as their starting point. For Bale and Crowley, Langland’s poetic skill (his “genius,” as Romantic criticism might phrase it) is not what defines his importance or that of his poem. Sixteenth-century author biographies are shaped to bring to the fore the names and identities of those whom the poet knew, not simply what the poet did. In Langland’s case, that takes the form of Bale and Crowley’s conflations of Langland and Wyclif. Chaucer too was affiliated with the Wycliffite project in sixteenth-century biographies, as I discuss further in chapter 5. Moreover, in sixteenth-century biographies, Chaucer, unlike Langland, was identified particularly with the court, especially with John of Gaunt. Although their affiliations diverge, both authors are themselves authorized through the names of others. The author-centered criticism that begins to associate biography with literature did not displace other ways of reading. Piers Plowman did come to be attributed to a named author for one subset of its sixteenth-century readership. Simultaneously, others saw the dominant voice of Piers Plowman as that of the Plowman, the authorized figure within the poem, rather than that of the author who produced it. Although different readers locate the poem’s authority differently, it is clear that Piers Plowman was as important in sixteenth-century England as it had been in its own time. For the Protestant readers of the sixteenth century, the significance of Piers Plowman was not as a major work of medieval literature but as the manifestation of a particular religious ideology. Although the professionalization of literary study might mean that the poem is today more widely read than it was 400 years ago, never since the sixteenth century has Piers Plowman held such cultural urgency.

CHAPTER 2 A PROLIFERATION OF PLOWMEN

lthough Chaucer is considered the fourteenth-century writer who had the most influence on the English poets of the fifteenth century, Langland too shaped the later Middle English poetic tradition through his influence on other writers. Ethan Knapp identifies in Hoccleve’s poetry a number of “elements in which he might be more profitably compared to Langland than Chaucer,” including Hoccleve’s discussions of his marriage, his writing in a voice shaped by a clerical rather than courtly milieu, and his focus on motion.1 Chaucer too may have been influenced by elements of Piers Plowman. Frank Grady has argued that Chaucer’s House of Fame borrows some of its poetic imagery from Piers Plowman, and Jill Mann claims that: “[t]he probability that Chaucer had read both Gower and Langland seems, on the face of it strong.”2 Another argument that Chaucer both read and responded to Piers Plowman is Paul Hardwick’s claim that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Plowman responds to both Langland’s Piers Plowman and the 1381 rebels’ use of that name; Hardwick contends that Chaucer remakes Langland’s plowman from religious metaphor to a figure for poetic making.3 If Chaucer’s Plowman alludes in some way to Langland’s Plowman, as well as to his appropriation by the 1381 rebels, it does so by defusing what was already in the late fourteenth century a potentially explosive image. In 1381, the rebels who burned the Savoy and beheaded Archbishop Sudbury presented Piers Plowman, and by extension Piers Plowman, as speaking for their cause, associating Langland’s poem with direct civil disobedience (as opposed to theological polemic). This association with political unrest is often cited as the motivation for Langland’s C text revisions of the poem. Even after these revisions, a reputation as a troublemaker may have remained attached to Langland’s protagonist. In Huntington Library MS 143, a late-fourteenth-century C text (sigil X), the name “Peres Plouhman” has been consistently erased. John Bowers argues that the

A

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erasures were an owner’s attempt to solve the problem of owning a poem named after such a politically controversial character.4 Interestingly, the Huntington manuscript preserves the poem in its entirety, aside from these few erasures. It is not clear when these erasures were made, and it is hard to imagine who the intended audience for this act of limited censorship could be: someone who might inspect a manuscript of Piers Plowman but then withhold a feared sanction because the title character’s name (but nothing else) was omitted. Still, the erasures seem to be one owner’s way of distancing Langland’s complete work from the name of his title character, of dissociating Piers Plowman from Piers the Plowman. The title character of Langland’s poem first migrated out of Piers Plowman in the fifteenth century Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, an antifraternal polemic that is Lollard in its theology and Langlandian in its verse style and characterization. For the next century, the plowman continued to have a literary presence, appearing in works of religious and social protest through the end of the sixteenth century.5 Thus, just as Langland came to have a distinct identity in the sixteenth century, through the biographies discussed in chapter 1, so too did his title character, Piers himself. Langland’s poem did not initiate the use of the plowman as a figure for the simple rustic. The Song of the Husbandman, which bemoans the economic hardships of the poor laborer, predates Piers Plowman by probably fifty years.6 It was, however, Langland’s poem that inspired Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and a number of later works. Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede survives in one fifteenth-century fragment, two sixteenth-century copies of the complete text, and one sixteenth-century printed edition (discussed below); these four witnesses are all independent of one another.7 Both Langland’s Piers Plowman and the anonymous Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede were in circulation in the sixteenth century, and together they contributed to the plowman’s growing reputation as a voice of social dissent. Aside from Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, the fifteenth-century alliterative poems of complaint that make up the Piers Plowman Tradition imitate Langland’s style, but without using the virtuous plowman figure as a speaker of their claims.8 These works share with Langland’s poem a concern for good governance as seen from the perspective of the commons, not the nobles. They also, like Piers Plowman, present their complaints indirectly and allegorically. These works follow Langland’s poem stylistically as well, which leads to an association between the form (the alliterative long line) and the content (political and theological satire) of Piers Plowman. As James M. Dean observes about the Richard the Redeless poet’s choice of alliterative verse: “[t]his style is appropriate for the content because so many other political-satiric writings, from Song of the Husbandman to The Crowned King, were composed in it.”9 Alliterative verse could of course be turned to

A PROLIFERATION OF PLOWMEN

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many ends; the poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness wrote in three distinct genres (courtly romance, religious allegory, and biblical narrative). As alliterative verse became increasingly rare toward the end of the fourteenth century, the association of alliteration with complaint (and with Piers Plowman specifically) became solidified. Richard the Redeless manifests a formal affiliation with Piers Plowman not only at the level of the line (its alliterative verse), but also at the level of the section divisions. Quite unusually for Middle English poetry, Richard the Redeless shares with Piers Plowman the division of the narrative into units called passus, “steps.” Unlike Piers Plowman, Richard the Redeless does not tell of a journey. In Piers Plowman, the narrator, Will, is on a quest both literal and figurative in order to find what it is to Do Well; the division of the poem into passus is therefore very appropriate. In the case of Richard the Redeless, which contains no such journey, the passus divisions seem a clear allusion to Piers Plowman. The only extant text of Richard the Redeless is in Cambridge University Library MS Ll.iv.14, where it follows immediately after a copy of Piers Plowman (B text sigil C2). The passus divisions of Richard the Redeless may be scribal rather than authorial; nevertheless, even a scribal allusion to Piers Plowman demonstrates that one early reader saw a formal kinship between the two poems. The early fifteenth-century authors of the poems in the Piers Plowman Tradition used Piers Plowman as a stylistic model and as a thematic model, but they did not necessarily invoke Langland’s characters. In the sixteenth century, Piers Plowman, not Piers Plowman, provided an authorizing model for the literature of complaint. Elizabeth Kirk has demonstrated that Langland diverged from existing religious imagery to cast the poor plowman as the poem’s center of religious authority.10 Once this image was established, it did begin to circulate outside of Langland’s poem, but in the fifteenth century, using the character of the plowman was just one way for a writer to borrow from Piers Plowman. By the sixteenth century, naming Piers Plowman was the most frequent way that writers registered their (direct or indirect) debts to Langland. For authors in the sixteenth century, naming Piers Plowman was often a symbolic act, one that identified a work as belonging to a particular genre of protest literature. In the sixteenth-century reception of Langland’s poem, the name of Piers Plowman often overshadowed that of his author, even after Crowley published his biography of the man he called Robert Langland. This conflation of author and character was nothing new; the 1381 rebels did the same thing when they invoked Piers as their ally, using borrowed Langlandian terminology to do so. Because so many sixteenth-century works took up the plowman character from Langland’s poem and from Pierce the

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Ploughman’s Crede, the figure of the plowman maintained its utility for later writers of satire or complaint. To be sure, a number of sixteenth-century literary texts feature plowmen in ways that do not particularly invoke Langland’s poem. In Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example, readers learn that the Redcrosse Knight’s adoptive father is a plowman. For Spenser, the brief reference to a plowman serves primarily to introduce a pun on the name of the hero, the eventual St. George. Near the end of Canto X of Book I of the Faerie Queene, Contemplation tells Redcrosse that he was a changeling, placed by a faery in a furrow, “Where thee a Ploughman all vnweeting fond,/. . ./And brought thee vp in ploughmans state to byde,/ Whereof Georgos he thee gaue to name.”11 The infant is named Georgos to play on the Greek word for earth-worker or husbandman. The plowman character is merely instrumental here, a means for Spenser to introduce this etymology of St. George’s name, and to emphasize the saint’s true Englishness: he is literally a product of the English soil. More commonly, uses of a plowman in sixteenth-century texts serve to contrast the simple, rural laborer with figures of nominal, though flawed, authority. In the 1548 anti-Eucharistic tract John Bon and Mast Person, the plowman John asks the parson to explain to him the feast of Corpus Christi: “What Saint is Copsi Cursty, a man, or a woman?”12 When the parson accuses John of Protestantism (“Now I may perceive ye love this new gear”) for his ignorance of Corpus Christi, John invokes his profession directly in his defense: “Ye must hold us excused, for ploughmen be but blind.”13 In the course of his explanation of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the parson proves to be no match for the “ignorant” questions of the plowman John. The piety of the simple laborer leads him to reject the parson’s Catholic doctrine, for (as John says in closing): “I know cheese from chalk.”14 John’s homespun metaphor implicitly grants to any layperson, educated or not, the ability to recognize the obvious distinction between the “cheese” of Protestant piety and the “chalk” of Catholic practice. It therefore demonstrates why the rural laborer figure held such an appeal for Reformation polemics. The plowman is the figural antithesis of the priest. In the medieval conception of the three social orders, the bellatores (those who fight) and the oratores (those who pray) come from what today would be called the same social class, often even from the same families, while the laborares (those who work) were socially distinct from, and lower than, the other two groups. Agricultural laborers also differed from the bellatores and oratores in their lack of formal education; in this they were also unlike their fellow laborares, urban craftspeople, who needed a higher level of literacy. It is hardly surprising, then, that Protestant statements against the Catholic clergy are often presented in the voice of a plowman. More particularly,


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the most famous plowman of English letters, Piers himself, appears repeatedly by name throughout the century, not only in editions of Langland’s poem, but in a number of other satirical works. It is not clear what the relationship is between the printing of Langland’s Piers Plowman and the printing of other sixteenth-century texts that invoke Piers Plowman’s name in the service of political and theological complaint. Some of the sixteenth-century texts featuring plowmen are quite distant from Langland’s poem in terms of style, content, and genre, but a few of them do suggest at least limited familiarity with Piers Plowman. The ShortTitle Catalogue dates a number of these works to “1550?” no doubt on the assumption that they must have been published after Robert Crowley’s 1550 publication of Piers Plowman, the first printing of Langland’s poem. The problem of the undated Plowman texts, and of their unclear relationship to Crowley’s editions of Piers Plowman, contains within it a question about the direction of influence. It may seem tempting to assume that the publication of a major literary work prompted the appearance of related minor works; however, it is equally possible that the market for the major work was created by the prior appearance of those supposedly minor works. In fact, internal evidence in some of the sixteenth-century “Plowmen texts,” as I will call them, suggests that they predate the publication of Piers Plowman. If the availability of other satirical poems in the voice of the plowman influenced Crowley’s decision to publish Langland’s poem, then the sixteenth-century “Plowman texts” had a major influence on literary history despite their status as “minor works.” Langland’s poem is both the originator and the beneficiary in a cycle of literary influence: Langland’s fourteenth-century poem prompts fourteenthand fifteenth-century imitations; these imitations create for the sixteenth century a literary trope (the satirical plowman); the popularity of that trope inspires the publication of Langland’s poem and its circulation to a new audience. Foucault remarks that an author’s name is “functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate them from others.”15 In the sixteenth century, the plowman’s name, not that of the author, was the organizational principle that served to group texts into a common textual identity. A traditional, unidirectional, notion of literary influence (tracing a vector from the major work to an attendant minor work) cannot fully account for the complex circulation of the plowman figure through a range of sixteenth-century literary texts. In his transformation from a sporadically appearing character within Langland’s fourteenth-century poem to a customary voice of satirical polemic in the sixteenth century, Piers becomes neither a stock character nor an allegory. Different invocations of the Piers Plowman name function differently within the works that contain them, but a handful of

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interrelated characteristics appear regularly: Piers’s (perceived) Lollardy or proto-Protestantism, his antiquity, his labor, and his economic and geographical marginality. Taken together, these characteristics make Piers a culturally paradoxical figure. As a character from a literary tradition long-standing by the sixteenth century, Piers represents England’s past, and his antiquity implicitly authorizes his perspective. Piers’s agricultural labor also marks him as being “of England,” a true native of the land. As a poor worker, though, Piers is outside of the centers of power, and in the works in which he appears he consistently speaks against the authoritative structures of church and court. Piers is both an insider and an outsider. Indeed, his very status as a political and economic outsider grants him the moral authority of an honest, native Englishman, untainted by the innovations and abuses of those in power. Given this dual identity, Piers was well suited for continued remobilization by adherents of different, even conflicting, sixteenth-century ideologies. One of the rhetorical commonplaces of sixteenth-century Protestant religious writing is the claim to be returning to the practices of the ancient, apostolic church. This claim authorizes theologies ranging from relatively conservative (for example, those defending Henry’s break with Rome without calling for further reforms) to radical, and it was answered by countercharges against every alleged “innovation.” Catholics were not the only ones to accuse Protestants of heretical innovation; different Protestant sects also leveled this claim at one another.16 Charges of novelty were best answered by scriptural evidence of apostolic practice, but Protestant authors also appealed to the native English religious tradition to authorize their rejection of Catholic doctrine, identifying the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Wycliffites as their theological forerunners. As sixteenth-century reformers looked back to their late medieval predecessors, the early Wycliffite use of Piers Plowman was taken up again by sixteenth-century editors who then “re-recycled” this authorizing literary figure. The appropriation of Piers Plowman by the author of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede made Piers Plowman both available and appealing to sixteenth-century reformist writers who might not have known Langland’s poem independently. The anticlerical discourse within Piers Plowman, the Wycliffite use of the Piers Plowman name outside the poem, and perhaps the poem’s use by the 1381 rebels as well, combined to give Piers Plowman and its title character a reputation for proto-Protestantism in the sixteenth century.17 For the 1381 rebels, Piers Plowman was a living contemporary. The letter of Jack Carter referred to him by name as “my broQer.” Sixteenthcentury authors did not typically follow a similar practice of absorbing the figure of Piers Plowman into their own historical context; the early


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modern uses of Piers Plowman tend to emphasize the antiquity of their source texts, and consequently of the Plowman himself. One way that the age of these texts was visible was in their archaic language, which was consequently a frequent topic of discussion for the texts’ sixteenth-century editors. The editors called attention to the archaic language because it stood as an inherent testimony to the antiquity (and thus authority) of Protestant doctrine. One example can be found in Reginald Wolfe’s 1553 edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. At the end of his book, Wolfe prints a glossary, headed: For to occupie this leaff which els shuld haue ben vacant I haue made an interpretation of certayne hard wordes vsed in this booke for the better vnderstandyng of it.18

For a reader unfamiliar with the poem’s “hard wordes,” this glossary might not have been much help. It is relatively short, including only forty-eight words for a poem over 800 lines long, and it is not keyed to line or page numbers, although the words do appear in the order in which they occur in the poem. Furthermore, it is on the verso of the last page, so readers would have to turn the pages all the way over to consult the glossary, a physically impractical configuration. The glossary is not announced on the title page, so readers would not necessarily know that they could consult it while reading the Crede. On top of all this, the glossary is not always accurate. The glossary’s errors begin immediately. The first word in the glossary is “frayning,” glossed by Wolfe as “forsakyng.” In fact, the Middle English “frayning” means “inquiring.” This entry in the glossary corresponds to line 27 of the poem, in which the narrator laments his inability to learn his creed, although he has asked many men. In Wolfe’s edition, the line reads: “But by a fraynyng for than, faileth ther manye.” [But in terms of this questioning, many failed in it.] It is hard to see how “frayning” could logically mean “forsaking” in this sentence, unless Wolfe understood the line to mean something like: “many failed [me] therefore forsakyng [me].” In the next line, the narrator uses the verb in a way that should clarify its meaning: “For first I frayned the freres, and they me fulle tolden.”19 Given the logical connection between “frayned” and “tolden,” its usage—that is in reference to questions asking for specific information—seems relatively clear. It is likely, not to mention fortunate, that many readers of the Crede would be able to derive the word’s meaning from its context without searching for it in Wolfe’s flawed glossary. Whatever his virtues as an editor, printer, and propagandist, Wolfe unfortunately had a few deficiencies as a linguist.

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The second entry in the glossary is even more problematic than the first; here “Wunede” is glossed as “wont.” Given its placement between “Frayning” (line 27) and “Graith” (line 34), “Wunede” must refer to the word printed as “wennede” in the line: “Then wennede I to wytten and with a whight I mette.”20 The word in question is the Middle English “wende,” went. That the word was unfamiliar to the compositor, if not the editor, is suggested already by the trisyllabic spelling “wennede” in the text of the poem.21 The glossary both misspells the word (relative to its appearance in the text) and defines it incorrectly. A reader dependent on this glossary to understand Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede would be off to a shaky start indeed. Most of Wolfe’s glosses are accurate, despite these early slips. Still, the glossary seems to have a symbolic value, even if it does not have much linguistic value. Fifteenth-century language obviously posed interpretive difficulties for at least some sixteenth-century readers. In fact, Wolfe was not the only sixteenth-century reader of a Plowman text to attempt a glossary. One owner of a Piers Plowman manuscript also attempted to define some of the poem’s medieval words that were no longer a part of the early modern lexicon. Cambridge University Library MS Ll.iv.14 (B text sigil C2) preserves a ninety-five item glossary of words from Piers Plowman; this glossary is written in a sixteenth-century hand, probably the same hand as the annotator of the poem.22 This glossary was first printed by Walter W. Skeat, who believed that the glossator was Robert Crowley.23 J. R. Thorne and Marie-Claire Uhart argue that, while Skeat’s hypothesis lacks sufficient evidence, it can safely be said that “the glossarist/annotator was of the same frame of mind as Crowley,” since the poem’s sixteenth-century annotations in this manuscript correspond in general interest area with Crowley’s marginalia in his edition of the poem.24 This manuscript glossary seems to have been for personal use, not for helping a later and less knowledgeable reader. The medieval words and their definitions appear in two columns, but without any indication of where in the poem they appear; they are not keyed to folio numbers or to the poem’s passus. Furthermore, the words glossed are not marked in any way within the text of the poem, so a later reader would not know to look for them in the glossary. The glossary’s placement gives further indication that it was compiled as a personal exercise rather than as an aid for another reader, whether that was someone known (that is, someone to whom the owner lent or willed the volume) or unknown. This manuscript contains ten separate items, the first of which is Piers Plowman, and the eighth of which is the glossary; according to the manuscript foliation, over seventy leaves once separated the glossary from the end of Langland’s poem.25


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The glossary in the Cambridge University Library manuscript is incomplete as it stands. Not only does it gloss only a small portion of the poem, many of the words listed as needing a gloss are not yet defined. In its arrangement and its status as unfinished, this glossary gives unusual insight into the reading process of an early modern reader of Piers Plowman. Many of the glossary’s entries are of words found in Passus 17 and 18 of the poem, with a significant number also from the Prologue, Passus 1, Passus 8, and Passus 20.26 The words in the glossary appear as series of words that appear in the same passus, although these sets taken together do not follow the order of the poem. Thus, the sixth through the eighteenth words in the left column of folio 170r are all from Passus 18 of the poem—from “ffreyne” (B.18.18) through “Besquatt” (18.248)—but the glossary subsequently switches to listing words from the Prologue and Passus 1. This suggests that the glossator was compiling the glossary while puzzling through difficult passages or while reading some favorite scenes, not during the process of reading the poem from beginning to end. The Piers Plowman glossary was essentially private, written in a single manuscript copy of the poem, while Reginald Wolfe’s printed glossary in his edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede was public, a reading aid for an unknown audience. Despite this difference, they both indicate that the vocabulary of fourteenth- or early-fifteenth-century alliterative verse was challenging, at least in places, for sixteenth-century readers. Even the London dialect of Chaucer’s works had become somewhat opaque to readers by the end of the sixteenth century; the first Chaucer edition to have a glossary appended to it is Speght’s edition of 1598. Stephanie Trigg notes that this sort of explanatory apparatus shows that “[e]diting had become a double act of veneration and alienation” for Speght and his successors.27 These glossaries therefore underscore how surprising it is that such Middle English texts were printed at all in the sixteenth century. Paradoxically, for many editors, including Wolfe, the very alterity of these medieval texts was part of their appeal; they were printed because, not despite their obsolete language. In Wolfe’s presentation of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, the difficulty of the language conveys part of the point to be made by reprinting an old work. Had Wolfe wished to update, rather than gloss, the hard words, in many cases he could have done so even while preserving the alliteration. For example, he could have emended the Middle English “pulched” to the early modern equivalent he gives in the glossary, “polished.” The experience of reading the archaic language of the Crede implicitly confirmed for the reader its authenticity as representing an older, pre-Reformation, English anti-Catholicism. For Wolfe and his readers, the Crede has symbolic value as much as it has literal, doctrinal value. It manifests the truth of

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the Protestant claim that the Reformation was a recovery of an ancient form of worship native to England. By preserving the archaic language of the Crede, despite its obscurity, Wolfe makes good on the promise that he offers in his short prefatory verse “To the Reader”: To read strange newes, desires manye, Which at my hande they can not haue: For here is but antiquitie Expressed only, as tholde booke gaue. Take in good part, and not depraue The Ploughmans Crede, ientyll reader: Loo, this is all that I requyer.28

The language of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede is archaic because Wolfe preserves the diction of his source text “as tholde booke gaue.” Its doctrine is neither new nor strange, adjectives that could indicate theological defensiveness on two different fronts in 1553. The argument that authorizes Protestantism as more ancient than Catholicism (with its practices not mentioned in the gospels) defines Catholic rituals as both “new” and “strange” in Christian history. Catholics were not the only denomination likely to be accused of novelty in this period. In 1553, “new” and “strange” doctrines were being promulgated as well by radical Protestant sects who would themselves oppose as too conservative (not too radical) the doctrine embodied by Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede begins with its narrator seeking to learn his creed, because he is worried about the consequences his current state of ignorance will provoke in confession: Whan I shall shewen my shrift, shent mote I worthen, The preeste wil me punyche, and penaunce enioyne.29

By 1553, such an anxiety about proper confession to a priest would have seemed theologically conservative to most readers. The 1549 Prayer Book allowed for penitents to make auricular confession but did not require that they do so, and by 1553 most English Protestants would have considered confessing to a priest theologically unnecessary. Lutherans, Calvinists, and more radical Protestants rejected auricular confession outright.30 In its linguistic form and theological content, Wolfe’s ancient text thus repudiates the “strange newes” offered by both ends of the doctrinal spectrum: conservative Catholicism and radical Protestantism. Another early-sixteenth-century editor who claims great antiquity for his medieval text is the editor of The Prayer and Complaynt of the Ploweman


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vnto Christ.31 There were two editions of the Prayer and Complaynt, both printed before Henry’s 1533 marriage to Anne Boleyn precipitated his final break with Rome.32 The editor of the Prayer and Complaynt is unknown. The first edition marked the Preface “to the christen reader”; the second edition titles it “W. T. to the reader.” The initials suggest William Tyndale, but Anthea Hume argues that the edition was more likely by George Joye, because it would be uncharacteristic of Tyndale to have left the first edition anonymous.33 The title page of the Prayer and Complaynt claims that the work was “writte[n] not longe after” 1300, a date probably a century too early. This prose treatise begins with a Preface that traces “a vayne name of newe lernynge” back to the Pharisees who accused Christ.34 The contemporary clergy, and particularly the episcopacy, imitate the Pharisees in their accusations against reformist preachers: “Euen nowe after the same maner/. . .our holye bysshops. . .be of the selfe same sort/. . .ye do se howe they defame/ sclaunder persecute the same worde and prechers/ and folowers of it/ with the selfe same names.”35 By this analogy, the reformers are, like Christ, oppressed by a corrupt clergy who slander true doctrine as heretical innovation, “[a]nd by that meanes they lyberally prison and persecute vnto the deth all the professours of the same.”36 This Preface links contemporary opponents of an unjust church to an authorizing history of both theological truth and the endurance of persecution. The reformers are martyrs following the model of Christ, teaching doctrinal truths despite their persecution by the religious authorities. The Prayer and Complaynt (both the Preface and the running titles call it “The Prayer or Complaynt”) is really neither prayer nor complaint so much as it is a creedal statement and a refutation of certain Catholic charges against Protestantism. It is a one-sided dialogue in which the speaker cites an opposing view (“Lord, some men say. . .”) in order to disprove it through biblical evidence. The speaker’s identity as a plowman is never mentioned beyond the work’s title. Given the fact that the plowman’s profession is irrelevant to the narrative proper, it seems clear that his identification explicitly as a plowman is iconic. For whoever gave this work its title, whether the author or the printer, the Prayer and Complaynt, like Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, associates a Lollard text with the figure of the plowman, but without individuating the plowman speaker as either a character or a type. In both instances, the plowman figure is invoked for his symbolic rather than his narrative value. The title page claim to textual antiquity is echoed in the prefatory matter of the two editions of Prayer and Complaynt. In the first edition of 1531, the preface to the reader on fols. Aiv–Aiiir is followed on fol. Aiiiv by a table of “suche olde wordes as be nowe antyquate worne out of

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knowledge by processe of tyme.”37 This table is presented as necessary because the text appears “in his [i.e., the plowman’s] owne olde englysshe or ortographye/ chaungyne therein nothing. . .other the englysshe or ortographye”38 The table itself is quite short, containing only thirty-one words. This glossary, like the glossary of Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, seems more symbolically useful to the volume’s editor than linguistically useful to its reader.39 In the second edition (possibly from 1532), the Preface is moved so that it starts on the recto of its page (fol. Aiir) and continues through the page that had formerly been allocated for the table (fol. Aiiiv). The table itself is omitted in this second edition, although the unrevised preface still refers to it. Because the Prayer and Complaynt is, as the Preface calls it, one of Protestantism’s “holy relyques,” its text is more valuable in its original form than updated. The use of redefined Catholic terminology in describing the Prayer and Complaynt a “holy relic” is typical of the rhetoric of this Lollard text, which consistently plays on ironies it identifies in the gap between Catholic practice and spiritual ideals. For example, Prayer and Complaynt contrasts the Catholic veneration of relics with the contemporary abuse and neglect of the living poor: Lorde/ what heryenge is it to fetche deed mens bones oute of the grounde there as they shulden kyndelyche roten / and shrynen hem in golde and in syluer / and suffren thy quycke bones of thyne ymages roten in prison for defaute of clothynge.40

In the logic of the text, Catholicism’s favoring of dead bones over the bodies of the living poor not only violates nature but mislocates the holy. By referring to the poor and imprisoned as God’s images, the Prayer and Complaynt demonstrates why, in its theology, they are more worthy of respect than Catholic relics. True “holy relyques,” according to the Prayer and Complaynt, are the textual remains that teach Protestant doctrine, not the corporeal remains of “deed mens bones.” The force of this attack on the Catholic veneration of relics is doubled by its association with the plowman, who is not only poor (as an agricultural laborer) but also the producer of a text that survives as a “relic” of an ancient English tradition of anti-Catholicism. John Foxe’s 1570 reprinting of the Prayer and Complaynt continues the earlier editions’ emphasis on the text’s historicity, although he modifies the previous editions’ exaggerated backdating of the text. Foxe does not explicitly assign the text to a particular year, but he suggests a date of composition later than the early-fourteenth-century date alleged by the two previous editions. Shortly before his quotation of the Prayer and Complaynt


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in the Actes and Monumentes, Foxe cites 1360 as the year in which God “beginneth some reformation of his churche,” and he lists the holy Martyrs and confessors, who folowing after in the course of yeares with lyke zeale and strength of gods word and also with lyke daunger of their liues gaue the lyke resistance agaynst the enemie of Christes religion, and suffered at his handes the lyke persecutio[n]s.41

The first on his list of martyrs and confessors is “that godly man” who wrote the Prayer and Complaynt. Foxe does not assign a name or biography to this author, nor does he justify his assertion that the author of the Prayer and Complaynt suffered persecution, or was perhaps martyred, for publishing this work. The actual biography of this author is apparently less important than his location within a community of reformist writing in the later fourteenth century. Foxe’s assertion that the Prayer and Complaynt was written after 1360 differs by at least half a century from the date given in his source text; if any of his readers noticed this alteration, they might at least be comforted by the reassurance that the text is still “An old auncient writing,” as Foxe terms it.42 Despite redating the text (a fact he does not mention), Foxe proclaims his fidelity to the earlier edition and to the plowman’s own language: Although the oldnes and age of his speche & termes be almost grown now out of vse: yet thought I it best, both for the vtilitie of the boke to reserue it fro[m] obliuion, as also in his own language to let it go abroade, for the more credit and testimony of the true antiquitie of the same.43

Foxe implies that the book’s utility is its transmission of doctrine, although if this were his primary concern, he could have updated the language for the ease of reading, something he explicitly does not do. Instead, he offers marginal glosses of obscure words while maintaining textual archaism. This suggests that the real utility of the Prayer and Complaynt for Foxe is its linguistic “testimony,” giving “more credit” to the long-standing history and “true antiquitie” of anti-Catholicism. Foxe’s desire to present medieval texts as medieval (or, in his terminology, “antique”) is visible again in his introduction of a text that claims to be the personal history of an examination for heresy undergone by the early-fifteenth-century Lollard William Thorpe.44 The text Foxe printed, “as wee haue received it, copyed out & corrected by maister William Tindall (who had hys owne hande writyng)” had modernized the text, a change Foxe regrets: “for the more credit of the matter, I rather wished it in his own naturall speache, wherin it was first writen.”45 Foxe assures his readers that the authentic, medieval text in Thorpe’s own words does exist,

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although Foxe himself has not seen it. To add credibility to this assertion, Foxe names both the owner of the old manuscript and Foxe’s informant as to its existence and antiquity: they bee yet a lyue, which haue seen the selfe same copy in his own old Englishe, resemblyng the true antiquitie both of the speache and of the tyme: The name of whom as for record of the same to auouche, is maister Whithead, who as he hath seen the true auncient copy in the hands of George Constantine, so hath he geuen credible relation of the same, both to the printer and to me. Furthermore, the sayd maister Tyndall (albeit he did somwhat alter and amend the English therof, and frame it after our maner) yet not fully in all wordes, but that some thing doth remaine, saueryng of the old speech of [the] tyme.46

These details add to Foxe’s claim the veneer of verifiability, although a reader of the Actes and Monumentes would be unlikely to track down this source text, especially since Foxe himself has not been able to do so. Early modern editors of the Plowman texts consistently emphasize the “medievalness” of their texts, highlighting the antiquity of the language as reproduced, despite the fact that intervening linguistic changes might present a barrier to the non-medieval reader. The early-sixteenth-century edition of A proper dyaloge, betwene a gentillman and a husbandma[n], eche complaynenge to other theyr myserable calamyte through the ambicion of the clergye, seems also to conform to this pattern.47 The interlocutors in this text represent the two nonclerical estates, and they agree that the avarice of the clergy is to blame for their respective poverty. The framing dialogue is an early modern addition to a medieval Lollard treatise, and the text makes no attempt to unify the two parts.48 The chronological distance between the sixteenth-century framing dialogue and the medieval Lollard text is, in fact, highlighted in the Dyaloge itself. The Gentillman complains about the clergy’s allegation that “thes heretyke lutheranes” are a “secte new fanggled/ With execrable heresyes entanggled.”49 Although the Gentillman is more often the knowledgeable speaker in the Dyaloge, he is wrong when he asserts that the English have only recently dared to complain against the clergy. The Husbandman knows better and can offer proof: By saynt mary syr/ that is a starcke lye I can shewe you a worke by and by Against that poynte makynge obieccyon Which of warrantyse I dare be bolde That is aboue an hondred yere olde As the englysshe selfe doth testefye.50


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The Gentillman is happy to conclude from this: “So is it than no newe found heresy.”51 The archaic language, the “englysshe selfe,” of the Husbandman’s book, like that of Pierce the Ploughmans Crede and the Prayer and Complaynt, is used as evidence of long-standing opposition to the clergy by the English laity. Significantly, it is the Husbandman who knows of a long tradition of English anti-Catholicism. The husbandman in the Proper dyaloge is not explicitly a plowman, but the Dyaloge seems to depend upon the reader’s familiarity with the genre of “Plowman texts” in that its agricultural laborer is linked to a local, and specifically historical, tradition of anticlerical complaint. Later in the century, the connection between rural laborers and Piers Plowman may become more automatic; in his 1570 reprinting of Jack Upland, John Foxe refers to Jack Upland as “a plouhman,” although the text does not actually make this designation.52 Perhaps Foxe subconsciously added the plowman identity to the rural complainant of Jack Upland, or perhaps he intentionally named that profession in order to exploit an existing trope. In either case, the added detail manifests a cultural understanding of the plowman’s literary identity as a simple layperson who speaks out against the flaws in the established social and ecclesiastical order. The Husbandman, Reginald Wolfe, and the editor of the Prayer and Complaynt all call attention to their texts’ archaic language. Sixteenthcentury editors of earlier texts could either update their originals, making them easier for modern readers to understand, or preserve archaic linguistic features as a demonstration of the texts’ age. Twenty-first-century editors of medieval texts usually choose a strategy somewhere between the two, although leaning more heavily toward the latter. Most current editions of medieval texts update their texts at least to some extent by regularizing spelling and following modern conventions of punctuation and capitalization.53 Sixteenth-century editors found similar compromises. Because of the intervening changes in the language, some surface elements of the medieval texts tend to be updated in sixteenth-century editions, even when their editors strive to preserve the texts in their original form (and advertise that preservation). Although sixteenth-century editions might preserve older spellings of words, medieval texts were often subject to typographical modernizations, as the characters Q and { became increasingly obsolete in the early modern printshop. Such orthographic modernization occurs in the sixteenth-century editions of Piers Plowman itself, although the text largely preserves medieval forms. Despite its popularity in the fourteenth and into the fifteenth century, and its continued manuscript circulation and recopying, Piers Plowman was not printed until 1550, when Robert Crowley produced three editions of the poem. As John N. King has shown, Crowley silently makes some

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small changes to the poem’s syntax and morphology to make them accord with sixteenth-century usage.54 Nevertheless, Crowley does maintain the poem’s difficult lexicon, and, like the editors of the Plowman texts discussed above, he makes a point of advertising his linguistic conservatism, announcing that “[t]he Englishe [of Piers Plowman] is according to the tyme it was written in.”55 Crowley dates the poem’s time of composition as “about two hundred yeres paste,” in the mid-fourteenth century.56 Despite the poem’s difficult, archaic vocabulary, Crowley provides no glossary in any of his editions of Langland’s poem. In his 1561 reprint of both Crowley’s text of Piers Plowman and Reginald Wolfe’s text of Peres the Ploughman’s Crede, Owen Rogers reprints Wolfe’s glossary to the Crede, but Piers Plowman itself remains unglossed even in Rogers’s edition.57 The Lollard Plowman texts signified their meaning in two divergent ways for Reformation propagandists.58 The content of the texts—their doctrine, their accusations, their complaints—supported the similar claims made by members of their sixteenth-century audience. To this extent, it was most advantageous to present a text easy for postmedieval readers to understand. On the other hand, the antiquity of the Lollard texts underwrote the claim that Protestantism was an authentically ancient, and thus authorized, doctrine. From this perspective, texts that manifested their age through their linguistic alterity held symbolic value; they asserted their authority because of (not despite) their difficult language. Sixteenthcentury editors of the earlier Plowman texts (including Piers Plowman itself) all face the same dilemma: presenting older writings as simultaneously ancient and relevant. Many of the Plowman texts highlight the antiquity of the text. Some, however, bring the Plowman into the present day. In texts that mark their age, the Plowman’s chronological distance gave his words added weight.59 In texts written in a presentist voice, the Plowman’s authority was enhanced by a different kind of distance: Piers the Plowman’s social marginality. As in modern American political discourse, the badge of outsider carries with it a paradoxical value. In the rhetoric of the Plowman texts, those in authority have allowed society to decay, and the solution must, therefore, be generated by those distant from the centers of power. This logic is underscored by a theology that emphasizes not Christ’s divine majesty but his simple humanity. Christ, like the plowman, is a humble member of the laity despised by the clerical hierarchy for his truthful but unauthorized teaching. The Preface to The Prayer and Complaynt of the Ploweman vnto Christ by W. T. is a reformist text that grants spiritual authority to those distant from power, common laborers. In this Preface, W. T. dates back to biblical times the dispute over who has authority, thus authorizing the lower ranking


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laity by analogy to the apostles. The “scrybes/ the pharyses the bysshops/ the preestes/ the lawyers the elders of the people” in the time of Jesus said “that Christ and his disciples were men neither of auctoritye nor reputacyon/ but laye men/ ydiotes/ fysshers/ carpenters and other of the rascall sort.”60 The complaint against the apostles, as reported by W. T., lumps together two categories of those traditionally denied both theological and political authority: uneducated lay people and members of the laboring class. For the scribes and pharisees who opposed Christ and his apostles, their low social status as fishermen or carpenters was, in itself, a reason not to respect them. For W. T., however, the apostles were “men. . .of auctoritye” precisely because of their marginal social status. The juxtaposition of biblical and modern titles (“scrybes” and “pharyses” on the one hand and “bysshops” and “lawyers” on the other) in the description of those who accused Christ makes obvious the Preface’s concern with current events. By implication, the modern laity, even those “of the rascall sort,” should have access to the word of God, just as Christ’s nonclerical disciples did. Twenty years after the publication of the Prayer and Complaynt, when the project of religious reformation had succeeded, the figure of Piers the Plowman was mobilized for a different purpose, that of political and economic reformation, in Pyers Plowmans exhortation/ vnto the lordes/ knightes and burgoysses of the Parlyamenthouse.61 In this treatise, Pyers explicitly draws the analogy between social and religious reformations, reminding his readers that the “fatte prelates” denied any error in their religion prior to the Reformation, and now “there be many fatte marchau[n]tes which wold haue no reformation in the comon wealth.”62 By naming his socioeconomic proposal a “reformation,” Pyers grants it the authority of the earlier Reformation of English religion. This allusion also suggests a shared literary understanding between author and reader; Pyers’s authority as a spokesman for economic reform is enhanced by the reader’s familiarity with his earlier textual role as a proponent of religious reform. In Pyers’s discussion of the current economic disparities in contemporary England, he addresses readers who are not themselves poor laborers. Pyers seeks to dispel the social myths promulgated by those who benefit from the current economic system (particularly, in this case, the mercantile class of the commons). The self-serving merchants espouse the economic doctrine that the economy is set up in a way beneficial to all, “but he that wyll be conuersaunt with the come[n] sorte of the poore comens shal. . .heare se & p[er]ceyue the case to be farre otherwise.”63 Pyers points out for his readers that empirical knowledge of the state of the commonwealth comes not in the parliament house but in the countryside, where the enclosure of fields for sheep pastures has denied poor farmers their

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livelihood. The virtuous plowman figure is a powerful political and literary symbol not because agricultural laborers were the primary market for this treatise, but precisely because they were not. Pyers stands as a voice of truth outside of the world of court, city, parliament, or marketplace: his authority is that of the simple outsider, a role granted spiritual importance in Reformation theology, and here granted political importance as well. Pyers’s concern about the enclosure of farmlands for grazing identifies his concerns with those geographically distant from the “Parlyamenthouse.” In the sixteenth century, as wool became an industry more important to the national economy, landowners increasingly turned to raising sheep rather than farming.64 The increased enclosure of formerly common lands in Tudor England may have affected as little as 3 percent of the available agricultural lands, but it was perceived by those in rural England as provoking a crisis, as it reduced available employment and thus led to local depopulation.65 Pyers Plowman’s voice was not the only one speaking out against the economic problems caused by enclosures; Andy Wood claims that sentiment against enclosures was “[p]robably the most common cause of riots during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,” and he notes that the unlanded poor were not the only participants in enclosure riots.66 Although the primary opposition to enclosures was in rural areas, an early-seventeenth-century treatise against enclosure argues that it provokes a kind of “trickle-up” economic crisis, eventually harming merchants in towns as well as agricultural laborers in the countryside: “the plowe maintaines all trades, as Mercers, Grocers, Tanners, Shooemakers, Glouers, Smiths, Taylors, Ioyners, Carpenters, &c. But since Inclosure began, all these Artificers prooue by experience, that they cannot haue such vtterances and returne for their wares as heretofore.”67 The sentiment that enclosure will hurt the entire country, not simply the displaced plowmen, is visible also in an early-seventeenth-century comment in a C text manuscript of Piers Plowman. In Passus 8 of the poem, Piers organizes the community to work together for the common good, but Wastour will not. Piers calls upon Hunger to punish Wastour, and the community is beset by famine. In British Library Additional MS 35157 (sigil U), Francis Ayscough has written at this point: “nota Brittaine shalbe bitten with hungere when the plouth shalbe neclected by inclosers.”68 The arrival of Hunger that Ayscough foresees is not caused by the idleness of wasters but by the enclosers’ threat to the nation’s farming capacity. If the plow is “neclected,” Ayscough warns, all of Britain, not just its plowmen, will suffer the consequences. Clearly, Pyers Plowmans exhortation is not alone in worrying about the threat that enclosure poses for farmers and nonfarmers alike. As a sixteenth-century reader of Pyers Plowmans exhortation might expect of a literary Plowman, Pyers couches his economic arguments in the language


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of anti-Catholicism. According to this treatise, the reduced availability of agricultural employment caused by enclosure has been exacerbated by the dissolution of the abbeys, which has increased the number of available workers. All of those who were once in the Catholic economy (monks, candle makers, image painters, and so on) now must find other work in a tight labor market. In its concern for the labor market, Pyers Plowmans exhortation echoes its Langlandian antecedent. Anne Middleton argues that “the waking interlude between the first and second visions of the C version. . .takes its premises and development as a narrative event from the provisions of the second Statute of Laborers.”69 The labor crisis in Langland’s post-plague England was, however, the reverse of the one produced by enclosing arable land. In the late fourteenth century, there was more work to be done than able-bodied workers to accomplish it; in sixteenth-century England, according to Pyers Plowmans Exhortation, enclosure and the dissolution of the abbeys have together produced a surplus of workers, and therefore devalued labor. In Pyers Plowmans Exhortation, Pyers proposes an increase in the amount of arable land combined with a system of tariffs and subsidies to improve the balance of trade and develop foreign markets for the new surplus of English goods. As an outsider, Pyers must present this scheme diplomatically. He invokes the high stature of those he addresses, “my lordes with the knightes & burgoisses of [the] parlyame[n]thouse,” and apologizes for his “rude boldnes” in presuming to offer them advice. In times of crisis, however, even someone with superior status might benefit from a helpful word from an inferior, “lyke as the moost expert mariners/ in a great tempestuous wether/ wil not disdayne somtime to be admonisshed by an inferioure Parson [i.e., person].”70 Because of Pyers’s status as an agricultural laborer, he knows firsthand the hardships of the rural poor, so he offers his solution to those with the power to implement it. In Pyers Plowmans exhortation, as in Piers Plowman itself, the experience of being a plowman is what authorizes Pyers to propose solutions to political problems. Piers Plowman’s professional expertise is invoked even more directly in the treatise known as I Playne Piers. This text takes its name from a verse that stands in place of a title on the opening page: I playne Piers which cannot flatter A plowe man men me call My speche is fowlle/ yet marke the matter Howe thynges may hap to fall.71

The plainness mentioned here has two components. The Plowman’s speech is “fowlle,” unornamented and plain. The Plowman is also plainspoken: he

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“cannot flatter” but speaks the truth. A reader would therefore be wise to “marke the matter,” for what the Plowman predicts “may hap to fall.” Piers outlines the hypocrisy and impiety of the clergy and the offenses of the great against the poor, who are kept from reading the Bible.72 He offers to the poor the consolation of a heavenly reward, and he expresses this in the language of rural labor: ther is no sede can brynge greate gayne but he be deed, thys we se playne in oure yerely sowynge, besyde thys we paciently abyde .vii. monethes lo[n]ge, tho we suffer at home much hunger and wronge, oure whete or we can gether why sholde we not than goddes workynge ken.73

The Plowman and his “bretherne hoggesherdes sheperhedes [sic]” and other rural laborers know what it means to wait through the growing season; thus they, much more than the rich, who are rewarded in this world, can certainly understand the promise of a heavenly reward to come. Their spiritual authority is precisely due to their economically and socially marginal status. The first-person plural forms (e.g., “thys we se playne. . .”) emphasize the distinction between the pious poor and those in more elevated positions, from which the proper doctrine is less “playne” to see. Although I Playne Piers does not directly refer to Piers Plowman, the later text does suggest a possible familiarity with the generic form of Langland’s poem, or at least with some other texts of the medieval dream vision tradition. I Playne Piers begins with the Plowman resting from his labor, meditating on the necessity of rest and then attacking the doctrine of clerical celibacy. “All this whyle me thought I slept,” the Plowman then announces.74 He awakes to continue his labor until nightfall. Despite his earlier weariness, Piers “coulde not slepe a wynke,” so he takes up a book in order to write down his thoughts.75 The use of an alternately sleeping and waking narrator might derive from Piers Plowman directly, but, even if it is not a direct allusion, it certainly partakes of two common dream vision devices: the sleepless narrator, and the narrator’s self-conscious writing of his dream for a secondary audience.76 As in Langland’s poem, which contains a series of linked dreams as well as a number of waking events, dream vision conventions are skewed by this text even as they are invoked. In I Playne Piers, the narrator takes up a book because of his sleeplessness, but unlike the narrators of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess or that of Henryson’s Testament of Criseyde, Piers writes, rather than reads, in this book. The dream of I Playne Piers is limited to the text’s opening section; it is not the text’s central focus. Moreover, no shift in subject matter or narrative technique differentiates the dream from Piers’s waking thought or writing. He never mentions falling asleep until the time of his


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waking up. Given these nonconventional uses of the dream vision genre, it seems that the author of I Playne Piers was using the genre symbolically. The dream vision structure connects I Playne Piers to an earlier literary tradition, the tradition in which its title character was born.77 The Plowman texts consistently mark Piers Plowman’s distance from the centers and discourse of power by explicit references to his simple speech, as in I Playne Piers. Nevertheless, the texts are all predicated on the belief that Piers’s words will be persuasive. Theirs is the rhetoric of seeming artlessness: the truth of Piers’s words needs no ornament. The language of “plainness” echoes throughout this textual tradition. The valuing of a plain, unadorned style has theological significance: it invokes the Protestant claims that Roman Catholic rituals were unauthorized additions to the pure apostolic Christianity described in the New Testament. The most extreme example of a text that imagines Piers as rhetorically effective despite his rustic identity is A godly dyalogue & dysputacyon betwene Pyers plowman and a popysh preest/ concernyng the supper of the lorde.78 In this text, “simple Pyers plowma[n]” encounters four priests at a dinner; “boldened and encouraged” by the holy ghost, Pyers interrogates one of the priests about the nature of the Eucharist.79 The narrative situation of the Godly dyalogue mirrors the scene in Piers Plowman when Conscience invites Langland’s dreamer, Will, to “come to his court, wiQ clergie sholde I dyne” (B.13.23).80 At this meal, Will argues with a gluttonous doctor of divinity about the natures of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest. In both Piers Plowman and A godly dyalogue, the clergyman gets the worst of the argument, but Langland’s Doctor of Divinity does not capitulate as does the “popysh preest” of the Godly dyalogue. In Piers Plowman, it is Conscience who is persuaded by the discourse; he goes forth with Pacience as a pilgrim (B.13.215), an outcome one would not expect to see echoed by the Protestant author of the Godly dyalogue. The thematic connection between the Godly dyalogue and Piers Plowman suggests that the (undated) Godly dyalogue might have been influenced by one of Crowley’s editions of Piers Plowman. This seems to be the implication of the STC dating of the Godly dyalogue to “c. 1550.” It is also possible, however, that the author of the Godly dyalogue knew Langland’s poem through one of its many manuscripts, so the dating of this text remains conjectural. In their “dyalogue & dysputacyon,” the priest and Pyers differ in their Eucharistic theology. Piers cites St. Augustine to defend his claim that the sacrament is memorial and that the body of Christ is not substantially present. The priest refuses to believe Pyers, arguing “S Austen sayth no such thing I trow how be it to saye truthe I haue not greatly occupyed miselfe in redyng of hys workes.”81 Far from being a doctrinal authority, even in defense of his own position, the priest is shown to have less learning than

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this “simple” plowman. Pyers even cites Augustine in Latin, improbably for a plowman, but effectively for the author’s demonstration that the putative authority figure, the priest, actually lacks authority.82 Like Piers Plowman itself, the Godly dyalogue embeds patristic Latin within an English text, constructing an implied reader with some theological education. Despite the text’s focus on the authority of the rustic plowman, no actual plowman was a likely reader for this text. The work’s title too, with its double reference to the interlocutors’ dialogue and disputation, presumes a learned audience insofar as it specifically invokes the academic meaning of “disputation.” “Disputation” here must suggest the theological or philosophical disputation of university debate. It is not a simple synonym for its more neutral pair, “dialogue.” In this treatise, Pyers shows his expertise in the labor of plowing, but he also proves his abilities in an employment proper to the clergy: theological disputation. Pyers has to do the labor of two estates, because the priest “[has] not greatly occupyed [himself]” in his obligations. Pyers’s Socratic argument forces the priest to concede that Christ’s body is not substantially present in the Eucharist. When Pyers finishes his proof, none of the priests present can disagree. The Godly dyalogue closes with the priests concerned about their potential loss of status, but no longer in disagreement with what they had previously considered heresy. The priests who witnessed the dispute say, “If these hobbes and rusticals be suffred to be thus busy. . .we shalbe fayne, to learne some other occupacion,” to which Pyers replies, “AMEN.”83 In the Godly dyalogue, the only “prayer” the priests utter is unintentional, as Pyers ironically reinterprets their professional anxieties as a prayer for a society in which priests do not necessarily take precedence over plowmen in scriptural interpretation, surely a society the priests themselves would not wish to see. By the end of the Godly dyalogue, Pyers has not convinced the priests to relish the idea of lay people debating theology, but he has demonstrated the truth of his doctrine. Despite his simplicity, and with the help of the holy spirit, he is able to best his social superiors. His practice of labor proper to the clerical order threatens the clergy’s professional monopoly. When Piers addresses his social superiors in these different texts, he registers the distance between them, but he does not refrain from speaking directly or boldly. This is particularly apparent in I Playne Piers, which begins with Piers describing his rest from his labor. His tone in the opening lines is moderate, but as he warms to his theme and moves to a mode of direct address, he becomes quite confrontational, no matter how elevated his addressee. “Consyder o Kynges & Princes” he exhorts, “how lothely a thynge is a christen kynge, to be Antychristes protectour.”84 His mocking tone is exaggerated by the text’s liberal use of alliteration, internal


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rhyme, and other sorts of verbal parallelism. Later in the century, these rhetorical elements will come to be generic markers in the Martin Marprelate tracts, Puritan polemics against the Anglican episcopacy.85 The second edition of I Playne Piers notes this similarity explicitly on its title page. In place of an authorial name, the title page proclaims “if any my name doo craue, I am the Gransier [i.e., grandsire] of Martin Mareprelitte.” The title page of the second edition of I Playne Piers futher emphasizes the treatise’s similarity to the Marprelate tracts by several other references to the title pages of the first two treatises allegedly by Martin Marprelate, known as The Epistle and The Epitome, both published in 1588. The second edition of I Playne Piers claims to have been “Compiled afore yeaster day, for the behoofe and ouerthrow of all Parsons, Vikars, and Curats who haue learned their Cathechismes, and can not yet vnderstand them, although the be past their grace.” The title page of The Epistle claims that it was “Compiled for the behoofe and owerthrow of the Parsous [sic]/ Fyckers/ and Currats/ that have lernt their Catechismes/ and are past grace,” while the The Epitome claims to have been “Compiled for the behoofe and overthrow of the vnpreaching Parsons/ Fyckers/ and Currats/ that haue lernt their Catechismes/ and are past grace.”86 Similarly, I Playne Piers echoes the Marprelate tracts in its claimed printing location. The Epitome claims to have been printed: “on the other hand of some of the Priests”; the second edition of I Playne Piers gives: “either of this side, or of that side of some of the Priestes.”87 The second edition of I Playne Piers survives in only a fragment of what seems to be a printer’s copytext. In this edition, rhyming words are often marked by line breaks, so the text is laid out in a mixture of verse and prose. This layout calls attention to the playful, rhyming nature of the treatise. It thus exaggerates the mockery and lack of decorum that would eventually make the Marprelate Tracts so influential, but those elements were already present in the first edition of I Playne Piers, from which the second edition diverges very little. Some topical references to early-sixteenthcentury events have been taken out, and references to kings are now to princes, a title more suitable with Elizabeth on the throne. Otherwise, the two texts are (to the extent that the second edition survives) nearly identical. In his style and his willingness to attack directly opponents of higher social status, Playne Piers truly is Martin’s “gransier.” The jesting of the Marprelate tracts has a dual rhetorical function. It implies that the opposing view is ridiculous, and, in doing so, it moves the locus of spiritual authority away from the figure of greater social authority. In this treatise, Martin challenges the defense of the established church made by John Bridges, dean of Salisbury, and he does so explicitly in a discourse that violates contemporary rhetorical standards. He begins

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The Epistle by telling the clergy that “D. Bridges hath written in your defence/ a most senceles book,” and then apologizing that Bridges’s illogic requires from him an equally “senseless” response: may it please you to giue me leaue to play the Duns for the nonce as well as he/ otherwise dealing with master doctors booke/ I cannot keepe decorum personae. And may it please you/ if I be too absurd in any place (either in this Epistle/ or that Epitome) to ride to Sarum/ and thanke his Deanship for it.88

Beyond calling attention to his theological opposition to Bridges, Martin calls attention to his own satirical voice as an “anti-rhetorician,” and he presents himself as the “Duns” to the socially superior “master doctor.” Following Cicero, early modern rhetorical handbooks identify indecorous and rough satire with the uneducated rustic, the simple fool.89 Such an identity has a political import in this debate. Martin makes his critique of the established church from outside of the conventional centers of power and in a voice far from those advocated by the standards of persuasive rhetoric. In pursuing this strategy of deliberate and explicit rusticity, Martin follows his predecessor, Piers Plowman (as he appears in all of the Plowman texts), who constructs his ethos through the same combination of uneducated speech, nonmetropolitan location, and low social status. Far from prohibiting his speech, Piers Plowman’s social and geographic distance from the centers of power authorizes his words in the Plowman texts. It is explicitly as a marginal figure that the Plowman speaks, even in his appearance most tied to the dominant literary tradition. An antiauthoritarian Plowman was famously allied to canonical Middle English literature by the later designation of a Lollard poem as one of the Canterbury Tales. The prologue that assimilates the so-called Plowman’s Tale to Chaucer’s frame narrative is generally believed to have been written later than the Tale itself.90 Since Lollards rejected the efficacy of pilgrimage, the connection between the Lollard text and the Chaucerian pilgrimage narrative makes little theological sense. It was, however, a powerful ideological move, defining Chaucer’s identity as proto-Protestant for at least two centuries of later readers.91 The Plowman’s Tale was first included in the Chaucer canon in Thynne’s 1542 edition of Chaucer’s Workes, and remained there until it was removed by Tyrwhitt in 1775.92 Chaucer’s pilgrims do include a virtuous plowman, described in the General Prologue, but he is one of the pilgrims who does not tell a tale in the unfinished Canterbury Tales.93 To the sixteenth-century author of the Plowman’s Prologue, fixing Chaucer’s oversight must have seemed only too tempting. Interestingly, the text of the Plowman’s Prologue alienates the Plowman from his putative narrative


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context as much as it absorbs him into the Canterbury Tales. He thus remains an outsider even in this most authorizing context. The Prologue to the Plowman’s Tale begins with an ending, the Plowman ceasing his labors. This ending marks a new beginning, however, as it allows the Plowman to go on pilgrimage immediately (“platte”), without resting from his labors as his team does: The Plowman plucked vp his plowe. Whan mydsommer mone was comen in, And sayd his beestes shuld eate ynowe And lyge in the grasse vp to the chynnne. They ben feble both oxe and cowe Of hem nys left but bone and skynne He shoke of shere and cultre of drowe And honge his harneys on a pynne. He toke his tabarde and his staffe eke And on his heed he set his hat And sayde he wolde saynt Thomas seke On pylgremage he goth forth platte.94

Unless he has been plowing the Southwark to Canterbury road, this Plowman is outside of the original pilgrimage group, despite the fact that a plowman had been among the original company at the Tabard Inn in Chaucer General Prologue. The reference to “the mydsommer mone” alienates the Plowman even further from Chaucer’s spring pilgrims.95 The detail of the plowman preparing for his pilgrimage by donning his “tabard” might be a detail intended to mitigate the discontinuity between the plowman’s introduction and Chaucer’s pilgrimage narrative, since it recalls the name of Harry Bailly’s inn. Despite the obvious gaps between Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the Plowman’s Tale, the 1606 edition of The Plough-mans Tale begins with Chaucer’s General Prologue description of the Plowman.96 The editor of The Plough-mans Tale does not attempt to explain illogic of the Plowman’s initial presence among the pilgrims in Chaucer’s version in conjunction with his later joining of the pilgrimage group in the Plowman’s Tale. Presumably readers of the volume did not mind this narrative difficulty any more than they minded the theological difficulty of a Lollard going on pilgrimage. For the editor of this volume, juxtaposing Chaucer’s Plowman and the Plowman of the Plowman’s Tale supported the affiliation between the two texts, even despite the unmatched details. The symbolic value of absorbing Chaucer into a medieval prehistory of Protestantism obviously outweighs the narrative and theological problems posed by the visible disparities between these two texts. The value of Chaucer’s name in this project is

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further suggested by the edition’s title page, which identifies the author of the Plowman’s Tale as “Sir Geffrey Chaucer,” an honorific never previously bestowed on Chaucer in an edition of his works. The fact that the Plowman is only incompletely assimilated into Chaucer’s fiction, retaining his status as an active laborer and an outsider, suggests that these two characteristics are important aspects of the Plowman’s literary identity in the sixteenth century. Textually, the Plowman’s Tale begins as something of an outsider as well, although it quickly joins the Canterbury Tales more fully. In Thynne’s 1542 edition, it appears after the Parson’s Tale as the last among the Canterbury Tales, a noticable appendage to anyone who compared this text with the 1532 edition that lacks the Plowman’s Tale. In the undated reprint of this edition, The Plowman’s Tale trades places with the Parson’s Tale; the Plowman’s Tale-Parson’s Tale arrangement is preserved by Stow, Speght, and Urry.97 The 1606 editor of The Plough-mans Tale praises this order, saying “it seemes to bee most reasonables [sic] that the Parsons Tale should bee the conclusion of their morning, worke [punctuation sic].”98 Accepting the Tale as Chaucerian, the editor of this volume hopes to assimilate it to the structure, if not the narrative or theological content, of the Canterbury Tales. In all of the sixteenth-century Plowman texts, the Plowman speaks as an outsider and lobbies for change. Nevertheless, the Plowman also always speaks for the principle of order. Since the established social structures have failed in some way, the Plowman advocates for reformations of various kinds, but he is neither an anarchist nor a nihilist. The Plowman’s proposals challenge those in power, but the Plowman himself claims conservatism, not radicalism; he seeks to repair a world troubled by the abuses of those in power. In this regard, his status as an agricultural laborer is significant. As one tied both to the cycles of the seasons and to the economic well-being of the commonwealth, the Plowman represents a kind of long term stability despite his oppositional stance. In perhaps the most politically controversial of the Plowman texts, Pyers Plowman’s Exhortation, which speaks to the governance of the realm, Pyers is careful to establish the limits of his complaint. He explicitly differentiates his desire to repair the social order from the goals of those who would eradicate it: I wold not that those ydell me[m]bres of this realme, which for [the] maytenau[n]ce of their ydelnes wold haue al thi[n]ges in co[m]men/ shuld think that I do now harp of that string.99

As Pyers Plowmans Exhortation demonstrates, religious reform could be used to justify extreme political reform, a prospect quite worrisome to those in


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power. Reformation propaganda is therefore as careful to dissociate itself from the taint of radical sects like the Anabaptists as it is to condemn the errors of Catholicism.100 The Plowman’s integration into the existing economy of individual labor and trade allows him to repudiate the socialism of the Anabaptists, even as he highlights current economic abuses. In I Playne Piers, Piers explicitly seeks to reinforce an orderly hierarchy of governance from the personal to the national. In lamenting the legal changes since 1543 that have prohibited laborers from reading the Bible, Piers maintains that his seemingly radical proposal for open access to scriptures is actually in the service of a social conservatism. When Piers was allowed to read scripture to his household, “then was I syr, then was I father, then was I shepherd and all.”101 Piers argues that all social bonds of loyalty and respect have collapsed since 1543, because the word of God is currently less available: the lawe is gone from the prestes, Iustyce from a great sort of princes, cownsell frome the elders, fayth from the people, naturall loue frome the parentes, all reuerence frome the subiectes, all loue and charitye from the prelates, honesty frome the youth, lernynge from the clargy, knowledge from the masters dyligence from the scollers, from the cytyzens concorde, feare from seruauntes, trewe dealying from marchauntes, corrage frome the nobles, chastytie from virgens, loue from the maried, paciens fro[m] the pore. O the vnfaythful state of mortal men, and this is all because we are wythout the knowledge of God.102

The 1542/1543 Acte for thadvauncement of true Religion and for thabbolisshment of the contrarie claimed that allowing the “lower sorte” of people to read the Bible had caused “greate dyvision and discenc[i]on” among themselves.103 Here Piers argues just the reverse; withholding the Bible from the majority of the nation has destroyed every principle by which society maintains its unity and security. It has undermined the stability of the family, the church, the city, the household economy, and the realm. The sixteenth-century texts featuring Piers Plowman range from recycled Lollard treatises (the Plowman’s Tale and the Prayer and Complaynt) to an economic policy proposal (Pyers Plowman’s Exhortation), but Piers himself has similar roles in all of these appearances. He criticizes some aspect of decay in the realm and offers a solution that will restore order and benefit all members of the commonwealth. He speaks to those above himself, but without conceding that he lacks any social authority to speak as he does. Although all of the doctrines that Piers espouses would have seemed radical to those in authority (civil or ecclesiastical), he presents himself as conservative, one seeking only the restitution of a lost social harmony, and his voice is often explicitly tied to England’s past.

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A related work, but one that does not invoke Piers Plowman’s name explicitly, is a broadside of 1552 by Thomas Churchyard called Dauy Dycars Dreame. Although Piers is not a character in Churchyard’s poem, Dauy [i.e., Davy] derives his name directly from Langland’s work: Dawe the Dyker appears in Piers Plowman at B.6.330 as the name of a laborer who is liable to die of hunger in the time of famine prophesied by Saturn. Churchyard’s poem is in hexameter couplets with internal alliteration by half line; it thus makes use of Langland’s own poetic form but modified for a sixteenth-century audience that would expect rhymed verse. Given these generic similarities, and the invocation of Langland’s poem, it seems reasonable to consider Churchyard’s poem among the sixteenth-century Plowman texts. Dauy Dycars Dreame looks forward to a future time of just social relations in a series of “when. . .” clauses, including some clauses that echo both the concerns and some of the characters of Langland’s poem. Such an idealized society will occur in a time When Justice ioynes to truth, and law lookes not to meede, & bribes help not to build fair bowres, nor gifts gret gloto[n]s fede.104

The social vision contained in Dauy Dycars Dreame can certainly be understood without reference to Langland’s poem, but these lines would have additional resonance for reader who was familiar with the depiction in Piers Plowman of Meed’s appearance before the King as well as Langland’s overall portrait of a society striving toward a perfection it had not yet reached. Whether or not readers all recognized the allusions to Piers Plowman in Dauy Dycars Dreame, the intertextuality locates the fundamentally ephemeral text of a broadside within a long-standing literary tradition. In a commendatory verse published with Skelton’s works in 1568, Churchyard invokes that medieval tradition directly: Peers plowman was full plaine, And Chausers spreet was great.105

As Poet Laureate, Skelton was the heir to both Chaucer and Langland, poets characterized by Churchyard in terms of their direct satire (plain speaking) and poetic inspiration (great spirit). By the time of the 1568 publication of the Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton, readers could know of plainspoken Piers Plowman either through Crowley’s or Rogers’s editions of Piers Plowman or through any number of treatises that invoke Piers Plowman’s name in support of a political or theological cause. The sixteenth-century reception of Piers Plowman (the


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poem) intersects with, but is not identical to, the reception of Piers Plowman (the character). In addition to the several known incarnations of Piers Plowman in polemics dating from the 1530s to the end of the sixteenth century, at least one such figure has been lost to modern scholarship. Andrew Maunsell’s 1595 Catalogue of English Printed Bookes cites: The Plowmans complaint of sundry wicked liuers, and especially of the bad bringinge vp of children: written in verse by R. B., prin. for Hugh Corne. 1580. in 8.106

The 1926 edition of the STC records a unique copy of this work in the collection of William Jaggard (STC 1061). By the time the 1976 revised edition of the STC was published, Jaggard’s collection had been dispersed. This item from Jaggard’s collection is now untraced, although presumably it still exists. The revised edition of the STC cites the entry of this work in the Stationers’ Register on May 31, 1580.107 The 1580 date would make the Plowman’s Complaint one of the later uses of Plowman in the literature of social critique. Given Maunsell’s inclusion of the Plowman’s Complaint in his Catalogue of theological works, the “bad bringing vp of children” referred to in the title might concern their religious education, or perhaps the failure of parents who are “wicked liuers” to discipline their children properly. In Langland’s poem, Piers’s family is seen only briefly. His wife is Dame Werch-whan-tyme is; his daughter is Do-ri{tso-or-Qi-dame-shal-Qee-bete; and his son is Suffre-Qi-Souereyns-tohauen-hir-wille-Deme-hem-no{t-for-if-Qow-doost-Qow-shalt-it-deereabugge-Lat-god-yworQe-wiQ-al-for-so-his-word-techeQ. The hortatory names of Piers’s family suggest that part of Piers’s role as the virtuous lay Christian is to act as the head of an orderly household.108 As I Playne Piers argues, an orderly household, in which a scripture-reading patriarch fulfills his roles as “syr,” “father,” and “sheperd,” is fundamental to a well-ordered society.109 The plowman’s usual sixteenth-century role was as a voice of dissent and an advocate of both political and theological reformation; this identity was relatively constant, but texts occasionally used the plowman figure for more conservative causes. The mid-sixteenth-century text of The Bankett of Johan the Reve, Unto Piers Ploughman in British Museum MS Harley 27 was never printed, but it has received some critical attention for its use of the Piers Plowman in a text defending the doctrine of transubstantiation.110 In the 1510 Lytell geste how the plowman lerned his pater noster, the plowman is a successful husbandman but a fool.111 The first thirty-one lines of the poem are descriptions of his agricultural skills and the riches he has earned, but

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when he is being shriven during Lent, and the priest asks him to say his Pater noster, he not only cannot say the prayer but has never heard of it. The priest tricks him into learning the prayer by having the greedy plowman memorize the names of a series of poor men who borrow grain from him, but the plowman is angry at losing his grain rather than grateful for learning the prayer. Rather than being a spokesperson for the simple but honest piety of the laity, the plowman of the Lytell geste is greedy and wrathful, and the priest’s trickery is not presented as a fault, although one could fault him for his earlier laxity in not ensuring the plowman’s religious education. Despite these essentially pro-clerical uses of the plowman figure in the sixteenth century, the plowman’s reformist identity was well known, and was almost entirely consistent, by the second half of the sixteenth century. The literary role of Piers Plowman as social critic began to dissipate toward the end of the sixteenth century. Although there are vestiges of this social identity still in the 1579 Newes from the North. Otherwise called the Conference betvveen Simon Certain and Pierce Plowman, that role for Piers is considerably more moderate than in earlier tracts that bear his name. In its structure, Newes from the North is more Chaucerian than Langlandian. The narrator stops at a Yorkshire inn while journeying from Edinburgh to London, and he enters into a discussion and tale-telling contest with the innkeeper, Simon Certain, and his neighbor Pierce Plowman. Although the three do discuss social ills (among other topics), Pierce is not singled out as the voice of complaint. Moreover, despite the rustic setting (in the small city of Ripon), Pierce’s agricultural profession is not heavily emphasized in the text. In fact, when he enters the narrative, he is coming to ask Sim Certain for a loan, as he has just returned from London where he spent so much money on books that he cannot afford to buy seed.112 This is hardly Langland’s virtuous and hardworking plowman, insistent on plowing his half acre, nor is it the angry social critic of I Playne Piers or Pyers Plowmans exhortation. By the end of the sixteenth century, the figure of the plowman who spoke boldly against social abuses was familiar (and perhaps stale) enough to be available for parody in the anonymous Cobler of Caunterburie (1590).113 The Cobler of Caunterburie was a response to a volume published earlier that year: Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie, which claims on its title page to be by “Robin Goodfellow,” the name of a fairy in early modern England, and thus obviously a pseudonym. As a trickster himself, Robin Goodfellow is, as the title page of Tarltons Newes claims, an “old Companion” of Richard Tarlton, the well-known and recently deceased theatrical clown. In Tarltons Newes, the narrator dreams he encounters Tarlton’s ghost, who describes purgatory and tells a series of stories (largely from the Decameron)


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about the people in purgatory and how they got there. The ghost’s narrative within the dream is a kind of jest Purgatorio, but in Protestant Elizabethan England (unlike Dante’s pre-Reformation Italy), the invocation of purgatory would mark the book as operating outside of the realm of current theology.114 There are two prefatory epistles printed with The Cobler of Caunterburie. In the first, the Cobler addresses his “Gentlemen Readers” and begs their pardon for taking on the identity of a literary critic, a role above his station. This letter is followed on the next leaf by one ostensibly by “Robin Goodfellow.” In the second letter, Robin Goodfellow, the supposed author of Tarltons Newes is allowed to have his say about the fact that the Cobler presumes to critique his work. The author of the Cobler here stages an epistolary confrontation between two fictional speaking voices about the propriety of the Cobler’s response to Tarltons Newes. Both of the letters depend on the notion that it is somehow inappropriate for the Cobler to undertake such a task, not because Tarltons Newes is beyond reproach, but because the Cobler is overreaching in writing his response. Robin Goodfellow’s attack on the Cobler begins: A Cobler become a Corrector? Ho, Ho, Ho: it was not so when Robin Goodfellow was a Ruffler, and helpt the countrie wenches to grinde their Mault: Then gentlemen, the Ploughswaine medled with his Teame: the Gentleman with his Hound & his Hawke: the Artificer with his labour: & the Scholler with his booke: euery degree contented him within his limits. But now the world is growne to that passe, that Pierce Plow man will prie into lawe, naie into Diuinitie, and his duncerie must needs be doctrine: tush, what of higher powers? what of Vniversities?115

“Robin Goodfellow’s” letter is of course doubly ironic: it was actually written by the author of the work it seemingly critiques, and it speaks on behalf of social order in the guise of a fairy known for his imposition of disorder.116 Moreover, the address to “gentlemen,” aristocrats depicted as hunting and hawking, implicitly allies Robin not only with his social betters but with a field of leisure pursuits far distant from the literary marketplace. Like the mid-century Plowman texts, this letter looks back to a lost social order, but it does so playfully. Helping “countrie wenches” with household tasks like grinding malt was one of Robin Goodfellow’s proverbial activities, but so was playing tricks on them, a fact conspicuously omitted here. Robin’s history of a lost golden age calls attention to the fact that this letter presents rather slanted vision of the past. Among the social groups Robin lists, he singles out the “Ploughswaine” for particular attention. In this ironic lament, Piers is no longer content to pursue only agricultural

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labor; he also presumes to speak his “duncerie” on theological and legal issues. In fact, within the memory of the readers of the 1590 Cobler of Caunterburie, “Pierce Plow man” never refrained from “prie[ing] into lawe. . .[and] Diuinitie.” Prying into law and divinity was the hallmark of Piers Plowman’s social identity in the sixteenth century. Understanding “Robin Goodfellow’s” letter requires knowing (as a reader in 1590 would) that there was no such thing as a literary plowman who only tilled the soil, leaving theology to scholars in “Vniversities,” and governance to gentlemen and “higher powers.” From the early part of the sixteenth century on, Piers the Plowman came to be a standard character in the discourse of literary complaint, and his plainspoken style influenced other pseudonymous critics of the social order, such as Martin Marprelate. By the end of the century, he was familiar enough as a social critic that he could appear ironically in a mock paean to “the good old days” when plowmen were plowmen. In 1579, Edmund Spenser sent forth his Shepheardes Calendar, cautioning his work: “Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style,/ Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle.”117 Spenser may here be referring to Chaucer (Tityrus) as the supposed author of the Plowman’s Tale, or he may be referring to Piers Plowman through his knowledge of the Plowman’s Tale. In either case, the identity of the “Ploughman” is presented as a disguise, a fiction that could be “playde awhyle” by an author. Piers’s marginal role authorized his speech in the polemics of the earlier sixteenth century, but his identity as a rural laborer is here cast as a mere literary device. In her study of seventeenth-century echoes of Piers Plowman, Barbara Johnson demonstrates that the figure of Piers Plowman maintains his former role of social critic in ballad and broadside literature through the seventeenth century.118 Nevertheless, Piers Plowman’s status in the literary culture diminished during Elizabeth’s reign, when new literary standards minimized the importance of the native literary tradition in favor of a courtly, smooth style.119 For two centuries, Piers Plowman appeared regularly in the literature of social and religious protest, but when literary theory began to emphasize continental rather than native models, this long familiar figure began to fade from the literary record. The impetus toward writing or preserving literary history is not ideologically neutral, nor does it occur in a vacuum. For the antiquarians of the English Reformation, looking to the past held special promise as well as special anxiety. In the light of Henry’s radical break from Rome, the English past loomed as a potential rebuke, as the Protestants had repudiated a part of that history. However, it also offered the potential for exculpatory narratives, explaining away the seeming violence of the Reformation as,


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indeed, a re-formation, a return to what once had been. The desire to re-form not only the nation’s religion but its own sense of its history (including its literary history) motivated much of the antiquarian work of the mid-sixteenth century. The reception of Piers Plowman played no small part in the reinterpretation of England’s religious past as proto-Protestant rather than (more accurately, but less usefully) Catholic. It is an interesting phenomenon of literary history that Piers Plowman figures appeared in print long before Langland’s Piers Plowman itself. There seems to have been no perceived market for a printed edition of Piers Plowman in the late fifteenth century, either because of or despite the number of manuscript copies in circulation. In addition to the number of copies from the early and mid-fifteenth century (the majority of extant manuscripts), four of the nineteen A text manuscripts were copied in the late fifteenth century.120 John Bowers has speculated that the principal audience for Caxton’s press was relatively conservative in their political viewpoint, and that this group’s reading tastes dictated the output of the early English press.121 This might explain why Langland’s poem, which seems from manuscript evidence to have maintained some level of readership, was not printed for almost a century after the arrival of print technology in England. Despite the lack of a printed edition until the middle of the sixteenth century, both Piers Plowman and Piers Plowman had acquired a substantial following by the second half of the sixteenth century. When Crowley edited the text in 1550, it must have found an immediate audience to require two further editions within the year. Crowley seems to have anticipated also that some would desire the book in a more deluxe copy, as some copies of the first edition were printed on vellum, a practice extremely uncommon by this time.122 Oddly, the paper copies of this same edition were, as R. Carter Hailey has discovered, printed on at least twenty-four different stocks of paper, presumably print shop remnants.123 Perhaps this edition was, as Hailey speculates, underfinanced, or perhaps Crowley expanded the run during production to adjust for demand. In either case, Crowley clearly envisioned a market for Piers Plowman of which some subset would be willing to pay a premium for their copies. Crowley’s multiple editions of Piers Plowman demonstrate that Langland’s fourteenth-century poem was valuable to its sixteenth-century readers and editors, and the several appearances of the poem’s title character in Protestant polemic show that Piers himself was also valuable, independent of Langland’s work. As Piers Plowman, a character who appears relatively little in Piers Plowman, becomes a frequent speaker of sixteenth-century

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polemic, Piers comes to have his own “authority function” separate from Langland’s author-function. Eventually Langland displaces Piers as the poem’s center of authority, but, for at least a half century, the author and his character mirror one another as authorizing predecessors invoked by sixteenth-century Protestant writers.

CHAPTER 3 LANGLAND ANTHOLOGIZED

t the end of the sixteenth century, a potential reader could have found Piers Plowman in a relatively recent edition, either one by Robert Crowley (1550) or that by Owen Rogers (1561). After the Rogers edition of 1561, there were no new editions of the poem for well over a century. Someone wishing to read the poem at the end of the seventeenth century would have had to acquire and use a copy over a century old. Piers Plowman was not the only medieval work relatively inaccessible for late-seventeenthand early-eighteenth-century readers. None of John Lydgate’s actual works were published from 1559 through the seventeenth century, although in 1784 an edition of the fifteenth-century satire London Lyckpenny was printed under Lydgate’s name. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis was published three times in the sixteenth century but not at all in the seventeenth century.1 The one medieval English author whose works remained relatively accessible well into the eighteenth century (whether through editions of the works themselves or through allusions and borrowings) was Chaucer. Thomas Speght’s 1602 edition of Chaucer’s Works had been republished in 1687, and the works would be newly edited in 1721 as well. Although three editions in 120 years is hardly a glut, it does seem that Chaucer’s works retained some currency. One index of Chaucer’s place in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century understanding of English literary history is the range of allusion to or adaptation of his works by later writers. Tim William Machan notes that “[i]n the years 1558–1625 thirteen plays based on Chaucer’s works were composed, and in 1630 a Chaucer adaptation entitled The Tinker of Turvey was published, which offers six tales told on a barge trip down the Thames from Billingsgate to Gravesend.”2 Chaucer’s works remained relatively well known into the eighteenth century, as the number of eighteenth-century Chaucer modernizations made in this period attest. Some of these were published; others seem to have been private exercises.3 Chaucer was clearly the medieval author

A

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whose works were most widely read (and most widely available) into the eighteenth century. Although complete editions of medieval authors’ works, other than those of Chaucer, were becoming relatively scarce, readers of earlier English literature had access to medieval literature in a new kind of book in the eighteenth century: the historical anthology of literary excerpts. This was the primary format in which eighteenth-century readers had access to Piers Plowman and to other non-Chaucerian works of medieval literature. As I use the term in this chapter, historical anthologies combine a discussion of the chronological history of literature (specifically English literature in these cases) with some amount of information on the authors themselves. The new publishing format of the historical anthology implicitly posed a new identity for medieval literature, including Piers Plowman. Although serious antiquarians might still refer to manuscripts or earlier printed editions of medieval texts in their entirety, historical anthologies offered the history of English literature to nonspecialist readers, broadening the access to medieval literature and also allowing for the inclusion of a richer variety of works than had been previously available to nonspecialists. Historical anthologies made literary history part of the common property of polite society.4 As a new genre, the historical anthology drew on elements of three extant genres: sequential biography, poetic miscellany, and literary historical narrative. Chapter 1 discussed John Bale’s collection of author biographies. The writers Bale lists include theologians as well as authors of verse or other more narrowly literary forms. A century after Bale’s collections, William Winstanley’s England’s Worthies (1660) gathered the “Select Lives of the most Eminent Persons of the English Nation,” including the lives of some poets.5 Winstanley’s collection includes biographical information for both Geoffrey Chaucer and “Sir John Mandevil,” but without including the texts they wrote.6 Thomas Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England, a collection of the lives of English “worthies” contemporary with Winstanley’s, names Robert Langland as a learned writer from Shropshire, but without quoting any of Piers Plowman.7 Fuller’s listing of Langland with writers “Since the Reformation,” because “the Morning-star belongs rather to the Day, then to the Night,” is discussed in detail by Barbara Johnson, as is Fuller’s conclusion that Langland “by Prolepsis [may] be termed a Protestant.”8 Fuller takes his biography of Langland directly from Bale’s Catalogus, and he adds to this a literary analysis of Piers Plowman from John Selden’s 1613 notes on Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion: It is written in a kind of English meeter, which for discovery of the infecting corruptions of those times, I preferre before many of the more seemingly serious Invectives, as well for Invention as Judgement.9

LANGLAND ANTHOLOGIZED

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Fuller mentions the Prayer and complaint of the Ploughman (Fuller’s spelling) as printed in Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes, arguing that it is also by Langland, given that it was written “of the same subject at the same time, in the same Language.”10 Finally, Fuller notes the literary and religious biases of his Catholic predecessor John Pits: “It’s observable that Pitzæus (generally a perfect Plagiary out of Bale) passeth this Langland over in silence: and why? Because he wrote in oppositum to the Papal Interest.”11 Fuller thus mixes literary criticism into his biographies of the Worthies, expanding the genre of collected biography somewhat, but without entering into the realm of literary anthology. A more specialized collection of (international) literary biographies is Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum (1675), which gives brief descriptions of “The most Eminent [poets] of all Ages.” Like the collections of Worthies by Fuller and Winstanley, the Theatrum Poetarum does not quote any of their verse.12 William Winstanley’s later Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) is a sequence of biographical notices from Robert of Gloucester in the mid-thirteenth century to Winstanley’s contemporary Sir Roger L’Estrange.13 In the Lives, Winstanley does sometimes include small selections of the authors’ poetry, but his purpose seems to be to celebrate the men themselves rather than to collect their verse. In his entry on Sir Philip Sidney (which runs for eight pages), Winstanley quotes verse memorials to Sidney by seven other authors before including Sidney’s sixline verse on his own death.14 Clearly Winstanley’s interest is more in the writers than in their writings. Literary texts by various authors had long been collected into printed volumes. Since the sixteenth century, readers could find miscellanies of contemporary works but not historical anthologies. From Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (originally titled Songes and Sonettes) of 1557 to Bernard Lintot’s Miscellany (originally titled Miscellaneous Poems and Translations) first published 1712, the miscellany offered booksellers a way to capitalize on a taste for contemporary poetry without dedicating an entire volume to one author. In her study of early modern literary collections, Barbara M. Benedict argues that “[a]lthough anthologies purportedly differ from miscellanies in scope, the forms are not fundamentally different.”15 I would emphasize, however, the distinction between miscellanies and historical anthologies, because the historical scope of the anthologies puts their editors and readers in different roles than the editors and readers of the miscellany.16 Editors of miscellanies (unlike those of historical anthologies) tend to collect the works without added commentary about the forms or content of the verse presented. Miscellanies also tend to highlight the novelty of their poetry as a selling point; miscellany editors sometimes even solicited contributions from readers before publication.17 Historical

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anthologies may continue up to the compiler’s present day; however, they necessarily begin with texts distant from their readers in both language and style. Although, as Benedict notes, the reader of all anthologies, including the historical anthology, is active in selecting readings and in making comparisons among the selections, the editor of the historical anthology is usually more of a controlling or guiding presence in the text than is the miscellany editor. Unlike other verse miscellanies, historical anthologies manifest a narrative of literary history (whether implicit or explicit). In fact, Elizabeth Cooper describes her 1737 anthology as a “Poetical Chronicle.”18 In their interest in historical narrative, the anthologies I will discuss in this chapter therefore derive also from a third generic predecessor, in addition to the miscellany and the sequence of biographies: the literary historical essay. One early example of this genre is the 1707 essay “Of the Old English Poets and Poetry,” which covers poetry until the time of Spenser, particularly that from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.19 The essay’s anonymous author does include within the narrative a few poetic excerpts, beginning with four lines from Robert of Gloucester’s twelfth-century verse chronicle, which “by the Help of an Interpreter, one may understand, and not without it.”20 However, because of its brevity, its limited focus, and the small number of poetic extracts included in the essay, I do not consider the essay a historical anthology. Like a number of the anthologies I discuss below, the essay “Of the Old English Poets and Poetry” does include an excerpt from Piers Plowman, about which the essay says, “the English is much mended of what it was in Gloucester’s Days.”21 The lines from Piers Plowman excerpted in the essay are from the confession of Sloth (B.5.386–391, 393–396, 402–410, 414–418, with no indication of the lines omitted in the transcription), but Sloth’s allegorical name is omitted. Instead, the essay identifies the lines as a “Satyr on the Laziness of the Monks.”22 The omission of Sloth’s allegorical name makes the scene more freestanding as a “Satyr” than it is in Langland’s poem. Sloth’s name evokes the other six Deadly Sins, but if this scene is not about Sloth himself, the reader will not miss the other Sins’ confessions, scenes from Piers Plowman which are not included in the essay. In excerpting Piers Plowman, the author of this essay therefore minimizes the reader’s sense that there is (somewhere, if not here) an unincluded rest of the poem. Despite its far-reaching title (“Of the Old English Poets and Poetry”) the essay is particularly concerned with ballads; the quotation from Piers Plowman seems to be included as much for its reference to the “Rimes of Robin Hood and Randal of Chester” as for its other literary merits. The author of this essay was not alone in writing a developmental narrative of early English literature. Around 1732–1733, Reverend Joseph


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Spence wrote for himself (in French) a history of English poetry, “Quelques Remarques Hist: sur les Poëts Anglois,” a work not published in his own time.23 Although probably unknown by Spence’s contemporaries, the “Remarques” may be of interest to the Langlandian for their positive assessment of Langland (whom Spence dates to the fifteenth century): “Dans le siécle quinziéme, à peine tourveroit on quelqu’un que ai réussi en poësie Angloise: si on excepte l’auteur de Pierce le Laboureur.”24 Spence was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and perhaps had more reason than most to think of the sweep of literary history; nevertheless, he was hardly unique in the study of literary antiquities. Although it is easy to reduce the eighteenth century to a time of studied literary novelty (and, indeed, of the birth of the novel itself), writers and readers of the period had a notable interest in the history of English poetry. Even Alexander Pope, who mocked the antiquarian Thomas Hearne in the The Dunciad, was himself something of a medievalist, and he presumes that his readers have some background in medieval literature as well. In introducing the satire on Hearne’s pedantry, The Dunciad asks: But who is he, in closet close y-pent, With visage from his shelves with dust besprent? Right well mine eyes arede that myster wight, That wonnes in haulkes and hernes, and H-----he hight. To future ages may thy dulness last, As thou preserv’st the dulness of the past!25

If Hearne resides in “haulkes and hernes,” he imitates Chaucer. In “The Reader to Geoffrey Chaucer,” a verse printed in Speght’s 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer’s Works, and in the 1687 reprint, “The Reader” asks Chaucer, “VVHere hast thou dwelt, good Geffrey al this while?” and Chaucer responds, “In haulks, and hernes, God wot, and in exile.”26 Those members of Pope’s audience who had read Chaucer’s works most likely did so in one of these three editions, the three most recently printed, in which case they may also have recognized an allusion to this verse. The phrase “haulkes and hernes” in the verse is itself Chaucerian: the Franklin’s Tale notes the curiosity of young scholars who pursue arcane knowledge “in every halke and every herne.”27 Even beyond Pope’s use of the pseudo-medieval “y-pent” and “besprent,” a certain level of antiquarian knowledge is required to decode his satire at Hearne’s expense.28 As the example of Alexander Pope suggests, Chaucer was the primary beneficiary of the eighteenth-century interest in medieval literature, but Langland was a visible presence alongside Chaucer. Copies of the sixteenthcentury Piers Plowman editions were still in circulation, at least among

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scholars, in the eighteenth century; Arthur Sherbo identifies a handful of eighteenth-century literary critics who owned copies of Piers Plowman, including Pope, who owned a Rogers Piers Plowman edition of 1561.29 Thomas Hearne owned a copy of one of the Crowley editions of the poem as well as a manuscript of the B text, and was lent at least two different manuscripts by other antiquarians.30 A partial concordance to the poem, the work in progress of an unidentified eighteenth-century scholar, survives in Glasgow University Library MS Hunterian 311, as described by Carl James Grindley.31 Thus, there seems to have been a continuing scholarly audience for the full text of Langland’s poem, although the broader popular audience had access to the poem primarily in historical anthologies. These anthologies distanced the poem from the arcane world of antiquarian scholarship, juxtaposing it with later and more familiar works. In the sixteenth century, Piers Plowman and its title character had been important in the political and theological arenas; in eighteenth-century anthologies, Piers Plowman was recontextualized against poetry rather than politics. The development of the historical anthology, as much as the changed religious climate, worked to move Langland more squarely into the narrative of English letters.32 This historical narrative was shaped in particular by a new eighteenth-century notion of periodization that shifted the point of literary origin from classical antiquity to the medieval or Renaissance past, a specifically English (rather than Latin) literary past.33 Jonathan Kramnick has demonstrated the way the discourse of “Ancients” vs. “Moderns” changed during the eighteenth century, such that early English writers (most centrally Chaucer and Shakespeare) moved from the camp of the “Moderns” (postclassical writers) to that of the “Ancients” (those from the distant national past).34 The new conception of vernacular “Ancients” did not entirely displace the older category of “Modern” as distinct from classical, as is evident from the “Modern” Language Association’s inclusion of medieval literary and linguistic studies, but the possibility of understanding medieval English authors as “Ancients” helped to authorize the literary study of their poetry. The first historical anthology of English poetry was Elizabeth Cooper’s The Muses Library, or a Series of English Poetry from the Saxons to the Reign of King Charles II (1737).35 In her anthology, Cooper highlighted the notion of vernacular origins. As the subtitle of Cooper’s anthology indicates, Cooper includes specimens of English poetry going back to its “Saxon” (or, in modern terminology, “Anglo-Saxon”) origin.36 This choice of subject matter has a certain scholarly logic, but it is the logic of thoroughness, not popularity. Cooper’s principle of selection meant that she was to include some authors unfamiliar to her readers. Cooper herself notes the generic novelty of her historical anthology; she says that such a combination


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of biography and poetic extracts “has never been aim’d at any where else.”37 Eighteenth-century general readers were probably familiar with Chaucer’s name, and many were also familiar with his works, but prior to Cooper’s anthology, most would have very little access to works written in Middle English and no familiarity with anything in Anglo-Saxon. By including in The Muses Library works older and less familiar than Chaucer’s, Cooper implicitly challenges her readers to revise some of their premises about literary merit. In her Preface, Cooper claims that “Those, who read the ensuing Volume with Attention, will be convinc’d that Sense and Genius have been of long-standing in this Island; and ’tis not so much the Fault of our Writers, as the Language itself, that they are not read with Pleasure at this Day.”38 The volume’s chronological arrangement and its inclusion of some little known writers implicitly prove Cooper’s contention of a deeply rooted English poetic ability, despite the “faults” of medieval English itself. For Cooper to begin her anthology as she does, with a verse conveyance putatively by Edward the Confessor, is a bold decision in favor of antiquity over familiarity. This short text in rhyming couplets bestows the keeping of the royal forest onto Randolph Peperking and his heirs. Although the language of the conveyance is certainly comprehensible to a modern reader, it does include some notable archaisms, such as the opening line’s firstperson pronoun and royal title: “Iche Edward Koning.”39 Cooper considers the fact that this legal document was written in verse to be “a Relique of the antient British Druids.”40 The text’s obscurity seems therefore to be part of its claim to inclusion, as it preserves a cultural remnant of the lost British past. After the conveyance, Cooper anthologizes two anonymous texts: a verse legend of the hot springs at Bath and a memorial to King Henry I upon his death. The rest of her inclusions are by named authors, and her contents seem inspired at least in part by Winstanley’s Lives of the Most Famous English Poets. Although she does not include authors who wrote in Latin (as Winstanley does), she does name in passing seven of the Latin authors included in Winstanley’s Lives. Counting authors mentioned as well as included, the authors Cooper cites in The Muses Library after the two anonymous texts are the same as the ones listed in the Lives until Cooper reaches Langland, who does not appear at all in Winstanley’s Lives. Although Cooper’s Preface had already offered a justification for including ancient English works as evidence of long-standing English “Sense and Genius,” she offers a second justification at the beginning of her historical narrative: Philosophers in a Series of Fossils, begin with Nature in her crudest State, and trace her, Step by Step, to the most refin’d.–In this Progress of English

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Poetry we must do the same; and they, who desire to see the Connexion, must bear with the rude Pebble, in order to be better pleas’d with the Ruby, and the Diamond. To set aside the Metaphor, few People suppose there were any Writers of Verse before Chaucer, but, as it appears there were many, ’tis absolutely necessary to give a Specimen from a few of them, both as Curiosities in themselves, and to manifest from what a low and almost contemptible Original, that happy Genius rais’d his Profession at once.41

Cooper here defines her work as a kind of curiosity cabinet for readers. Langland is one of the writers whom Cooper dates before Chaucer, and, despite her praise for Chaucer as elevating English verse, she is actually quite favorable toward Piers Plowman in her commentary. While the conveyance of Edward the Confessor may indeed be included as a “curiosity” and a “rude pebble,” Piers Plowman seems in Cooper’s estimation at least a ruby, if not a diamond. The geological analogy is extended by her use of the word “specimen” for her selections of literary works, rather than “extract,” “quotation,” or another term with a specifically textual connotation. By calling these excerpts “specimens,” Cooper implicitly casts herself as a “natural historian of literature,” and her use of a specifically geological analogy allies her project not only with the scientific study of the past but also with an area of intellectual inquiry that was both novel and controversial in her day. The science of geology originated in the eighteenth century, when writers began to ask questions about various natural phenomena, including the apparently marine fossils found far distant from present oceans. Were these shells that had been deposited in landlocked places by the Great Flood (or by another means), or were they merely stones that happened to look like shells, lusus naturae?42 Cooper’s reference to studying a series of fossils discursively affiliates her project with the nascent science of mineralogy.43 The Muses Library was published within a decade of John Woodward’s encyclopedic and widely read classification of mineral specimens: Fossils of All Kinds Digested into a Method Suitable to their Relation and Affinity (1728).44 Woodward’s work was translated into French, Italian, and German within twenty years of its publication, and its influence and reputation were such that many members of Cooper’s audience would likely have known of it. The reference to fossils is not Cooper’s only scientific allusion. Before his discovery of the comet that would come to bear his name, Edmund Halley was known to his scientific contemporaries for proposing a system to gauge the earth’s antiquity by measuring the salinity of its seas. Halley hypothesized that the seas were originally fresh water, but that they became saline through mineral deposits carried by rivers over time. If one could work out the rate of salination, one could then calculate how long it had


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taken for the seas to reach their current saltiness.45 Halley proposed that the Royal Society measure the salinity of different bodies of water, so that future natural philosophers could compare those eighteenth-century data to the later salinity and derive the rate of salination, and thus the age of the earth.46 Cooper makes direct reference to this theory (although not to Halley by name) in her Preface, pointing out that to complete the observations necessary to calculate the salination rate would take centuries. In contrast, her literary historical project “to set up a Bulwark between Time, and Merit” is much more immediate: “I flatter my self, that the Success of [my project] need not be quite so far removed; nor is it more Romantick, or less Useful” than Halley’s.47 Cooper’s correlations between earth science and literary studies might seem counterintuitive, but Rhoda Rappaport notes that intellectuals of the early eighteenth century shared “a willingness and ability. . .to deal with a range of subjects—from ancient history to mathematics, from epistemology to anatomy—that inevitably startle the modern specialist.”48 Similarly, Roy Porter observes that the “broadening social interest, and. . .deeper institutional basis for the cultivation of science in Britain” allowed science to spread to previously underrepresented groups by the late eighteenth century.49 Thus, even as a nascent and popular discourse of geology was beginning to bring to a wider public the question of how Britain itself was formed, the new genre of literary anthologies attempt to demonstrate for a popular audience the formation of a native literary tradition. Cooper’s Preface narrates English literary history as linear; it is a story of writers’ successive improvements upon their predecessors’ work, and she begins this story with Piers Plowman. The Preface presents Piers Plowman favorably as a point of literary origin, but unfavorably as a product of an age less refined than Cooper’s own. After quoting a few panegyrics on the arts, she concludes: “But, to wave [sic] any farther Authorities, we need only look back to the Days of Langland, the first English Poet we can meet with, who employ’d his Muse for the Refinement of Manners, and, in the Rudeness of his Lines, we plainly discover the Rudeness of the Age he wrote in.”50 Cooper’s discussion of Langland manifests an eighteenthcentury ambivalence toward the medieval poetic record. Although she does praise Langland, she acknowledges that earlier English poetry is in some sense marred by its production during a less polished age and in a less developed language. The gradual improvement of the English language and letters through time is, for Cooper, the result of a series of improving imitations. She presents literary history as a sequence of progressive and conscious acts of refinement. Although Piers Plowman is not the first of her volume’s inclusions, Cooper calls Langland the “first English Poet,” and he is thus the point

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of origin for these successive improvements. In her description of Piers Plowman, she says ’Tis a Work of great Length, and Labour; of the Allegorick-kind; animated with a rich Imagination, pointed with great Variety of just Satire, and dignify’d with many excellent Lessons of Morality and Virtue: And, to say all in a Word, if I may presume to say so much, Chaucer seems to have this Model in his Eye; and, in his Pardoners Prologue, particularly, has a Feature or two nearly resembling the Speech and Character of Sloth hereafter quoted.51

Cooper does not identify which features she has in mind in identifying the portrait of Sloth as the model for the Pardoner’s prologue, but, by suggesting that Langland not only preceded but inspired Chaucer, she posits a particular role for Piers Plowman in the literary canon. She acknowledges that the sixteenth-century literary theorist George Puttenham had considered Chaucer’s works earlier than Piers Plowman, but she dismisses this chronology; “as [Puttenham] is not so much as acquainted with [Langland’s] Name, there is little Reason to depend on his Authority.”52 The phrase that Cooper uses to describe Chaucer’s inspiration by Langland proposes a very dirrect textual relationship. Chaucer, Cooper says, “seems to have this Model in his Eye.” Cooper here is not claiming a general inspiration or similarity of themes. She seems to imagine Chaucer with a manuscript of Piers Plowman before him as he writes. For Cooper, literary history is a series of poets inspired by but improving on their antecedent texts. Chaucer’s “happy Genius” raised English letters from their previously “low and contemptible” state, but not in a literary vacuum. Cooper’s analysis of Chaucer’s debt to Langland suggests that she understood the later Middle Ages in England to have featured a rich literary culture, itself preceded by the less impressive but still vital literary tradition to which the early verses she includes bear witness. The Muses Library emphasizes not only the linear quality of the English poetic tradition but also the fact that the tradition has existed as long as the nation itself. English literature did not spring full-blown from the forehead of either Chaucer or Shakespeare. Like the array of fossils from “rude pebbles” to precious gems, the literary record is buried deep in the national past. Chaucer is not the only author to have borrowed from Langland, however, according Cooper’s synopsis of English literary history, Milton too had Piers Plowman “in his Eye.” After her quotation of Langland’s description of Sloth (B.5.414–419), Cooper anthologizes the scene in which Kinde sends diseases and death (B.20.80–85, 87–89, 95–101), which she juxtaposes with Milton’s description of the Lazar House in Paradise Lost, book 11, lines 475ff.53 She heads these two quotations: “The Passage, which, I think,


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seems to have given a Hint to Milton, is as follows.”54 Cooper’s syntax here reveals what is important to her. She does not say: “The following passage gave a hint to Milton,” but “the passage that gave a hint to Milton follows.” Her emphasis is on Langland specifically as a model for Milton. This excerpt from Piers Plowman is noteworthy for its importance in Paradise Lost, and thus in literary history, not for its significance within the narrative development of its own poem. In Cooper’s progressive narrative of English literary history, Langland himself has no poetic model. In justifying her mid-fourteenth-century dating of Piers Plowman, she notes that: “’tis notorious Langland copies his Characters, and Manners from the Age he lived in.”55 She then lists a number of historical (or supposedly historical) references in the poem–for example, the scene where “Conscience reproaches Mede with causing the Death of the King’s Father, which exactly tallies with the Fall of Edward II.”56 She concludes that the set of historical references would place Langland’s writing of Piers Plowman within the reigns of Edward III or Richard II. In Cooper’s literary historiography, English literature is a series of imitations of one’s predecessors. Langland, before whom there were versifiers but no “English Poets,” wrote from life, but had no antecedent vernacular poet from whom to learn his craft. Although she does not use the language of paternity, Cooper implicitly casts Langland in Chaucer’s traditional role as the Father of English Poetry. Cooper laments that Langland’s work is so little known: “Selden, in his Notes on Draiton’s Poly-Olbion, quotes him with Honour; but he is not so much as mention’d either by Philips or Winstanly; though in my Judgment, no Writer, except Chaucer, and Spencer, for many Ages, had more of real Inspiration.”57 Despite Langland’s poetic inspiration, Cooper is not so flattering in her commentary on Langland’s versification. Part of her conviction that Langland was prior to Chaucer derives from what she sees as the faulty and archaic diction of Piers Plowman. She notes that “the worst Writer, after Chaucer, had some regard to Measure, and never neglected Rhymes: Whereas this is greatly defective in both; seldom affording a perfect Verse, and using a Dialect hardly intelligible.”58 Langland’s deficiencies, as Cooper sees them, are due to chronology, not to his poetic inability. Despite this criticism, Cooper’s praise of Piers Plowman is particularly noteworthy, as she seems consciously to have inserted Langland into the narrative of British poetry, from which Winstanley’s had omitted him.59 Cooper’s discussions of Piers Plowman manifest two commonplaces of eighteenth-century medievalism: glorification of the exceptional individual and disparagement of the period as a whole. In the nineteenth century, a reader of medieval literature could look back at an idealized Middle Ages of chivalry and honor, a simpler, and in some ways better, time.60 Readers

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in the eighteenth century still saw their own age as superior to those that had come before; they had not yet acquired the nineteenth-century nostalgia for the glories of the past. When an eighteenth-century reader praises a particular medieval author or set of authors, that praise effectively removes those few writers from literary history. One mark of a writer’s “genius” is his distance from the rest of his contemporaries.61 It is open to interpretation, then, whether one writer’s production of a landmark work of poetry changes or merely steps out of the trajectory of literary history. Cooper sees literary history as the cumulative product of exceptional individuals: Langland used his poetic skills to critique contemporary society; Chaucer elevated English verse; Milton adapted and improved upon Langland’s model in writing his description of the Lazar House, and so on. Her model implies that a work of literature is important for its influence on later writers more than for its sentiments or moral. Cooper’s contemporary Thomas Hayward took a radically different approach to the history of English poetry. Hayward’s anthology, The British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts Moral, Natural and Sublime of our English Poets Who Flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, was published in 1738, one year after the first edition of Cooper’s Muses Library.62 Unlike Cooper, Hayward orders his volume topically, and he collects the sentiments of several writers (some quite brief) under an alphabetical series of headings: Abbeys, Absence, Abstinence, Accident, etc. Under each subject heading, he does arrange the writers chronologically, “to shew the gradual Improvements of our Poetry and Language,” but his interest in poetry is quite different from Cooper’s.63 He does not attempt to explain the works nor to give any information about their authors. Hayward presents for his readers the sentiments available in the history of English poetry, but very little of either the poetry or the history itself. Modern readers might find the organization of Hayward’s collection strange. Although popular florilegia are still published on particular themes (often sentimental themes, such as Love or Motherhood), a modern reader might not see the need for a thematic poetry anthology covering such an encyclopedic set of topics. The type of modern book most similar in arrangement to The British Muse is perhaps a dictionary of quotations, but Hayward justifies his inclusion of excerpts by their beauty not necessarily by their fame. Indeed, he claims to include “beautiful Passages, never before extracted, from Shakespear [sic], Johnson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and above a Hundred more.”64 By contrast, the chronological organization of Cooper’s anthology seems quite natural to modern readers, literary heirs to the English publishing tradition she inaugurates. Hayward and Cooper must have been working on their anthologies at the same time, and they certainly traveled in the same literary circles. The


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Preface to Hayward’s volume was written by the antiquary William Oldys, who also lent some of his volumes to Elizabeth Cooper to assist her preparation of the (never completed) second volume of The Muses Library.65 The two anthologizers made different choices about how far back in English literary history to begin their selections, however. Oldys’s Preface explains that Hayward limited his excerpts to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “[t]hough he had sufficient temptation to have called in auxiliaries of a more ancient date.”66 He resisted temptation because he did not trust modern readers “to relish the wholesome force and native beauties of older times.” Oldys suggests further that modern readers could only learn to value medieval poetry through cultivating first an appreciation of Renaissance poetry; he claimed that Hayward was “afraid” to include writers earlier than those of the sixteenth century “till his readers might be prepared by the poetry of an intermediate age.”67 If Oldys is to be believed, Hayward’s aesthetic goals hinder his historicist ambitions. He chose not to include earlier poetry, despite its value, because the beauty of early poetry was too unfamiliar for his readers to recognize. The next great anthologizer of English poetry, Thomas Warton, continued and expanded on Cooper’s presentation of literary history as a single narrative strand, a series of influences and refinements. Warton’s massive History of English Poetry (1774–1781) ran to three substantial volumes. In fact, Warton had intended a fourth volume, but it was never completed. His editorial commentary on particular poems and their authors is supplemented by explanatory sections discussing the relevant historical and cultural backgrounds of the verse he presents. Warton thus juxtaposes English poetic history against English cultural history as a way of giving his readers the tools to understand what might be obscure in such historically distant texts. Of the three earliest anthologies (Cooper’s, Hayward’s and Warton’s), Warton’s is the most heavily narrative, and it engages most thorougly in the writing of national political and religious history through the lens of literary history.68 Like Cooper, Warton uses his Preface to present his anthology in scientific language, and with the presumption that his own age represents the pinnacle of human society.69 From this lofty position, Warton’s eighteenthcentury audience can look back at the nation’s historical progress: In an age advanced to the highest degree of refinement, that species of curiosity commences, which is busied in contemplating the progress of social life, in displaying the gradations of science, and in tracing the transitions from barbarism to civility.70

Despite his contrast between barbarism and civility, Warton does recognize a shared identity with his postconquest antecedents. He justifies excluding

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“Saxon poetry,” not only because of the linguistic difficulties it would present for the reader, but also because “[b]efore the Norman accession. . .we were an unformed and an unsettled race. . . . The beginning of these annals seems therefore to be most properly dated from that era, when our national character began to dawn.”71 Thus, although he wishes to trace “the transition from barbarism to civility,” Warton does not want to include such “barbarism” as precedes the birth of the “national character.” Despite his rhetoric of diachronic change, Warton, like Cooper, is primarily interested in demonstrating continuity rather than disjunction with the past, a continuity implicit in his use of the first-person pronoun “we” to describe postconquest Britons. The sixteenth-century readers of Piers Plowman who identified Langland as a proto-Protestant had nationalist theological aims, as they sought a local prehistory for the Protestant Reformation. Eighteenth-century anthologizers too thought in nationalist terms about their projects, but that nationalism was articulated in racial and aesthetic terms rather than theological ones. Eighteenth-century anthologizers’ references to a transhistorical British identity and to a specifically English poetic greatness construct a meaning for early English literature quite different from the one constructed by their Reformation predecessors. The different ways that sixteenth- and eighteenth-century readers understood Piers Plowman as well as its poet gives a particularly clear example of this change, as the two generations of readers write very different pseudo-biographies of Langland to justify their interpretations of the poem. In The Muses Library, Cooper marshals Piers Plowman as one piece of evidence to prove a long-standing English poetic greatness. She laments the fact that Langland is so little known in her age, concluding that: “in my Judgment, no Writer, except Chaucer, and Spencer, for many Ages, had more of real Inspiration.”72 By “inspiration,” Cooper clearly refers to a poetic, not a visionary, capability. Cooper’s understanding of Piers Plowman presents a significant change from a sixteenth-century reading of the poem that saw the poem as serving a religious rather than social purpose. Sixteenth-century readers’ discussions of Piers Plowman as prophesying the dissolution of the abbeys are premised on notions of Langland’s “inspiration” fundamentally different from that posited by Cooper. Cooper understands Langland not as a theologian but as a social satirist, and as the point of origin for a literary tradition implicitly linked to that of her own day. In marking Langland’s priority in the history of English poetry, Cooper also implicitly identifies socially corrective satire as the work of poetry. This is another attribute (beyond the direct literary influence) that Cooper sees connecting the poetry of Langland and Chaucer.


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Langland [was] the first English Poet we can meet with, who employ’d his Muse for the Refinement of Manners. . . . Chaucer, not the next Writer, tho’ the next extraordinary Genius, encountered the Follies of Mankind, as well as their Vices, and blended the acutest Raillery, with the most insinuating Humour.—By his Writings, it plainly appears that Poetry, and Politeness grew up together.73

Genius and poetic merit, in this account, are both bound up with the idea of the poet as standing outside of (and correcting) society to teach the proper adherence to the dictates of “Politeness.” Similarly, in the description of Piers Plowman quoted above Cooper says that the poem is “pointed with great Variety of just Satire, and dignify’d with many excellent Lessons of Morality and Virtue.” In the same passage, by citing Piers Plowman as a source for the Pardoner’s Prologue, Cooper implies that Chaucer, like Langland, is an author of such “just Satire.” Chaucer and Langland seem, in Cooper’s descriptions of their works, early Steeles or Swifts. Despite their historical distance, they conform (at least in part) to the generic standards of eighteenth-century literature. In an introduction to eighteenth-century satire, David Nokes claims: “It would be difficult to find another comparable period of modern literary history whose tone was so firmly established by a single dominant genre.”74 If one takes satire as a mode of expression or authorial tone, rather than, more narrowly, a literary genre, it is clear that satirical writing was the predominant mode in eighteenth-century literature of many genres (from periodical essay to heroic verse to the early novel). Cooper’s categorization of both Chaucer and Langland as satirists helps justify her decision to begin her anthology with works so historically distant. The linear narrative of English literary history, as Cooper tells it, begins with medieval poetry selected to look generically familiar to its eighteenth-century readers, even as the medieval language marks its alterity. In keeping with her understanding of Langland as a social satirist, Cooper chooses to anthologize two sections of the poem that deal in some way with urban social interactions: the Marriage of Meed from Passus 2 of the B text, and the Confessions of the Sins from Passus 5.75 The sections Cooper chooses have theological as well as social import, and other passages of Piers Plowman could also be said to satirize social interactions, but the excerpts Cooper includes are among the sections of the poem that display multifaceted communication within groups of people, as opposed to Will’s more catechistic dialogues with individual characters throughout the poem. To this extent, the conversations among multiple speakers in the passages Cooper anthologizes are more “social” than some of the other kinds of speech in the poem, which can tend toward extended monlogue rather than interactive dialogue.

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Judging from the several dozen surviving copies, as well as from the influence the Muses Library had on later anthologizers, Cooper seems to have found an audience for her contribution to the new genre of literary anthology. Unfortunately for her, she seems not to have received the financial support she needed, either in sales or patronage, to produce the intended second volume of the work. Preserved in the British Library is a letter, dated February 1, 1738, from Cooper to the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, to which she had dedicated her first volume in hope of further patronage, asking the Society to support her second volume. In this letter, she also complains about her financial loss in producing the first edition with neither patronage nor the support of a bookseller: “I find the greater Part of the Edition left on my hands; which has intirely disabled me from proceeding with the Second Volume; and without the sequel, I am fully persuaded the undertaking will be really of little Use, or Value.”76 According to its minutes for Friday, February 10, 1737/8, the Society replied that it had a policy against sponsoring publication of parts of longer works already begun.77 Without the Society’s patronage, Cooper never completed the second volume, although she did begin work on it; Oldys’s diary records on June 22, 1737 that “Mrs. Cooper came to my chambers: said she would return me Puttenham’s Art of Poesy, Browne’s Pastorals, and Sir Henry Wotton, when she had finished her extracts for the second volume of her Muses’ Library to be published by Christmas.”78 The British Library also preserves a letter from Cooper dated February 2, 1740 to Thomas Birch, requesting that he support a motion that those members of the Society for the Encouragement of Learning who had not yet paid for their copies of the Muses Library be requested to do so.79 Cooper’s work on the Muses Library may not have been lucrative for her, but it did establish a model for later writers to follow in writing the history of English literature. Fifteen years after Cooper published her anthology, much of her assessment of Langland’s poetry is copied verbatim by Theophilus Cibber in his Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland.80 Cibber disagrees with Cooper’s claim that Langland preceded Chaucer, although not on particularly good evidence: It has been disputed amongst the critics whether this poet preceded or followed Chaucer. But we are rather inclined to believe that he was cotemporary [sic] with him, and our conjecture is strengthened by the consideration of his stile, which is equally unmusical and obsolete with Chaucer’s.81

In modifying Cooper’s assertion on relative dating, Cibber does not directly respond to her claim that Langland influenced Chaucer, but he also omits the discussion of Sloth that Cooper used to justify the claim of


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Langland’s priority. Perhaps because of Cibber’s distaste for Langland’s style, he drastically reduces Cooper’s selections from Piers Plowman. Of Cooper’s three excerpts, Cibber quotes only the dozen lines of Kinde sending diseases and death, and he too follows them with Milton’s description of the Lazar house.82 Cibber thus maintains Cooper’s premise that Langland’s significance is primarily measured in his influence on later, and better known, figures in English literary history. Cooper’s particular choice of excerpts influences other later anthologizers as well. Both Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–1781) and Joseph Ritson’s English Anthology (1793–1794) follow Cooper in anthologizing, among other parts of the poem, selections from the Confessions of the Sins, although they do so somewhat differently. Warton presents ten different excerpts from Piers Plowman, most of them quite short (three to ten lines); two of these small excerpts come from the Confessions of the Sins. Ritson anthologizes only the Confessions of the Sins, and he does so at length, reproducing most of the passus that contains the Confessions (B.5.1–441).83 None of these eighteenth-century editors explicitly challenges the earlier view that Langland was a proto-Protestant; however, by including the Confessions of the Sins, they surely demonstrate the error of such an interpretation. A late-sixteenth-century anthologizer, had there been such a thing, would never have chosen to include the Confessions of the Sins. Although the Sins might not demonstrate the proper contrition in their confessions, the poem does take seriously the doctrine of auricular confession as necessary for salvation, notwithstanding any sixteenth-century claims of the poem’s antiCatholicism. The prominence of the Confessions of the Sins, and the fact that none of the anthologizers notes the scenes as explicitly Catholic in doctrine, demonstrate how differently Piers Plowman functioned in the eighteenth century and in the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, Langland was seen as a satirist, fulfilling the poet’s function of correcting society. In the sixteenth century, he was seen more as a religious writer who happened to frame his anti-Catholic opinions in verse. Although Langland’s religious affiliation is not at issue for eighteenth-century readers, it will once again become an important subject for readers and editors in the early nineteenth century, as chapters 4 and 5 will demonstrate. The representation of medieval literature in Joseph Ritson’s English Anthology might provide some insight into the popularity of the Confessions of the Sins for eighteenth-century editors.84 Noting that Ritson includes from medieval English literature only the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and the long excerpt from the Confessions of the Sins, Charlotte Brewer suggests that Ritson chose this selection from Piers Plowman “as containing some of the poem’s most vivid and dramatic

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poetry.”85 The narrative in this section of Langland’s poem is undoubtedly both vivid and dramatic; moreover, it has sufficient internal logic to stand alone without elaborate explanation, unlike some other portions of Piers Plowman. However, I think there is still another factor to account for the prominence that this section of the poem had in eighteenth-century anthologies, including those by Cooper, Warton, and Ritson: this is the portion of Piers Plowman that is arguably most “Chaucerian,” at least insofar as readers in the eighteenth century would have understood that adjective. Chaucer’s reputation shifted in focus in the three centuries after his death. The Chaucer known in the eighteenth century was similar to the Chaucer commonly understood now: he was seen as a comic narrative poet, the estates satirist of the Canterbury Tales’ General Prologue. This is not the only possible understanding of Chaucer’s oeuvre; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both manuscript and print collections highlight Chaucer as a lyric poet as much as they present him as a narrative poet.86 Even into the sixteenth century, poets were mining Chaucer’s lyrics for their own poetic purposes.87 Similarly, the Chaucer canon grew dramatically in the sixteenth century, as increasing numbers of short poems were added to editions of Chaucer’s Works, suggesting that Chaucer’s lyric poetry was considered in some sense definitional.88 The emphasis on Chaucer as a lyric poet implicitly aligned him with sixteenth-century poetic practice, reinforcing the idea of Chaucer as an early writer whose work still had value. Just as sixteenth-century readers understood Chaucer through those of his works most in line with contemporary literary standards, eighteenthcentury readers too saw Chaucer in their own light and used his name for their own purposes. In the Life of Chaucer he wrote for the 1721 edition of Chaucer’s Works, John Dart calls Chaucer “a True Master of Satyr.”89 In the early eighteenth century, a number of verse satires claimed either to be Chaucer’s own work or to be written “in a Chaucerian style.” For example, Brown Bread and Honour, a Tale Moderniz’d from an Ancient manuscript of Chaucer was a non-Chaucerian eight page anonymous satire in rhyming couplets.90 In this poem, Brown Bread laments that no one will deign to eat such rough food anymore, and Jove points out that no one values Honour anymore either, so the two of them set forth together as companions. The poem is only “Chaucerian” insofar as it is a satire of contemporary morals; it does not resemble any particular work by Chaucer. Because eighteenth-century readers were apt to define Chaucer by his satire, Langland, his fellow medieval satirist, could reasonably be seen as Chaucer’s generic double and even one of his sources. Ritson’s English Anthology juxtaposes Chaucer’s General Prologue and Langland’s Confessions of the Sins, reducing all of medieval English


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literature to two satirical portraits of fourteenth-century urban life. Ritson certainly had the expertise and interest to include more medieval texts: his 1802 Bibliographia Poetica, and his acerbic Observations on the First Three Volumes of the History of English Poetry (published in 1782, a decade before the English Anthology) both demonstrate great erudition in medieval studies. Despite a modern critical history of seeing Chaucer as the greater realist of the two, and despite Langland’s allegorical framework, Helen Cooper makes a strong claim for Langland’s interest in portraying accurately his London milieu: “[i]f one wants to know what fourteenth-century England sounded or smelled like–the street cries of London, Glutton vomiting in the pub—one turns to Langland, not Chaucer.”91 By anthologizing these particular passages from Piers Plowman and the Canterbury Tales, Ritson quite succinctly demonstrates that for him the salient feature of each author’s work is its urban estates satire. Piers Plowman is excerpted much more liberally in the lengthy History of English Poetry than in any other eighteenth-century anthology. Warton’s excerpts are, like his anthology, idiosyncratic. Warton uses short excerpts inserted into his historical narrative in order to prove particular points about the nature of Langland’s poetry; for example, the description of Hunger and of Envy are given to manifest the poem’s “great picturesque humour.”92 He therefore does not present the excerpts in the order in which they appear in the poem. Warton’s excerpts from Piers Plowman are as follows: 1. Beginning of the Dream and the Field Full of Folk (B.Prologue. 11–23) 2. The Search for Dowel (B.8.1–end; 9.1–58; 10.1–101; 10.137–184) 3. The friar’s attempt to solicit a donation from Meed (B.3.47–50) 4. The Confession of Covetise (B.5.186–207) 5. “now is religion a rider. . .” (B.10.303–308) 6. Hunger’s effects (B.6.174–177) 7. description of Envy (B.5.80–82) 8. Mercy and Truth (B.18.113–123) 9. Kinde sends diseases (B.20.80–85, 87–89, 95–101, 104–110), juxtaposed with Paradise Lost, book 11, lines 475ff. 10. Pride’s attack on Conscience (B.20.113–117).93 Warton’s attitude toward Langland seems decidedly mixed. He certainly does not approve of Langland’s alliterative verse or his Midlands dialect, which Warton calls an “affectation of obsolete English.” According to Warton, both Langland’s alliteration and his vocabulary serve “to render his manner extremely perplexed and to disgust the reader with

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obscurities.”94 Nevertheless, Warton describes the selections he includes as “contain[ing] much sense and observation of life, with some strokes of poetry.”95 In his commentary, Warton correlates details in the poem to what he knows (or believes) about Langland’s biography. In introducing the portrait of Religion (B.10.303–308), Warton says: “Our author, who probably could not get preferment, thus inveighs against the luxury and diversions of the prelates of his age.”96 Warton’s headnote (following Bale’s biography) identifies “Robert Longlande” as “a secular priest, and a fellow of Oriel college in Oxford.”97 Like Cooper, Warton sees Langland as engaged in social more than theological satire. For Warton that criticism of the social order has its basis (at least in part) in the poet’s own biography. Warton also shares with Cooper the idea that Langland was Chaucer’s satirical model. In introducing the lines in which the friar offers Meed absolution in exchange for glazing a cloister window, Warton says that they are “in a strain which seems to have given rise to Chaucer’s SOMPNOURS TALE.”98 He also footnotes the similar satire in Piers Plowman’s Crede. By demonstrating the affiliation between Piers Plowman and Piers Plowman’s Crede, Warton expands even beyond Chaucer and Milton the narrative of Langland’s literary influence. Warton and Cooper explicitly (and Ritson implicitly) value Langland as a writer on whose works later authors, most notably but not solely Chaucer, modeled their own. Cooper, Warton, and Ritson established the terms by which Piers Plowman would be understood for the rest of the century. The idea of Langland as prior to and influential for Chaucer was widely circulated, although later commentators would pose alternate relationships, both personal and literary, between Chaucer and Langland; these new theories will be discussed in the final chapter of this book. By the end of the eighteenth century, single-volume (or even threevolume) historical anthologies of selections had been largely replaced in the publishing industry. English literary history now appeared in lengthy series of authors’ complete or selected works; such series might run to seventy-five or one hundred volumes. In his Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, in thirteen volumes, Robert Anderson had harsh words for previous editors who had limited their series’ contents either by omitting important authors or by excerpting each author’s works. A collection of poetry that limits its contents in these ways does a disservice to its reader: “[b]y anticipating him, it deprives the reader of that pleasure which every one feels, and of that right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself,” Anderson says.99 The ever-lengthier collections of identically bound small volumes that comprised the late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century


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anthologies of English literature have a symbolic effect different from that of the much smaller collections produced in the middle of the century. A collection that ran to eighty volumes, even if they were small volumes, could fill a whole shelf.100 Interestingly, the expansion of anthologies into longer series worked against Langland. Although he had been included in a number of eighteenthcentury anthologies, he was much less represented in these multivolume collections. In part, this was a consequence of the collections’ tendencies to imitate (or pirate) one another. The format of the volumes might have been another strike against Langland. Unlike either Warton’s History of English Poetry or Thomas Tyrwhitt’s Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, both of which were heavily annotated, the multivolume collections of English poetry tended to print their texts, including those from the Middle Ages, without explanatory notes or glosses. Long selections of Chaucer’s works would be challenging to read in such a format; long quotations from Langland might be impossible. Some eighteenth-century anthologies (Ritson’s English Anthology, for one) do include unannotated selections from Langland, but in such cases the selections tend to be relatively short, unlike the complete works generally found in the multivolume latecentury collections. In discussing (in the third person) his own editorial decisions, Anderson contrasts the collection he had planned with the one he ultimately produced. Each new collection of British poetry must justify itself as either more thorough or better produced than its predecessors, and Anderson had originally intended to include a much wider selection of older literature than had his predecessors. Ultimately, however, he omitted many of the early authors he had intented to introduce into his collection, and for a curiously circular reason: it seemed best to continue to omit those authors, since readers did not know much about their works. Perhaps because he could not claim the thoroughness he had once intended, he does at least explain these exclusions quite thoroughly: The list of the works of the older poets, which [Anderson] originally recommended for republication, comprehended those of Chaucer, Langland, Gower; the best parts of Lydgate, Barclay, Hawes; the best parts of Skelton, Surrey, Wyat; the best parts of Warner, Sydney, Sackville, Spenser, Marlow, Davies, Shakspeare, Drayton, Daniel, Jonson, Donne, Hall, Drummond, Stirling, Browne, P. Fletcher, G. Fletcher; the best parts of Quarles, King, Carew, Suckling, Crashaw, Davenant, and the translations of Fairfax, Sandys, and May. The works of the authors printed in Italics were, on due consideration, omitted; it being thought safer to allure curiosity into this unfrequented track of reading, by a republication of the works of those authors, who, though not either universally read or understood (as must ever

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be the case with the best elder poets of every country), are notwithstanding familiar to us in conversation, and constantly appealed to in controverted points of poetical taste, than to run the risk of suppressing it totally, by a bulky republication of all or the better parts of the works of those unfortunate authors, who still remain unpopular, merely from the want of being read.101

The “unfortunate” Langland, having been omitted in previous collections, is omitted by Anderson as well. Paradoxically, then, as the collections of British literature grow longer toward the end of the eighteenth century, the list of authors included grows shorter. Elizabeth Cooper’s 1737 strategy of including short excerpts and her goal of representing the complete progress of English literary history meant that she included lesser known (or at least lesser read) authors such as Langland. At the end of the century, as competing editors offered their readers ever longer or more elegantly produced series of poetry volumes, they could not afford to include the archaic sounding “curiosities” that Cooper preserved. Cooper did not have to appeal to “poetical taste” as Anderson does, since she was engaged in a scientific survey of the nation’s literary remains. The shift in the literary anthology’s purpose over the century meant that Langland’s identity within the anthology shifted as well. In the early eighteenth century, Langland was seen as a point of origin for the English literary tradition, but he then fell out of that tradition, as anthologies turned toward preserving not the total of literary history but (as declared in the title of one widely read anthology) literary history’s “Elegant Extracts.”102 Piers Plowman was identified primarily with theological questions in the sixteenth century, so much so that the poem lost some of its identity as poetry. It was important for its content rather than its form. Eighteenthcentury anthologizers were more interested than their mid-sixteenthcentury predecessors in the poem’s literary qualities, because the poem was an early example of the nation’s poetic past, a point from which modern poetry, particularly satirical poetry, had developed. It is a measure of how unimportant the poem’s theology is to its eighteenth-century anthologizers that they can all excerpt from Robert Crowley’s Protestantizing edition of the poem the Confessions of the Sins, perhaps the most obvious example of why Crowley’s interpretation is wrong, without any comment whatsoever. Ironically, perhaps, the poem’s return to the sphere of poetry rather than theology also marked the diminution of the poem’s relevance, and the decline of its perceived importance. By the end of the eighteenth century, Piers Plowman had lost its place in poetic anthologies, as the principle of collection shifted from documenting the development of literary


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history to demonstrating the consistent “elegance” of the national literary record. In the sixteenth century, Piers Plowman’s name traveled independently of Langland’s poem. In the eighteenth century, pieces of Piers Plowman themselves started to appear separate from the poem as a whole. As Seth Lerer has recently observed, “[t]he mark of any culture’s literary sense of self lies in the way in which it makes anthologies,” and it is therefore important to pay attention to each work’s original format and material context.103 Anthologies define which literary texts are significant in a tradition, and they identify particular aspects of an anthologized work as definitional of the literary text itself. Eighteenth-century anthologies were editorially derivative, taking their texts from previous editions of the full poem or from earlier anthologies. Studying such volumes does not teach us anything new about the progress of textual editing, nor does it provide independent witnesses of lost textual traditions. Although such research does not help us learn more about the text of Piers Plowman, it can teach us about the “idea of Piers Plowman,” and about the perceived identity of William Langland, as they developed through the eighteenth century. It would not be until the early nineteenth century that a new edition of the entire poem would be produced. For two hundred and fifty years, between the editions of Owen Rogers (1561) and Thomas Dunham Whitaker (1814), Langland’s identity was constructed in reference to some set of decontextualized elements of his poem. Once again today, most people who know Piers Plowman at all are familiar with it through anthologized excerpts: that is, those selections encountered in a classroom setting. The modern anthology textbook, with its glossed words and essays on historical periods, is a successor to Cooper’s anthology, which also used literary texts as (in her words) a “Poetical Chronicle.”104 In its excerpts, the Norton Anthology echoes its predecessors, including, among other selections, the confession of Gluttony from B text Passus 5, as had Cooper and Ritson (Warton included the confession of Covetise in the History of English Poetry).105 The Norton Anthology also prints in full the B text Prologue, which Warton had excerpted down to a dozen lines on the Field Full of Folk. Nevertheless, even where the selections are the same (and there are a number of passages printed in the modern anthology that are not in its eighteenth-century predecessors), Piers Plowman means something different in the two different types of anthology. Cooper included early English literature as a way of showing the continuous progress of English letters. By the end of the eighteenth century, Langland was omitted from histories of English poetry for just the same reason: his work was too foreign to be pleasing to later audiences. Modern classroom anthologies largely omit aesthetic criticism. Instead they discuss works against the

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literary standards of their own day, rather than trying to make them conform to a single modern standard of literary value. Every generation reconstructs Piers Plowman through its publishing formats and contexts, and it does so in light of a particular understanding of the poet, William Langland. For those eighteenth-century editors who did include Piers Plowman in their anthologies, Langland was an early witness to the transhistorical genius of English poetry, perhaps the first true English poet. Publishing the poem in anthologized excerpts allowed eighteenthcentury editors to present readers with some access to a difficult poem that few would have chosen to read in its entirety. However, in shortening the poem for its readers, those editors also obscured the complex and often contradictory experience of reading the poem, an experience that is itself part of Langland’s meaning. Piers Plowman is an extremely learned poem, often organized by allusion or pun, with a word or phrase prompting a new narrative trajectory.106 Moreover, characters within the poem disappear (and sometimes reappear) at dizzying pace. Excerpting individual scenes or dialogues shows the internal unity within those sections, but at the cost of the reader’s grappling to make sense of the juxtapositions among episodes. Ironically, then, by making Piers Plowman more accessible to its readers, eighteenth-century anthologies also restricted readers’ access to what makes Langland’s work distinctive.

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iterary histories written in England during the eighteenth century used medieval literature in two distinct ways. A highly inclusive and highly excerpted anthology such as Cooper’s Muses Library could incorporate medieval literature into a unified and linear narrative of the nation’s literary history. On the other hand, an anthology such as Anderson’s Complete Edition boasted of its thoroughness in presenting complete texts of multiple works by its chosen authors, but did not necessarily aspire to collecting works from every representative of British literary history. In collections of the latter sort, medieval texts, particularly non-Chaucerian texts, could just as easily be written out of the narrative of English letters. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers had particular polemical reasons for making use of medieval texts, as they sought to justify recent political and religious upheavals by reference to historical precedent. By the eighteenth century, however, arguing for a continuity in English legal and theological history was no longer so urgent. Eighteenth-century anthologies, whether they were collections of excerpts by many authors or of longer works by fewer authors, were most frequently organized to show a progressive development within a continuous tradition. To the extent that medieval literature appeared in the eighteenth century, it was typically in order to represent a particular stage in a sequence of literary development. Literary histories interested in showing the similarities between earlier and later writers most often began with postmedieval literature in order to establish a more obviously unified narrative of English letters. During the eighteenth century, alongside the discussion of how (or whether) medieval texts fit into the narrative of English letters, linguistic scholarship began to analyze more closely different stages in the development of the English language. Although medieval literary texts from different centuries were likely to be grouped together under the designation “ancient,” the language in which those texts were composed was conceptually

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subdivided into increasingly precise chronological units, including, in various systems of categorization, periods of Anglo-Saxon, Saxon, Dano-Saxon, Norman-Saxon, Semi-Saxon, Old English, Early English, Middle English, Later English, and Modern English.1 Such new attention to the particulars of medieval language rendered medieval linguistic history simultaneously more accessible and more alien to eighteenth-century readers. Linguistic and antiquarian scholarship of the eighteenth century made medieval language more comprehensible, but in so doing it reinforced the distance between modernity and the Middle Ages. In 1705, George Hickes produced the learned Linguarum Vett[arum] septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico criticus et archaeologicus in two elaborate folio volumes containing texts in runic, Anglo-Saxon, “Moeso-Gothic,” and Icelandic, accompanied by a number of engravings.2 Hickes uses Piers Plowman a number of times to illustrate the history of particular terms or grammatical formulations, and he seems to presume that his readers, others interested in northern antiquities, would be relatively familiar with the text. He does mention in an early reference to the poem that Robert Langland was “auctor xx satyrarum, quibus titulus The Vision of Pierce Plowman.”3 Almost all of Hickes’s other citations of the poem are merely to “satyrographus” or “satyrographus noster,” not to the poem’s title or the author’s name. Presumably that epithet for Langland (juxtaposed with an alliterative text) would be sufficient reference for a reader of the Thesaurus to recognize Piers Plowman. Three years after its original publication, Hickes’s daunting work was edited and abbreviated by William Wotton and republished as a single octavo volume with the use of foreign scripts greatly reduced.4 Wotton retained a number of Hickes’s texts in the Saxon alphabet, but did not use an entirely separate font for these texts; Saxon letters formed similarly to their Roman counterparts were represented in standard type. The volume was prefaced with a table translating the Saxon alphabet, so readers with limited background could recognize the handful of distinctive Saxon letter forms.5 Wotton’s abbreviation was made even more accessible when it was translated from Latin to English by Maurice Shelton in 1735.6 In the thirty years after its initial publication, Hickes’s Thesaurus progressed into subsequently less-learned forms, each aimed at a broader audience. Wotton’s dedicatory letter to James Bridges says that Hickes’s Thesaurus, “though published some Years since, has lain buried as it were under its own Weight, so that few of our own Countrymen, scarce any Foreigners, have known what Stores were reposited in it.”7 Still, even in its shortened form, Wotton’s Latin abbreviation was beyond the abilities or interests of the general reader. Shelton justified his translation by remarking that even those capable of understanding Hickes’s or Wotton’s Latin “are

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discouraged from Reading either of them by a Sight of the Saxon and other Characters in them, and by the Apprehensions they labour under besides that they contain nothing else but old dry Stuff.”8 The new forms in which the Thesaurus appeared were not enough to popularize medieval textual and linguistic scholarship, but “the Medieval” remained in common view at the turn of the nineteenth century, as the “old dry stuff” of Hickes’s “Moeso-Gothic” texts gave way to the considerably more popular and less authentic “Gothic” of the gothic novel.9 Hickes originally wrote for an audience of learned antiquarians, and he presumed that they were familiar with Langland’s poem, although the poem had not been published in full since 1561. Even the anthologized selections from Piers Plowman that appear first in Cooper’s Muses Library of 1737 were not yet available to readers of Hickes’s Thesaurus in its original or subsequent formats. Nevertheless, Piers Plowman must have remained sufficiently available to readers to justify Hickes’s use of it to elucidate medieval linguistic phenomena. It was not just the antiquarian reader of Hickes’s Thesaurus who was expected to have some passing familiarity with Piers Plowman. Similar references to Piers Plowman appeared in earlyeighteenth-century texts aimed at the more general reader as well. The Muses Mercury essay “Of Old English Poets and Poetry” discussed in the previous chapter was published in 1707, well before the publication of Piers Plowman excerpts in the anthologies of Cooper (1737), Cibber (1753), Warton (1774), and Ritson (1793). Probably the most widely circulated eighteenth-century analysis of Piers Plowman was the “Essay on the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions” that appeared in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), an early and very popular collection of English ballads.10 Percy’s collection was immediately successful, going through four editions in thirty years and inspiring other similar collections.11 It might therefore be easy to forget what an oddity it was when it appeared. Even prior to Percy’s Reliques, England’s medieval inheritance was increasingly prominent in eighteenthcentury English literature, architecture, and culture.12 One manifestation of this attention to things medieval was a growing interest in ballad collecting. Nevertheless, ballads were, to a certain extent, excluded from the realm of literary history or criticism.13 Medieval ballads were little noticed in the literary anthologies that preserved the works of Chaucer, Langland, and their contemporaries, as these anthologies defined their content in light of modern poetic tastes, frequently excluding “lower” forms like ballads. Even Elizabeth Cooper, whose approach to medieval texts is more inclusive than most, based her selections on current standards of poetic merit. For example, she quotes a jest by Robert of Gloucester, but excludes the

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work of another twelfth-century writer: “Richard the Hermit Was his Contemporary, but too despiciable [sic] to admit of a Quotation.”14 The 1707 essay “Of the Old English Poets and Poetry” is unusual among early eighteenth-century literary criticism in that it incorporates the ballad into a unified narrative of English poetic history. However, the author of the essay acknowledges that such an interest does not match the contemporary critical climate. The essay dates the ballad of “Chevy Chase” to the time of Lydgate, and describes the ballad’s favorable reception in all intervening eras until the present one: The Author of it is not known; but it was in great Esteem in the last three Centuries, even by Men of the best Sense. Sir Philip Sidney, who understood Poetry as well as many of our Criticks, who would not deign to look on that Poem, says of it, I never read the old Song of Piercy and Douglas, that I found not my Heart mov’d more than with a trumpet.15

The essayist’s arch litotes about Sidney’s qualification as a literary critic implicitly refutes the contemporary “[c]riticks, who would not deign to look on” a medieval ballad.16 The essay concludes with a claim that “in England, as well as in Italy, the Poets were the Refiners of the Language.”17 Presumably, the ballad of “Chevy Chase” also participates in this function of poetry. The essay is defensive about its praise of a medieval ballad, because the ballad was considered a form below true poetry. Even this writer, who so praises “Chevy Chase,” is quick to differentiate “The NutBrown Maid” from that tradition: “not that it is a Ballad; but an Allegorical Poem.”18 The essay “Of Old English Poetry” cites the ballad collection of Samuel Pepys as the source for the “Nut-Brown Maid,” and says that Pepys’s interest in ballads was “known to most People conversant with Books, and Bookish Men.”19 Yet ballads were still considered antiquarian artifacts rather than a true part of literary history. This essay’s praise for “Chevy Chase” is taken further a few years later by Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on that ballad. Addison praises “Chevy Chase” for the “natural” and “poetical” sentiments and the “majestick simplicity” it shares with the best ancient poetry; he uses the term “Poem” interchangably with “Ballad,” “Song,” “old Song,” and “antiquated Song” to refer to “Chevy Chase”; and he consistently terms its author a “Poet.”20 Addison did not offer such praise for all medieval ballads; his Spectator essay on “The Babes in the Woods” praises its naturalness of sentiment, but not its “abject Phrase, and poorness of Expression.”21 When Addison writes about “Chevy Chase,” in Spectator 70 (May 21, 1711), he introduces his analysis “without any further Apology for so doing,” a phrase admitting to the unorthodoxy of his subject.22 At the end of his essay in Spectator 74


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(May 25, 1711), after a series of comparisons between elements of “Chevy Chase” and the Aeneid, Addison concludes: I shall only beg Pardon for such a Profusion of Latin Quotations; which I should not have made use of, but that I feared my own Judgment would have looked too singular on such a Subject, had not I supported it by the Practice and Authority of Virgil.23

Although professedly unapologetic about his defense of a medieval ballad, Addison nevertheless marshals Virgil in support of his literary aesthetics. Addison may not doubt the poetic merit of “Chevy Chase,” but he acknowledges that others might find his interest in the ballad “singular.” Given the defensiveness with which the handful of ballad supporters articulated their opinions, it is perhaps unsurprising that Percy worried about the reception of his ballad collection. Percy’s famous story of noticing Humphrey Pitt’s chambermaids using leaves from the ballad manuscript as kindling in the parlor fireplace suggests something of the general perception of the worth of such texts, and not simply if one judges the chambermaids’ activity as literary criticism. Percy can hardly have been the only witness to the use of a ballad collection as kindling; the chambermaids were lighting the fire in the parlor, not the kitchen, after all. Percy was merely the only one to question the destruction of the old book.24 In this literary critical climate, it seems significant that Percy dubs his ballad collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Texts from earlier eras were not infrequently called “relics.”25 Ballads were not, however, generally classed as poetry.26 Percy’s Reliques assimilated ballads into the category of poetry beyond the collection’s title. Percy’s essays, including the essay “On the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions,” absorb the ballad tradition into the larger literary tradition of poetry in English. The second “Book” of the Reliques (in volume 1) is “Ballads that Illustrate Shakespeare”; the ballads presented in this section of the Reliques are preceded by an essay “On the Origin of the English Stage” that traces the progress of the English theatre from medieval mysteries through the time of Shakespeare. In his essays, Percy uses medieval literary history, including a detailed discussion of Piers Plowman, as a means of elevating the folk tradition of the ballad into the more elite category of poetry. The inclusion of literary historical essays is not Percy’s only strategy to valorize medieval ballads. Christine Baatz has demonstrated that even the typography and illustrations of Percy’s volumes work to elevate the image of the ballads, “re-establishing their proper poetical merit” by presenting them as native classics.27 Percy’s much maligned practice of emending or adding to the ballads to make them better accord with contemporary poetic

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taste is a further attempt to elevate ballads and to rid them of their reputation as subliterary. Percy’s strategies worked; as Nick Groom has demonstrated, dictionary definitions of “ballad” were noticeably more positive after the publication of Percy’s Reliques.28 Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry sought a broad audience for ballads, and found it. The collection was an immediate success with the reading public, despite the fact that Percy’s editorial practice was roundly criticized by Joseph Ritson among others.29 Percy’s inclusion of the essay on the “Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions” suggests that the title of Piers Plowman and something of its form were known to a wide range of readers.30 Percy identifies a relationship between the alliterative verse of Piers Plowman and that of two poems in the folio manuscript from which many of his ballads are taken, and he contextualizes the poetics of Piers Plowman against some more highly regarded poetic traditions as well.31 Percy notes that the use of alliteration was a feature of “the old Saxon and Gothic poets” and compares early English alliterative verse to ancient Icelandic poetry.32 He also compares the metrical form of Piers Plowman to French Alexandrines, hypothesizing a link to the “ancient Gothic and Francic poets.” The Alexandrine-writing modern French are, in Percy’s literary historiography, Germanic: the offspring of the ancient Franks. Even still in the eighteenth century, Percy argues, “every French heroic verse evidently consists of the ancient distich of their Francic ancestors.”33 For Percy, literary history and racial history are intertwined. Eighteenthcentury historiography often emphasized the racial and cultural contrast between Normans and Saxons in England even several generations after the Conquest, a perspective that Sir Walter Scott would later popularize in Ivanhoe.34 Percy’s assimilation of French poetic forms into an unproblematically Germanic literary history sidesteps the usual opposition between England’s French (Norman) and Germanic (Saxon) inheritance. The Normans, so often (as in Ivanhoe) presented as effete interlopers, are, in Percy’s account, assimilated to an earlier Germanic lineage. Thus England’s poetic and linguistic history is one of relative continuity, even despite the Norman conquest. More frequently, alliterative, Germanic verse like that of Piers Plowman was seen by both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers in contrast to the courtly, rhyming, French verse forms of Chaucer. Like Percy’s essay on “On the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions,” Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1775 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales also identifies the alliteration of Piers Plowman as a Saxon feature, but Tyrwhitt rejects the argument that Piers Plowman is metrical.35 Whereas Percy locates Piers Plowman in a trajectory that joins ancient Germanic forms with modern poetic practice, Tyrwhitt is more willing to concede a disjunction between


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Langland’s poetics and those of later poets. Tyrwhitt’s celebrated edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has an indirect relationship to Piers Plowman as well: its popularity encouraged readers to look for new editions of more medieval literary texts.36 In a 1787 letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine, Thomas Holt White argued that “Langelande was the Ennius of Milton”; just as Ennius’ establishment of the Latin epic allowed his follower Virgil to perfect it, so did Langland’s “uncouth alliteration” establish the possibility of unrhymed verse to be perfected in Milton’s “metrical cadence.”37 Unlike Cooper, who posits that Langland was Milton’s direct source, Holt White suggests only that Langland’s use of unrhymed verse influenced Milton’s poetics. In Holt White’s opinion, Piers Plowman is central to the literary tradition and therefore deserves to be edited in its entirety. Holt White calls on the readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine to rise to Langland’s aid, asking: “Is there then no Tyrrwhit [sic] left to rescue the father of English blank verse from his present wretched plight, and place him by the side of Chaucer, the father of our rhime?”38 Twenty-six years later, Holt White’s call for a new edition of Langland’s poem was answered. However, the next editor of Piers Plowman, Thomas Dunham Whitaker, was, in many ways, no Tyrwhitt. In addition to his scrupulous textual scholarship, Tyrwhitt’s contribution to the history of Chaucer editions was his use of a modernizing format for a medieval work. Tyrwhitt’s edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales detached the poet’s major work from its previous context in large folio collections of complete works, instead printing the Tales in a set of five octavo volumes. The physical disposition of the poems in Tyrwhitt’s edition thus looked more like that of volumes of contemporary literature than had any of the previous Chaucer editions. Like the texts in the 1721 Urry edition of the Works (which had been printed in two different folio sizes at different subscription costs), Tyrwhitt’s Chaucerian texts were printed in a modern roman type, leaving behind the archaizing black letter that had distinguished Chaucer’s works in sixteenth-century editions.39 Although Tyrwhitt’s Canterbury Tales volumes rejected Chaucer’s sixteenth-century format in favor of a visually modern one, Whitaker made exactly the opposite editorial choice in his edition of Piers Plowman. Before Whitaker’s edition, Piers Plowman had previously been available in one of the four relatively plain sixteenth century octavo editions of Crowley and Rogers, or excerpted in an anthology of the type discussed in the previous chapter. Whitaker’s 1813 edition of Piers Plowman (which he calls Peirs Plouhman) returns the medieval poem to a bibliographical past it never had. Whitaker de-modernizes the poem’s textual format in his edition, printing Piers Plowman in a highly ornate, rubricated black letter quarto edition.40 Unlike the anthologies that made Piers Plowman more accessible to general

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readers, Whitaker’s edition of the medieval poem distances it from its nineteenth-century audience. The typography of Whitaker’s edition self-consciously imitates medieval manuscript practice by printing in a rubricated black letter (with proper nouns printed in red), by preserving the antiquated characters thorn (Q) and yogh ({), by using a Tironian “et” consistently for both the English “and” and the Latin “et,” and by incorporating scribal abbreviations such as “oQr” for “other.” Whitaker’s edition is rendered even more typographically obscure by its inclusion of runic and Saxon characters in its introductory discussion of the history of Germanic languages.41 The volume’s “manuscript-like” appearance is further enhanced by the fact that each passus begins with a decorated initial: a four-line initial capital with foliate extensions inhabited by real and fantastic creatures.42 Whitaker includes a running paraphrase at the foot of each page in a small roman font. This paraphrase makes the content of the poem more accessible, but its very presence serves both visually and linguistically to emphasize the foreignness of Langland’s medieval text. Although this is an English poem, a nineteenthcentury reader is likely to require some amount of translation, both linguistic and cultural, to understand it. Whitaker’s 1813 Piers Plowman edition was followed by his 1814 edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, a direct copy of the 1553 edition.43 The Crede is printed in the same black letter typeface used in Whitaker’s edition of Peirs Plouhman, with proper names, the running title and section headings printed in red. The first and last pages of the Crede both contain small scale illustrations of the text. The narrator’s unsatisfactory dialogues with representatives of the four fraternal orders is depicted on the first page. Here, the narrator and four rather unpleasant looking friars are incorporated into the foliate extensions of the poem’s initial “C” to form an upper border of the page. It is Pierce the Ploughman who ultimately teaches the narrator his creed. After the friars’ failure as figures of spiritual authority, the text of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede concludes with a prayer that false friars may amend themselves, followed by the word “Amen,” and the rather un-Middle English “finis.” Below this in Whitaker’s edition is a scene showing the narrator (marked by his pilgrim’s staff and scallop) talking to Piers, whose team of oxen stands in the background.44 The text of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede is prefaced only by a single page of editorial commentary, which includes a hypothesis that the rarity of the 1553 edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede is due to fraternal suppression; this page also contains some notices of the medieval poem by other writers.45 Given the lack of prefatory material in this edition of the Crede, and its physical similarity to Whitaker’s edition of Langland’s poem, it seems that he intended them to be bound together, as many copies were. Although


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some surviving copies of Whitaker’s Peirs Plouhman lack the Crede, and some copies of the Crede are bound separately, the two are most frequently bound together. Another indication that they were intended to be jointly bound is the fact that, when bound alone, the Crede makes a rather oddly shaped volume: it contains only twenty-two leaves but is printed in a relatively large format for such a short text. The pages are 21 29 cm, relatively similar in dimension to letter size paper (which is just under 22 cm28 cm). The combination of Piers Plowman and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede replicates the contents of Rogers’s 1561 edition of Piers Plowman, but on a much grander scale. Whitaker imitates an earlier edition of Langland’s fourteenth-century work, but in a format that self-consciously celebrates, and even exaggerates, the poem’s archaism and alterity. The typography of Whitaker’s edition of Piers Plouhman manifests the self-conscious revival of obsolete medieval forms typical of Romantic medievalism. At the same time, some of his commentary on the poem suggests that elements of medieval culture are submerged but still present in contemporary Britain. Percy and Scott, too, participate in both of these contrasting Romantic medievalisms. Their linguistic scholarship presumes a division between medieval texts and contemporary readers; nevertheless, works such as Scott’s collection of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (3 volumes, 1802–1803) and Percy’s Reliques, with their mixture of medieval and more recent balladry, imply that the medieval is still present, particularly in the rural, northern reaches of Great Britain. Romantic medievalism saw the continuation of medieval forms among those both educationally and geographically excluded from the cultural elites: not only on the “Celtic margins of the Union” but in the “semi-oral literature of the city street.”46 Although the belief that the Middle Ages belong to a now-closed past, and the contrasting claim that it is still present, would seem to proceed from mutually exclusive conceptions of history, Whitaker is not unusual in endorsing these two historiographies simultaneously. The two strains of medievalism can be reconciled by noting the geographic and class dynamics of Romantic medievalism, in which those on the periphery of contemporary life, whether the urban poor or the distant Scottish rustics, still live in the simpler past that has been left behind by metropolitan sophisticates. Whitaker’s advertised editorial practice manifests further his ambivalence about the status of the medieval. Whitaker claims on his title page that his text is “Printed from a MS. contemporary with the author, collated with two others of great antiquity, and exhibiting the original text; together with an Introductory Discourse, a perpetual commentary, annotations, and a glossary.”47 As an editor, Whitaker simplifies the text for his readers; he provides them with an Introduction, Annotations, and Glossary. Simultaneously, though, he renders the text typographically more obscure,

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emphasizing its “great antiquity.” Whitaker’s title page reference to his procedure of manuscript selection and collation aligns his work with the development of a more precise practice of scholarly editing. In the late eighteenth century, medievalists began slowly to articulate a set of shared expectations about textual editing.48 The issue of editorial methodology was particularly important in Joseph Ritson’s response to Percy’s Reliques, as Ritson publicly disparaged Percy’s silent revisions to the texts.49 In fact, as Nick Groom has demonstrated through his study of Percy’s correspondence with his printers, Percy was dissuaded from including much of the commentary and critical apparatus he had intended.50 Whitaker’s title page claim of manuscript collation implies his adherence to the new editorial practice of deciding on readings by comparing multiple manuscripts. The previous edition, Owen Rogers’s of 1561, used a different appeal to textual authority. It claimed to be “newly imprynted after the authours olde copy.”51 In fact, Rogers’s edition was not based on a manuscript at all; it was a direct reprint of Robert Crowley’s 1550 second edition. Rogers promotes his volume by linking it to the author himself, but without any discussion of his actual editorial practice. The underlying premise of Rogers’s claim is that a single authorial manuscript does exist, and does contain the authoritative text. Whitaker’s comparison of manuscripts acknowledges that none of the existing manuscripts of Piers Plowman is authorial, and that the editor is thus forced to make judgments about the quality of various scribal products. The claims these two editors make to advertise their volumes reveal the development of new expectations about textual editing between 1561 and 1813, and also reveal a new perspective on Langland’s work as inevitably mediated by its manuscripts. As W. W. Skeat first observed, Whitaker in fact records very few manuscript variants; John Bowers consequently calls Whitaker’s practice best-text editing.52 The title page assertion that the text is “printed from” a single manuscript but “collated with” two others shows Whitaker’s methodological ambivalence. Some of Whitaker’s adherence to a single manuscript is due to the fact that his three manuscripts represented both B and C texts of the poem (as is discussed further on). The texts in the three manuscripts thus diverged enough that collating the manuscript readings would have proved difficult at a number of points in the poem. Although Whitaker rarely presents readers with the variants from his different copies of the poem, his Introductory Discourse contains a two page parallel text edition of the same passage so that readers can see for themselves the kinds of textual differences that led Whitaker to his choice of manuscripts.53 As much as one can find fault with Whitaker’s editing, his decision to give readers such a parallel text extract preceded by fifty-three years the EETS publication of Skeat’s Parallel Extracts from Twenty-Nine Manuscripts of Piers


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Plowman. . .(1866), which Skeat produced in preparation for his later three volume parallel text edition.54 Throughout Whitaker’s volume, he does (as he claims on the title page) print his text almost exclusively from a single manuscript. The stated reconstructive practice of editing one manuscript against two others that Whitaker advertises on his title page is at odds with his actual work as an editor. The title Whitaker gives the poem is: Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. Or, The Vision of William concening Peirs Plouhman, and The Visions of the same concerning the Origin, Progress, and Perfection of the Christian Life.

While there are certainly variations in Middle English orthography, no manuscript of the poem actually uses the spelling Peirs Plouhman for the title. Already on the title page, Whitaker diverges from the readings in his manuscripts. Whitaker’s base text, now Huntington Library MS Hm 137 (C text sigil P), calls the poem “Peeres plouheman” in its explicit; Oriel College, Oxford MS 79 (B text sigil O), another manuscript Whitaker consulted, calls it “dialogus petri plowman.”55 The final manuscript used by Whitaker, now Huntington Library MS Hm 114 (B text sigil Ht), begins with the heading “Piers ploughman” and ends “Explicit Pers Ploughman.”56 Crowley’s edition had identified the poem as The vision of Pierce Plowman. Whitaker’s contemporaries were most likely to follow Crowley’s spelling of the Plowman’s given name: Pierce. Percy spells it this way in his essay on the poem’s versification, as does Tyrwhitt; Ritson also spells it this way in his Bibliographia Poetica (1802). In naming the Plowman “Peirs” (reversing the “e” and the “i” of the name), Whitaker follows neither the usual modern spelling nor the spellings available in the explicits of the manuscripts he consulted. The spelling is visibly (if inaccurately) archaic; it “medievalizes” the poem in much the same way as signs at tourist sites that identify “ye olde gift shoppe.”57 Whitaker is not single-minded in his attempts to distance Langland and his poem from his nineteenth-century audience. Even as his spelling of the title and the format of his volume insistently medievalize Piers Plowman, Whitaker’s discussion of his manuscripts connects the fourteenth-century poet to his nineteenth-century regional descendants. In this, Whitaker is like Scott and Percy, who saw ballads as simultaneously medieval and contemporary. In the case of Piers Plowman, it is a linguistic rather than a generic homology between the medieval past and the rural present. Whitaker’s discussion of the manuscripts he used makes this clear. Whitaker was a country vicar and did not have the easy access to manuscripts that

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modern scholars take for granted. He was indebted to friends for the three manuscripts that he was able to use, two from the collection of the antiquary Richard Heber and one that Edward Copleston procured for him from Oriel College, Oxford.58 Among these three, Whitaker identifies the current Hm 137 as the oldest on paleographic grounds. In a footnote, Whitaker explains his dating of this manuscript to Langland’s own time: Having been pretty conversant with charters, I may be allowed to lay some weight on the observation, that the peculiar form of the initial D in Dancastr’ has never occurred to me after the reign of Edward the Third.59

The antiquity of the manuscript’s hand is reinforced by the antiquity of its language: it “abounds with Saxon words and idioms.”60 Moreover, according to Whitaker, another fact favors the selection of this manuscript from among the three to which he had access: namely, that the orthography and dialect in which this MS. is written approach very near to that Semi-saxon jargon, in the midst of which he [i.e., Whitaker] was brought up, and which, notwithstanding some inroads within the last half century upon its archaisms, he continues to hear daily spoken on the confines of Lancashire, and on the west riding of the county of York.61

“Semi-Saxon” is, as David Matthews has shown, equivalent to the current term “Middle English,” and was often used for early Middle English in particular.62 For Whitaker, who was born in 1759, to claim that he was brought up in Lancashire among speakers of Semi-Saxon is quite remarkable. Like the ballad collectors who highlighted the preservation of medieval literary forms in the popular culture of Scotland and northern England, Whitaker identifies the geographical “hinterlands” as temporally, not just geographically, removed from the modern metropolis. Thus, Whitaker’s work as the editor of a fourteenth-century text is enabled by his own geographic and professional marginality, as the vicar of Whalley, Lancashire. Even some fifty years past Whitaker’s birth, the “inroads” of modernity have not eliminated the “archaisms” of Lancashire and West Yorkshire speech. It is therefore no paradox that Whitaker judges the Piers Plowman manuscripts written in dialects less like the northwest English dialect of the nineteenth century to have been written later than Hm 137. The residual regional currency of the Semi-Saxon represented in Whitaker’s favored manuscript authenticates its antiquity. Not only is the “Semi-Saxon” northern dialect of the nineteenth century conservative, Langland’s own fourteenth-century northern dialect also preserved the language of northwest England from some 400 years earlier, according to Whitaker. Whitaker claims that “the dialect of the


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author of these Visions, was, as far as it remained uncorrupted by additions since the conquest, the true Mercian language.”63 The changes to English since the Norman Conquest are, in Whitaker’s view, corruptions, degradations to England’s earlier native dialects. Langland’s Shropshire birth allows him to escape the corrupting influence of a creolized Middle English dialect, just as Whitaker’s Lancashire birth grants his authority in historical linguistics. Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry, had identified Langland’s diction and versification as defects of the poem, censuring Langland’s “imposed constraint of seeking identical initials, and the affectation of obsolete English.”64 For Whitaker, the very archaism that Warton disparages ties Piers Plowman to a heroic, Saxon history, free from Norman linguistic corruption. Despite the fact that Whitaker had access to only four distinct copies of Piers Plowman (his three manuscripts and a printed edition), he was nevertheless aware that the poem existed in different forms, what Whitaker called “in critical language, distinct schools.”65 Whitaker probably learned this understanding of the poem’s textual tradition from the writings of Ritson, who was the first to recognize that Piers Plowman occurred in two different but identifiable versions (what we would call the B and C text). Ritson hypothesized even that “it may be possible for a good judge of ancient poetry, possessed of a sufficient stock of critical acumen, to determine which was the first, and which the second,”66 Whitaker’s base text (Huntington Library MS Hm 137) was the only C text manuscript among the versions of the poem he had access to; the manuscript he considers next in authority, currently Hm 114, is a conflation of the A, B, and C texts.67 Crowley’s edition and Whitaker’s third manuscript, Oriel College Oxford 79, both contain the B text of the poem and thus differ so markedly from Whitaker’s C text base text that he grants them little authority in establishing the text of the poem for his edition. Although Whitaker recognizes wide textual variation among his exemplars, he considers all of the different texts of Piers Plowman to be authorial, as they “bear marks, not of the same spirit and genius only, but of the same peculiar and original manner, so that it is scarcely to be conceived that they are interpolations of successive transcribers.”68 Whitaker recognizes the different textual traditions of Langland’s B and C texts, but, unlike Crowley, he chooses to edit the C text of the poem. Demonstrating an unusual attitude toward authorial revision, Whitaker bases his decision of which text to edit on his assessment of which version is the author’s earliest. Although Whitaker believes that the poet himself revised the text, he is interested in not the poet’s final intention but his first intention.69 The current critical consensus is that the C text of Piers Plowman was the last of Langland’s versions, but Whitaker understands the

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evidence before him differently. Whitaker considers his linguistically conservative base text to contain the earliest form of the poem; he argues that his C text manuscript “bears every mark of being the first but vigorous effort of a young poet.” By seeking the poem’s origin in the early days of Langland’s own poetic vocation, Whitaker secures it within the early days of English letters. According to Whitaker, Langland’s revisions took place in “a period when the English language was undergoing a rapid change.”70 By rejecting Langland’s revisions to Piers Plowman, Whitaker also rejects the fourteenth-century linguistic changes that Langland himself experienced. Once again, Whitaker explicitly and intentionally pushes Piers Plowman deeper into the past by his editorial choices. Whitaker insists on locating Piers Plowman within (what he takes to be) its authentic historical setting, and he is therefore interested in how the poem represents fourteenth-century English society. Despite the poem’s framework of allegory (which Whitaker calls “the most insipid for the most part and tedious of all vehicles of instruction”), Piers Plowman is resolutely based in the real life of people Langland had encountered in the world.71 Whitaker imagines the poet roaming far and wide in search of manners and characters; mingling with men of every accessible rank, and storing his memory with hints for future use. I next pursue him to his study, sedate and thoughtful, yet wildly inventive, digesting the first rude drafts of his Vision; and in successive transcriptions, as judgment matured, or invention declined, or as his observations were more extended, expanding or contracting, improving and sometimes perhaps debasing his original text.72

In “digesting the first rude drafts of his Vision,” Langland transforms his encounters with individuals into portraits of types. Langland’s knowledge of the world came both from his personal experiences and from learned sources. He was, says Whitaker, “a keen and severe observer of human nature; well read in the scriptures and schoolmen, and intimately acquainted with the old language and poetry of his country.”73 Whitaker locates Langland within a particular historical moment (the fourteenth century) but presents him also a social commentator still relevant to the nineteenthcentury: Langland’s satire comes both from a historically determined tradition of “old language and poetry” and from a transhistorical understanding of human nature. Whitaker’s description of Langland’s poetic practice has often been recognized as characteristically Romantic. Both John Bowers and Charlotte Brewer identify the similarity between Whitaker’s imagination of Langland and Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.74 Whitaker describes Langland as “mingling with men of every accessible rank” in search of


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poetic matter. In the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth states that he chose “incidents and situations from common life,” and that he presented them “in a selection of language really used by men,” but with a “colouring of imagination.”75 Langland, in Whitaker’s description, observed common life and transformed it into poetry, just as Wordsworth claims to have done. Wordsworth also claims to have composed his Lyrical Ballads in a popular form and in ordinary, spoken language, despite the fact that the Lyrical Ballads are actually full of classical allusions and traditional poetic diction.76 Whitaker’s Introductory Discourse, with its description of Langland’s processes of collecting scenes from real life but revising them into poetry, suggests that Whitaker sees in Piers Plowman something of the hybridity of the Lyrical Ballads, which balance the ballad genre of popular verse against the language and syntax of elite poetry. As John Bowers has noted, Whitaker imagines Langland in his own image, not just in Wordsworth’s: “Whitaker, who was a Lancashire vicar, decided that his poet too was an ‘obscure country priest.’”77 Whitaker’s description of his fourteenth-century subject makes Langland a Romantic poet as well as his own double. In this, Whitaker reiterates the projections of the present onto the past that resulted in the sixteenth century reception of Piers Plowman as a proto-Protestant text. Chapter 2 discusses the way Crowley’s 1550 edition of Piers Plowman erased Bale’s earlier hypothesis that Langland had been a priest, thereby remaking Langland into Crowley’s double (rather than Bale’s). Just as Bale and Crowley understand Langland’s biography through their own, Whitaker too presents Langland as reproducing elements of his own biography. Although Whitaker was presumably unaware of his own biases in responding to the medieval poet, he certainly recognized and repudiated the biases of his sixteenth-century predecessors. The eighteenth-century anthologies’ tendency to reprint the Confessions of the Sins might well have led a thoughtful reader to doubt Langland’s reputation as a protoProtestant, although none of the anthology editors directly addresses that question. In his 1813 edition, Whitaker directly and emphatically refutes the claim of Langland’s proleptic sympathy with the goals of the Reformation: The Reformers of the sixteenth century claimed as their own the Author of these Visions; but surely on no good grounds. That he believed and taught almost all the fundamental doctrines of Christianity has no tendency to prove him a Wickliffite or Lollard.78

Unlike Crowley, Whitaker does not wish to use Piers Plowman as historical evidence against his own theological opponents. Whitaker thus does not

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need to endorse the poem’s particular Christianity; he needs to endorse its poetry. Whitaker’s demonstration of the poem’s relevance takes the form of “Romanticizing” Langland where Crowley had “Protestantized” him. Despite their different emphases, both editors implicitly assert the continuing value of Piers Plowman for their own times by absorbing its author into a culturally familiar poetic identity. Whitaker is not the first to recognize some elements of Catholicism in Langland’s poem. As was noted in chapter 1, Francis Ayscough, the early seventeenth-century owner and annotator of British Library Additional MS 35157 (C text sigil U), identifies in Langland’s text “a litle taste of poprie.”79 Whitaker is, however, the first to make a public statement of Langland’s Catholicism rather than Protestantism. In order to refute the Reformers’ adoption of Langland as an ally, Whitaker outlines the Catholic “incumbrances” that Piers Plowman displays, despite its reformist attitude. Langland, unlike his Protestant admirers, believes in: “satisfaction for sin to be made by the sinner,. . .the merit of works,. . .voluntary poverty; [and] the worship of the cross,” Whitaker points out.80 Still, whether because of the lingering influence of Langland’s earlier reputation, Whitaker’s own fondness for the poem, or simply discursive habit, Whitaker himself occasionally speaks of the poem in a kind of Protestantizing language. In his summary of Passus 2, Whitaker names as “True Religion” the authoritative speaker who explains to the dreamer the imagery of the Prologue.81 In fact, she quite explicitly names herself as Holy Church (C.1.70). In the text of the poem, Whitaker calls her by her proper name. “Holychurche ich am,” she says, a line accurately translated (“I am Holy Church”) in Whitaker’s running paraphrase at the foot of the page.82 The Catholic overtones of the medieval name must have been sufficiently unsettling to Whitaker that he chose to replace it in his prefatory summary of the poem. Similarly, in his summary of the final Passus, Whitaker refers to “the fortress of ‘Unity,’” but without acknowledging that the poem explicitly glosses Unity as Holy Church (C.21.329; C.22.297).83 Again, the text of the poem and its running paraphrase represent Langland’s words accurately, despite Whitaker’s reticence to repeat Langland’s terminology in his Introductory Discourse. When Whitaker prints the line “In Unite holichurche Conscience held hym,” only “Unite” and “Conscience” are printed in redletter as proper names. “Holichurche” is printed in black letter; apparently Whitaker understood it as a description rather than a proper name. The running paraphrase does, however, capitalize the name’s gloss: “Conscience maintained his post in Unity, i.e., the Holy Church.”84 Whitaker presents “the Holy Church” as a decoding of the allegorical name “Unity,” adding the definite article and thereby differentiating it from the personification allegory.


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Whitaker presents the text faithfully throughout (to the extent that he knew the manuscript tradition), and his paraphrase never shies from manifesting Catholic practices or doctrine (including the belief in pilgrimages, auricular confession, and papal authority). Despite this accuracy, and as much as he insists on Langland’s Catholicism, Whitaker still contextualizes Piers Plowman within the evolution toward Protestantism that he sees as inevitable. Readers [of Piers Plowman]. . .will contemplate, some with philosophical curiosity, and others with pious satisfaction, the successful struggles of a powerful mind, which, in an age when evangelical truth had well nigh been suffocated under a load of ceremonies and traditions,. . .though not wholly purged from every remnant of error and superstition, had yet been led, in an uniform progress of investigation and discovery, to the purifying fountain of living waters in the example, the merits, and the intercession of the Redeemer.85

Like the virtuous pagans who would have been Christians if given the opportunity, Langland demonstrates the morality and theological striving that would lead later English Christians away from the Church of Rome and away from a doctrine of salvation through works (“ceremonies and traditions”). In Whitaker’s description of Langland, he suggests that the truths of Protestantism were available, even before the Reformation, to those who sought them. Although incomplete, Langland’s tendencies toward a Protestant doctrine of faith rather than works result from an almost scientific process of “investigation and discovery” leading to “evangelical truth.” Whitaker’s view of Langland as Catholic but nevertheless capable of an imaginative access to what Whitaker calls “the purifying fountain of living waters” allows him to posit Langland as a source text for a series of Protestant imitations. Although Whitaker disproves the understanding of Langland as a proto-Protestant, he nonetheless continually invokes that same understanding in discussing Langland’s satire as well as the influence Piers Plowman had on later English literature. The Introductory Discourse contains a set of references to Piers Plowman in other literary works.86 In his collection of later authors’ references to Langland, Whitaker includes a long note on Spenser’s knowledge of Piers Plowman.87 Here Whitaker disputes Tyrwhitt’s suggestion that Spenser referred to Chaucer, not Langland, as “the Pilgrim that the Plowman plaid awhile” in the Epilogue to the Shepheardes Calendar. In the course of his response to Tyrwhitt’s hypothesis, Whitaker proposes not only that Langland’s Piers was a model for Chaucer’s Plowman but that “it cannot be doubted, though it has never before been observed, that this personage is the archetype of the Red Cross Knight” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.88 Although Whitaker is at pains to

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demonstrate the error of considering Langland a proto-Protestant, he does not hesitate to identify Langland’s Catholic poem as the model for Spenser’s insistently Protestant allegory. Whitaker uses the residual myth of Langland’s Protestantism again in the same note when he discusses the popularity of Piers Plowman. He comments that it was a model for subsequent authors, such that: at a period when English sense and spirit first began to revolt against the usurpations and abuses of the church, every succeeding remonstrance was put into the mouth of a Ploughman, witness the Ploughman’s Tale, the Creed of Peirs Ploughman, and lastly, “the Prayer and Complaint of the Ploughman unto Christ.”89

All of the texts he names are Lollard texts, texts that for the sixteenthcentury Reformers provided an association between Piers Plowman and Protestantism. Whitaker rejects the idea that Langland was a Protestant, but in some sense he tries to have it both ways, repeating much of the evidence the Reformers had used to identify Langland with their own goals. One sixteenth-century claim about Langland that Whitaker refutes unhesitatingly is the belief that he had prophesied the dissolution of the monasteries. That Langland imagined a king opposing the religious houses, Whitaker did not deny; such a prediction was no prophecy, however: the dissolution of the corrupt monasteries was inevitable, given the “natural tendency of enormous evils to redress themselves.”90 Moreover, a medieval political subject could imagine sufficient power to confront religious institutions only in the person of the monarch, so “he would naturally be directed to a King as the probable instrument of their destruction.”91 Because a king had, in fact, come to “bete” the religious, as Langland warned, the sixteenthcentury readers of Piers Plowman identified Langland as a divinely inspired prophet of events their own time. Whitaker attributes Langland’s view of the dissolution to common sense rather than prophecy. Whitaker marshals one more piece of evidence against the prophetic nature of Langland’s reference to a coming King who will “confesse {ow alle/ And bete {ow as Qe byble telleQ. for brekyng of {oure reule.”92 This warning cannot be considered a prophecy because it lacks specificity. It is “couched in general and guarded terms: but genuine prophecy dares to be particular.”93 Langland after all, does not explain which king he means or how exactly he will “bete” the religious. Langland is not a true prophet, says Whitaker, because he gives no evidence of foreknowing the particulars of Henry VIII’s break from the Church of Rome. Interestingly, in explaining this distinction between the general prediction of an eventuality and a true prophecy, Whitaker does not give an


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example of how Langland might have worded an actual prophecy about the times of Henry VIII. Instead, Whitaker clarifies his distinction between prediction and prophecy by imagining “a dreaming bard at present” making predictions about a distant future.94 The predictions Whitaker places in the mouth of this imagined prophet reveal anxieties about contemporary political issues, anxieties that might explain some of Whitaker’s ambivalence about the Catholicism (or Protestantism) of Piers Plowman. Whitaker first imagines the “dreaming bard” as extending Langland’s supposed prophecy of the Reformation, but then he changes the event foreseen from a continuation to a reversal of the Reformation. Whitaker’s examples of visions that would rise to the level of “genuine prophecy” are that a King would arise, who should strip the church of its remaining revenues, or what, in the present lethargy of Protestantism, is quite as likely, that Popery should once more become the established religion of this country.95

To claim that the two opposing possibilities are equally likely is to posit either that both could happen or that neither one will. If either event is to take place, Whitaker certainly does not imagine it happening soon. Whitaker notes that prophecy requires historical specificity: a true prophet would ascribe the events foreseen to a particular era, the reign of “George the Eighth, or Edward the Ninth,” for example. Whitaker wrote under the regency of George IV. Even if every successive king were named George, the reign of George VIII would likely be over a century away. The last Edward had been Edward VI; the reign of a future Edward IX would thus be similarly distant. The fact that Whitaker imagines one of these prophecies being fulfilled at least a century hence makes his reference to “the present lethargy of Protestantism” stand out. No present political or religious situation could have much bearing on events that far distant; Protestantism’s “lethargy” must be for Whitaker a more proximate concern. In fact, Whitaker’s worry that weak Protestantism might allow the resurrection of English Catholicism was one expressed by many of his contemporaries as parliament debated Catholic Emancipation. For all of Sir Walter Scott’s love of Britain’s medieval past, he too shared Whitaker’s anxiety about the potential danger posed by those who still held England’s medieval religion. In an 1807 letter to Robert Southey, Scott protests that he is not “a bigot in religious matters, nor a friend to persecution,” but he nevertheless argues that it would be too dangerous to allow Catholics, being “ipso facto connected with foreign politics,” into positions of political authority. The analogy Scott offers is telling: “If a gentleman chooses to walk about with a couple of pounds of gunpowder in his pocket, if I give him the shelter of my roof, I may at least be permitted to exclude him from

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the seat next to the fire.”96 Although Britain shelters Catholics under its roof, Catholics are not truly residents of the house, in this metaphor; they are potentially explosive guests. Anti-Catholic laws are thus not bigotry but prudent policy, as Scott sees it. Whitaker’s prophecy that Catholicism will once again become England’s state religion is ascribed in the Introductory Discourse to a hypothetical “dreaming bard.” Many of Whitaker’s contemporaries would consider this prophecy to be no far-fetched dream. It would be immediately recognizable to an early nineteenth-century reader as a prediction that was made repeatedly in the public discourse about the disastrous results that Catholic Emancipation would produce. Parliamentary debate and petitions show the continual repetition of similar claims and counterclaims through the first three decades of the nineteenth century. A petition to the House of Commons by the archdeacon and clergy of Suffolk presented February 11, 1813 is perfectly typical of the rhetoric used by those opposed to extending full legal rights to Catholics. The petitioners say that they: view, with increasing concern and alarm, the repeated and persevering efforts of the Roman Catholics of the United Kingdom, to obtain from the legislature an elevation to a degree of political power which, in the humble opinion of the petitioners, cannot be granted them without the most imminent danger to the constitution both in Church and State.97

Petitions and speeches in favor of maintaining the prohibition of Catholic participation in parliament consistently described Catholic political power as dangerous to the established church, to the Hanoverian succession, and to Britain’s domestic security. On February 25, 1813, Henry Grattan, representing Dublin, made a motion that the House of Commons form a committee to consider the laws affecting the Catholics of the United Kingdom. William Edward Tomline replied (in his first speech as an MP) by invoking a historically demonstrable difference between the “spirits” of Catholicism and Protestantism: I entreat those who advocate the cause of the Roman Catholics, to compare the persecuting spirit of their religion, with the benignant spirit of ours, their principles favourable to despotism, with ours encouraging liberty; their arrogant infallibility with our acknowledgment of the erroneousness of human judgment; their inquisition with our trial by jury; their rod of iron with our sceptre of olive; and then say whether, upon the terms they propose, union can long exist or harmony can long prevail.98

Tomline’s premise of transhistorical identity between England’s past and present Catholics (and, implicitly, Protestants) was common to arguments


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against Emancipation. Such a rejection of the Enlightenment notion of progress was not, however, universal. In a motion of June 22, 1812, George Canning argued that “[t]here cannot be a circumstance which more strikingly marks the progress of opinion, and the improvement of the human mind, within the space of one century” than England’s withdrawal from the slave trade; similarly, parliament should not blindly uphold past anti-Catholic legislation without testing its applicability to present circumstances.99 Although the issue of Catholic Emancipation was hotly debated for years, it was not until 1829 that England’s and Ireland’s Catholic subjects were freed of the penal laws.100 Contemporary anti-Catholic polemic and Whitaker’s uncertainties about the health of Anglo-Protestantism might well explain the duality that Whitaker displays in reference to the Catholicism of Piers Plowman. Without the immediate political motive for seeing Langland as a Protestant that Crowley and his contemporaries had, Whitaker is able to analyze the poem’s theology more honestly, and thus to argue for Langland’s Catholicism. Because the poem does advocate a reform of injustices, both civil and ecclesiastical, Whitaker also respects Langland as one with “an acute moral sense [and] a vehement indignation against the abuses of public and the vices of private life.”101 Nevertheless, in the atmosphere of anti-Catholic rhetoric that preceded Catholic Emancipation (a rhetoric that Whitaker himself clearly endorsed), Whitaker is able to praise Piers Plowman only by surreptitiously, perhaps even unconsciously, reverting to the very notion of Langland’s proto-Protestantism that he himself refuted in the same text. Despite his covert ambivalence about Langland’s theology, which he defines one way while simultaneously presenting it slightly differently, Whitaker does make some important critical claims about the poem. One of Whitaker’s most innovative interpretations of the poem is his argument that it is a unified whole. Earlier commentators had typically seen Piers Plowman rather as a collection of disjointed parts. George Hickes refers to the poem as a collection of twenty satires, effectively separating the passus into discrete works.102 Elizabeth Cooper remarks that Piers Plowman “does not appear to me of a Piece; every Vision seeming a distinct Rhapsody, and not carrying on either one single Action, or a Series of many,” an assessment copied verbatim by Theophilus Cibber in his anthology of 1753.103 Warton’s History of English Poetry does not explicitly address the structure of Piers Plowman, but its own approach to the poem is so disjointed that it would be hard to form a coherent understanding of Langland’s text from Warton’s; he quotes the passages out of order and never attempts to explain the purpose or narrative of the poem as a whole. Whitaker himself sometimes refers to the whole poem with the plural title “Visions concerning Peirs Plouhman,” because he separates the poem

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into the Vision of Piers Plouhman and the Visions of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest.104 Nevertheless, he sees these four visions as part of a unified whole, a single macro-poem. A substantial portion of Whitaker’s Introductory Discourse consists of his passus by passus summary of Piers Plowman, after which he proclaims that “it has now, for the first time, been shewn that it was written after a regular and consistent plan.” 105 His pride in this literary critical accomplishment is visible in his repetition of the claim. When Whitaker lists the particular difficulties that Piers Plowman presents for its editor, the first one he includes is the challenge “to disentangle the whole plan of the visions, which had never been attempted before.” In a footnote comparing his Introductory Discourse and that of his predecessor, he notes further that “Crowley’s short abstract has no such pretensions” to demonstrating the poem’s unity.106 By proclaiming the poem’s coherence, Whitaker in effect joins with Percy in elevating Langland’s stature within the trajectory of British literary history. For Whitaker, Langland’s Piers Plowman is more than a linguistic curiosity or an example of Germanic poetics; it is also a poem with its own literary value. In this way, at least, Whitaker paves the way for the modern era of literary scholarship on Piers Plowman. By virtue of its discussion of the manuscript variants, limited though it is, Whitaker’s edition also foreshadows the era of modern textual scholarship on Piers Plowman that truly begins with Skeat’s various editions at the end of the nineteenth century.107 Unfortunately for Whitaker, he may have done too little too late in both of these areas. His contemporaries did not recognize his progress toward what would become the modern practice of scholarship on the poem as much as they recognized his deficiencies in both literary and textual scholarship. Thomas Wright, who would produce the next edition of the full poem in 1842, criticized Whitaker’s edition in an 1834 article in the Gentleman’s Magazine.108 Whitaker’s edition is, Wright says, “not one with which we can be satisfied.”109 Wright particularly calls into question Whitaker’s choice among his manuscripts. Wright calls Whitaker’s preference for the manuscript in a dialect closest to that of his own region as “capricious,” although he does not acknowledge that Whitaker bases his choice on a linguistic theory, not merely on local boosterism. Similarly, Wright disparages Whitaker’s decision to print what he considers the earliest authorial version, again without addressing Whitaker’s justification for the choice.110 Wright’s article casts its criticism of Whitaker’s edition and its commentary on the text of Piers Plowman as providing aid to a future editor of the poem. Wright expects that the Visions of Piers Plowman will not be the last of the works of the old time which shall be given to us, in at least somewhat of its original integrity; and


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with the hope of forwarding so desirable an object, we will venture to offer a few suggestions on the text which we think ought to be adopted.111

Wright closes his article similarly, saying that we wish to see a good edition of [Piers Plowman]; and if the few observations we have made shall prove to have hastened the accomplishment of our desires, then shall we consider that our pages have been devoted to a good and profitable end.112

Contemporary readers in 1834 could not have known that the anonymous author of this article was to be that next editor whose “good edition” of 1842 would eventually replace Whitaker’s unsatisfactory one. Most modern readers would agree with Wright’s complaints about Whitaker’s editorial practice, but this does not mitigate the extent to which Wright’s comments seem motivated primarily by editorial self-interest and a desire to build a market for his new edition of the poem.113 In 1841, the year before the publication of Wright’s edition of Piers Plowman, Isaac D’Israeli endorsed the editorial suggestions Wright had made in his Gentleman’s Magazine article, noting that: “[t]here is an excellent specimen for an improved text and edition in Gent. Mag., April, 1834.”114 D’Israeli’s Amenities of Literature criticizes Whitaker’s edition particularly on two aesthetic grounds: Whitaker bowdlerized his text, and he printed it in an illegibly antiquated type. Whitaker’s “delicacy of taste unfitted him” for editing Piers Plowman, D’Israeli asserts; consequently, Langland’s “vigorous language is sometimes castrated. . .and passages are slurred over with an annihilating &c.”115 In fact, Whitaker reserves “&c” for closing biblical citations in his paraphrase. When he suppresses some of Langland’s text, either it is unmarked in the text (as when Whitaker omits some of the confession of Lechery), or the omission is indicated by a series of asterisks (as are the omitted lines from the confession of Gluttony). In both cases, Whitaker’s textual notes do indicate that he has removed some objectionable lines. The portion of the confession of Lechery that Whitaker omits (C.6.179–194) is Lechery’s description of his sexual encounters. This would have fallen on p. 97 of Whitaker’s text. Whitaker’s notes following the text of the poem explain that “Eighteen lines are here omitted, which, though undoubtedly written with a moral purpose, have the fault imputable to many passages in the ancient satirists, that they present too distinct images of vice.”116 The lines omitted from the confession of Gluttony (C.6.399–402, and 412–414) describe Gluttony urinating, farting, and vomiting. These lines would have appeared on pages 107 and 108 of the text where they are replaced by rows of asterisks. Whitaker’s

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endnote explains: “I have been compelled to curtail the text, on account of its extreme filthiness. The curious reader, ‘whose stomach is constant,’ may find it, however, in the printed text of Crowley”117 D’Israeli also challenges Whitaker’s orthographic and typographic choices, calling Whitaker’s black letter edition “magnificent and frightful,” and complaining that “the editor has not assisted the reader through his barbarous text interspersed with Saxon characters and abbreviations.”118 Whitaker’s textual Romanticism sought an emotive authenticity, and he consequently produced a text that “felt medieval,” even if the running paraphrase meant that it did not conform to the layout of a medieval manuscript. Immediately after its appearance, perhaps even at the time of its appearance, such a practice was already at odds with the modern editorial concern for textual fidelity. The extent to which D’Israeli rejects Whitaker’s editorial goals is evident in his comment that, “[s]hould a new edition appear, the perusal would be facilitated by printing with the white letter.”119 Easy perusal clearly had not been Whitaker’s purpose; his Introductory Discourse concludes its overview of his edition with the hope that even in the present appetite of mankind for easy and dissipating objects of literary pursuits, there are some readers who will be happy in an opportunity of being introduced to the spirited and vigorous Father of English Poetry, if not divested of all his difficulties, and still clad in the formidable array of blackletter.120

Whitaker wished to introduce Langland to the modern reader on Langland’s own terms and in a guise that was suitably medieval. Whitaker therefore exaggerates the very textual and typographical difficulties that D’Israeli believes the editor ought to simplify for the reader. By the mid-nineteenth century, printing in black letter type was so rare that its appearance stood as a synecdoche of the kind of fetishistic medievalizing that most editors opposed, even as they sought greater fidelity to the medieval text through the application of new editorial methods. In his Preface to The Riches of Chaucer, a two-volume collection of Chaucer’s works published in 1835, Charles Cowden Clarke laments the difficult position in which he finds himself, as an editor of medieval poetry: Some will condemn me for having done too little; others for being a ruthless mutilator. The blackletter men, and sticklers for not altering or removing the old land-marks, will sentence me without benefit of clergy: the modern reader, to whom any thing in the form of antique orthography acts as a repellent, will inquire what service I have rendered towards reviving a taste


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for the poetry of Chaucer, seeing that I have retained all his obsolete terms and idioms, with several antiquated orthographies?121

Clarke identifies those who advocate an entirely unmodernized text as “blackletter men,” indicating that a preference for such an antiquating typography is seen as extremism. Whitaker was certainly the kind of “blackletter man” whose editorial practice was unwelcome to the modern readers whom Clarke caricatures as being unwilling to read older literary works in their original language. Perhaps it is true, as Whitaker’s contemporary Sir Walter Scott asserted in the introductory chapter to Waverly: “the great book of Nature [is] the same through a thousand editions, whether of black letter or wire-wove and hot-pressed.”122 Unlike nature, the physical features of literal books do change over time, as Scott’s metaphor suggests. The different forms and formats of actual, historical books are significant hermeneutic elements, directing interpretation as much as the text itself. In the case of Piers Plowman, Whitaker’s paraphrased black letter edition alienates the text from the present as much as the Protestantizing marginalia of Robert Crowley’s editions absorbed the medieval text into current theology. Just as Crowley’s edition manifests the concerns of its own cultural context, Whitaker’s edition of Piers Plowman is a thoroughly Romantic product. Editorial method and theory shifted radically and decisively during the half century after the appearance of Whitaker’s edition, but modern readers must be cautious of following Wright and D’Israeli in condemning Whitaker’s edition for its failure to live up to standards it never endorsed. Whitaker’s edition of Piers Plowman was not well received by other antiquarians, and it was soon supplanted by new editions of the poem that followed different editorial practices (more comparisons of manuscripts, modern typography, smaller format volumes). The 1813 edition is therefore not tremendously useful for understanding how nineteenth-century readers saw the poem, but it does give valuable insights into the changing identity of William Langland for those readers. Whitaker’s edition is noteworthy for explicitly refuting the Protestant adoption of Langland as an ally. By insisting on Langland’s orthodox Catholicism, despite his theological satire, Whitaker makes a major contribution to the understanding of this Middle English author, historicizing Langland specifically as a medieval poet rather than as a prophet of later events. Eighteenth-century anthologies had presented Langland as a linguistic and poetic innovator, the origin of English poetry, but without close attention to the nature of his poem. Whitaker is a careful and thorough reader of Piers Plowman, and he insists on its status as a coherent whole. His advocacy of Langland and his poem

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are too late, however. As Cowden Clarke suggests in his Chaucer edition, most modern readers are “repell[ed]” by the medieval. Whitaker might have advanced scholarship on Langland by “de-Protestantizing” him, but he simultaneously diminished the potential audience for his edition, in that sense harming Langland’s cause as much as helping it.

CHAPTER 5 FICTIONS OF AUTHORSHIP, FICTIONS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

hile Crowley’s biography of Langland emphasizes his supposed theological affiliations, Whitaker’s Introductory Discourse focuses more on Langland’s poetry than his theology, as Whitaker offers an explanation of Langland’s crafting of Piers Plowman. Whitaker describes Langland’s compositional process using particularly visual terms: “[s]ometimes I can descry him taking his staff, and roaming far and wide. . .storing his memory with hints for future use. I next pursue him to his study, sedate and thoughtful, yet wildly inventive, digesting the first rude drafts of his Vision.”1 The narrator here is a privileged observer at multiple points in Langland’s poetic process: Whitaker imaginatively observes Langland’s peregrinations as well as his private labors. Given that this was written in an era long before the motion picture, such a description of spectatorship (if not voyeurism) deserves attention. Despite Whitaker’s use of a language suggesting physical observation, and even physical action (“I next pursue him to his study”), his narratorial perspective does not truly reproduce that of a real historical eyewitness, for no colleague of Langland’s would have access to such solitary scenes. The private occasions of life and work that the narrator recounts fictionalize the medieval poet; in the Introductory Discourse, Langland becomes a character in a potential novel, watched and described by an omniscient narrator who has access to the poet’s habits of mind (“storing his memory with hints for future use”) as well as to actions externally visible (“roaming far and wide”). To a certain extent, biography always fictionalizes its subject; Whitaker’s description of Langland is in no way unique in that respect. The successive imaginations of Langland discussed in the previous chapters all partake in their own fictions, but those different depictions of Langland purport to be truthful rather than imaginative. Whitaker’s depiction of

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Langland’s processes of composition and revision may be novelistic, but Whitaker treats it as factual, not hypothetical, basing his textual analysis of Piers Plowman on this understanding of Langland’s work as a writer. In this same section of his “Introductory Discourse,” Whitaker describes Langland as revising his poem “in successive transcriptions” through his life and thereby “improving and sometimes perhaps debasing his original text.”2 In the absence of a definite biography for Langland, or of dates of composition for the different versions of Piers Plowman, Whitaker asserts that “we are at liberty to suppose that the first edition of his work appeared when he was a young man, and that he lived and continued in the habit of transcribing to the extreme old age.”3 Langland’s successive transcriptions and alterations over several years explain, for Whitaker, the variations among the three manuscripts Whitaker used. In addition to successively transcribing his poem, Langland continually modernized the mode of expression in the later copies in response to changes in the English language. By this account, the earliest stage of Piers Plowman was the most medieval, and thus the most “authentic.”4 Although Langland’s alterations to the poem are authorial, they are not all true to the poem, because Langland adapts Piers Plowman over time to match the linguistic habits of a later audience. Whitaker’s narrative of himself watching Langland make these successive revisions to the poem authorizes and undergirds his editorial decisions. The narrative can function as an editorial justification in this way because, although the witnessing that Whitaker describes is obviously false, the story itself is, in Whitaker’s opinion, true. Whitaker thus uses his own fictional narrative of Langland’s poetic process to grant himself the editorial authority to judge the relative values of the different versions of the poem. To a certain extent, every editorial theory is based on fictions both selfconscious and submerged. The editor begins with a hypothesis about the work’s composition, and then constructs a text predicated on this understanding of the textual history. In the essay “The Logic of Textual Criticism,” Lee Patterson makes a similar point about editorial practice (specifically in regard to the Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman edition). Patterson points out that the hidden first step of stemmatic editing is in defining (not just counting) errors as a way of categorizing manuscripts; to that extent it begins with a fiction of the ideal text.5 Necessary to this process is a tactical “forgetting” of the fact that the enabling narrative is itself always some sort of fiction. In a number of cases throughout the reception history and editorial history of Piers Plowman, discussions of Langland situate themselves more self-consciously and more evidently within the realm of hypothesis and fiction. These narratives attempt to explain Piers Plowman through clearly

FICTIONS OF AUTHORSHIP

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fictionalized biographies of William Langland like that in Whitaker’s Introductory Discourse. Among these self-conscious fictions are many that involve a second medieval author as well. The preceding chapters suggest how often readers of Langland correlate him to his more famous colleague, Chaucer. Critics did not always stop at comparing the two poets’ works, however; some described Langland and Chaucer in terms of an imagined personal relationship as friends or professional relationship as fellow poets. Several of the works discussed in the preceding chapters posit textual relationships between the poetry of Chaucer and that of Langland. Even some readers who do not make an explicit connection between the two authors’ works implicitly linked Chaucer and Langland as poets by virtue of identifying both of them as writers who supported John Wyclif. The tradition of identifying direct poetic indebtedness between these two medieval English authors begins in 1737, when Elizabeth Cooper argues that Langland’s portrait of Sloth is a source text for Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue.6 Thomas Warton expands the account of Chaucer’s debt to Langland further, claiming that Langland’s depiction of the friar who confesses Meed (B.3.47–50) is “plainly copied by Chaucer.”7 The idea that Langland was Chaucer’s source implicitly challenges Chaucer’s reputation as the first English poet. Some commentators were less willing to unseat Chaucer from this position. Theophilus Cibber’s disagreement with Cooper’s ordering of the poets might suggest some investment in putting Chaucer first. As evidence for the two poets’ contemporaneity, Cibber says that Langland’s style is “equally unmusical and obsolete with Chaucer’s.”8 Cibber’s terminology, that Langland and Chaucer’s styles are “equally obsolete,” does suggest that he is no fan of Chaucer, let alone Langland. Nevertheless, even though Cibber cannot spare much praise for Chaucer, he still positions Chaucer at the center of his epoch, defining Langland against his more famous contemporary. Since the Chaucerians of the fifteenth century, Chaucer had been described as unique in his era, the “first that euer elumined our language with flowers of rhetorick eloquence,” as Lydgate calls him in the Serpent of Division.9 If Chaucer based his poetry on Langland’s, Chaucer necessarily loses some of his status as the unique and foundational poet in an otherwise unpoetic age. When literary anthologies or histories of the lives of English poets include multiple medieval authors, this also reduces Chaucer’s centrality for the later understanding of medieval English literature. Readers of Piers Plowman from the eighteenth century to the present have understood Chaucer and Langland as near contemporaries. By virtue of their chronological arrangement, the historical anthologies discussed in chapter 3 necessarily juxtapose the works of two poets who wrote almost simultaneously, but the conjunction of these two medieval authors has

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particular importance because of Chaucer’s usual reputation as the sole literary highlight of an otherwise dark age. In eighteenth-century literary historiography, no other period of literary history is so identified with a single great author as the Middle Ages is with Chaucer.10 Langland is metaphorically comprehensible by comparison to Chaucer, and medieval England itself is metonymically available through the works of these two writers. In such cases, Chaucer and Langland become more clearly equals in their historical roles. Such a reduction in the perceived distance between Chaucer’s and Langland’s literary accomplishments enables fictions that reduce the interpersonal distance between these two fourteenth-century poets as well. The fact that anthologies allowed readers to encounter Langland and Chaucer together seems to have produced in readers a desire to imagine the writers themselves encountering one another socially not just textually. The foreshortening produced by historical distance, as well as an anachronistic conception of both as professional authors, makes it difficult for later critics to imagine that these two London poets never met. Consequently, a number of nineteenth-century discussions of Langland describe him in terms of his presumed relationship with Chaucer. A belief in Chaucer and Langland as social acquaintances or friends, not merely contemporaries, requires a kind of anachronistic erasure of social differences, however. If Langland really was a London chantry priest in the 1370s and 1380s, while Chaucer was customs controller and royal envoy, their meeting would be a greater historical fluke than their apparent lack of contact. The imagined interchanges between Langland and Chaucer are also influenced by the fact that each author’s individual life had itself already been made into narrative by later interpreters. As is evident from the differing biographies of Langland by Crowley and Whitaker, Langland was sufficiently enigmatic to later readers that they could project onto him any number of desired identities. Chaucer too was fictionalized by his early modern readers. Even though a number of then-recognized facts about his life were in circulation, narratives of Chaucer’s biography tended to include speculation as well as those facts established by documentary evidence. As it happens, a number of these “facts” have since been identified as false, particularly those derived from the belief that Chaucer was the author of Thomas Usk’s autobiographical Testament of Love. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the attribution to Chaucer was widely accepted, and it was influential in the development of the Chaucer biography. The first known challenge to Chaucer’s authorship of the Testament was in Wilhelm Hertzberg’s 1866 German translation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.11 The first English writer to argue that Chaucer could not have


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written the Testament was John Payne Collier, in his 1867 General Introduction [to] Seven Poetic Miscellanies.12 By the late nineteenth century, the Testament had been removed from the Chaucer canon, and its autobiographical details rightly ascribed to Usk rather than Chaucer. Nevertheless, Chaucer’s biography was still bound up with that of Usk, as Thomas Prendergast has demonstrated; in 1928, T. F. Tout identified Usk’s unfortunate end as providing an exemplum for his friend Chaucer, despite the fact that there is no evidence the two poets knew one another.13 Biographical readings of Chaucer’s works were not limited to interpretations of the Testament. At the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Furnivall compiled narratorial references, or presumed references, to love-longing throughout Chaucer’s works to form a coherent narrative of Chaucer’s romantic history, but Furnivall’s narrative was quickly debunked by T.R. Lounsbury.14 In Chaucer’s case, it is not the absence of historical documentation available in a particular era that accounts for later readers’ projections of narrative fictions about him; it is his poetic style. Chaucer’s use of winking, self-referential poetic personae led many readers to understand Chaucer himself as inhabiting the world of Chaucerian poetry. Such responses go beyond the crude autobiographical fallacy of mistaking the poetic “I” for the voice of the author (although certainly some criticism has done this as well). Readers of Chaucer have not merely read through the poetic personae to get at the poet but have projected the poet into scenes structured by fictional genres familiar from Chaucer’s own works. Readers of Piers Plowman would not be tempted to imagine its allegorical dialogues as autobiographical in any significant way, but readers of Chaucer’s works did imagine Chaucer as though he were a character in the Canterbury Tales. Thomas Speght’s 1598 Life of Chaucer includes a story that circulates with the Chaucer biography for more than two centuries. As evidence that Chaucer was educated at the Inner Temple, Speght quotes a piece of secondhand evidence: “Master Buckley did see a Record in the same house, where Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscane fryer in Fleetstreete.”15 Speght never claims to have seen this record personally, although he does cite Buckley’s report as authoritative. Although no later researcher will be able to confirm this “lost” record, the anecdote is reported and amplified by successive biographers for centuries. The biography of Chaucer in William Winstanley’s England’s Worthies (1684) reports the fine and hints at a motive for Chaucer’s violent act: Mr Buckley. . .gives an account of a Record he read in the same Inner Temple wherein Geoffry Chaucer, no friend to the covetous and leacherous Clergy-men of those times, was fined two shillings for beating of a

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Franciscan Frier in Fleet-street: a considerable Sum, since Money was so scarce in those days.16

Winstanley’s biography is an unattributed compilation of information from Speght’s Life of Chaucer, but Winstanley does weave some original commentary into Speght’s basic narrative. The relative value of two shillings and Chaucer’s characteristic animosity to “the covetous and leacherous” clergy are both Winstanley’s additions to his source. Chaucer’s disdain for the fraternal orders is evident to Winstanley from Chaucer’s poetry. Moreover, such hostility is implicitly justified, in Winstanley’s account, by the negative attributes of the “covetous and leacherous” clergy (a characterization of the religious Winstanley presumes his readers will agree with); Chaucer’s violent act is thus rendered somehow honorable, even if criminal. Winstanley is not the only later reader to add psychological detail to Speght’s alleged Inner Temple record. In 1770, Thomas Chatterton writes a version of this story that further elaborates Chaucer’s presumed motive. The friar in Chatterton’s narrative, upset by Chaucer’s anti-fraternal Plowman’s Tale, wrote “a satyric maumery” about Chaucer that was “acted at the monasteries in London, and at Woodstock before the Court.” Although the friar’s revenge for Chaucer’s slighting of his profession is literary, Chaucer’s vengeance on the friar is physical: “meeting his antagonist in Fleet Street, [Chaucer] beat him with his dagger.”17 Chatterton invents the entire story of the literary rivalry, including the extremely dubious detail of a mumming once widely performed but now presumably lost. Chatterton even expands Speght’s account of the physical assault: Chaucer now is said to have beaten his rival “with his Dagger.”18 Whether or not this qualifies as assault with a deadly weapon, Winstanley’s version suggests a greater act of violence than the unspecified beating in Speght’s narrative. The story of Chaucer beating the friar remains in circulation well into the nineteenth century, although not without a growing number of doubters. As early as 1802, Joseph Ritson refers to Chatterton’s narrative as a “hum,” particularly because of its erroneous premise that Chaucer wrote the Plowman’s Tale. Ritson also implicitly casts doubt on the claim that Chaucer was a student at the Inner Temple.19 In 1835, Charles Cowden Clarke presents the anecdote with heavy disclaimers; he says that Chaucer is “reported to have been” fined, but that “Speght gives the anecdote upon the unsatisfactory authority of a Mr. Buckley, who, he says, had seen the memorandum in the Temple records.”20 Cowden Clarke implies his disbelief in the anecdote, identifying it as hearsay, and he also rejects the related claim that Chaucer was a Wycliffite. Still, Cowden Clarke stops short of identifying Buckley’s memorandum as a fiction, leaving it for the reader to decide the veracity of the tale.


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The alleged Inner Temple record of Chaucer’s fine first enters the received Chaucer biography as evidence of his education, but it simultaneously serves to reinforce the idea of Chaucer’s anti-fraternal bias and thus his Wycliffism. As Thomas J. Heffernan has pointed out, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion of the Chaucer canon to include apocryphal works like the Wycliffite Plowman’s Tale enables this understanding of Chaucer.21 The story of Chaucer’s act of violence has a second hermeneutic context as well: its sanctioned violence implicitly absorbs Chaucer into the world of the fabliau. The biographical understanding of Chaucer seems thus to be influenced by the content and narrative form of his poetic works. The anecdote functions as the punch line to an elided “Inner Temple Student’s Tale.” Similarly, Carolyn Dinshaw has argued that the invention of a feud between Gower and Chaucer, as first hypothesized in Thomas Tyrwhitt’s 1775 edition of the Canterbury Tales and subsequently reported with varying degrees of certainty by critics through the twentieth century, masculinizes Chaucer by describing him in terms of the symbolic violence of a literary quarrel by which “the manly Chaucer was purged of Gower’s femininity.”22 In 1865, George Kingsley defends the legend of Chaucer and the friar from its growing number of detractors in terms that similarly masculinize Chaucer. Kinglsey suggests that the story should be maintained, despite its lack of evidence, both because it is traditional and because it conforms to his gendered religious biases: Tradition (when it agrees with our own views) is not lightly to be disturbed, and remembering with what more than feminine powers of invective “spiritual” men seem to be not unfrequently endowed. . .I shall continue to believe the legend for the present. If the mediæval Italians are to be believed, the cudgelling of a friar was occasionally thought necessary even by the most faithful, and I see no reason why hale Dan Chaucer should not have lost his temper on sufficient provocation.23

Kingsley describes Chaucer as having “burnt into the very soul of monasticism with the caustic of his wit.”24 Despite this, it is the friar, in Kingsley’s account, whose “powers of invective” are disparagingly gendered “feminine.” Chaucer’s satire, no less than his cudgeling of the friar, earn him the approving, masculine adjective “hale” and the honorific title “Dan.” As in so many of the actual Canterbury Tales, the male protagonist (here Chaucer himself) bests his rival in an act of violence scripted as comic or heroic, not horrifying. The Miller’s Tale ends with the young clerk Nicholas publicly shaming the injured, older carpenter whom he has already cuckolded; the Friar’s Tale ends with the corrupt summoner being

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dispatched to hell by a devil who is the summoner’s sworn brother but no friend. The biographers who report the story of Chaucer’s two shilling fine do not seem troubled by the fact that Chaucer perpetrated a violent assault. In their view, the friar clearly had it coming. Chaucer’s encounter with the friar is simply a more physical extension of the Summoner’s Tale, in which a greedy friar gets his comeuppance from a sick man who mockingly bequeaths him a fart. In the case of Langland, authorial biography is even more influenced by later poetic interpretation, because the text of Piers Plowman is arguably the only evidence from which to construct a biography.25 Beyond the extent to which Chaucer and Langland are necessarily fictionalized by their separate biographers, the two authors at times become literary characters in their own right. Moreover, these fictions often include both Chaucer and Langland. The fictional narratives linking Chaucer and Langland take two different approaches to the poets’ relationship. Either they harmonize the poets’ biographies around a shared poetic vocation and consequent friendship, or they highlight the poets’ differences in style, reading into those differences a fundamental disagreement over what English poetry should look like. Whether the stories present the two poets as colleagues or rivals, they both implicitly celebrate a heroic narrative of the creation of English literature. If the two poets were friends, they were collaborators in that process; if they were rivals, it was because they had different strategies for achieving that mutual goal. The 1803 Life of Chaucer by the novelist and political philosopher William Godwin performed the remarkable feat of extending the handful of documentary records available on Chaucer’s life so that they filled two large volumes.26 Rather remarkably, given the length of the Life, Godwin claims in his preface: “I can pretend only to have written a superficial work,” and he apologizes for “the slightness of the present work, in comparison of the magnitude of its subject.27 Godwin expanded the records of Chaucer’s life to the impressive Life, primarily by including explanations of every location or institution with which Chaucer might have come in contact. Godwin’s second strategy of amplification was his imagination of what Chaucer was likely to have said, thought, or felt in different situations. Both of Godwin’s practices of amplificatio are explained and mocked by Sir Walter Scott in his (anonymously published) “Review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer” in the Edinburgh Review for 1804.28 Scott’s review of the Life says that “Mr William Godwin’s two quarto volumes contain hardly the vestige of an authenticated fact concerning Chaucer, which is not to be found in the eight pages of Messers Thomas Tyrwhitt and George Ellis.”29 By contrasting the length of the Life with its scarcity of “authenticated fact[s],” Scott highlights the speculative character of Godwin’s biography.


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Scott further illustrates Godwin’s fictionalizing of Chaucer’s biography by quoting several passages from the Life and italicizing every instance of Godwin’s hedging modifiers, “probably” and “it is likely.”30 Godwin’s motive for writing the Life seems to have been primarily financial, rather than political; fortunately for Godwin, the Life of Chaucer (unlike most of his recent ventures) was a commercial success.31 Nevertheless, as Rowland Weston has shown, Godwin’s depiction of medieval Catholicism in the Life demonstrates the Humean evolution of his political thought after Political Justice.32 Although Godwin himself was notorious in early-nineteenth-century England for his atheism, his radicalism, and his family scandals, the politics of the Life of Chaucer are surprisingly royalist. Godwin consistently connects Chaucer to the royal court of Edward III and particularly to John of Gaunt, even in the title of his biography: Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet; including Memoirs of his Near Friend and Kinsman, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.33 John of Gaunt was only indirectly a kinsman of Geoffrey Chaucer, and only later in their lives. Gaunt’s third wife, Katherine Swinford, was the sister of Geoffrey Chaucer’s wife Philippa (née Roet). Although Swinford had long been Gaunt’s mistress, the two were not married until 1396, well into Chaucer’s poetic career. The connection between Chaucer and the royal family is emphasized visually by the frontispieces that precede the first edition’s two volumes: portraits of Geoffey Chaucer and John of Gaunt, respectively. Godwin’s presentation of Chaucer frames the poet in a courtly setting and uses hypothetical analysis to imagine Chaucer’s life in that context. Godwin also gives a biography of Langland in his Life of Chaucer, although admittedly a far less extensive biography than he presents for Chaucer. In his biography of Langland, Godwin follows the same process of fictionalizing to explain Langland’s feelings as well as others’ responses to Piers Plowman. Godwin recognizes but refutes the claim of Langland’s heterodoxy; Langland was, he writes, “on the whole probably a sound Catholic, and would have felt great indignation and horror at the peremptory proceedings of Wickliffe and his followers.”34 Godwin explains that Langland’s reputation has been bound up with that of the fourteenthcentury Wycliffites because of their adoption of his poem, not because of anything inherent in the poet’s sympathies: “the fate of his poetry became united with the fate of the Lollards. With them his work was a favourite companion and relaxation.”35 Like Whitaker, but a decade earlier, Godwin differentiates between Langland’s own religious sentiment and that ascribed to him by later readers. In a sad irony of reception, as Godwin tells it, “the Catholics regarded Langland with horror; if the author had lived to a later period, they would probably, in spite of the eminence of his attainments, have, without

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compunction, consigned him to the flames.”36 Godwin dates Piers Plowman between 1347 and 1355, a half century before the 1401 proclamation De Hæretico Comburendo would lead to the burning of those judged heretical.37 Of course, there is no evidence of the Catholic outrage and hostility that Langland allegedly encountered. Despite his own numerous unsubstantiated hypotheses, Godwin is quick to criticize other literary historians’ poorly grounded claims about Langland’s place in literary history. Godwin explains that the sixteenth-century Protestants favored Piers Plowman, and that they simultaneously sought to elevate Chaucer’s reputation “by representing him, with or without the strictness of evidence, as the fellowlabourer of Langland.”38 Despite the hypocrisy of his disdain for assertions made “without the strictness of evidence,” Godwin is correct in this case; the attribution of the Plowman’s Tale to Chaucer was undoubtedly influenced by a desire to cast Chaucer as a proto-Protestant poet (as Langland was considered to be). Godwin recognizes that sixteenth-century readers of Piers Plowman and of Chaucer’s poetry let their desires shape their literary interpretations. Godwin’s caution about interpreting Chaucer’s theology through an analysis of works he may not have written is reported by Cowden Clarke, who does not contradict Godwin’s evidence but nevertheless questions his conclusions. In his own assessment of Chaucer’s attitude toward members of the clergy, Cowden Clarke points out that Chaucer was not uniformly anticlerical, as “his innate love of justice and liberality. . .would not suffer him to become an undiscriminating and malignant opposer,” and that Chaucer wrote eloquently of the honest Parson in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales.39 Cowden Clarke cites Chaucer’s supposed authorship of the Plowman’s Tale and Jack Upland as evidence that the poet was a critic of clerical corruption, but adds a note admitting that “Mr. Godwin is of the opinion that these two treatises were not written by Chaucer.”40 Cowden Clarke carefully locates his belief that Chaucer strongly opposed clerical corruption between the opinions of those who consider Chaucer a proto-Protestant, and the arguments of those who would deny his criticism of the clergy by eliminating anticlerical works from the Chaucer canon. Cowden Clarke alleges that the arguments against Chaucer’s authorship of the Plowman’s Tale and Jack Upland are driven by ideological bias rather than textual evidence. He notes that [t]here have not been wanting partisans of Chaucer, who either from affected zeal for his reputation or from religious partisanship, have ventured to question the fact of his being author of “Jack Upland” and of “The Plowman’s Tale”; could such persons, however, reduce their speculation to a matter of certainty, they would but leave the opinions of the poet


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unchanged; for there is abundant proof remaining scattered through various productions, unquestionably his writing, which stamp him the enemy of corrupt priestcraft, and the friend of ecclesiastical regeneration.41

Chaucer’s works show a willingness to highlight clerical corruption and a desire for the reform of abuses in the church, but Cowden Clarke stops short of claiming that Chaucer was a Wycliffite. He particularly disputes John Foxe’s attempts to “class Chaucer among doctrinal reformers.”42 Still, he concedes that Chaucer “essentially helped forward the cause of the Reformation by his formidable attacks upon the weak and corrupt branches of the ecclesiastical government.”43 Cowden Clarke is, to a certain extent, having it both ways: he knows that Chaucer was not literally an agent of theological reformation, but he presents Chaucer as an ally of this cause, even as he repudiates those who hold either of the extreme positions in this debate. Discussions about the authenticity of various Chaucerian (or nonChaucerian) works were tied up in disagreements about Chaucer’s biography. Like the early scholarship on Langland, then, the nineteenth-century literary criticism of Chaucer does not fully differentiate textual studies from personality studies. Thus, the medieval author is himself a kind of character whose motives must be understood to tell the story of literary history. Given the fundamental circularity of textual analysis that is based on biographical speculation that is itself based on an author’s literary texts, later readers’ own ideologies repeatedly come to the fore in such analyses. Godwin’s biographical narrative admittedly contains conjectural, and thus fictional, details. It therefore is particularly obvious in its manifestation of its author’s personal biases. Godwin reveals the power of his interpretive desires in a series of conflicting statements about the relationship between Chaucer and Langland. Specifically, his biographies evince a reluctance to prioritize Langland ahead of Chaucer in some area, even as he works to elevate Langland’s reputation. In considering whether one poet influenced the other, Godwin says that “Chaucer has been supposed to have had [the friar’s confession of Meed] in his eye in his Sompnoures Tale.”44 Godwin’s footnote cites Warton’s History of English Poetry on this attribution, and Warton does indeed make this claim. Godwin’s phrasing, that “Chaucer. . .had this passage in his eye,” does not follow Warton’s, however. Instead, it echoes the phrasing Cooper uses in citing Langland’s portrait of Sloth as Chaucer’s model for the Pardoner’s Prologue. It seems likely that Godwin knew Cooper’s anthology as well as Whitaker’s, and that, even though he cites only one of them, he had both in mind (or in his eye), when he reports the hypothesis that Chaucer copied Langland.45

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Although Godwin repeats the claim that Langland was a source for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he does not let this claim imply Langland’s unquestioned poetic priority. When Langland wrote Piers Plowman, Godwin asserts, “Chaucer was already a poet,” having written the Court of Love and perhaps having begun Troilus and Criseyde.46 Langland composition of Piers Plowman thus overlaps with the period of Chaucer’s earliest poetry, and precedes the composition of Chaucer’s best-known works. During this earliest period of English literature, Langland was as important a figure as Chaucer in literary history, according to this chronology. Godwin acknowledges that Langland’s poetry is less attractive to later readers than is Chaucer’s, and he suggests that the modern preference for Chaucer’s rhyming verse over Langland’s alliterative verse might be due merely to “the habit to which our ears are formed,” and that nineteenthcentury readers might therefore undervalue Langland’s poetic art. If so, “[a]t the period when Langland’s poem was yet new to the ears of his countrymen, he might place himself proudly upon an equality with his more famous and fortunate contemporary.”47 Godwin does not directly assert that Langland did take such pride, but he implies that Chaucer’s fame somehow preceded his major poetry and thus was current at the time Langland composed Piers Plowman, for Langland could only take pride in matching Chaucer’s ability if he knew who Chaucer was. Soon after the appearance of Piers Plowman, Chaucer would go on to finish Troilus and Criseyde and write his other major works, according to Godwin’s chronology. Langland would then lose his status as Chaucer’s equal. As Godwin’s discussion of Langland’s relationship to Chaucer unfolds, Godwin opposes Warton’s and Cooper’s assertions of poetic imitation, but without acknowledging that he has previously implied his agreement with their claims. Godwin cites as a “singularity” in the histories of these two poetic contemporaries that “[t]hey were neither of them, so far as we can judge from the most exact adjustments of chronology, indebted to the other for the commencements and hints of genius.”48 In a Romantic image of poetic composition, he imagines Chaucer and Langland in their separate experiences of solitary composition, “each in his sequestered nook, unconscious of each other’s existence, wrapt in thoughts of inspiration.”49 Godwin here anticipates Whitaker in using Romantic imagery in describing an imagined scene of medieval poetic composition. Godwin’s assertion that the two authors did not know of one another is based on “adjustments of chronology,” not on an assessment of the content of their works. Perhaps this accounts for Godwin’s unacknowledged reversal of his own prior implication that Chaucer had borrowed from Langland. The claim that the two were “unconscious of each other’s existence” also undermines Langland’s earlier asserted bragging rights for matching the


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skills of his “more famous and fortunate contemporary.”50 Godwin’s eventual conclusion that the two writers were unaware of one another might also be related to his notion that the appearance of two great authors simultaneously was due to a set of favorable external conditions. Godwin uses a peculiar horticultural metaphor to explain this phenomenon: “They were the growth of a country widely manured with literature, impregnated with the seeds of genius, and bursting at once in different parts of its surface into poetic life.”51 Godwin’s apparently contradictory statements about Chaucer’s fame and Langland’s influence on Chaucer seem influenced by his habit of writing the characters of the Life into novelistic scenes. From recorded facts and from Chaucerian and pseudo-Chaucerian poems taken as biographical fact, Godwin produces a biography rich in imagined narrative detail, including details even of things that he reports as not having happened. Godwin regrets the likelihood that Chaucer and Langland probably did not know one another, for They would have been friends in as eminent a degree, as Chaucer and Gower were. Langland, it may be, perished unknown and uncountenanced, discouraged and depressed by the neglect he was fated to endure. Chaucer would have brought him from his retreat, have introduced him to the palaces of the great, and have plentifully supplied him with the means of improvement, and with the honourable support and honest pleasure which result to a man of ardent and aspiring spirit when the faces of his fellow beings are turned upon him with a confession of his worth. But England was not permitted to be blest with the effusions of Langland’s riper and more cultivated mind.52

In this complex passage, Godwin slips between inferences about events believes to have happened (“. . .it may be. . .”) and the imagination of those he knows not to have happened. The relationship between Chaucer and Langland is expressed in the past conditional (“Chaucer would have. . .”) but the effusion of detail threatens to overwhelm the contrafactual nature of Chaucer’s reported actions. Godwin’s desire for Chaucer and Langland to have known one another is apparent in his rhetoric. Godwin is sure that the two poets would have formed a close friendship, and that Chaucer would have helped Langland gain some needed financial support. In the “neglect” Langland endured and the failure of his contemporaries to manifest their “confession of his worth,” Godwin may have seen something of his own career. By 1803, Godwin faced increasing financial difficulties; his later writings were not received with as much favor as his earlier Caleb Williams and Political Justice, and Godwin was increasingly forced to borrow to support his family.53

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Godwin’s desire for Langland to have experienced the “pleasure which result to a man of ardent and aspiring spirit when the faces of his fellow beings are turned upon him with a confession of his worth” sounds suspiciously like his own nostalgia for the literary prestige he once enjoyed. Whether or not Godwin identifies with Langland, he certainly seems invested in imagining personal friendships among Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, the three well-known writers of fourteenth-century England, friendships that would have blessed England with a richer corpus of medieval literature. In Godwin’s fantasy, the friendship between Chaucer and Langland would benefit the nation not just the two poets. Literary history has here a nationalist component; the poetic record is the property of all of England. Responding in 1992 to almost two centuries of disapproving comments about Godwin’s fictionalized conclusions about Chaucer’s life, Vincent DiMarco asserts that “Godwin. . .believed he was writing literary history, not legend.”54 This may be true in general for Godwin’s imagination of scenes from Chaucer’s life, but it is not true in the case of Godwin’s description of Chaucer’s missed opportunity to form a friendship with Langland. In his imagination of what would have happened in the hypothetical case of their forming a relationship, Godwin explicitly concedes that he is operating in the realm of fantasy. Interestingly, the fiction Godwin constructs about this friendship is articulated in terms more certain than those Godwin uses for his presumptions about the historical events he describes (many of which are imagined, but which Godwin does believe to have happened). When Godwin writes imaginative scenes from “literary history, not legend,” he frames his conclusions with defensive iterations of “perhaps,” and “it may be.” When Godwin writes “legend,” imagining the consequences of a purely and admittedly fictional relationship between Chaucer and Langland, he states his conclusions in a tone of certainty: “they would have been friends”; “Chaucer would have brought him from his retreat.” Despite Sir Walter Scott’s disapproval of this speculative historiography, Godwin himself did not deny the imaginative nature of much of the material in the Life. On the contrary, he identifies its mixture of the documentary and the novelistic as an important generic innovation: [i]t was my purpose to produce a work of a new species. Antiquities have too generally been regarded as the province of men of cold tempers and sterile imaginations.. . .It was my wish, had my power held equal pace with my strong inclination, to carry the workings of fancy and the spirit of philosophy into the investigation of ages past. I was anxious to rescue for a moment the illustrious dead from the jaws of the grave, to make them pass in review before me, to question their spirits and record their answers.55


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Godwin casts himself as a “master of the ceremonies,” introducing and recording but not actually writing the sentiments of these medieval ghosts.56 This practice too comes in for criticism in Sir Walter Scott’s review. Scott says of Godwin, “[i]t seems to have been his rule, that if it be difficult to think like our ancestors, it is very easy to make them think like ourselves.”57 A curious reader could already have found the biographical details of Chaucer’s life in the “Life” prefaced to the 1721 Urry edition of Chaucer’s Works, in the preface to Tyrwhitt’s Canterbury Tales or in Warton’s History of English Poetry. Godwin vivifies the biography by writing Chaucer’s life in the third person omniscient narratorial voice typical of the novel, but in his preface to the Life, Godwin describes himself as amanuensis not author. Godwin therefore denies his authorial agency where it is most obvious, in his “recording” of the sentiments of those long dead. Godwin’s literary-biographical practice anticipates that of Walter Savage Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen was first published in 1824, twenty-one years after the first edition of Godwin’s Life. Among Landor’s Imaginary Conversations was one among Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer. Although within Landor’s “Conversation of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarca” the Chaucer character tells a lengthy tale of Sir Magnus Lucy that is entirely un-Chaucerian in its style, the three poets’ initial discussion comparing cities in England and Italy does attempt to reflect accurately the national differences in medieval architecture and urban development.58 Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, like Godwin’s Life of Chaucer, mixes the biographical with the literary, although Landor’s hybrid genre is rather more fictional than Godwin’s. Landor and Godwin both imagine Chaucer in dialogue with his poetic contemporaries, but they do so with different levels of historical justification. Chaucer did know the works of Boccaccio and Petrarch: he cites Petrarch explicitly in the Clerk’s Tale, and he may even have known that the originator of the story of patient Griselda was Boccaccio.59 However, there is no evidence that Chaucer actually met either of the two Italian authors, and Chaucer’s personal, rather than textual, interaction with his Italian contemporaries was an open question in the nineteenth century. Godwin asserts that Chaucer must have met Petrarch, contradicting the doubt Tyrwhitt had already cast on this biographical tradition. Godwin’s Life even includes an imagined dialogue between Petrarch and Chaucer when Chaucer was in Italy.60 On the other hand, Godwin believes that Chaucer and Langland neither met nor knew one another’s work; his proposed friendship between Chaucer and Langland is thus even more “imaginary” than Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Such narratives imagining relationships between Chaucer and Langland may seem to cross the boundary of literary criticism and enter into the

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world of fiction writing, but there are also modern examples of scholarship juxtaposing the two writers’ biographies. J. A. W. Bennett links the historical Chaucer and Langland in his 1969 essay “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” but he does so defensively, aware that the two poets have come to occupy different conceptual spheres in the twentieth-century understanding of Middle English literature. Bennett therefore imagines the criticism of his argument that Chaucer had read Piers Plowman: “But how, it may be said, can the Chaucer ‘that God of Loves servantz serve’ sort with the poet of Dowel, Dobet, Dobest? The gap is not so great as appears at first sight.”61 Bennett’s essay reunites the literary reputations of these two authors, reversing the “traditional assumption that in the last analysis Langland remains a preacher, Chaucer a poet of creative imagination,” an assumption that dates back to sixteenth-century responses to the two poets’ works.62 As Bennett suggests, it is difficult for critics who begin with the premise that the two authors pursued distinct vocations to imagine textual influence in either direction. Bennett’s reconception of the field of Middle English literature in some ways returns to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century presumptions that Chaucer and Langland must have known one another. Bennett’s view is no doubt more carefully argued, and it is predicated on both a more accurate Chaucer biography and a much narrowed canon of Chaucerian works. Nevertheless, Bennett cannot quite avoid fictionalizing the two poets. If Langland did live on Cornhill, as Piers Plowman implies, while Chaucer lived over Aldgate and worked at Westminster, [t]hey must have passed each other in the street. . .perhaps as Chaucer was hurrying back from the office via Paternoster Row, with his second-hand torn copy of Macrobius (Parliament of Fowls, 110) or a remainder volume of the old-fashioned tail-rhyme romances that he was to parody in Sir Thopas; perhaps with Piers Plowman itself.63

Bennett’s factual geography of where booksellers were located in medieval London and his discussion of who provided the market for the different volumes available at such shops gives way to rhapsodic imaginings of Chaucer encountering Piers Plowman in such a venue: “how easily might it have caught Chaucer’s eye!”64 Bennett’s thematic and textual evidence of the possible links between Chaucer and Langland are provocative; the fact that the two men are likely to have walked on the same city street is decidedly less compelling as an argument that they knew one another’s works. Bennett, like Godwin, does not assert that the two were friends, or even that they had read one another’s poems, but he clearly seems attracted by the possibility.


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Godwin’s fantasy of the friendship that Langland and Chaucer should have had (but did not) precedes by a century the most extensive fictional account of the two poets as friends, that given in Florence Converse’s widely distributed juvenile novel Long Will.65 The majority of Converse’s novel concerns the ideological relationship between Piers Plowman and the Rising of 1381. In her account, the self-serving Jack Straw and Wat Tyler exploit Langland’s essentially socialist message for their own ends. She also spends much of the novel developing the romantic relationship between Langland’s daughter Calote and the chivalrous squire Stephen Fitzwarine. The initial relationship in Long Will, and one to which it recurs periodically, is, however, the personal and professional relationship between Langland and Chaucer. In the novel’s opening scene, “one, russet-clad” lies on a hilltop, composing alliterative verse: “‘’Twas on a May morning, on the Ma’vern Hills,’ whispered the singer, ‘on the Ma’vern Hills’; and he fell in a dream.”66 Immediately, “a gay lad in scarlet hosen and a green short coat” appears; the first young man watches him approach: “The dreamer moved no whit, but waited, level-eyed.”67 The appellation “dreamer” for the russet-clad youth, and the sudden appearance of a mysterious but attractive new character, locate the novel within the medieval tradition of the dream vision. Initially, the encounter between the two young men seems to take place in a conventional literary dream, but the dream into which the “one, russetclad” falls must be rather a daydream than a sleeping dream. The ensuing dialogue soon makes it apparent that both characters are equally real and awake. A reader of Converse’s novel who was also aware of medieval generic conventions might expect the “gay lad” (a young Geoffrey Chaucer, as it turns out) to be an authoritative figure, one who will teach or lead the dreamer (later identified as “Long Will” Langland). Although he is the younger of the two, Chaucer does presume a kind of authority in their dialogue. When Langland answers a question about his profession with “I know not, yet,” Chaucer, who has previously mentioned his composition of a rondel, replies: “Thou long brown man, it may be thou’rt a poet.”68 Chaucer is correct, for Langland has already begun his work on Piers Plowman. When Langland recites for Chaucer the opening lines of his Prologue, the courtly Chaucer responds with horror: “No, no! not thus, not thus!” cried out the child on a sudden; “never thus! An thou come to court they’ll not hearken thy long slow measures. Thou shalt make thy verses the French way with rhyme. Needs must thou learn this manner of the French ere thou come to court.”69

Predictably, Langland rejects Chaucer’s belief that the court is the only milieu for poetry.70 He tells Chaucer sternly that “There be a many souls

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in England that know not such light songs” as Chaucer’s love lyrics.71 In the opening pages of Long Will, Converse establishes the fundamental social difference between Langland’s verse, identified by its old-fashioned alliteration and its serious content, and Chaucer’s fashionable, French, and, above all, courtly verse. Long Will presents the two poets as disapproving of one another’s professional choices. Chaucer does say that he enjoys Langland’s “old fashion of singing,” but because he uses poetry as a means to courtly patronage, he follows the current taste for French rhyme.72 As he is presented in the novel, Langland is familiar with courtly alliterative verse, if not necessarily with French-style rhymed verse. During the course of the narrative, the young Langland’s mentor, Brother Owyn, is revealed to be the Gawainpoet, and all four of his works are alluded to in the text. The monks say that no man might so tell the stormy mishap of Jonah [Patience], except he had sailed the sea; and no man might so sing Belshazzar’s Feast [Cleanness], except he had dined in a king’s palace; and when they had heard the tale of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, they averred that haply Brother Owyn came of Arthur’s family. . .But the tale that Brother Owyn loved best [elsewhere in the novel revealed to be Pearl] he had not yet sung to the brethren.73

Converse’s Langland rejects both courtly models, Chaucer’s and that of the former knight Brother Owyn, in favor of his own simpler, non-stanzaic, unrhymed alliteration. Converse presents Langland’s verse form as a conscious choice, one based on a proto-socialist ethic rather than a courtly aesthetic. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers of medieval literature knew that alliteration characterized English poetry before rhyme, but Langland’s use of alliterative verse could still be understood in two different ways: as a regional survival or a conscious revival. An eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury reader who analyzed Langland’s alliteration as evidence for the inherent conservatism of northern poetry would see Langland as subservient to literary history. As noted in chapter 3, Elizabeth Cooper gives such an analysis. Since, in her literary chronology, “the worst Writer, after Chaucer, had some regard to Measure, and never neglected Rhymes,” Langland’s unrhymed, unmetrical verse proves in itself that Langland preceded Chaucer.74 One could also see Langland as a shaper of, not simply shaped by, literary history if one understood him to have chosen his alliterative form intentionally. A number of later commentators did offer this different, and more politically charged, account. In this analysis, Langland was familiar with rhymed verse, perhaps even with Chaucer’s verse, for, in Godwin’s words, “Chaucer was already a poet.”75 Langland nevertheless consciously, and thus politically, chose not to adopt the French, courtly


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form but to revive the native form. This is the critical tradition from which Converse draws her portrait of Langland as mildly scornful of, but also himself mocked by, the courtly Chaucer. An early formulation of the argument that Langland was aware of, but rejected, Chaucer’s courtly style appears in the second edition of Thomas Warton’s Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1762). Warton asserts that some of Chaucer’s and Gower’s works were completed (and, he presumes, available to Langland) before the composition of Piers Plowman, but Langland decided not to follow those models.76 Langland’s verse is “rougher” than Chaucer’s or Gower’s, because Langland preferred the native English tradition to his contemporaries’ more international style: the example of Gower and Chaucer, who sought to reform the roughness of their native tongue, by naturalizing many new words from the Latin, French, and Italian, and who introduced the seven-lined stanza, from Petrarch and Dante, into our poetry, had little influence upon Longland, who chose rather to go back to the Saxon models, both for language and form of verse.77

Warton recognizes that modern English poetry derives from the internationalism of Gower’s and Chaucer’s courtly verse. He speaks of them as reforming “their native tongue” in such a way that they influenced “our poetry.” Langland’s preference for the native “Saxon models” was therefore a conscious regression from the innovations of his contemporaries; if Langland knew of the new London poetry, he “chose rather to go back” to a native alliterative form and diction. Langland was not necessarily a diehard nativist in Warton’s account, however. Warton concedes that Langland “might have settled on his plan of stile and versification before he saw any of their poems.”78 Even if Langland did not write alliterative verse directly in reaction to his contemporaries’ works, Warton describes Langland’s diction and meter as a choice, a “plan” Langland had to “[settle] on.” If Langland chose his poem’s form and diction even before reading Chaucer’s poetry or Gower’s, he must have at least considered other options. The possibility that Langland intentionally opposed Chaucer’s poetic model demonstrates the interpretive duality of Chaucer’s long-standing identity as the poet who enhanced the English language through his laureate style.79 Chaucer’s use of words derived from French made his language more comprehensible to postmedieval readers, but it also made his language less English. In his 1787 letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine advocating a new edition of Piers Plowman (discussed in chapter 4), Thomas Holt White sums up the respective merits of the two medieval poets: Though Langlande will by no means bear a comparison with Chaucer for wit, pleasantry, or discrimination of character, yet the enquirer into the

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origin of our language will find in him a greater fund of materials to elucidate the progress of the Saxon tongue, which Chaucer is accused of vitiating with discordant Gallicisms.80

It is not clear if Holt White means to suggest that Langland himself accused Chaucer of “vitiating [the language] with discordant Gallicisms” or if he means to describe contemporary critics of Chaucer. The phrase is quite strong, relative to the usual eighteenth-century interpretations of Chaucer, even those by partisans of Langland. In fact, the complaint about Chaucer’s language seems to be more about the status of all things French than it is about Chaucer. Holt White’s letter is dated November 12, four months after the storming of the Bastille. Although a dichotomy between the French and the English had long been part of the construction of an English national identity, in 1789 and later, such a distancing of Gallicisms of all kinds had a political currency.81 Chaucer’s use of “discordant” French loan words “vitiat[ed]” the English language, according to Holt White and to the unnamed accuser of Chaucer to whom he alludes. Significantly, Holt White uses the first-person possessive pronoun in reference to Langland’s language, whereas Warton had used it for Chaucer’s. Langland’s vocabulary and alliterative style “elucidate the progress” of “our Saxon tongue,” the language native to England prior to its French corruption. Robert Henry’s History of Britain, first published in 1789, also discusses Langland’s verse form in terms of Germanic language and poetics, but Henry seems uncertain whether alliterative poetry was still current in Langland’s time or whether Langland intentionally revived it. Henry first mentions the alliteration of “the visions of Pierce Plowman,” in order to demonstrate the claim that “[t]his mode of versification continued to be occasionally used by the poets of England long after” the Anglo-Saxon period.82 Later, Henry juxtaposes Langland’s alliterative form with the rhymed, metrical romances of the fourteenth century: [a]bout the middle of that century an attempt was made to revive, or at least to imitate the alliterative poetry of the Anglo-Saxons without rhyme, by Robert Langlande, a secular priest of Oxford, in his famous allegorical satire against persons of all professions, called The Vision of Pierce Plowman.83

In Henry’s latter formulation, Langland is made a more conscious poetic agent, choosing to revive or imitate an archaic form (unrhymed alliterative verse) rather than to use a more current form (rhymed, metrical verse), and choosing also to avoid the subject matter of contemporary “romances of chivalry.”84


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Henry’s implication of a nationalism in Langland’s poetics and subject matter is proposed more explicitly by Isaac D’Israeli half a century later. When D’Israeli first describes the style of Piers Plowman, he seems to subjugate it to “the polished poems of Gower and Chaucer; the work bears no trace of their manner, nor of their refinement, nor of their versification.”85 Like Henry, D’Israeli is uncertain whether Langland chose his form or whether it was a product of geography: Either his labor was concluded ere the writings of the court poets had travelled to our obscure country priest in his seclusion in a distant county, or else he disdained their exotic fancies, their Latinisms, their Gallicisms, and their Italianisms, and their trivial rhymes.86

If Langland repudiated foreign elements, it was a rejection of Italian as well as French influences in D’Israeli’s account. His anti-Continental nationalism is more generalized than the simple British vs. French dichotomy common during the Napoleonic era. For D’Israeli, it is equally likely that the influence of court poetry traveled slowly or that its foreign frivolity and “exotic fancies” rendered it beneath the notice of an “obscure country priest.”87 D’Israeli mentions the courtly “refinement” and “versification” of Chaucer and Gower, only to redefine their “polished poems” as “trivial rhymes.” The reason for Langland’s more traditional verse does not ultimately matter to D’Israeli; both the geographic and the intentional explanations for the poetic style of Piers Plowman can be made to prove Langland’s nationalism, “for the writer of the Visions concerning Piers Ploughman was strictly a national poet” whose poem demonstrates “the energy of his Anglo-Saxon genius.”88 D’Israeli leaves the question of motive open, but he strongly implies that Langland consciously and patriotically chose an Anglo-Saxon form for Piers Plowman, “scorning the subjection of rhyme.” Florence Converse’s fictional character Long Will, like the Langlands described by Holt White, Henry, and D’Israeli, consciously rejects both the form and content of metrical romance, but then struggles to imagine his poetic vocation outside of that model. Long Will knows that one sort of poet “abideth in a king’s palace; he is a jongleur, and deviseth merry tales of love, and adventure of war, to please the ladies in hall,” but, Will concludes, “I am not of these.”89 Holt White’s disapproval of “discordant Gallicisms” and Henry’s suggestion that Langland revived an obsolete Anglo-Saxon form imply that Langland was motivated by nativism, even nationalism.90 Henry’s contrast between Langland’s estates satire and courtly chivalric romance might underlie Converse’s portrait of Long Will consciously rejecting an identity as a jongleur at court.

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In her novel’s opening scene, Converse presents Chaucer and Langland as disagreeing about the appropriate forms and topics for poetry. Despite their literary differences, Converse imagines the two men as bound together by their shared identity as poets. When they meet at young King Richard’s court later in the novel, Chaucer says to Long Will: “Thou and I are old friends”; he then “kissed Will Langland o’ both cheeks.”91 Near the end of the novel, when the disappointed rebels turn on London’s Flemish weavers, Converse’s Chaucer protects Langland from the mob, invoking their brotherhood as poets. Even in this moment of amity, Converse shows that professional differences divide Chaucer and Langland. While Long Will despairs over his inadvertent role in the bloody Rising and its horrific consequences for the innocent Flemings, Chaucer admits to being impressed, and even envious of the impact Will’s poem has had on its audience, even though that impact drove the rebels beyond a quest for social justice to a murderous frenzy: “I have not yet stirred men so deep.” Will’s answer, “I am I, and thou art thou,” preserves the moral authority Long Will establishes in their first meeting, when he rejects the idea of composing poetry as mere entertainment for lords and ladies.92 Throughout Long Will, Converse depicts Langland as both poetically and personally acquainted with Chaucer but scornful of the apolitical frivolity of the courtly tradition. In this, she looks back to a nineteenthcentury critical tradition that sought to explain how a poet who must have been aware of Chaucer could so thoroughly ignore Chaucer’s obviously superior model.93 In the logic of nineteenth-century literary biographies, if Langland could have followed Chaucer but refused to, he must have done so out of a desire to distance himself from the internationalism and lightness of courtly versification. Such criticism presumes from Chaucer’s later canonization that he enjoyed similar fame and poetic prestige in his own day, although there is no surviving evidence of a wide circulation of Chaucer’s works or name within his lifetime. The early-nineteenth-century narratives of Langland’s life by Godwin and others are less self-consciously fictional than Converse’s early-twentiethcentury novel, but they all describe Langland in terms of an imagined relationship with Chaucer. Whether that imaginary relationship is one of collegial support or of conflicting attitudes toward French diction and versification, it has a nationalist import. Either Langland’s relationship with Chaucer is a means of elevating the English literary tradition, and thus benefiting the nation, or a patriotic Langland scorned Chaucer’s abandonment of a true English language and verse form in favor of French innovations. Biographical fictions that juxtapose Chaucer and Langland do so in the context of a larger conception of Englishness both synchronically and diachronically. England’s present literature and language derive from their


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medieval forerunners, so Langland and Chaucer were instrumental in defining even modern Englishness. At the same time, Langland’s native style valorized Englishness in explicit contrast with French poetic forms. Langland’s role in both paradigms links him to nineteenth-century ideologies of English identity. In these early-nineteenth-century narratives about his life and poetry, Langland was a nationalist before his time. In the nineteenth-century responses to Langland and his poem, as in the sixteenth-century responses, early modern ideologies are projected back into the fourteenth century. The reception history of Piers Plowman thus provides a lens through which one can view the cultural concerns of later readers as they imaginatively project their own worlds backwards in history. When later readers reimagine Langland in terms of their contemporary social conflicts, sometimes they do so tendentiously, as the sixteenthcentury reformers do in seeking to publicize a native, English, premodern history of Protestantism; sometimes, however, they seem to do so unwittingly, like the nineteenth-century linguists who can imagine only antiFrench sentiment as the motivation for Langland’s “choice” of poetic dialect. Readers’ responses to texts are always shaped by their own beliefs and interests, of course, but as the less widely read of the two canonical medieval authors, and as an author whose biography is unknown, Langland seems to attract more ex post facto theorizing than his contemporary, Chaucer. Langland’s identity as a writer from England’s past is ideologically useful for later readers in different ways, but so too is the fact that he remains something of a cipher. On that nearly blank slate, much can be written. In analyzing the early modern uses to which Piers Plowman was put, I do not mean to imply that current readers of the poem are any less invested in using it for their own ends. The political purposes of modern readers are perhaps limited to academic, rather than national or ecclesiastical, politics. Langland’s poem has more readers now than at any time since the late fourteenth century, given its place in the Middle English canon as taught in universities.94 That academic readership may be continue to expand, as scholars of Langland build up the professional structures that readers of Chaucer have long had: single-author journals, conferences, and organizations: the first volume of YLS was published in 1987; the 1993 International Langland Conference was followed by others in 1999, 2003, and 2007 under the name International Piers Plowman Conference. The conference and journal both operate under the auspices of the International Piers Plowman Society. The growing importance of Piers Plowman in the field of Middle English studies is not without its detractors. Seth Lerer argues that recent work in medieval literary studies includes “the attempt to displace Chaucer with

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Langland in the medieval canon and curriculum.”95 Lerer’s claim that there is a growing threat to Chaucer’s centrality may be exaggerated. The essay he cites in evidence of this claim is Frank Grady’s “Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame.”96 In that article, Grady argues that “the conventional description of [Chaucer’s literary] inheritance ought to be amended” to include Langland as well as the Latin, French, and Italian poems usually cited.97 If Grady attempts to displace anyone with Langland, it seems to be Dante, more than Chaucer. Although Lerer may overestimate the extent of the challenge that Langland studies poses to Chaucer studies, he is correct that research on Langland has, over the past half century, gained greater prominence in the field of medieval English literature. It is too early to tell what Langland’s identity will prove to be in the coming century, and it will take later scholars to analyze the ways that our current ideologies, concerns, and desires shape our reading of Piers Plowman. For a man who may not have existed, at least not under that name, William Langland has had many identities in the 600 years since his composition and revisions of his great poem. Those different identities may not be accurate to the biography of whoever wrote Piers Plowman, but they are not “wrong,” insofar as they do convey some truths about the way readers project their own interests onto literary texts. The many Langlands of this study may have little in common with the real, historical William Langland, but they are in some way necessary. Readers have no choice but to recreate a work as they read it, and therefore, whether explicitly or not, to fictionalize its author. Despite, or more likely because of, Langland’s mysterious history, he is an important figure in the literary histories written by early modern readers, and he remains a fascinating object of study, whoever he was.

NOTES

Introduction Langland as an Early Modern Author 1. A counterargument of sorts can be found in the staging theories described by Jan Kott in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday and Co, Inc., 1964). 2. Lotte Hellinga, Caxton in Focus: The Beginning of Printing in England (London: The British Library, 1982), 101. Caxton himself translated about twenty of the works he printed; he and Colard Manson (his partner in Bruges) were the only fifteenth-century printers to do their own translations; British Library Reference Division, William Caxton: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Quincentenary of the Introduction of Printing into England (London: British Library, 1976), 10–11. William Kuskin argues that in the fifteenth century a link develops between “the material production of goods [i.e., English printed books] and the symbolic production of cultural identity.” William Kuskin, “ ‘Onely imagined’: Vernacular Community and the English Press,” in Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, ed. Kuskin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 200. 3. Tim William Machan, “Early Modern Middle English,” in Caxton’s Trace, ed. Kuskin, 300. 4. On Middle English alliterative poetry, see David Lawton, ed., Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982). Lawton’s “Note on Primary Sources,” 155–159, lists editions and manuscripts of the known texts in this literary tradition. 5. There is abundant scholarship in each of these areas, more than is useful to list here. Some important examples in each of the three areas (sequentially) are: E. Talbot Donaldson, “MSS R and F in the B-Tradition of Piers Plowman,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 39 (1955): 177–212; Lawrence Warner, “The Ur-B Piers Plowman and the Earliest Production of C and B,” YLS 16 (2002): 3–39; A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer, Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of the Z-Text in Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 851 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994); Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 195–202; Anne Middleton, “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background, 101–123; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven

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6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427,” New Medieval Literature 1 (1997): 59–83. Three manuscripts of the A text (sigils T, Z, and V), five manuscripts of the B text (sigils W, C, L, R, and F), and ten manuscripts of the C text (sigils X, I, H, P2, P, E, V, M, K, and G) are dated to the late fourteenth century or the turn of the fifteenth century. Ralph Hanna III, William Langland (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993), 38–42. To put this in context, eleven of the eighteen surviving full copies of the C text of the poem, nine of the sixteen surviving copies of the B text, and ten of the nineteen surviving copies of the A text are from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Collectively, about 57 percent of the surviving manuscripts are from within a generation of the poem’s composition. Hanna, William Langland, 37–42. I am particularly concerned with the annotation of Piers Plowman manuscripts by their sixteenth-century readers here, but this is not the only codicological evidence of the poem having been read. Some Piers Plowman manuscripts are in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century bindings, implying that their early modern owners valued their contents enough to have them rebound. Three B text manuscripts have sixteenth- or seventeenth-century bindings: Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17 (sigil W), Oxford, MS Bodley 814 (sigil Bo), and Oxford, Corpus Christi MS College MS 201 (sigil F); C. David Benson and Lynne S. Blanchfield, The Manuscripts of “Piers Plowman”: The B-Version (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 57, 78, 99. I have throughout silently incorporated Benson and Blanchfield’s expansions of abbreviations; I also omit indications of line breaks in the marginalia I quote. Benson and Blanchfield, 206. Benson and Blanchfield, 206. Benson and Blanchfield, 163. The year was, in fact, 1370, but this manuscript (along with all but two other B text manuscripts) identifies the year of scarcity as “One thousand and Qre hundred, twies twenty and ten.” I discuss this passage (and its use as a terminus a quo) in chapter 1. John Stow, A Svrvay of London. Contayning the Originall, Antiquity, Increase, Moderne Estate, and Description of That Citie (London: John Wolfe, 1598), 121. The lines from Piers Plowman are B.13.265–269. Tonya Schaap, “From Professional to Private Readership: A Discussion and Transcription of the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Marginalia in Piers Plowman C-Text, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Digby 102,” in The Medieval Reader: Reception and Cultural History in the Late Medieval Manuscript, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maide Hilmo (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 95. Benson and Blanchfield, 144; the annotator’s marginalia are transcribed on 144–147. Benson and Blanchfield, 146, 145. Benson and Blanchfield, 145. Although sixteenth-century readers were more likely men, there is one known female reader of the poem in the

NOTES

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

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sixteenth century (Anne Fortescue); I therefore use the gender-neutral double pronoun advisedly. On Anne Fortescue’s reading of the poem, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “The Women Readers in Langland’s Earliest Audience: Some Codicological Evidence,” in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers n. v., 2003), 121–134. Carl James Grindley, “Reading Piers Plowman C-Text Annotations: Notes toward the Classification of Printed and Written Marginalia in Texts from the British Isles, 1300–1641,” in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maide Hilmo (Victoria, Canada: University of Victoria, 2001), p. 107. I have not marked line breaks in quoting the annotations, although Grindley does indicate them in his transcriptions. Grindley, 101. In chapter 1, I discuss further Ayscough’s application of details in Langland’s poem to current events. Grindley, 113. The annotation is to C.15.65 in the Russell-Kane edition of the C text. Grindley, 126. This line is C.22.176. Barbara A. Johnson also discusses the political and social concerns evident in Ayscough’s annotations to the poem. Johnson, Reading “Piers Plowman” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: Reception and the Protestant Reader (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 155–158. Benson and Blanchfield, 83. This manuscript was also owned by a John Thynne, who (Benson and Blanchfield suggest) may have been the same John Thynne who built Longleat (83, n. 103). Barbara M. Benedict argues, for example, that “[c]anonicity is a modern concept that has no historical correlative except, in fact, as a cultural attitude of choice that spreads to include literature for the first time in the ‘long’ eighteenth century”; Benedict, “Canon as Canard,” Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 3 (1997): 89. Sources on early modern Chaucerianism include: Joseph A. Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? Studies in the Reception of Chaucer’s Book (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998); Steve Ellis, Chaucer at Large: The Poet in the Modern Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Theresa M. Krier, ed., Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1993); Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds., Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999); Thomas A. Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Interestingly, given the “Chaucer-centrism” of much recent work on early modern medievalism, an early and influential book on this phenomenon focused neither on Chaucer nor on Middle English: Allen J. Frantzen,

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25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

NOTES

Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). David Matthews has studied the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship on Middle English language (and by extension literature) in The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Lawton made this observation in the first volume of New Medieval Literatures, a journal dedicated to expanding the canon of literary study as well as expanding the critical perspectives medievalists bring to bear on the texts they study. David Lawton, “Analytical Survey 1: Literary History and Cultural Study,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 246. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 3. Barbara A. Johnson examines the question of whether John Bunyan, author of a later personification allegory about how to live a Christian life, had read Piers Plowman, but she finds no direct evidence of literary influence or allusion. She argues instead that “[i]t is in terms of a specific kind of readership that Langland’s poem and Bunyan’s narrative are connected”; Johnson, Reading, 163. These works are alliterative poems of political and religious satire that borrow the figure of the Plowman or the language of Piers Plowman as intertextual marks of their genre and spirit. Helen Barr surveys and edits these texts in The Piers Plowman Tradition: A Critical Edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Crowned King. (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), (London: Everyman’s Library, 1993); she is also responsible for naming the “tradition” as such. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See also Anne Hudson, “Piers Plowman and the Peasants’ Revolt: A Problem Revisited,” YLS 8 (1994): 85–106. Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series 28, pt. 1, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, et al., 1863–1864), 2.34. Richard Firth Green edits this letter along with four rebel letters preserved in the Chronicon; “John Ball’s Letters.” The Chronicon is also available in a Rolls Series edition: Henry Knighton, Chronicon, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, Rolls Series 92, 2 vols (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1889– 1895). Ann Astell extends Justice’s analysis, contextualizing the rebels’ responses to Piers Plowman in their awareness of poem’s genre. She argues that “Ball read Langland’s poem as a political allegory,. . .[and] did so with considerable sophistication,” and that “Langland himself provided Ball with cues to encourage such an interpretation.” Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 71. In this introduction, and throughout this book, I use the term early modern (perhaps unusually broadly) to designate the period from the sixteenth through the beginning of the nineteenth century, the time period during which medieval literature was already historical but before the rise of modern editorial theory, and of the academic study of vernacular literature in universities.

NOTES

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34. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed. . .[ed. William Thynne.] (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532), Aiiv. This Preface may well have been written by Brian Tuke, rather than William Thynne. James E. Blodgett discusses Tuke’s claim to have written this; Blodgett, “William Thynne (d. 1546),” in Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), n. 1. Joseph A. Dane argues against the Tuke attribution; Dane, Who Is Buried? 39–43. Because the Preface purports to be by William Thynne, I use Thynne’s name, understanding that it may not actually be his writing. 35. The edition is Robert Anderson, The Works of the British Poets, vol. 1; see BibMan, which itemizes the prefatory matter in all of the early Chaucer editions. 36. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), 398. 37. Thomas Dunham Whitaker, Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. . .(London: John Murray, 1813), iv. 38. Rokayle and this note are examined in Hanna, William Langland, 2–3. I discuss this note and the sixteenth-century attempts to write a biography for William Langland in chapter 1. 39. C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 40. John Bowers, “Piers Plowman’s William Langland: Editing the Text, Writing the Author’s Life,” YLS 9 (1995): 65–90. In saying that “someone” wrote Piers Plowman, I am endorsing the now-standard “single author hypothesis,” but it is worth remembering that a generation ago this too was controversial in criticism of the poem. A few critics still support the multiple authorship theory; see for example, Eric Dahl, “ ‘Diuerse Copies Haue It Diuerselye’: An Unorthodox Survey of Piers Plowman Textual Scholarship from Crowley to Skeat,” in Suche Werkis to Werche: Essays on “Piers Plowman” in Honor of David C. Fowler, ed. Míceál F. Vaughan (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1993), 53–80. For a strong defense of William Langland’s name and identity as the sole poet, see Anne Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 15–82. 41. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan, eds., The Arden Shakespeare: Complete Works (Walton-on-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1998), 1. 42. On the political uses of Chaucer’s works in this period, see John Watkins, “ ‘Wrastling for This World’: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer,” in Refiguring, ed. Krier, 21–39. On the political uses of AngloSaxon law in Reformation England, Frantzen, Desire for Origins, especially Chapter 2: “Origins, Orientalism, and Anglo-Saxonism in the Sixteenth

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43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

NOTES

and Nineteenth Centuries.” For a more general overview of the relationship between Reformation historiography and literary history, see Brian Cummings, “Reformed Literature and Literature Reformed,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 821–851. Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 80. Much has been written on this subject. On the text of Robert Crowley’s 1550 editions of the poem, see J. R. Thorne and Marie-Claire Uhart. “Robert Crowley’s Piers Plowman.” Medium Ævum 55 (1986): 248–254. On the George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson’s Athlone editions of the poem, see Lee Patterson, “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective,” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 55–91. See also Andrew Galloway, “Uncharacterizable Entities: The Poetics of Middle English Scribal Culture and the Definitive Piers Plowman,” Studies in Bibliography 52 (1999): 59–87. On the history of the text across a number of editions, see particularly Charlotte Brewer, Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); see also Dahl, “ ‘Diverse Copies Have It Diverselye.’ ” Recent scholarship on the relationship between Caxton’s output and the canon of medieval literature includes Russell Rutter, “William Caxton and Literary Patronage,” Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 440–470; and William Kuskin, “Caxton’s Worthies Series: The Production of Literary Culture,” ELH 66 (1999): 511–551. The sixteenth-century editions of Confessio Amantis are STC 12142–12144. The manuscripts of the poem are discussed in: John Gower, Confessio Amanatis, ed. Russell A. Peck, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway, vol. 1 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 44. The three kinds of meaning are in some way analogous to what J. L. Austin has termed locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). Some of the commentators I discuss made only unpublished manuscript commentary on the poem, so the circulation of their particular interpretations was by definition limited. One way the poem’s early modern reception continues to be important for modern readers is the fact that Robert Crowley’s three 1550 editions of the poem preserve readings of a B text manuscript now lost. I discuss Crowley’s editions of the text in chapter 1. Early modern reception of Piers Plowman is important in terms of analysis, not simply editing. The terms in which Langland is discussed today reproduce some of the early modern discussions of his identity, if in different terminology. Whereas sixteenth-century readers spoke of Langland as a proto-Protestant, commentators today situate Langland against the context of contemporary Lollardy. Nevertheless,

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defining Langland’s theology remains central to discussions of the poem. A recent reading of Piers Plowman in the context of Lollardy is Anne Hudson, “Langland and Lollardy,” YLS 17 (2003): 93–106.

Chapter 1 The Birth of Langland 1. A. J. Minnis relates medieval authors’ self-referentiality to scholastic literary theories of auctoritas, noting in particular the different claims to authority in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower; Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, second ed. (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1988), Chapter 5: “Literary Theory and Literary Practice.” 2. This is not universally true, of course; Petrarch and Dante both use their poetry to tell stylized but nevertheless individual narratives of their loves. 3. RivCh, HF, II.573–574; LGW, G.255–266; CT X.1081–1092. 4. Christine de Pizan, The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, trans. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, ed. Renate BlumenfeldKosinski (New York: W. W Norton and Co., 1997), 90–91. 5. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142. On the sixteenthcentury rise (or “birth”) of the author, see Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6. The overdetermined authorizing gestures inherent in the 1616 edition of James’s Workes are discussed by Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67–73. The political underpinnings and literary context of Chaucer’s 1532 canonization in Thynne’s first edition are discussed by John Watkins, “ ‘Wrastling for this world’: Wyatt and the Tudor Canonization of Chaucer,” in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Theresa M. Krier (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 21–39. 7. OED, s. v. “anonymal” and “anonymous.” Anonymal was originally the word applied to texts whose authors are unnamed; “anonymal” entered the language in the sixteenth century and disappeared in the seventeenth century, around the time that “anonymous” (originally a noun designating a person whose name is unknown) gained its adjectival meaning: “Bearing no author’s name; of unknown or unavowed authorship.” 8. For a full treatment of the relationship between Piers Plowman and the 1381 rebels, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 9. As an Appendix to “Kynde Name,” Anne Middleton lists all the “signatures” by name or anagram that she sees in the poem’s three texts. Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley and Los Angeles,

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

NOTES

University of California Press, 1990), 15–82; the Appendix is pp. 80–82. The signature occurs in this form only in the B text of the poem. All quotations from the B text of the poem are from George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman, the B version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best, by William Langland (London: The Athlone Press, 1975), abbreviated K-D. Quotations from the C text of the poem are from George Russell and George Kane, eds., Piers Plowman, the C version: Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best, by William Langland (London: The Athlone Press, 1997). Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 72–73. Middleton, “Kynde Name,” 51. George Kane, “Piers Plowman”: The Evidence for Authorship (London: The Athlone Press, 1965), 69–70. The B text manuscripts that somehow identify this line are listed in C. David Benson and Lynne S. Blanchfield, The Manuscripts of “Piers Plowman”: The B-Version (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 11. This manuscript is described by K-D on page 14. Kane cites the omission of the name in this manuscript in Evidence, 69, n. 2. Other nouns in this manuscript are rubricated, so this is not conclusive evidence that the scribe took “Longe Wille” as an actual (and not merely allegorical) name. K-D, 14; Benson and Blanchfield, 161. Benson and Blanchfield, 201. Benson and Blanchfield, 231, 233. Scribal annotations to the Oriel College manuscript are listed by Benson and Blanchfield on 199–201. Benson and Blanchfield, 205. Benson and Blanchfield, 172, 181. Benson and Blanchfield, 146. Benson and Blanchfield, 168; Kane, Evidence, 70, n. 2. Benson and Blanchfield, 196; Kane, Evidence, 70, n. 2. Kane, Evidence, 69–70. On this practice, see Kane, “Signatures,” Chapter 4 of Evidence, 52–70. Anne Middleton also discusses the medieval practice of coded signatures in “Kynde Name,” 27–37. Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis Together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Churchill Babington and Joseph Rawson Lumby, 9 vols., Rolls Series 41 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1865–1886), 1:ix–x n. 2, 1:xlvii, 1:liii. The transcription is as given in Ralph Hanna III, William Langland (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1993), 5. The five manuscripts are Huntington Library MS HM 143, Bodleian Library MS Digby 102, University of London Library MS S.L.V.88, British Library MS Additional 35157, and Bodleian Library MS Douce 104 (C text

NOTES

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

159

sigils X, Y, I, U, and D, respectively). The transcription of the explicit is as given in Hanna, William Langland, 6. Hanna follows Kane (Evidence, 35–27) in arguing that the “W” is not a surname initial but a scribal duplication of the preceding name Wille (William Langland, 6, n. 19). Hanna, William Langland, 5, n. 18. The manuscript is Bodleian MS Rawlinson poet. 137 (sigil R of the A text). Hanna transcribes the manuscript note on Stacy de Rokayle in William Langland, 25–26. Kane also transcribes this note and includes a plate showing the full manuscript leaf; Kane, Evidence, 26 and plate I. Hanna summarizes what is known about Eustace Rokayle and his affiliation with the Despenser family in William Langland, 2–5. Although the Dublin note’s attribution of the poem to William Langland, son of Eustace Rokayle, is generally accepted, Oscar Cargill published in 1935 a counterargument, attributing the poem instead to a poet named William de la Rokele. Cargill, “The Langland Myth,” PMLA 50 (1935): 36–56. Another frequent tactic in the debates between Protestants and Catholics was the reversal of accusations against the accuser in something like the time-honored playground rejoinder: “I know you are but what am I?”. Thus, in a 1535 sermon, Hugh Latimer uses a series of redefinitions to turn against Catholicism its own anti-Protestant claims: But ye say, it is new learning. Now I tell you it is the old learning. Yea, ye say, it is old heresy new scoured. Nay, I tell you it is old truth, long rusted with your canker and now new made bright and scoured.. . .Ye call your learning old: it may indeed be called old, for it cometh of that serpent which did pervert God’s commandment and beguiled Eve; so it is an old custom to pervert God’s word, and to rust it, and corrupt it. Hugh Latimer, Sermons, ed. George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society 27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 30–31. John Bale, Illustrium maioris Britannia scriptorum. . .summarium (Wesel: Theodoricum Plataenum, 1548). There were two Wesel editions of the Summariaum, one of which bears the imprint “Ipswich”; see Robert Steele, “Notes on English Books Printed Abroad, 1525–48,” Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 11 (1909–1911): 235. May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), 14. On Leland’s projected and completed work, see McKisack, 5–7. John Bale, Scriptorvm Illustriu[m] maioris Brytanniae quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant Catalogus. . .(Basel: Ioannem Oporinum, 1557). John Bale, Scriptorvm illustrium maioris Brytanniae posterior pars, quinque continens centvrias vltimas, qvas avthor Ioannes Baleus Sudouolgius, Anglus, ex Lelando antiquario, alijsque probis authoribus, non paruo labore collegi. . .(Basel: Ioannis Opporinus: 1559). On Bale’s successive revisions and expansions to his biobibliography, see McKisack, 14–15. John Bale, The laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes Antiquitees, geuen of hym as a newe yeares gyfte to kynge henry the viii. in the .xxxvii. yeare of his Reygne, with declaracyons, enlarged: by Johan Bale (London: n. p., 1549).

160

NOTES

38. “which, the author, John Bale of Suffolk, England, collected from with no small labor, from [the writings of] Leland the Antiquarian and other authors”; Bale, Posterior pars, t. p. 39. On Bale’s debt to Leland, see McKisack, 15. 40. Anne Middleton, “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 109. 41. Bale, Catalogus, 454. 42. For example, Jack Upland is attributed to Chaucer by John Foxe in the 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments. Bale’s notebook comments that “Hoc opus a quibusdam Galfrido Chaucero, sed sinistre tribuitur.” [This work is attributed by certain persons to Geoffrey Chaucer, but wrongly.] Bale’s autograph notebook was edited by Reginald Lane Poole as Anecdota Oxoniensia. Index Britanniae Scriptorum, quos ex variis bibliothecis non parvo labore collegit Ioannes Baleus, cum aliis: John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1902); the ascription of Jack Upland to Wyclif rather than Chaucer is on page 274. Early modern editions of Jack Upland and theories of its authorship are discussed in P. L. Heyworth, ed., Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoinder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 5–6; Heyworth notes also that the edition by John Day cited in Bale’s notebook does not survive. 43. The poet’s first name remains “Robert” in published biographies for well over a century. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Tyrwhitt argued that the name of the poet, not just that of the dreamer, was Will; Tyrwhitt, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, To Which Are Added an Essay on His Language and Versification; an Introductory Discourse; and Notes, 4:74–75 n. 57. Tyrwhitt’s inception of the modern tradition of naming the poet as “William Langland” is discussed by Charlotte Brewer, Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32–34. 44. Poole, 383, 509, 510. Bale’s references to Robert Langland are also reprinted in Vincent DiMarco, “Piers Plowman”: Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 3–4. The relationships and relative dates of these four entries cannot be determined; they may not be independent of one another. 45. R. B. Haselden and H. C. Schulz, “Note on the Inscription in HM 128,” Huntington Library Bulletin 8 (1935): 26–27. 46. Benson and Blanchfield, 85. 47. The shared reading of “set” is the proof Haselden and Schulz cite in support of their identification of HM 128 with the manuscript “Ex domo Guilhelmi Sparke.” Haselden and Schulz, 27. The notebook record is in Poole, 509. 48. Bale, Catalogus, 474. Reprinted in DiMarco, Reference Guide, 6. 49. Poole, 383. Oscar Cargill notes that Nicholas Brigham (or whoever copied the texts collected by Brigham) seems to have confused the opening line of Piers Plowman with that of the lyric “Somer Sonday,” which Cargill quotes as “In a somer sonday wan sote was ye sunne”; “The Langland Myth,” 45. 50. Benson and Blanchfield, 85.

NOTES

161

51. Haselden and Schulz, 26. They do not know conclusively, however, who that William Sparke is. On Bale’s sources for manuscripts, including Sparke, they refer to Cargill, “The Langland Myth.” 52. Hanna, William Langland, 3. 53. The manuscripts preserving “I, Robert” reading are London, Society of Antiquaries MS 687 (A text sigil M) and Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 (B text sigil F). The dating is that of Hanna, William Langland, 38, 40. These manuscripts and the sixteenth-century ascriptions of the poem to “Robert Langland” are discussed by Kane, Evidence, 37–43. 54. In English (translation mine): Robert Langland, a priest, as it appears, born in Shropshire, in the town commonly called Mortymers Clibery, [that is to say] in the clay land, eight miles from the Malvern hills. However, whether he was educated in fine letters to adulthood in that uncouth and rustic place, I cannot say for certain. Nor whether he pursued them in Oxford or Cambridge, since studies especially flourish among the teachers in those places. Nevertheless it is clearly evident that he was among the first disciples of Wyclif, and in a spirit of passion put forth under pleasant appearances and figures a pious work in the English language against the papists’ open blasphemies against God and His Christ. He called this work, which deserves the reading of good men, The Vision of Piers Plowman. In one book [beginning] “In summer season when hot was the sun. . .” I do not know of any other works by him. In this learned work, in addition to its pleasant and varied figures, he foretold prophetically many things which in our own day we have seen fulfilled. He completed his work in A D 1368, when John Chichester was mayor of London. Bale’s Catalogus entry on “Robert Langland” is as transcribed in DiMarco, A Reference Guide, 6. 55. Bale’s comment on Langland’s prophecies that have recently been fulfilled presumably refers to Henry VIII’s break with Rome and his dissolution of England’s abbeys, discussed below. 56. Barbara Johnson quotes the Fuller biography and discusses Fuller’s assertion that Langland “may by Prolepsis be termed a Protestant,” but without mentioning its similarity to Bale’s biography; Johnson, Reading “Piers Plowman” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: Reception and the Protestant Reader (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 146. 57. On the organization of the “centuries” in Bale’s Summarium and Catalogus, see Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1976), 99–100. 58. All three editions have the same publication date, and, because the second and third share a title, their STC numbers and traditional sigla differentiate them. Robert Crowley, ed., The Vision of Pierce Plowman, now fyrste imprynted. . .(London: Robert Crowley, 1550), STC 19906, Cr1. Robert Crowley, ed., The Vision of Pierce Plowman, nowe the seconde tyme imprinted by Roberte Crowlye. . .Whereunto are added certaine notes and cotations in the mergyne, geuyng light to the Reader. . .(London: Robert Crowley, 1550), STC 19907,

162

59.

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

NOTES

Cr2. Robert Crowley, ed., The Vision of Pierce Plowman, nowe the seconde tyme imprinted by Roberte Crowlye. . .Whereunto are added certaine notes and cotations in the mergyne, geuyng light to the Reader. . .(London: Robert Crowley, 1550), STC 19907a, Cr3. In subsequent citations, I use the sigla to identify particular editions. Kane and Donaldson believe that Crowley’s second and third editions (Cr2 and Cr3) include readings from one or two more B text manuscripts, also no longer extant. On “Cr,” the manuscript on which Crowley based his text, see K-D, 6–7. The survival of the poem in at least two distinct versions (now called the B text and the C text) was first hypothesized in the eighteenth century by Thomas Hearne and was first claimed in print by Joseph Ritson in his Bibliographia Poetica of 1802; the theory that there are three distinct versions canonized in Piers Plowman scholarship by Skeat’s editions in the late nineteenth century. On Hearne and Ritson see Brewer, 20–22 and 33–36; see also Vincent DiMarco, “Eighteenth-Century Suspicions regarding the Authorship of Piers Plowman,” Anglia 100 (1982): 124–129. On Skeat, see Brewer, 91–112. Crowley, The Vision of Pierce Plowman, nowe the seconde tyme imprinted (Cr2), fol. *iir. All of my quotations below are to this edition. Grindley, 93 and, 138, n. 24. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iir. A bibliography of works written by and printed by Crowley appears as an appendix to John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 473–477. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iir. B.13.268–270. K-D, 500. Poole, 510; DiMarco, Reference Guide, 4. Thomas Prendergast argues from a study of Bale’s notebook that Crowley saw the notebook in an intermediate stage, before the addition of some of Bale’s notes on Piers Plowman. Prendergast, “The Work of Robert Langland,” in Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah A. Kelen (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming). Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iir. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iir. John Wyclif, The true copye of a Prolog wrytten about two C. yeres paste by John Wycklif. . .(London: Robert Crowley, 1550), fol. Aiv. Unfortunately, the meter of Crowley’s verse does not improve from there. The poem is in iambic pentameter, although it does not follow a traditional sonnet rhyme scheme, instead rhyming: ababb cc dedee ff. My discussion of the valences of “author” in the sixteenth century is indebted to Jeffrey Masten’s similar argument about notions of authorship in Renaissance drama in Textual Intercourse, especially 63–66. On the political ramifications of the Chaucer biography in Speght’s Works, see my “Climbing Up the Family Tree: Chaucer’s Tudor Progeny,” Journal

NOTES

74. 75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

163

of the Early Book Society 6 (2003): 109–123. By the turn of the seventeenth century, readers did seem to have an interest in authorial biography. One post-1598 reader’s attempt to synthesize a brief biography of Chaucer from available sources is discussed in R. F. Yeager, “British Library Additional MS 5141: An Unnoticed Chaucer Vita,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 14 (1984): 261–281. The contents of Thynne’s editions of 1532 and 1542 and of Stow’s 1561 edition are listed by Hammond in BibMan, 116–122. Speght cites both Leland and Bale for many of the biographical details he includes; Speght’s Life of Chaucer is transcribed by Hammond (BibMan, 18–35). Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–251. Hammond’s BibMan remains the best source on the sixteenth-century expansion (and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evaluation and reduction) of the Chaucer canon. John Watkins, “Wrastling for this world” 22. In 1561, Owen Rogers reprinted Crowley’s edition, appending Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede to the text. This edition does not reprint Crowley’s biography for the poet, although it preserves Crowley’s passus summaries, placing them at the heads of their respective passus rather than printing them all together as a preface. Owen Rogers, ed. The Vision of Pierce Plowman, newly imprinted after the authours olde copy. . .Wherevnto is annexed the Crede of Pierce Plowman, neuer imprinted with the booke before [by Robert Langland] (London: Owen Rogers, 1561). Under the term “second edition,” I include both Cr2 and Cr3. Although these are technically different editions, their differences are minimal and not relevant to the points I make in this section. Both Cr2 and Cr3 claim on their title pages to be “nowe the seconde tyme imprinted.” Crowley did not, then, market them as distinct editions from one another, merely as different from his first edition, Cr1. My comparison between Crowley’s first and second editions is indebted to the careful analysis of their differences by R. Carter Hailey, “ ‘Geuyng light to the reader’: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550),” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94 (2001): 483–502. Hailey hypothesizes that the change to passus summary heads is an attempt to correct the sloppy titling of the first edition, which occasionally reads “The vision of / The vision of” or “Pierce Plowman / Pierce Plowman” across the open spread, but which most frequently reads “Pierce Plowman / The vision of.” Hailey counts only twenty-seven of the one hundred and fifteen spreads in which the title reads across correctly (“Geuyng light,” 493 n. 26). I do not see, however, why it would be easier for a careless compositor to follow a new and more complicated system of titles than to correct the titling mistakes of the first edition. These counts are by Hailey, who also notes that almost half of the new notes are citations to Langland’s Latin biblical quotations, allowing a reader

164

NOTES

83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

who lacked Latin to understand Langland’s use of scripture (“Geuyng light,” 497). Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iiiiv. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Eir. Hailey also mentions Crowley’s assertion that scripture must be read whole as an example of his Protestantizing gloss (495). Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iiv. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Niir; Piers Plowman B.10.314–315. The same phrase glosses B.5.45–47, Reason’s exhortation to Religion that religious houses must uphold their rule lest the king take stewardship. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Fir. John Bowers, “Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes toward a History of the Wycliffite Langland,” YLS 6 (1992): 41. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iiv. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Iiiiir; Piers Plowman, B.6.325. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Divr. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iiv. OED, s.v. “prognostication.” Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iiv. I discuss Crowley’s differentiation of the manuscript readings below. “In this learned work, in addition to its pleasant and varied figures, he foretold prophetically many things which in our own day we have seen fulfilled.” “A work that is erudite and in a way prophetic.” Poole, 510. Early English Books 1475–1640, reel 122. Barbara A. Johnson discusses the annotations made by this reader as well as other sixteenth century Piers Plowman marginalia; Johnson, Reading, 148–159. Aiir; B.Pro. 65–67. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iiv. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iiv. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Divv; B.3.326. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Biiir; B.13.152–156. For an interpretation of this riddle and a more general discussion of the intellectual background of the riddles of the poem, see Andrew Galloway, “The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England: The ‘Oxford’ Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman” Speculum 70 (1995): 68–105. This riddle is discussed on pages 91–93. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Rviiiv; B.13.268–9. Crowley, Cr2, fol. Rviiiv. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iir. Benson and Blanchfield, 24. The dating of this manuscript is as per Hanna, William Langland, 39. Benson and Blanchfield, 133. The “chapters” referred to in this table are not passus, as is clear from the opening line of the table: “ye furst passe off ye wysyome [sic, for ‘visione’] conteynethe iij chapters” (133). The parable of the belling of the cat is in the poem’s Prologue. In this manuscript, that passage is on folio 2v.

NOTES

165

110. This note is on folio 2v of the manuscript. The annotation is transcribed in Benson and Blanchfield, 132. 111. Benson and Blanchfield, 132–133. 112. Benson and Blanchfield, 132 and 136. Benson and Blanchfield suggest that the annotations by W. H. “may have been made at the time of the writing or rubrication of the MS,” given the W. H. annotation to the table of contents. 113. Grindley, 96. 114. Grindley, 101. Barbara A. Johnson identifies the annotations in British Library Additional MS 35157, including this one, as revealing a millenarian perspective; Johnson, Reading, 157–158. 115. Grindley, 103. Barbara Johnson notes this marginal reference to Piers Plowman as prophesying the Reformation, but does not mention Francis Ayscough’s similar annotation to the C text Prologue; Johnson, Reading, 157). 116. Benson and Blanchfield, 145. 117. Sharon L. Jansen, “Politics, Protest, and a New Piers Plowman Fragment: The Voice of the Past in Tudor England,” Review of English Studies n.s. 40, no. 157 (1989): 93–99. 118. Jansen, 94–95. 119. Jansen, 94. 120. Grindley, 112. The passage Ayscough marks is C.14.155a. 121. Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Sir Adrian Fortescue and his Copy of Piers Plowman,” YLS 14 (2000): 43. In this essay Turville-Petre uses Fortescue’s interest in Piers Plowman as evidence for moderating the view of Fortescue as a Catholic martyr, an identity promulgated for him by the Knights of Malta; Fortescue was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1895 (Turville-Petre, 31). 122. Turville-Petre notes that “his offence is a mystery,” and may well have been political more than theological, as “there is little to suggest that he would have been prepared to die for the old faith” (46). 123. Bostock’s private refutation of Crowley is discussed, for example, by Brewer, 18–19, and by Johnson, Reading, 149. 124. John Stow, The Chronicles of England, from Brute vnto this Present Yeare 1580 (London: R. Newberie [1580]), 387. 125. On Stow’s attribution and its followers, including a discussion of the three John Malverns, see DiMarco, Reference Guide, 9. 126. [George Puttenham]. The Arte of English Poesie, Contriued into three Bookes. . .(London: Richard Field, 1589), 48. 127. Middleton, “Kynde Name,” 16. 128. Puttenham, 50. 129. Andrew Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes: Which concerneth such matters of Diuinitie, as haue been either written in our owne Tongue, or translated out of anie other language: And haue bin published, to the glory of God, and edification of the Church of Christ in England (London: Andrew Manusell, 1595). 130. Maunsell, Second parte, iiv.

166

NOTES

131. The two dedications are on the unnumbered prefatory folios iir–iiiv; they are preceded by a dedication to Queen Elizabeth (Maunsell, First Part, fol. ir–v). 132. Maunsell, First Part, 80. 133. Maunsell, First Part, fol. ir. The 1553 freestanding edition of Pierce the Ploughmans Crede is also overlooked by Maunsell’s Catalogue. 134. Middleton, “Kynde Name,” 16. 135. In the mid-twentieth century, the multiple author theory was so dominant that it could comfortably be transmitted as near orthodoxy to introductory students. In his overview of Piers Plowman in The College Survey of English Literature, B. J. Whiting writes that the single-author theory “has been vigorously attacked, and many valid objections to it having [sic] been pointed out, so that today many scholars hold that there was a separate author for each of the three versions.” B. J. Whiting, et al. eds, The College Survey of English Literature, 2 vols. (Harcourt Brace and Company, New York, 1942), 1:163. The multiple author theory was all but eliminated in the field by Kane’s Evidence. 136. Joseph Ritson, Observations on the First Three Volumes of the History of English Poetry, a Familiar Letter to the Author (London: J. Stockdale and R. Faulder, 1782), 12. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1774–1781). 137. Joseph Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica: A Catalogue of Engleish [sic] Poets, of the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries (London: G. and W. Nicol, 1802), 26–31. On Tyrwhitt’s theory that the poet may have been William, rather than Robert, Langland, see also note 43 above.

Chapter 2 A Proliferation of Plowmen 1. Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: The Pennsylvania State Press, 2001). The quotation is from page 72, n. 62; the thematic parallels Knapp draws between Hoccleve and Langland appear on pages 71, 72, and 135. 2. Frank Grady, “Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame,” SAC 18 (1996): 3–23. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 207. 3. Paul Hardwick, “Chaucer: The Poet as Ploughman,” The Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 146–156. 4. John N. Bowers, “Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes toward a History of the Wycliffite Langland,” YLS 6 (1992): 24–27. 5. A concise survey of the different ways that Piers Plowman and Piers Plowman were used in the two centuries after Langland’s composition can be found in Anne Hudson, “Epilogue: The Legacy of Piers Plowman,” in A Companion to “Piers Plowman,” ed. John Alford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 251–266.

NOTES

167

6. The early fourteenth-century Song of the Husbandman is edited in James M. Dean, Medieval English Political Writings (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996). 7. Helen Barr, The Piers Plowman Tradition: A Critical Edition of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Crowned King. (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), 8. 8. The particular works Barr edits as members of the Piers Plowman Tradition are Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede, Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Crowned King. Winner and Wastour and Parlement of the Three Ages are also alliterative works in the tradition of social satire and complaint. London Lickpenny is similar in spirit, but it is written in rhyming rather than alliterative verse. 9. James M. Dean, ed., Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 13. 10. Elizabeth Kirk, “Langland’s Plowman and the Recreation of FourteenthCentury Religious Metaphor,” YLS 2 (1988): 1–21. 11. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Qveene, edited by A. C. Hamilton (London: Pearson Education, 2001), 136; FQ Book I, x.66.3–5. 12. The original publication of the text is: Luke Shepherd, John Bon and Mast Person (London: J. Day, and W. Seres, [1548]); I quote here from the modern edition printed in A. F. Pollard, An English Garner: Tudor Tracts 1532–1588 (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc, 1964), 161. 13. John Bon, in Pollard, Garner, 162. 14. John Bon, in Pollard, Garner, 168. 15. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 123. 16. This irony is discussed by A. G. Dickens, who summarizes in particular the cluster of anxieties provoked by the Anabaptists; Dickens, The English Reformation, second edition (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 262–263. 17. A number of scholars have looked at the Protestant use of Lollard materials, including but not limited to the Piers Plowman texts. Important studies include: John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Anne Hudson, “ ‘No newe thyng’: The Printing of Medieval Texts in the Early Reformation Period,” in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Douglas Gray and E. G. Stanley (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1983), 153–172. I have previously discussed sixteenth-century uses of the Piers Plowman name in “Plowing the Past: ‘Piers Protestant’ and the Authority of Medieval Literary History,” YLS 13 (1999): 101–136. 18. Pierce the Ploughmans Crede (London: Reynold Wolfe, 1553), fol. Diiiv. Henceforth abbreviated PPCrede. 19. PPCrede (1553), line 28, fol. Aiiv. 20. PPCrede (1553), line 32, fol. Aiiv.

168

NOTES

21. It is possible too that the gloss “wont” was the compositor’s error for “went.” 22. Benson and Blanchfield, 148–149. 23. The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman. . .by William Langland, ed. W. W. Skeat, EETS o.s. 38 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1869), 421–426. 24. J. R. Thorne and Marie-Claire Uhart, “Robert Crowley’s Piers Plowman,” Medium Ævum 55 (1986): 251. 25. A description of this manuscript can be found in Benson and Blanchfield, 45–48. Some leaves are now missing (if the foliation is accurate), but the glossary is still fifty-two leaves past the Conclusion of Piers Plowman. 26. Skeat has identified which word in the text of the poem each glossary item refers to; his list is on pages 424–425 of his 1869 B text edition. 27. Stephanie Trigg, “Discourses of Affinity in the Reading Communities of Geoffrey Chaucer,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, 270–291. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999, 283. 28. PPCrede (1553), fol. Air. 29. PPCrede (1553), fol. Aiir. 30. Dickens, 244. 31. Anne Hudson implicitly dates the Prayer and Complaynt to the early fifteenth century; Hudson, “No newe thyng,” 173. 32. The Prayer and Complaynt of the Ploweman vnto Christ: writte[n] nat longe after the yere of our Lorde .M. thre hu[n]dred (Antwerp: Martin Keyser, [1531?]; London: Thomas Godfrey, [1532?]). These two editions are STC 20036 and 20036.5 respectively. The former is reprinted in William Oldys and Thomas Park, eds., The Harleian Miscellany: A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts. . ., vol. 6 (London: White and Co, et al., 1810), 92–117. I quote from the UMI microfilm of the latter edition. The Antwerp edition is listed in both Robert Steele, “Notes on English Books Printed Abroad, 1525–1548,” 223–225; and Anthea Hume, “Appendix B, English Protestant Books Printed Abroad, 1525–1535: An Annotated Bibliography,” in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 8, pt. 2, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 1078–1079. 33. Hume, 1079. 34. Prayer and Complaynt, second ed., fol. Aiir. 35. Prayer and Complaynt, second ed., fol. Aiiv. 36. Prayer and Complaynt, second ed., fol. Aiiir. Barbara A. Johnson also discusses the Prayer and Complaynt in light of the way reformers countered charges of their “new learning”; Johnson, Reading, 78–79. 37. The table is included by Oldys and Park with their reprint of the first edition of the Prayer and Complaynt; Oldys and Park, 94. 38. Prayer and Complaynt, second ed., fol. Aiiiv. 39. Prayer and Complaynt, second ed., fol. Aiiiv. 40. Prayer and Complaynt, second ed., fol. Diiiv.

NOTES

169

41. John Foxe, The Ecclesiasticall history contaynyng the Actes and Monumentes of thynges passed in euery kynges tyme in this Realme. . ., 2 vols. (London: John Daye, 1570), 1: 494. 42. Foxe, 1: 494. 43. Foxe, 1: 494. Foxe ascribes the previous edition to William Tyndale, perhaps on the basis of the Preface by “W. T,” an abbreviation that Tyndale did in fact use in naming himself as the author of such prefaces; for examples of this, see Hume, 1074, 1079, 1085, 1087. The modern challenge to Tyndale’s authorship is discussed above in note 34. 44. Anne Hudson points out that there is no evidence to connect the text to Thorpe. Foxe takes this attribution from the 1530 edition he uses as a source text. Hudson discusses both editions of the Testamente in “No newe thyng,” 163–164. 45. Foxe, 1: 629. 46. Foxe, 1: 629. 47. [William Barlow], A proper dyaloge, betwene a gentillman and a husbandma[n], eche complaynenge to other theyr myserable calamyte through the ambicion of the clergy [Antwerp: J. Hoochstraten, 1529?]. Anthea Hume attributes the dyalogue to Jerome Barlow and gives the date as 1530 (Hume, 1076). 48. Hudson, “No newe thyng,” 159. Alistair Fox discusses the use of dialogue in Henrician polemic in “Propaganda and Polemic: The Retreat from Fictive Literature after 1525,” Chapter 12 of Politics and Literature in the Reign of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 209–231. 49. Proper dyaloge, fol. Biiiv. 50. Proper dyaloge, fol. Bivr. 51. Proper dyaloge, fol. Bivr. 52. Foxe, 1: 341. Barbara Johnson discusses the Husbandman of the Proper dyaloge and Foxe’s interpretation of Jack Upland as manifesting the way the Plowman tradition absorbed other texts; Johnson, 80–81. 53. Joseph A. Dane makes a similar point about the hypocrisy of modern critics who disparage John Urry’s 1721 edition of Chaucer’s Works for interventionist editing without disparaging similar practices in modern editions; Dane, 118. 54. King, English Reformation Literature, 329–330. King’s example of Crowley’s doctrinal alteration to the poem at B.10.291–303 is, however, probably better explained as reflecting the reading in the manuscript Crowley used. On this see Thorne and Uhart, “Robert Crowley’s Piers Plowman,” 252. 55. The “Prologe” in which Crowley makes this claim is included in all three editions; here and elsewhere, I quote from Cr2 (STC 19907), fol. *iiv. 56. Crowley, Cr2, fol. *iir. I discuss Crowley’s dating of Piers Plowman later in this chapter. The fact that Crowley’s editions are unglossed seems to render less likely Skeat’s unsubstantiated hypothesis that the glossator of Piers Plowman in Cambridge University Library MS Ll.iv.14 was “no other than Robert Crowley”; Skeat, The Vision of William. . .(1869), 426. 57. Rogers preserves Wolfe’s first-person discussion of the glossary (“. . .I haue made an interpretation of certayn hard wordes. . .”). This, I assume, is the

170

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70. 71.

NOTES

reason the Crede glossary is sometimes incorrectly referred to by critics as one Rogers added to Piers Plowman. The glossary appears on fol. Diiiv of Rogers’ edition of Piers Plowman, as it had done in Wolfe’s edition of Pierce the Ploughmans Crede. The foliation of Rogers’s volume restarts with the beginning of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. Although Piers Plowman is not, strictly speaking, a Lollard text, its sixteenthcentury audience believed it to be; I therefore include it under this designation as well. An earlier and more detailed version of my argument about the Plowman’s antiquity appears in “Plowing the Past.” Prayer and Complaynt, second ed., fol. Aiir. Pyers Plowmans exhortation/ vnto the lordes/ knightes and burgoysses of the Parlyamenthouse (London: Anthony Scoloker, [1550?]). PP Exhortation, fol. Aiiir. PP Exhortation, fol. Aiir. Carl J. Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 162–166. The 3 percent figure is reported by Dahlman, 165, n. 23. Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 82–83. [Francis Trigge], To the Kings most excellent Maiestie. The Hvmble Petition of Two Sisters; The Church and Common-wealth: For the restoring of their ancient Commons and liberties, which late Inclosure with depopulation vncharitably hath taken away: containing seuen reasons as euidences for the same (London: George Bishop, 1604), fols. A4r–A5v. Carl James Grindley, “Reading Piers Plowman C-Text Annotations: Notes toward the Classification of Printed and Written Marginalia in Texts from the British Isles, 1300–1641,” in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maide Hilmo (Victoria, Canada: University of Victoria, 2001), 106. Another of Ayscough’s annotations is dated 1603, so this note is presumably also from the early seventeenth century, and thus roughly contemporary with Trigge’s Humble Petition. Anne Middleton, “Acts of Vagrancy: The C Version ‘Autobiography’ and the Statute of 1388,” in Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 208. The B text of Piers Plowman might not address the issue of vagrant laborers as directly, but an anxiety about the increasing power of individual laborers when there is a labor shortage is evident in the way that the society that Piers constructs in the Visio is destabilized by idle laborers: “ ‘I was no{t wont to werche,’ quod Wastour, ‘now wol I no{t bigynne!” (B.6.167). PP Exhortation, fol. A7v. I playne Piers which cannot flatter. . .first edition [London, 1550?], t. p.

NOTES

171

72. Henry VIII’s Acte for thadvauncement of true Religions and for thabbolisshment of the contrarie of 1542/1543 makes it lawful for “everye noble man and gentleman being a householder to reade or to be red by any of his familye or s[er]vantes. . .the Byble or New Testament,” but “no woomen nor artificers prentises journeymen serving men of the degrees of yeomen or undre, husbandemen nor laborers” could read the Bible under penalty of imprisonment. A special proviso allowed for noblewomen and gentlewomen to read such texts alone and silently. Great Britain, The Statutes of the Realm: Printed by Command of His Majesty King George the Third. . .from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, facsimile edition, vol. 3 (London: Dawsons, 1963), 896. In I Playne Piers, Piers says that he could read scripture “Aboute thre yeres paste” (fol. Avir); he also abuses Edward Crome and Nicholas Shaxton for their June 1546 recantation (fols. Eiiv–Eiiir). I Playne Piers therefore seems to date from the second half of 1546. 73. I Playne Piers, first ed., fol. A8r. 74. I Playne Piers, first ed., fol. Avv. 75. I Playne Piers, first ed., fols. Avv–Avir. 76. On the medieval dream vision genre, see J. Stephen Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988). 77. Kathleen Cawsey argues that the narrative and stylistic disjunctions of I Playne Piers indicate that it was compiled from existing texts (many of which were in verse), rather than written together as a whole. Cawsey, “When Polemic Trumps Poetry: Buried Medieval Poem(s) in the Protestant Print I Playne Piers,” in Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages, ed. Sarah A. Kelen (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, forthcoming). 78. A godly dyalogue & dysputacyon betwene Pyers plowman and a popysh preest/ concernyng the supper of the lorde/ no lesse frutefull then necessary to be. noted of al christen men specyally considering the great controuerses & varyaunces had therin now in your tyme [London: W. Copland, c. 1550]. 79. Godly dyalogue, fol. Aiiir. 80. In the C text this dinner takes place in Passus 15. 81. Godly dyalogue, fol. Aivr, misnumbered Aiiir. 82. Godly dyalogue, fols. Aivv–Avr. 83. Godly dyalogue, fol. Aviiir. 84. I Playne Piers, first ed., fol. Aiiiir–Aiiiiv. 85. On the impact the Marprelate Tracts had on the style and rhetoric of Elizabethan polemic, see Joseph Black, “The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588–89), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in Early Modern England,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 707–725. The relationship between Martin’s jesting manner and early modern rhetorical theories of decorum is also discussed in Chapter 3 of Raymond A. Anselment, “Betwixt Jest and Earnest”: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift, and the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).

172

NOTES

86. I Playne Piers, second ed., t. p. The Epistle: [“Martin Marprelate”] Oh read ouer D. Iohn Bridges [East Molesey, UK: R. Waldegrave, 1588], reproduced in The Marprelate Tracts [1588–1589] (Menston, UK: The Scolar Press, Ltd., 1967). The Epitome: [“Martin Marprelate,”] Oh read ouer D. John Bridges/ for it is worthy worke: Or an epitome of the fyrste Booke/ of that right worshipfull volume. . .[Fawsley, UK: R. Waldegrave, 1588], t.p. 87. I Playne Piers, second ed., t. p.; The Epitome, t.p. 88. The Epistle, 1, reproduced in The Marprelate Tracts [1588–1589], [5, unnumbered]. 89. Anselment, “Betwixt Jest and Earnest,” 42. 90. The first extended proof of this dating was by Andrew N. Wawn, “The Genesis of The Plowman’s Tale,” Yearbook of English Studies 2 (1972): 21–40. In a subsequent essay, Wawn argues that the author of I Playne Piers knew a manuscript version of The Plowman’s Tale without the Chaucerian Introduction; “Chaucer, The Plowman’s Tale, and Reformation Propaganda: the Testimonies of Thomas Godfray and I Playne Piers,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 56 (1973): 174–192. The Plowman’s Tale had also been printed separately before its appearance among the Canterbury Tales; that edition is STC 5099.5. When I discuss the Plowman’s Tale as one of the Canterbury Tales, I follow the convention of capitalizing but not italicizing tale names, even though this is not an authentic Chaucerian Tale. 91. Thomas J. Heffernan discusses the way editors’ biases influenced their selection of Chaucer’s works, paying particular attention to the publication history of the Plowman’s Tale. “Aspects of the Chaucerian Apocrypha: Animadversions on William Thynne’s Edition of the Plowman’s Tale,” in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honor of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 155–167. 92. BibMan, 445. 93. Canterbury Tales, General Prologue, lines 530–541; RivCh, 32. 94. Chaucer, Workes (1542), 119. 95. In the Introduction to her edition of the Plowman’s Tale, Mary Rinelander McCarl notes these and other differences between Chaucer’s Plowman and the Plowman of the spurious Tale; The Plowman’s Tale: The c. 1532 and 1606 Editions of a Spurious Canterbury Tale (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997), 33–34. 96. “Sir Geffrey Chaucer,” The Plough-mans Tale, Shewing by the doctrine and liues of the Romish Clergie, that the Pope is Antichrist and they his Ministers (London: Samuel Macham and Matthew Cooke, 1606), fol. A2r. 97. BibMan, 445. 98. “Chaucer,” Plough-mans Tale, fol. A2v. 99. PP Exhortation, fol. A2r. 100. Dickens, 262. 101. I Playne Piers, first ed., fol. Avr. 102. I Playne Piers, first ed., fol. D6r–D6v.

NOTES

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103. Great Britain, Statutes of the Realm. . ., 896. 104. Thomas Churchyard, Dauy Dycars Dreame (London: R. Lant, [1552?]), single sheet. 105. John Skelton, Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton, Poet Laureate, nowe collected and newly published (London: Thomas Marshe, 1568), fol. Aiiir. 106. Andrew Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Bookes: Which concerneth such matters of Diuinitie, as haue bin either written in our owne Tongue, or translated out of anie other language. . .(London: Andrew Maunsell: 1595), 81. Maunsell also notes Owen Rogers’s 1561 edition of Piers Plowman, and I Playne Piers, which he calls “Pieres plowman in prose.” The identity of this work is clear as Maunsell quotes its Conclusion: “God saue the King & spede the plough. . .” (80–81). 107. STC, 1:51. The Plowmans complaint of sundry wicked liuers is the only work the STC records as printed for the London stationer Hugh Corne (STC, 3:45). A number of works are attributed to people calling themselves “R. B.,” but it would be impossible to know if any of them are the same R. B. who (allegedly) wrote The Plowmans complaint of sundry wicked liuers. Thus, neither the stationer nor the author provides any clues about the identity of this lost poem. 108. Piers’s family members do not appear as speaking characters, but they are mentioned in B.6.78–82. 109. I Playne Piers, first ed., fol. Avr. 110. Barbara A. Johnson suggests that “[t]he fact that this text survives only in manuscript documents its lack of success in dismantling the reformist status of the figure [of Piers Plowman]”; Johnson, Reading, 85. However, Johnson dates the text to 1532, which would be rather too early for any text to “dismantle” the image of the reformist Plowman, which was largely due to later works. Anne Hudson argues that the 1532 date (originally given by Myrta Ethel McGinnis in her Yale Ph.D dissertation of 1932), is too early; Hudson, “Epilogue,” 260. 111. A Lytell geste how the plowman lerned his pater noster (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1510). 112. T. F., Newes from the North. Otherwise called the Conference Betvveen Simon Certain and Pierce Plowman. . .(London: John Allde, 1579), fol. Biiir. 113. The Cobler of Caunterburie, Or an Inuectiue against Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie. A merrier Iest then a Clownes Iigge, and fitter for Gentlemens humors (London: Robert Robinson, 1590). The title responds to that of its predecessor: [Robin Goodfellow], Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie, Onely such a iest as his Iigge, fit for Gentlemen to laugh at an houre, &c. Published by an old Companion of his, Robin Goodfellow (London: T. G. and T. N, 1590). The Cobler and Tarltons Newes are edited and discussed in Jane Belfield and Geoffrey Creigh, eds., The Cobler of Caunterburie and Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987). 114. In its structural imitation of Dante and its borrowings from Boccaccio, The Cobler of Cauterbury follows Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie. On both of

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NOTES

115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122.

123.

these, see the Introduction to H. Neville Davies, ed. The Cobler of Canterbury: Frederic Ouvry’s Edition of 1862 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976), 10–18. Cobler, fol. A4v. Although later, and seemingly influenced in some of its particulars by Shakespeare’s Puck, the ballad called The mad-merry prankes of Robbin Good-fellow ([London]: H. G[osson?], [1631?]) does attest to Robin’s reputation for trickery. Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, Conteyning tvvelue Æglogues proportionable to the twelue monethes (London: Hugh Singleton, 1579), fol. 52r. Johnson, Reading, 91–92. King discusses the way that this aesthetic continues to influence criticism of early Tudor literature (English Reformation Literature, 10–12). None of the extant B or C text manuscripts are late-fifteenth-century copies, although three B text manuscripts and one C text manuscript date from the sixteenth century. Hanna, William Langland, 38–42. Bowers, “PP and the Police,” 36–37. R. Carter Hailey, “ ‘Geuyng light to the reader’: Robert Crowley’s Editions of Piers Plowman (1550),” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94 (2001): 492. Hailey, “Geuyng light,” 492.

Chapter 3 Langland Anthologized 1. This is not to say that there was no antiquarian interest in the Middle Ages in the late seventeenth century. David C. Douglas discusses the importance of Anglo-Norman and particularly Anglo-Saxon religious history for Restoration theological and political polemic; Douglas, English Scholars: 1660–1730 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 18–22. Discussions of seventeenth-century medievalism can also be found in Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), especially Chapter 5; and D. R. Woolf, “The Dawn of the Artifact: The Antiquarian Impulse in England, 1500–1730” Studies in Medievalism 4 (1992): 5–35; R. J. Smith analyzes the historiography of the seventeenth century in The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Charlotte Brewer gives a brief overview of the seventeenth-century reception of Piers Plowman; Brewer, Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20–22. 2. Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 41. 3. A number of such modernizations are collected in Betsy Bowden, Eighteenth-Century Modernizations from the Canterbury Tales (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1991).

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4. There are a handful of studies of the development of the literature anthology. In Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Barbara M. Benedict focuses on all literature collections, not just collections arranged historically. Jonathan Kramnick identifies eighteenth-century literary historiography as divided between the idea of the past as indecorous and a nostalgia for the past in Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Trevor Ross outlines the pre-history of the eighteenth-century canon in The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Other books that discuss the anthology in its early stages include: Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Laura Mandell, Misogynous Encounters: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky: 1999), which includes a discussion of the way women writers were (and were not) anthologized in the eighteenth century. 5. William Winstanley, England’s Worthies: Select Lives of the Most Eminent Persons of the English Nation, from Constantine the Great, Down to These Times (London: Obadiah Blagrave, 1684). 6. The “life” of Mandeville is on 87–90; Chaucer is on 116–123. Winstanley, following Speght’s biography of Chaucer, quotes briefly from The Testament of Love and The Plowman’s Tale (both attributed to Chaucer) to establish facts about Chaucer’s life and sentiments. These quotations are given for the purposes of biography rather than literary history; moreover, they constitute only a small portion of Winstanley’s discussion of Chaucer. I therefore do not count Winstanley in the same category as the anthologizers I discuss below. The introduction of the historical anthology does not entirely displace historical lists of poets; one later example of such a work is Joseph Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica. 7. Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England. . .3 vol (London: Thomas Williams, 1662), 3:8–9. 8. Barbara A. Johnson, Reading “Piers Plowman” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress”: Reception and the Protestant Reader (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 146. 9. Fuller, 3:8. Fuller cites Michael Drayton, John Selden, Poly-Olbion (London: M. Lownes, I. Browned, I. Helme, I. Busbie, 1613), 109. 10. Fuller, 3:9. 11. Fuller, 3:8. The work in question is Pits’s De Illustribus Angliae scriptoribus, first published (in Paris) in 1619. 12. Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets, Especially the Most Eminent, of all Ages. The Antients Distninguish’t from the Moderns in Their Several Alphabets (London: Charles Smith, 1675). 13. William Winstanley, The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, or the Honour of Parnassus (London: Samuel Manship, 1687).

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14. Winstanley, Lives, 79–86. Winstanley’s notion that a poet’s “Life” consists primarily of laudatory verses by others mirrors the guiding principles in the Life of Chaucer that first appears in Thomas Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer; it too is largely a series of paeans to the poet; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Our Antient and Learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer. . ., ed. Thomas Speght (London: Adam Islip, 1598). The Life covers fourteen pages (biir–ciiiv), of which five (civ–ciiiv) consist of verses of praise. 15. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 3. 16. Benedict has more recently reiterated her argument that the division between miscellanies and anthologies “is not a meaningful distinction” in the eighteenth century (Barbara M. Benedict, “The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting and Différance in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” New Literary History 34 [2003]: 231). She concedes that “‘miscellanies’. . . advertised novelty, whereas ‘anthologies’ tend to be associated with the sale of literary tradition,” but concludes that the two formats differ only “by the degree of timeliness, not by kind” (“Paradox,” 231–232). Since my interest is precisely in the relative timeliness or historicity of the two genres, I maintain the anthology/miscellany distinction, although I concede her point that there is some significant overlap between the features of the two genres. 17. For example, Benedict quotes Pope and Lintot’s 1711 advertisement soliciting contributions of new works for the Miscellaneous Poems and Translations a year before its publication. The 1712 Miscellaneous Poems and Translations included the first edition of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, establishing the miscellany’s role in disseminating new work. 18. Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library: A Series of English Poetry from the Saxons to the Reign of Charles II (London: J. Wilcox, T. Green, J. Brindley, and T. Osborn, 1737), ix. 19. “Of the Old English Poets and Poetry. An Essay,” The Muses Mercury: Or the Monthly Miscellany 1, no. 6 (June 1707): 128–139. 20. “Of the Old English Poets,” 128. 21. “Of the Old English Poets,” 130. 22. “Of the Old English Poets,” 129. 23. This short text was only printed in 1949; it fills just over ten printed pages. It is edited by James M. Osborn in “The First History of English Poetry” in Pope and His Contemporaries, Essays Presented to George Sherburn (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1949), 230–250. Osborn speculates that Spence wrote the history in French “while in an early flush of enthusiasm during his first visit to France and Italy when acquiring fluency in the tongues of these countries”; Osborn, 232. 24. Osborn, 244. 25. Alexander Pope, Pope’s Dunciad of 1728: A History and Facsimile, ed. David L. Vander Meulen (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 3.177–182. In the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, Pope removes the “haulkes and hernes” Chaucer allusion with its pun on the name of his target, but adds a new explanatory note with sufficient information to identify him clearly. 26. Chaucer, Workes, fol. Avv.

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177

27. Chaucer, CT, V:1121; RivCh., 123. 28. Pope himself was quite a Chaucerian; among his juvenalia are a twenty-six line imitation of a Chaucerian fabliau and translations of The Merchant’s Tale and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. All three of these Chaucerian texts appear in Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, a Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 9–10, 76–98, 98–110. Pope’s Merchant’s Tale first appeared in Alexander Pope, et al., Poetical Miscellanies, the sixth part, containing a collection of original poems, with several new translations (London: Jacob Tonson, 1709). His translation of “The Wife of Bath: Her Prologue, from Chaucer” appeared in Richard Steele, Poetical Miscellanies, Consisting of Original Poems and Translations (London: Jacob Tonson, 1714). 29. Arthur Sherbo, “Samuel Pegge, Thomas Holt White, and Piers Plowman,” YLS 1 (1987): 125–127. 30. Hearne’s ownership of the Crowley edition (acquired in 1725) and his access to manuscripts lent by John Urry (by 1719) and Peter LeNeve (in 1725) are discussed in Vincent DiMarco, “Eighteenth-Century Suspicions Regarding the Authorship of Piers Plowman,” Anglia 100 (1982): 124–125. Hearne also owned British library MS Lansdowne 398 (B text sigil R) by 1732, on which see Benson and Blanchfield, 93. 31. Carl James Grindley, “An Eighteenth-Century Concordance of Piers Plowman,” Notes and Queries 42 (1995): 162–164. 32. Although I discuss the selection of particular authors for particular anthologies, I choose to avoid the term “canonization,” given the heated debate about the nature and notion of canonicity in the eighteenth century, see the Forum in Eighteenth Century Life 21, nos. 1 and 2 (February 1997, November 1997), beginning with Richard Terry, “Literature, Aesthetics, and Canonicity in the Eighteenth Century,” 21, no. 1 (February 1997): 80–101. 33. Many eighteenth-century historical anthologies of English literature begin with Tudor, rather than medieval literature. Even the Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry goes back only to Elizabethan verse, despite its title; Henry Headley, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1787). Information about (often including the prefaces and tables of contents of) different eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthologies is available on Laura Mandell and Rita Raley’s extremely useful website about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthologies. Laura Mandell and Rita Raley, Anthologies and Miscellanies, March 1997, http://www.english. ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/anthologies (January 16, 2007). 34. Kramnick, Making the English Canon, 20–21. An example of an earlier identification of medieval literature as “modern” is Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum (1675), which includes Chaucer and Lydgate as “Eminent Poets Among the Moderns.” Edward Phillips, Theatrum Poetarum, or a Compleat Collection of the Poets, Especially The Most Eminent, of all Ages. The Antients distninguish’t from the Moderns in their several Alphabets (London: Charles Smith, 1675). The Theatrum Poetarum was bound as one volume, with the

178

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

NOTES

pages numbered separately for Ancients and Moderns. The entry on Chaucer is on 50–51 of the section of Moderns; Lydgate is on 113. There was also a second printing in 1738 with a different title page on which the volume bears the alternate title The Historical and Poetical Medley. In 1741, the unsold copies were reissued with another new title page (which once again used the anthology’s original title). Although she herself was a playwright, all of the writers Cooper includes are men. Cooper was the author of two plays: The Rival Widows, or the Fair Libertine and The Nobleman; DNB, s.n. “Elizabeth Cooper” (4:1068–1069). Cooper, Muses Library, xv. Cooper, Muses Library, viii. Cooper, Muses Library, 1. Cooper, Muses Library, 1. Cooper, Muses Library, 1. The geological debates of this period are covered in Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1977), and Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). The word “fossil” at this point meant simply, “something taken out of the earth”; it had not yet developed its specialized reference to the remains of prehistoric animals (OED, s.v. “fossil”). See also V. A. Eyles, “The Extent of Geological Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century, and the Methods by Which It Was Diffused,” in Toward a History of Geology, ed. Cecil J. Schneer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 173. Eyles, 175–176. John Woodward, Fossils of All Kinds Digested into a Method Suitable to their Relation and Affinity. . .(London: William Innys, 1728). Edmund Halley, “A Short Account of the Cause of the Saltness of the Ocean, and of the Several Lakes That Emit No Rivers; with a Proposal, by Help Thereof, to Discover the Age of the World,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 29 (1714; reprint edition: New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1963): 296–300. Halley, 299–300. Cooper, Muses Library, xiv. Rappaport, 1. Porter, 94. Cooper, Muses Library, xi. Cooper, Muses Library, 8. Cooper, Muses Library, 8. Cooper cites the Lazar House passage to book II and corrects it in her errata; Cooper, Muses Library, xvi. Cooper, Muses Library, 17. Cooper, Muses Library, 8. Cooper, Muses Library, 8. Cooper, Muses Library, 7. There were three seventeenth-century editions of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (with John Selden’s notes), STC

NOTES

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

179

7226–7228, but no eighteenth-century edition earlier than Cooper’s anthology. Cooper, Muses Library, 8. Cooper’s text of Piers Plowman seems to be from one of the two Crowley editions that declare themselves “nowe the second tyme imprinted” (Cr2 and Cr3). Because Cooper alters Crowley’s spelling and punctuation in her edition, it is difficult to assign a source text with certainty, although her text seems somewhat closer to Cr2 than to Cr3. Romantic and Victorian medievalism differed in their depictions of and attitudes toward the past. Romanticism identified the medieval past as a still present influence on contemporary social life; Victorians saw it as a discrete and closed historical period. On this distinction, see Elizabeth Fry, Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 1–3. On the ideology of nineteenth-century medievalism, see also Brian Stock, “The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism,” New Literary History 5 (1974): 527–547. I use the masculine pronoun advisedly: the medieval English authors known in the eighteenth century were all men. Thomas Hayward, The British Muse, or A Collection of Thoughts Moral, Natural, and Sublime, of Our English Poets: Who Flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (London: F. Cogan and J. Nourse, 1738). Hayward, t.p. Hayward, t.p. Oldys’s lending of volumes is recorded in his diary, reprinted as A Literary Antiquary: Memoir of William Oldys, Esq., ed. James Yeowell (Spottiswoode & Co.: London, 1862). References to Cooper’s borrowings are on 1, 4, and 7. Oldys lent books to Warton as well; the entry for Monday, July 4, 1737 reads: “Returned Sir T. More’s works: some of his English poetry therein might be for Mrs. Cooper’s work, or Mr. Hayward’s on Fortune, &c” (4). Although the DNB entry on Cooper suggests that Oldys did most of her work, René Wellek has laid this sexist presumption to rest: The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 143, 226–227. Hayward, xxi. Hayward, xxi. Because Warton sets himself the task of explaining the history of England, as well as that of its language and poetry, from the thirteenth century on, he sometimes loses control of his topic, adding in sufficient background to become a second foreground to his narrative. In a scathing criticism of Warton’s History, Joseph Ritson mocks Warton’s digressive style. Commenting on Warton’s “Dissertation on the Gesta Romanorum,” Ritson writes “This ingenious contrivance takes up 97 pages. A pretty reasonable assistant! Was it inserted for any other purpose? Has it any particular connection with the history of English poetry in the 16th century? O, no; but it serves to fill up the volume, and that’s enough. Excellent historian!” Observations, 29.

180

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69. Eighteenth-century linguistic and literary commentators agreed that the English language had advanced since Chaucer’s time; however, there were two possible corollaries to this. Most common was the sentiment that such progress would continue; such a sentiment produces Pope’s famous dictum in the Essay on Criticism: “what now Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.” Leonard Welsted argued directly against this view, claiming instead that “the English language is not capable of a much greater Perfection, than it has already attain’d”; if English changes in the future, in Welsted’s view, it will only be to decay. Welsted, “A Dissertation Concerning the Perfection of the English Language, the State of Poetry, &c.,” in Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1725, ed. Willard Higley Durham (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915), 358. 70. Warton, History, 1.i. 71. Warton, History, 1.vi. 72. Cooper, Muses Library, 7. 73. Cooper, Muses Library, xi. 74. David Nokes, Raillery and Rage: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Satire (Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press, Ltd., 1986), 1. 75. The third section she excerpts is the one discussed above: the brief description of Kinde sending diseases from the planets, chosen for inclusion because it is a possible source for Milton’s description of the Lazar House in Paradise Lost. 76. Elizabeth Cooper, Letter to the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, February 1, 1738, British Library Additional Manuscript 6190, fol. 48r. 77. Society for the Encouragement of Learning, Minutes, vol. 1, British Library Additional Manuscript 6187, fol. 84v–85r. 78. Oldys, Literary Antiquary, 1. 79. Elizabeth Cooper, Letter to Thomas Birch, February 2, 1740, British Library Additional Manuscript 4303, fol. 77r. 80. Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift, 5 vols., second ed. (London: R. Griffiths, 1753), 1.18–20. Cibber is not Cooper’s only follower. Vincent DiMarco has noted that Godwin’s Life of Chaucer (1804) includes elements copied from Warton’s History of English Poetry, which itself borrowed passages from Cooper’s anthology; “Godwin on Langland,” YLS 6 (1992): 126. Warton’s debt to Cooper is discussed below; it is not clear whether Godwin knew Cooper’s work directly. 81. Cibber, 1:18. 82. Cibber, 1:19–20. 83. Joseph Ritson, The English Anthology, 3 vols. (London: T. and J. Egerton, 1793–1794). The excerpt from Piers Plowman is in volume 3 (poems by unidentified authors), 35–58. Ritson says: “The extract begins immediately after ‘Passus quintus de visione,’ that is, with book or section vi” (3.36). Ritson presumably means that the extract begins immediately after the incipit of Passus 5 (in the poem’s sixth section, counting the prologue), not after Passus 5 itself.

NOTES

181

84. Ritson’s three-volume English Anthology is organized into four parts, each internally chronological, but the parts themselves are not in chronological order. Ritson’s two medieval excerpts (Chaucer’s General Prologue and Langland’s Confessions of the Sins) are in Part 4, which includes Early English poems and ballads. 85. Charlotte Brewer, Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33. 86. Some of Chaucer’s lyric poems appear in a dozen or two dozen manuscripts; early printed editions also showcased the short poems. A variety of Chaucer’s short poems were among the first books Caxton printed in England. Furthermore, Chaucer’s lyric poetry was imitated, not just read, in the fifteenth century; on Chaucer’s short poems, see Rossell Hope Robbins, “The Lyrics,” in Companion to Chaucer Studies, ed. Beryl Rowland, second ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 380–402. 87. Robbins notes that “[i]n the mid-sixteenth-century Devonshire MS., lyrical passages in Troilus and Criseyde were uprooted to make new poems. . .[these extracts] were copied from Chaucer by Mary Shelton” (“Lyrics,” 382–383). 88. Not all of the pseudo-Chaucerian additions were short poems. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Lollard “Plowman’s Tale” was added to the Canterbury Tales in Thynne’s edition of 1542, and remained there (despite questions about its authenticity) until Tyrwhitt finally rejected it in 1775. 89. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Compared with the Former Editions and Many Valuable MSS, ed. John Urry (London: Bernard Lintot, 1721), e2v. See 500 Yrs, vol. 1, 1357–1800, for examples of such works in which the name of Chaucer is applied to topical satire. The pseudo-Lydgate satire, The Beasts in Power, published in 1709, demonstrates that Chaucer was not alone in being a cover name under which contemporary political satire was printed. “John Lydgate,” The Beasts in Power, or Robin’s Song: With an Old Cat’s Prophecy (London: n. p., 1709). 90. Brown Bread and Honour, a Tale Moderniz’d from an Ancient Manuscript of Chaucer (London: John Morphew, 1716). 91. Helen Cooper, “Langland’s and Chaucer’s Prologues” YLS 1 (1987): 72. 92. Warton, History, 1.282. Warton’s text is from one of the Crowley editions; he does not seem to have used manuscripts of the poem. 93. Warton, History, 1. 267–285. 94. Warton, History, 1.266–267. 95. Warton, History, 1.266. 96. Warton, History, 1.281. 97. Warton, History, 1.266. 98. Warton, History, 1.278. Langland is not the only author whom Warton describes by reference to Chaucer. In introducing Gower, Warton says: “If Chaucer had not existed, the compositions of John Gower, the next poet in succession, would alone have been sufficient to rescue the reigns of Edward the third and Richard the second from the imputation of barbarism”; Warton also lists Gower’s talents, concluding: “[i]n these respects he resembled his friend and cotemporary [sic] Chaucer: but he participated no considerable

182

NOTES

99.

100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106.

portion of Chaucer’s spirit, imagination, and elegance.” Warton, History, 2.1–2. Robert Anderson, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain, 13 vols. (London: John & Arthur Arch, Bell & Bradfute & I. Mundell & Co, 1792–1795), 1:2. Eventually, this comes to be an explicit selling point, as in the series The Five-Foot Shelf of Books, the alternate title for The Harvard Classics, published in 1910. The editor of the Five-Foot Shelf, Charles William Eliot, retired president of Harvard University, intended the collection to stand as a surrogate education in the liberal arts for workers who had not had the privilege of a university education. A brief discussion of the biases and accomplishments of this collection can be found in Adam Kirsch, “The ‘Five-foot Shelf’ Reconsidered: Revising a monument from a more humane and confident time,” Harvard Magazine 104, no. 2 (Nov–Dec 2001): 51. Anderson, 1.4. Vicessimus Knox, Elegant Extracts, or Useful & Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Youth in Speaking, Reading, Thinking, Composing and in the Conduct of Life: Being Similar in Design to Elegant Extracts in Prose. 4 vols. second ed. (London: Charles Dilly, [1783?]). The verse collection of Elegant Extracts had companion anthologies Elegant Espistles and Elegant Extracts in Prose. These collections were extremely popular in the early nineteenth century; by 1824, Elegant Extracts was in its eleventh edition. Some indication of the book’s cultural value is given by the fact that in Chaper 4 of Jane Austen’s novel Emma, Harriet Smith reports that her suitor Robert Martin reads aloud to his sisters out of Elegant Extracts. Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118 (2003): 1263. Cooper, Muses Library, ix. M. H. Abrams et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, seventh ed., vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2000). Andrew Galloway has argued that Langland knew and used in his poem a set of Latin riddles associated with Oxford and with rhetorical education. These riddles are an extreme example of the extent to which Piers Plowman requires of its readers knowledge of a broad range of textual allusions; Galloway, “Rhetoric,” 86–87.

Chapter 4 Langland Recontextualized 1. David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xxvii–xxx. These several terms appear in different combinations in the various theories of linguistic development, but never all together. Most linguistic theorists of this period saw three distinct stages in medieval English where current scholarship sees

NOTES

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

183

essentially two (Old and Middle English). Matthews has collected many of the relevant linguistic analyses in The Invention of Middle English: An Anthology of Primary Sources (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). George Hickes, Linguarum Vett[arum] Septentrionalium Thesaurus septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico criticus et arcaheologicus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1703–1705). As Clare Simmons points out, the format of Hickes’s Thesaurus, with its multiple alphabets and numerous engravings, made it an expensive book to produce. Such scholarship was often beyond a publisher’s means, since it necessitated a number of specialized fonts of type. Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in NineteenthCentury British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 22. The linguistic study of earlier forms of English was already well established by the time Hickes published his Thesaurus. John Joscelyn had already produced an (unpublished) Anglo-Saxon grammar and dictionary by the end of the sixteenth century. The grammar is now lost, but the dictionary is British Library MSS Cotton Titus A. xv and A. xvi. On Joscelyn’s work, see Timothy Graham, “John Joscelyn, Pioneer of Old English Lexicography,” in The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Timothy Graham (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 83–140. “The author of twenty satires, the title of which is Piers Plowman”; Hickes, 1.25 n. William Wotton, Linguarum Vett[arum] Septentrionalium Thesaurus. . . Conspectus Brevis (London: Richard Sare, 1708). Wotton, viii. Maurice Shelton, Wotton’s Short View of George Hickes’s Grammatico-Critical and Archaological Treasure of the Ancient Northern Languages (London: D. Browne, 1735). Shelton’s translation was also republished in 1737. The series of different versions of Hickes’s Thesaurus is discussed by Simmons, 21. I quote Wotton’s dedication from Shelton’s English translation, biv. In Wotton’s Latin edition the dedicatory letter is on iii–vii. Shelton, A4v. Joseph M. P. Donatelli has discussed the turn from medieval scholarship to medievalism and the relationships between late eighteenth century scholarly research and popular fictions about the Middle Ages; “The Medieval Fictions of Thomas Warton and Thomas Percy,” University of Toronto Quarterly 60 (1991): 435–451. On the rise of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, see also Peter Sabor, “Medieval Revival and the Gothic,” in The Eighteenth Century, vol. 4 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 470–488. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets, Together with Some of a Later Date, 3 vol. (London: J. Dodsley, 1765; reprint, with Introduction and Notes by Henry B. Wheatley, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1891).

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11. Nick Groom demonstrates the popularity of Percy’s Reliques by citing the press runs for the different editions in The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1999), 7–8. Ballad collections after Percy’s Reliques include: Joseph Ritson’s Ancient Songs and Ballads of 1790 and Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border of 1802. Percy’s influence is discussed in Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: The Athlone Press, 1964). 12. On the interconnection between gothic revival architecture and Whig politics in the eighteenth century, see Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon Press, Ltd., 1999). 13. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the ballad was a current form for articulating popular protest; consequently, ballads were considered a low and even dangerous form. Nick Groom contrasts the popular conception of ballads before and after the publication of Percy’s Reliques; Groom, 22–27. 14. Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library: A Series of English Poetry from the Saxons to the Reign of Charles II (London: J. Wilcox, T. Green, J. Brindley, and T. Osborn, 1737), 6. In his 1774 History of English Poetry, Warton does call attention to the political use of satirical ballads in the Middle Ages; on Warton’s and other responses to ballads, see Gwendolyn A. Morgan “Percy, the Antiquarians, the Ballad, and the Middle Ages,” Studies in Medievalism 7 (1995): 22–32. 15. “Of the Old English Poets and Poetry. An Essay,” The Muses Mercury: Or the Monthly Miscellany 1, no. 6 (June 1707): 131. 16. “Of the Old English Poets,” 132. 17. “Of the Old English Poets,” 132. 18. “Of the Old English Poets,” 132. 19. “Of the Old English Poets,” 132. 20. Spectator 70 and 74, edited in [Joseph Addison], The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), 1.297–303, and 1.315–322. Interestingly, the negative epithet opposed to “Simple” in Addison’s critical vocabulary is “Gothick,” which here refers not to a work’s age but its unnecessarily elaborate style. The two examples Addison gives of poets whose works are “Gothick” are Martial and Cowley (Spectator 70; [Addison], 1:297). 21. Spectator 75 (June 7, 1711); [Addison], 1.362. 22. [Addison], 1.298. 23. [Addison], 1.321–322. 24. The story may, of course, be false. Still, even a fictional story can record actual sentiments. If Percy thought that everyone who saw such a thing would be equally scandalized by the use of ballad texts as kindling, he would have told the story differently. 25. For example, chapter 2 discusses that terminology in the sixteenth-century Preface to The Prayer and Complaynt of the Ploweman vnto Christ. 26. Percy’s use of the term was not unprecedented. In an argument about Percy’s importance to later Romanticism, Ted Olson cites three eighteenth-century

NOTES

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

185

ballad collections that preceded Percy’s; each one uses in its title a different term: ballad, song, or poem; Ted Olson, “Thomas Percy’s Role in the Rise of Romanticism and in the Emergence of Modern Ballad Scholarship,” Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association 13 (1994): 120–125. The three are A Collection of Old Ballads (1723–1725); Allan Ramsay’s The Evergreen, Being a Collection of Scots Poems Wrote by the Ingenious before 1600 (1724) and Ramsay’s The Tea-Table Miscellany: A Collection of choice Songs, Scots and English (1724). Christine Baatz, “ ‘A Strange Collection of Trash’?: The Re-Evaluation of Medieval Literature in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765),” in Anthologies of British Poetry: Critical Perspectives from Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider, and Stefanie Lethbridge (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 105–124. Groom, 23–24. Even Percy may have been embarrassed by his association with the form. Percy first intended to publish the Reliques anonymously (From a letter to Evan Evans, December 1764. Quoted in Groom, 210). When the fourth edition was published in 1794, it was under the name of Percy’s nephew, also Thomas Percy (on which see Groom, 8 and n.; see also Baatz, 122). An overview of the relationship between Percy and Ritson can be found in Johnston, Enchanted Ground. Ritson’s confrontations with other antiquarians are also discussed in the biography by Bertrand H. Bronson, Joseph Ritson, Scholar-at-Arms, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1938). Percy’s essay “On the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions,” along with the other three historical essays from the Reliques (“Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels”; “On the Ancient Metrical Romances”; and “On the Origin of the English Stage”) were published together, but without the ballads, in 1767. Thomas Percy, Four Essays, as improved and enlarged in the second edition of the Reliques of Ancient Poetry (London: J. Dodsley, 1767). The extreme scarcity of this book now might suggest that its distribution was limited. Percy, 2.383. Percy, 2.378–379. A portion of Percy’s essay “On the Alliterative Metre, Without Rhyme, in Pierce Plowman’s Visions” is excerpted by David Matthews in The Invention of Middle English, 72–74. Percy, Reliques, 2:388. Percy’s notion of the “degallicized” French may have influenced Thomas Carlyle’s conception of the Normans as Teutonic, as expressed in his Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843). In Reversing the Conquest, Simmons contrasts Carlyle’s racial theories with Scott’s, 95–97. The development of different racial theories about the Anglo-Saxons is surveyed by Reginald Horsman, “Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in great Britain Before 1850,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 387–410. Horsman discusses both Percy and Carlyle, and he notes that “in the first half of the nineteenth century old interpretations of the Saxons under a Norman yoke

186

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

NOTES

existed side by side with newer ideas of an overriding Norse mystique” (Horsman, 392). Thomas Tyrwhitt, ed., The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, 4:73–75. Tyrwhitt presents his edition of the Canterbury Tales as a correction to the faulty texts in the 1721 Urry edition of Chaucer’s Works, the most recent text of the Canterbury Tales. Joseph A. Dane surveys the reception of Urry’s edition of Chaucer’s Works and the continued influence of Urry’s detractors; Dane, Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? Studies in the Reception of Chaucer’s Book (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 115–135. Thomas Holt White, [Letter], Gentleman’s Magazine 57 (1787): 945; Holt White’s letter is also transcribed by Arthur Sherbo in “Samuel Pegge, Thomas Holt White, and Piers Plowman,” YLS 1 (1987): 124. I follow Sherbo’s identification of the letter’s signature (“T. H. W.”) as that of Thomas Holt White. Holt White, 946. Urry had wanted to publish the Works in a blackletter type, and had advertised it that way. He was overruled by his publisher Jacob Tonson. On Urry’s (posthumously published) edition, see William L. Alderson and Arnold C. Henderson, Chaucer and Augustan Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 95–105. The late sixteenth-century Chaucer editions are not published in black letter throughout: editorial commentary and prefatory matter are in a roman face to differentiate them from the Chaucerian text. As Joseph Dane points out, the two sixteenthcentury editions of the pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale are both printed in a roman typeface; Dane, 65. Thomas Dunham Whitaker, Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. . .(London. John Murray, 1813). Whitaker, vii–xvii; This section of Whitaker’s Introductory Discourse is indebted to the researches of Hickes, Percy, and others. The initial “I” of the first passus is a seven-line capital, as is the initial “C” that begins the edition of Pierce the Plowman’s Crede discussed below. Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, [ed., Thomas Dunham Whitaker] (London: T. Bensley, 1814). Although Whitaker is not identified on the title page of the Crede, the edition is ascribed to him by Charlotte Brewer, 37. The page of commentary prefacing this edition of the Crede says that “the text of [Wolfe’s] edition is verbally given in the present one.” The 1814 edition even includes Wolfe’s 1553 glossary and its explanation (“For to occupie this leaffe. . .”) and his Prefatory Verse to the reader (“To read strange newes. . .”) in a language that would have been noticably archaic by 1814 (fol. Fir); Wolfe’s glossary and the Prefatory Verse are discussed in chapter 2. PPCrede (1814), fol. E4v. PPCrede (1814), fol. A2r. The title page of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede is unornamented, and, although it names the poem and its publisher, does not name an editor. John Simons, “Medievalism as Cultural Process in Pre-Industrial Popular Literature,” Studies in Medievalism 7 (1995): 6. On the Romantic practice of collecting of ballads largely from Scotland, see Groom, 28.

NOTES

187

47. Whitaker, t.p. 48. The development of what we might consider modern textual editing has been much discussed. Most relevant here is the discussion in Brewer, 24–26. See also Matthews, Making, 29. 49. Ritson’s attacks on Percy are discussed by Matthews, Making, 38–39. 50. Groom, 198–201. 51. Owen Rogers, The Vision of Pierce Plowman. . ., [by “Robert” Langland] (London, Owen Rogers, 1561), t.p. 52. W. W. Skeat, The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, in Three Parallel Texts, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1886), 2.lxxx, quoted in John Bowers, “Piers Plowman’s William Langland: Editing the Text, Writing the Author’s Life,” YLS 9 (1995): 71. 53. Whitaker xxxiv–xxxv. The text is from the Confession of Wrath (B.5.135–153; C.6.103–128). 54. This is not to suggest that Whitaker’s textual scholarship was any match for Skeat’s. As Charlotte Brewer points out, Skeat found Whitaker’s transcription so faulty that he retranscribed these passages as a correction of Whitaker’s errors; Brewer, 42 n. 8. 55. These explicits are both cited in George Kane, “Piers Plowman”: The Evidence for Authorship (London: The Athlone Press, 1965), 47. 56. C. David Benson and Lynne S. Blanchfield, The Manuscripts of “Piers Plowman”: The B-Version (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 228. 57. Whitaker’s idiosyncratic spelling was preceded by the even more egregiously misspelled title of Joseph Ritson’s Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës, 3 vols. (London: G. and W. Nicol, 1802). However, Ritson’s spelling here is an attempt to represent pronunciation not to antiquate his text. He uses such spelling consistently, as in his accusation that Percy was an “illiterate transcribeër” (1.cix, cited in Matthews, Making, 47) or in the subtitle of his Bibliographia Poetica: A Catalogue of Engleish Poets. . . 58. Whitaker discusses these manuscripts in his “Introductory Discourse,” xxxi. 59. Whitaker, xxxi n. 60. Whitaker, xxxi. 61. Whitaker, xxxii. 62. Matthews, Making, xxvii–xxx. 63. Whitaker, xxxii. 64. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (London: J. Dodsley, 1774), 266. 65. Whitaker, xxxi. 66. Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica, 30 n. 67. On this manuscript, see K-D, 14–15. Whitaker explains his valuation of the three manuscripts on xxxi–xxxiii. 68. Whitaker, xxxiii. 69. Quite the opposite editorial premise is articulated by Derek Pearsall in the preface to his edition of the C text. At a time when critical attention focused primarily on the B text, Pearsall justified editing the C text because “the

188

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

NOTES

C-revision, being the author’s latest revision, presumably represents his latest thinking and therefore, a priori, what he is entitled to ask to be remembered by, unless it is marred by evident senility”; Derek Pearsall, ed., Piers Plowman by William Langland: An Edition of the C-Text (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 10. Whitaker, xxxi. Whitaker, iv. Whitaker, vi. Whitaker, iv. Despite Whitaker’s regionalism, “country” here seems to refer more generally to England. Bowers, “Piers Plowman’s William Langland,” 70; Brewer, 38–39. Preface to the Lyrical Ballads reprinted in William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillenger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 446–447. Morgan, “Percy,” 30. Bowers, “Piers Plowman’s William Langland,” 70; Whitaker, iv. Whitaker, xvii–xviii. Whitaker was not the first to observe that the Reformers vastly overstated their case. In his 1803 Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Godwin had declared that Langland was “on the whole probably a sound Catholic,” although Godwin recognizes that Langland’s poem was quickly taken up by the Lollards, retroactively (if erroneously) implicating Langland. Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the Early English Poet; including Memoirs of his Near Friend and Kinsman, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; with Sketches of the Manners, Opinions, Arts and Literature of England in the Fourteenth Century, 2 vols, (London: Richard Phillips, 1803), 2.416. Vincent DiMarco discusses Godwin’s responses to Langland, and traces the sources of his Langland biography, in “Godwin on Langland.” I discuss Godwin’s portrait of Langland in the following chapter. Carl James Grindley, “Reading Piers Plowman,” 112. Whitaker, xviii. Whitaker calls the Prologue “Passus I” and therefore identifies Passus 1 as “Passus II.” His identification of “True Religion” is on page xx. Whitaker, 16. Whitaker’s summary of the Passus 22 (which he calls “Passus Secundus De Dobest,” following the scribal practice of subdividing the poem) is on xxix–xxx; Whitaker’s Introductory Discourse does not mention the poem’s reference to Unity Holy Church in Passus 21. Whitaker, 407. Whitaker, xli. This is perhaps another reason to suspect that the 1814 edition of Pierce the Plowman’s Crede, which also contains a set of notices of its poem, is Whitaker’s editorial work. Whitaker, xliii–xliv, n. Whitaker, xliv n. Whitaker, xliv n. Whitaker, xxxviii.

NOTES

189

91. Whitaker, xxxviii. 92. The text is from Whitaker’s edition, 84; the equivalent lines appear on 296 of the Russell-Kane edition of the C text (C.5.168–169). The lines are from Reason’s speech in what is usually numbered Passus 5, Whitaker’s “Passus Sextus.” The running paraphrase on the bottom of the page does not mention the Protestant interpretation of these lines as prophetic. 93. Whitaker, xxxviii. 94. I have previously discussed Whitaker’s response to Langland’s supposed prophecy and its relationship to Whitaker’s own political concerns in “Peirs Plouhman [sic] and ‘The formidable array of black letter’ in the early nineteenth century,” in Illuminating Letters: Typography and Interpretation, ed. Megan Benton and Paul Gutjahr (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 47–67. 95. Whitaker, xxxviii. 96. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols. (London: Constable & Co, Ltd., 1932–1937), 1:400, quoted in R. W. Harris, Romanticism and the Social Order 1780–1830 (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc, 1969), 262. 97. [Great Britain. Parliament], The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, vol. 24 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), col. 443. 98. [Great Britain. Parliament], col. 769. 99. [Great Britain. Parliament], The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time, vol. 23 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1812), col. 646. 100. Linda Colley reports the slow decline of exclusionary, anti-Catholic sentiment in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 327–331. 101. Whitaker, xxxvi. 102. Hickes, Thesaurus, 1.25 n. 103. Cooper, Muses Library, 9; Theophilus Cibber, Lives, 1:19. 104. He calls it “the Visions concerning Peirs Plouhman” on xxxix, for example. 105. Whitaker, xxx. 106. Whitaker, xl and note. 107. Skeat’s importance as the scholar who first applied a new sort of editorial practice to the poem is acknowledged by Charlotte Brewer’s division the earlier chapters of Editing Piers Plowman: Part I “The early phase” contains four chapters about the eight editors from Crowley through Wright; Part II (“The late nineteenth century”) contains one chapter on the Early English Text Society (including Skeat) and four chapters on Skeat’s individual editions; the brief Part III (“The Skeat aftermath”) contains only two chapters. The last three parts of the book discuss the origin and ramifications of the Athlone editions. 108. [Thomas Wright], “The Visions of Piers Plowman,” Gentleman’s Magazine vol. 155, pt. 1 (April 1834): 385–391. Charlotte Brewer ascribes to this letter to Wright (53). Between the editions of Whitaker and Wright, Richard Price re-edited the selections from Piers Plowman included in the History of English Poetry for his 1824 revised version of Warton’s historical anthology; Brewer discusses Price’s edition on 45–49.

190

NOTES

109. Wright, 386. 110. Both of Wright’s complaints about Whitaker’s manuscript selection are on 386. 111. Wright, 386–387. 112. Wright, 391. 113. Charlotte Brewer remarks that Wright “cooks his own goose” by himself committing the same editorial faults for which he so thoroughly blames Whitaker; Brewer, 55. 114. Isaac D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, 2 vols. (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1841), 210 n. 115. D’Israeli, 210 n. 116. Whitaker, “Notes,” 5. 117. Whitaker, “Notes,” 6. 118. D’Israeli, 210. 119. D’Israeli, 201. 120. Whitaker, xli. This part of the Introductory Discourse is followed by eight pages of “Testimonies of Authors concerning the writer of these visions” before the text of the poem proper. 121. Charles Cowden Clarke, The Riches of Chaucer in which his impurities have been expunged; his spelling modernised, his rhythm accentuated, and his obsolete terms explained, 2 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1835), 1.v. 122. [Sir Walter Scott], Waverly; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, 3 vols., second ed. (Edinburgh, UK: Archibald Constable and Co; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 1:11.

Chapter 5

Fictions of Authorship, Fictions of English Literature

1. Thomas Dunham Whitaker, Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, Dobet, et Dobest. . .(London. John Murray, 1813), vi. 2. Whitaker, vi. 3. Whitaker, xxxiii. 4. Whitaker, xxxii–xxxiii. 5. Lee Patterson, “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective,” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 58–59. Patterson rejects the alternative approach, conservative editing, as “not editing” or editing incompletely (88). 6. Elizabeth Cooper, The Muses Library A Series of English Poetry from the Saxons to the Reign of Charles II (London: J. Wilcox, T. Green, J. Brindley, and T. Osborn, 1737), 8, as discussed in chapter 3. 7. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1 (London: J. Dodsley,

NOTES

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

191

1774), 278 n. Warton innacurately describes this scene a satire on “[t]he artifices and persuasions of the monks” (1.278). Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift, 5 vols., second ed. (London: R. Griffiths, 1753), 1.18. As quoted by Spurgeon (500Yrs, I, 14). Spurgeon dates the Serpent of Division to 1400, but it has more recently been dated to December of 1422; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate: a Bio-Bibliography (Victoria, Canada: The University of Victoria, 1997), 50. In Making the English Canon, Jonathan Kramnick analyzes the eighteenthcentury shift by which earlier vernacular writers (rather than writers from antiquity) came to be defined as “classics.” The three critical figures in the new native canon, Kramnick’s “canonical trinity,” are Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Shakespeare was certainly an important figure in the eighteenth-century reception of Elizabethan literature, but so too was his contemporary Spenser. Shakespeare’s priority in his era is therefore not as self-evident as Chaucer’s in his. Hertzberg’s challenge to Chaucer’s authorship of the Testament is cited by Spurgeon, 500Yrs, III, 146. Spurgeon, 500Yrs, II, 87. Perhaps the most widely published challenge to the attribution of the Testament of Love that published by T. R. Lounsbury in “The Fictional Lives of Chaucer, I,” Atlantic Monthly 40 (1877): 269–280. On the history of The Testament of Love in the Chaucer canon, see BibMan, 458–459. Thomas A. Prendergast, “Chaucer’s Döppelgänger: Thomas Usk and the Reformation of Chaucer,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999): 264. T. R. Lounsbury, “Fictitious Lives of Chaucer, II,” Atlantic Monthly 40 (1877): 592–600. Geoffrey Chaucer, Workes (1598), fol. biiir–biiiv. William Winstanley, England’s Worthies: Select Lives of the Most Eminent Persons of the English Nation, from Constantine the Great, Down to These Times (London: Obadiah Blagrave, 1684), 122–123. This version of the “Anecdote of Chaucer” is edited from Chatterton’s manuscript note and printed in Thomas Chatterton, The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, a Bicentenary Edition, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:442–443. Taylor and Hoover date the anecdote to January 1770. Caroline Spurgeon also cites a published version in The Town and Country Magazine 2 (January 1770): 16 (500Yrs, I, 434). Chatterton himself republished the anecdote in his Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (London: Fielding and Walker, 1778), 137. Chatterton is not the only later writer to amplify the terms of Chaucer’s assault of the friar. In 1841, Thomas DeQuincey recounts that Chaucer was fined “for kicking a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street.” DeQuincey’s reference to Chaucer’s conflict with the friar first appeared in “Homer and the Homeridae,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1 (1841): 747–749 (cited in 500Yrs, II, 229).

192

NOTES

19. Ritson, Bibliographia Poetica, 19–20 n. 20. Cowden Clarke, The Riches of Chaucer, 1:5. 21. Thomas J. Heffernan, “Aspects of the Chaucerian Apocrypha,” 160. Such a notion of Chaucer as proto-Protestant survives until well into the twentieth century. Some vestige of it is visible in Matthew Arnold’s assertion that “[Chaucer’s] poetry transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance-poetry of Catholic Christendom”; “Introduction” in The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions By Various Writers and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold, ed. Thomas Humphrey Ward. vol. 1 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), xxxiv. 22. Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape, and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 141. 23. G. H. Kingsley, ed., Animaduersions uppon the Annotacions and the corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer’s workes. . ., by Francis Thynne, Early English Text Society, o.s. 9 (London: N. Trübner and Co, 1865), xi, quoted in 500Yrs, 3:77 (part three of Spurgeon’s work is printed in vol. 2). 24. Kingsley, xi., quoted in 500Yrs, III, 77. 25. The note on “Stacy de Rokayle” in Dublin, Trinity College MS D.4.1 (discussed in chapter 1) identifies the poet’s paternity but gives no significant information about the life of the poet himself. 26. William Godwin, Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, first ed., 2 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1803). The second edition was produced in four smaller volumes (London: Richard Phillips, 1804). 27. Godwin, Life, first ed., 1.ix and 1.xi. 28. Sir Walter Scott, The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 17 (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1835), 57–64. 29. Scott, “Review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer,” in Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 17 (London: Robert Cadell, 1835), 57. 30. Scott, “Review,” 61–64. 31. On Godwin’s financial situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, see DNB, s.n., “William Godwin,” 4:66 and Paul M. Clogan, “Literary Criticism in William Godwin’s Life of Chaucer,” Medievalia et Humanistica n. s. 6 (1975): 189. 32. Rowland Weston, “Politics, Passion and the ‘Puritan Temper’: Godwin’s Critique of Enlightened Modernity,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002): 445–470. 33. Clogan discusses Godwin’s claim that Edward III purposely sought out the poet as a learned companion for his son, John of Gaunt (“Literary Criticism,” 193–194). 34. Godwin, Life, first ed. 2.416. All subsequent notes are to the first edition. 35. Godwin, 2.416. 36. Godwin, 2.416. 37. Godwin, 2.405 and 2.417. 38. Godwin, 2.417. 39. Cowden Clarke, Riches, 16.

NOTES

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

193

Cowden Clarke, Riches, 16, n. Cowden Clarke, Riches, 16. Cowden Clarke, Riches, 17. Cowden Clarke, Riches, 15. Godwin, 2:410. Vincent DiMarco gives other examples of Godwin’s cited debt to Warton and his uncited but likely debt to Cooper in “Godwin on Langland,” 126, 130. Warton’s and Cooper’s claims of Chaucer’s imitations of Langland are discussed in chapter 3. Godwin, 2.417. The Court of Love was first added to the Chaucer canon in Stow’s 1561 edition of Chaucer’s Works, and it remained in the canon until the nineteenth century. Even when it was no longer seen as Chaucerian, it remained an adjunct to the agreed upon canon; in W. W. Skeat’s 1878 revised edition of Robert Bell’s Annotated Editions of English Poets, Skeat moved The Court of Love and other poems now jugded spurious to a separate section, “Poems Attributed to Chaucer” (BibMan, 141–143, 417–418). Godwin, 2.417. Godwin, 2.418. Godwin, 2.418. Godwin, 2.417. Godwin, 2.418. Godwin, 2.420. The DNB gives a rather unflattering overview of Godwin’s life, particularly as regards his borrowing later in life, which earns him the epithet “the venerable horseleech” (DNB, s.n. “William Godwin,” 8:67). DiMarco, “Godwin,” 125. Godwin, 1.x–xi. Godwin, 1.xi. Scott, “Review,” 72. The dialogue is reprinted in Walter Savage Landor, Selected Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, ed. Charles L. Proudfit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 93–154. The textual history of the Griselda story is briefly surveyed in RivCh, 880. For an argument that Chaucer might have known Boccaccio’s version of the story, see Leonard Michael Koff, “Imaginary Absence: Chaucer’s Griselda and Walter without Petrarch,” in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 278–316. Godwin, 2:143–158. J. A. W. Bennett, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” in “Piers Plowman”: Critical Approaches, ed. S. S. Hussey (London: Methuen, 1969), 323. Bennett, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” 311. Bennett, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” 322. Bennett, “Chaucer’s Contemporary,” 322.

194

NOTES

65. Florence Converse, Long Will, a Romance (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co, 1903). Long Will was adopted as an Everyman edition in 1908 and was reprinted several times in the first quarter of the century. Long Will and its relationship to the contemporary reception of Piers Plowman are discussed by C. David Benson, Public “Piers Plowman,” 13–14; and by Paul Hardwick, “ ‘Biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his Werk’: Appropriation of Piers Plowman in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Studies in Medievalism 12 (2002): 182–189. 66. Converse, 3. 67. Converse, 4. 68. Converse, 5. 69. Converse, 8. 70. Or perhaps not so predictably, given Godwin’s earlier wish that Chaucer had been able to introduce Langland to “the palaces of the great” (2.420). 71. Converse, 8. 72. Converse, 8. 73. Converse, 17–18. 74. Cooper, 8. 75. Godwin, 2.417. Godwin is not alone in this chronology of the two poets’ works. Thomas Warton says that “several of Gower’s and Chaucer’s pieces probably made their appearance before” Piers Plowman (Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, 2 vols., second ed. [1762; reprint New York: Greenwood Press, 1968], 2:215). 76. On the other hand, Chaucer does choose to follow Langland: “Chaucer indeed, in the Plowman’s Tale seems to have copied from our author” (Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser. 2 Vols. Second edition [London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1762. Reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1968], 2.217). Warton does not connect Chaucer’s satire in the Summoner’s Tale to Piers Plowman until the later History of English Poetry, on which see note 7 above. 77. Warton, Observations, 2:215. 78. Warton, Observations, 2:215. 79. Seth Lerer discusses the fifteenth-century initiation of the tradition of Chaucer as laureate poet in “Writing Like the Clerk: Laureate Poets and the Aureate World,” chap. 1 of Chaucer and His Readers, 22–56. 80. Thomas Holt White, [Letter], Gentleman’s Magazine 57 (1787): 945. 81. On anti-French sentiment as a unifying force in British nationalism from the Restoration onward, see Linda Colley, Britons. In the early days of the French Revolution, there was, of course, a strong pro-Revolutionary sentiment in England as well. On anti-French sentiment in the nineteenth century, see Gerald Newman, “Anti-French Propaganda and British Liberal nationalism in the Early Nineteenth Century: Suggestions Toward a General Interpretation,” Victorian Studies 18 (1975): 385–418. 82. Robert Henry, The History of Great Britain from the First Invasion of It by the Romans under Julius Caesar, Written on a New Plan, fifth ed., 12 vols.

NOTES

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

97.

195

(London: Cadell and Davies, 1814), 4:174. The first edition of Henry’s History of Great Britain was published in 1789. Henry, History, 8.309. Henry, History, 8.309. Isaac D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, 2 vols. (New York: J. & H. G. Langley, 1841), 1.203. D’Israeli, 1.203. By “Latinisms,” D’Israeli must mean the importation of Latinate words into English, for Langland certainly makes use of Latin in his work. Gerald Newman notes, however, the persistence of anti-French rhetoric well into the nineteenth century and posits that even after Waterloo (1815) Francophobia served as a unifying force to consolidate British middle class identity (“Anti-French Propaganda”). D’Israeli, 1.204. Converse, 13. Although it is controversial to claim the existence of “nationalism” in the medieval period, a recent collection of essays does just that: Kathy Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). An earlier assertion of the applicability of this allegedly modern notion to fourteenth-century England was made by Thorlac Turville-Petre in England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1996). Converse, 256. Converse, 314. This is not the only way that Long Will demonstrates Converse’s debt to scholarship on Piers Plowman; C. David Benson has demonstrated that the novel’s characterizations of Long Will echo the turn of the century Langland biographies by W. W. Skeat and J. J. Jusserand; Benson, Public PP, 14. The poem certainly was known by name or extract in earlier periods, as the preceding chapters have shown, but readers of the poem in anthologies, or readers of later texts that used the name of Piers Plowman, were not likely to have read the poem in full. Anne Hudson concludes her survey of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century responses to the poem: “Regretfully one must conclude that, at least after the immediate and usually Lollard imitations, Piers Plowman in the two and a half centuries after its composition was more honoured in the name than in the reading”; Hudson, “Epilogue,” 263. Seth Lerer, “The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies,” Literature Compass 1 (2003): ME 006, 13, n. 35. Frank Grady, “Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame,” SAC 18 (1996): 3–23. Lerer’s “e.g.” implies that Grady’s article is simply one of a number of examples he could have chosen to illustrate this phenomenon; I therefore do not intend to put too much weight onto this single example. I do, however, want to take issue with Lerer’s characterization of Grady’s argument. Grady, “Chaucer Reading,” 23.


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INDEX

abbeys, suppression of, 32, 34, 37, 73, 118 Acte for thadvauncement of true Religion and for thabbolisshment of the contrarie (1542–43), 69 Actes and Monumentes (Foxe), 61, 63, 79 Activa Vita (Piers Plowman), 4, 27, 29 Addison, Joseph, 104–5 agricultural laborers, 33, 46, 48, 54, 57, 70–73; authority and, 58–62, 64, 71; B text and, 170n69; complaint and, 74; enclosure and, 73; “Plowman’s Tale” and, 70; reform and, 69 Aldgate, England, 142 allegory, 10, 45, 47; tediousness of, 114 alliterative verse, 46, 48, 53–54, 57, 60–61, 68; authority and, 71–73 alterity, 51, 58, 91, 109 Anabaptists, 69 Anderson, Robert, 96–98, 101 Anglicans, 65 Anglo-Saxons, 90, 102, 146–47; poetry of, 82–83 Anima (Piers Plowman), 36 annotation, 5, 21; “longe wille” and, 19–20; prophecy and, 34–37 Anonymous, use of, 18, 157n7 anthologies, 77–81, 96, 103, 107, 125, 129–30; archaism and, 82–84; authority and, 86; collections and, 91–95, 97–99, 101, 107, 115, 137; Langland and, 82–85; literary

history and, 86–90; medieval literature and, 177n33; miscellanies and, 175n16; poetry included in, 97; studies of, 175n4 anti-Catholicism, 51, 55, 61, 65, 93, 120–21; anticlericalism and, 31, 38–39, 41, 54; Catholic accusations and, 57; enclosure and, 73; nonclerical estates and, 63 archaism, 102–3, 109, 125, 140; anthologies and, 82–84; authority and, 61, 63, 65, 67; Saxon dialect and, 112 Arden Shakespeare, The (Shakespeare), 11 Arnold, Matthew, 192n21 Arte of English Poesie, The (Puttenham), 40, 92 Astell, Ann, 154n32 auctoritas, 157n1 Augustine of Hippo, 63–64 aura, 30–31 auricular confession, 93, 117 Austin, J. L., 156n47 authority, 1, 64–67, 105, 143; agricultural laborers and, 58–62, 71; archaism and, 61, 63, 65, 67; biography and, 132; Christ and, 69; Cooper and, 82, 86; Crowley and, 30–31, 37, 41–42; identity and, 74, 148; Langland and, 48–49, 52–53, 76; persecution and, 57; plowman figure and,

214

INDEX

authority––continued 45–46, 64, 71, 73; Piers Plowman and, 108, 110, 113, 117, 119, 128; rhetoric and, 114, 128 authorial identity, 18, 22 autobiography, 130–31 Ayscough, Edward, 37 Ayscough, Francis, 5–6, 71, 116; prophecy and, 36–38 Baatz, Christine, 105 “Babes in the Woods, The” (ballad), 26 Bale, John, 27–30, 39, 41, 96, 115; anthologies and, 78; authorship and, 42; Catalogus, 22–26, 33; Crowley and, 162n68; Illustrium maioris Britannia scriptorum summarium, 22; prophecy and, 33; Robert Langland and, 24–25; Wycliffe and, 26 Ball, John, 9, 41, 154n32 ballads, 103–6, 109, 111–12, 115; popular protest and, 184n13; Scottish 109, 112 Bankett of Johan the Reve, Unto Piers Ploughman, The (anonymous), 71 Barr, Helen, 9 Barthes, Roland, 18 Beasts in Power, or Robin’s Song: With an Old Cat’s Prophecy, The (Lydgate), 181n89 “belling of the cat,” 36 Benedict, Barbara M., 79–80; canon and, 153n23 Benjamin, Walter, 30–31 Bennett, J. A. W., 142 Benson, C. David, 4–5; Langland’s biography and, 10; “longe wille” and, 19–20 Bible, 2, 32, 69, 75; Henry VIII and, 171n72; lay reading of, 32, 62, 69, 171n72 Bibliographia Poetica (Ritson), 85, 111 biography, 41, 96, 132–35, 141–42, 148–50; anthologies and, 79, 83;

authorship and, 42; autobiography and, 130–31; Langland’s, 17–21; Life of Chaucer and, 137, 139, 141; Whitaker and, 115, 127–30 Birch, Thomas, 92 blackletter men, 124–25. See also orthography, typography Blanchfield, Lynne, 4 Boleyn, Anne, 57 Bostock, Andrew, 39 Bowers, John, 11, 27, 33, 43, 75, 110, 114–15 Brewer, Charlotte, 14, 93, 114 Bridges, James, 102 Bridges, John, 65–66 Brigham, Nicholas, 23–24, 160n49 British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts Moral, Natural and Sublime of our English Poets Who Flourished in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, The (Hayward), 88 Brown Bread and Honour, a Tale Moderniz’d from an Ancient manuscript of Chaucer (Anonymous), 94 Browne, Thomas, 92, 97 Bunyan, John, 154n27 Calvinism, 6, 55 Canning, George, 12 canon, 7; Chaucer and, 8, 10; debate over, 177n32; history of, 153n23; vernacular and, 191n10 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 8, 43, 106–7, 131, 133; biography and, 30; Godwin and, 136, 138, 141; General Prologue of, 66–67, 93–94, 136; Hertzberg translation of, 130; individual Tales, 68, 86, 91, 129, 133, 134, 137, 141, 142; Lollardy and, 66; nationalism and, 10; “Plowman’s Tale” (pseudoChaucerian) and, 67–68; “Retraction” of, 17; Thynne’s edition of, 181n88; Warton and, 93–97

INDEX

Cargill, Oscar, 160n49 Carlyle, Thomas, 185n34 Carter, Jack, 9, 48 Catalogue of English Printed Bookes (Maunsell), 40–41, 71 Catalogus (Bale), 22–26, 33 Catholicism, 93, 116–19, 125, 135–36; accusations turned against, 159n31; anti-Catholicism and, 51, 55, 61, 65, 93, 120–21; anticlericalism and, 31, 38–39, 41, 54; condemnation of, 98; corruption and, 38; doctrine and, 46; Emancipation and, 12–13, 119–21; enclosure and, 73; Fortescue and, 39; Godwin and, 188n78; Henry VIII and, 12, 48, 57; literary history and, 74–75; nonclerical estates and, 63; prophecy and, 37; proto-Protestantism and, 22; Reformation and, 12; rituals of, 77; terminology of, 59; Wycliffe and, 26 Cawsey, Kathleen, 171n77 Caxton, William, 1–2, 30; literary history and, 75; Middle English and, 14; translation by, 151n2 Chatterton, Thomas, 132; Chaucer anecdote and, 191n17 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 103, 106–7, 117, 124–26, 129–33, 142–44; advancement of English and, 180n69; anthologies and, 81–84, 91–92, 101; aura of, 30–31; autocitation and, 17; Book of the Duchess, 75; canonization of, 7; Canterbury Tales, 8, 43, 93–97, 106–7, 130–31, 133; centrality of, 153n24; clergy and, 5, 131–32; Court of Love, 138, 193n46; Friar anecdote and, 191n18; gallicisms of, 13, 146; glossaries for, 53; House of Fame, 43; identity and, 145–50; Jack Upland and, 23, 160n42; Langland and, 10, 13, 86; Langland friendship and, 129–30,

215

134, 139–41; Life of Chaucer (Godwin) and, 134–38, 140–41; Life of Chaucer (Speght) and, 131–32, 134–35; literary history and, 86–88, 90; Lollardy and, 66; lyric poetry of, 94; medievalism and, 8–9; “Plowman’s Tale” and, 67–68, 74, 172n90; Plowman texts and, 70; poets compared to, 181n98; Pope and, 176n25; Piers Plowman and, 43, 86; protoProtestants and, 192n21; pseudoChaucerian works and, 8, 139, 181n88; publication of, 14; romantic history of, 72; selfreferentiality and, 157n1; Testament of Love (Usk) and, 130, 175n6, 191n12; Troilus and Criseyde, 181n86; typography and, 186n40; Winstanley and, 175n6; Works of, 155n34; Wycliffe and, 42 Chaucer, Phillipa, 135 “Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame” (Grady), 150 “Chaucer’s Contemporary” (Bennett), 142 “Chevy Chase” (ballad), 104–5 Chichester, John, 4, 27–28 Christianity, 5, 116; authority and, 69; Eucharist and, 63–64; humanity of, 68; Pharisees and, 57; Reformation and, 115; ritual in, 77. See also Catholicism; Protestantism Chronicles of England (Stow), 39 Chronicon (Knighton), 9 Church of England, 37–38 Churchyard, Thomas, 70 Cibber, Theophilus, 92–93, 103, 121, 129 Clarke, Charles Cowden, 124–26, 132, 136–37 clergy, 5, 63, 131–32, 137; authority and, 64; Chaucer and, 131–32; corruption of, 57. See also Catholicism

216

INDEX

Clergy (Piers Plowman), 32, 36–37 Cobler of Caunterburie (anonymous), 72–74 collections, 94, 96–98, 101, 103, 107; archaism and, 98; ballads in, 103. See also anthologies Collier, John Payne, 131 complaint, 44–47; plain style and, 74 Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (Anderson), 96, 101 Confessio Amantis (Gower), 14, 77; anthologies and, 77 confession, 55, 93, 117 “Confessions of the Sins” (Piers Plowman), 91, 93–94, 98, 115 Conscience (Piers Plowman), 5–6, 95, 116; biblical texts and, 32; clergy and, 63; literary history and, 87; prophecy and, 36–37 Constantine, George, 63 “Conversation of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarca” (Landor), 141 Converse, Florence, 143–45, 147–48; debt to scholarship on Piers Plowman, 195n93 Cooper, Elizabeth, 82–85, 103, 107, 121, 129, 144; anthologies and, 80, 86–87, 91–94, 96, 98–99, 101; Chaucer and, 137–38; literary history and, 86–90; Muses Library, 82–84, 92, 101, 103; satire and, 91; selection of men and, 177n36 Cooper, Helen, 95 Copleston, Edward, 112 Cornhill, England, 142 Corpus Christi, feast of, 46 Court of Love (Chaucer), 138, 193n46 court poetry, 147–48 Covetise (Piers Plowman), 95, 99 Crowley, Robert, 31–33, 66–67, 107, 110–11, 113, 115–16; anthologies and, 77, 82, 98; authorship and, 42; Bale and, 162n68; B text and, 162n59; clergy and, 63; Cooper and, 178n58; early modern period

and, 156n49; glossing and, 169n56; literary history and, 75; Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and, 163n79; plain style and, 70; Piers Plowman and, 26–30, 38–42, 45, 47, 50, 57–58; Preface by, 38; Reformation prophecy and, 33; Robert Langland and, 26; verse of, 162n71; Whitaker and, 121–22, 124–25, 127, 130 Crowned King, The (anonymous), 44 Dame Study (Piers Plowman), 5 Dante, 73, 145, 150, 157n2 Dart, John, 94 Dauy Dycars Dreame (Churchyard), 70 Dawe the Dyker (Piers Plowman), 70 Dean, James M., 44 Decameron (Bocaccio), 72 De Hæretico Comburendo (1401 proclamation), 136 DeQuincey, Thomas, 191n18 Despenser family, 159n30; selfreferentiality and, 21 DiMarco, Vincent, 140 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 133 D’Israeli, Isaac, 123–24, 147; typography and, 125 “Dissertation on the Gesta Romanorum” (Warton), 179n68 Doctor of Divinity (Piers Plowman), 6, 63 Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest (Piers Plowman), 95, 111, 122, 142; clergy and, 63 Do Well (Piers Plowman), 7, 45; Patience and, 35 Drayton, Michael, 78, 87 dream visions, 75, 77 Dryden, John, 8; advancement of English and, 180n69 Dunciad (Pope), 81–82; Chaucer allusion in, 176n25 early modern period, 154n33, 177n34

INDEX

economics, 17, 22, 44, 48, 59–60, 62; reform and, 68–69; reformation of, 69 Edinburgh Review ( journal), 134 Editing “Piers Plowman”: The Evolution of the Text (Brewer), 14 editorial theories 110, 124, 125, 128 Edward II, 87 Edward III, 4, 29–30, 87, 112, 135; authorship and, 40; Church of England and, 38 Edward the Confessor, 83–4 Edward VI, 29–30; Bale and, 22 Elde (Piers Plowman), 6 Elegant Extracts, or Useful & Entertaining Pieces of Poetry (Knox), 182n102 Eliot, Charles William, 182n100 Elizabeth I, 6, 74 Ellis, George, 134 enclosure, 59–61 England’s Worthies (Winstanley), 78, 131; anthologies and, 78 English Anthology (Ritson), 93–95, 97; chronological organization of, 180n83 Englishness, 90, 148–49; identity and, 98–99, 116, 125, 145–50; Protestantism and, 116–21, 149 Enlightenment era, 121 Ennius, 107 Envy (Piers Plowman), 95 epic, 102–3, 105, 107–8, 145, 147, 150 Epistle, The (Marprelate), 66, 114, 128 Epitome, The (Marprelate), 66, 114, 128 Essay on Criticism (Pope), 180n69 “Essay On the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Visions” (Percy), 103, 105 Eucharist, 46, 63–64 Fables Ancient and Modern (Dryden), 8 Faerie Queene (Spenser), 46, 117

217

fiction, 127–30, 132–36; biography and, 127–31; hypothesis and, 128; Life of Chaucer and, 134, 136–40 Fortescue, Adrian, 39, 165n121 Fortescue, Anne, 152n17 fossils, 178n43 Fossils of All Kinds Digested into a Method Suitable to their Relation and Affinity (Woodward), 84 Foucault, Michel de, 47 Four Essays, as improved and enlarged in the second edition of the Reliques of Ancient Poetry (Percy), 185n30 Foxe, John, 61, 63; Jack Upland and, 169n52; plowman figure and, 65; Prayer and Complaynt and, 59 France, 13, 106, 145, 147–50; nationalist sentiment against, 147, 194n81, 195n87; rhyme in, 142–44, 146–47 French Revolution: anti-French sentiment and, 194n81, 195n87 friendship (Chaucer-Langland), 129–30, 134, 139–41, 143 “From the Printer to the Reader” (preface to 1550 edition, Piers Plowman), 26 Fuller, Thomas, 79; Histories of the Worthies of England, 26, 78–79 Gawain-Poet, 45, 144 General Introduction [to] Seven Poetic Miscellanies (Collier), 131 Gentillman (Proper Dyaloge), 63, 65 Gentleman’s Magazine, 107, 122–23, 145 geology, 84–85 George IV, 119 Germanic culture, 106, 108, 122, 146 glossaries, 49–54, 59, 61, 67, 97; Wolfe and, 169–70n57 Gloucestershire, England, 27 Glutton (Piers Plowman), 95, 99, 123 Godly dyalogue & dysputacyon betwene Pyers plowman and a popysh preest/ concernyng the supper of the lorde, A (anonymous), 63–64

218

INDEX

Godwin, William, 139, 142–44, 148; Caleb Williams, 139; Langland’s Catholicism and, 188n79; Life of Chaucer, 134–38, 140–41; Political Justice, 135, 139 Gower, John, 14, 43, 97, 139–40, 145, 147; Chaucer feud and, 133; selfreferentiality and, 157n1; talents of, 181n98 Grady, Frank, 43, 150 Grattan, Henry, 120 Grindley, Carl James, 27; anthologies and, 82 Griselda (Decameron), 141 Groom, Nick, 106, 110 Hailey, R. Carter, 75, 163n80 Halley, Edmund, 84–85 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 1 Hardwick, Paul, 43 Harvard Classics, The, 182n100 Haselden, R. B., 24 Hayward, Thomas, 88–89 Hearne, Thomas, 81–82; B text and, 162n59 Heber, Richard, 112 Heffernan, Thomas J., 133 Henry, Robert, 146–47 Henry I, 83 Henry IV, 29 Henry VIII, 30, 118–19; Boleyn and, 57; Catholicism and, 48; dedication to, 9, 30; Fortescue and, 39; Leland and, 23; literary history and, 74; prophecies about, 161n55; prophecy and, 37; Reformation and, 12. See also abbeys, suppression of Hickes, George, 102–3, 121; book production and, 183n2; Thesaurus, 102, 183n2 Hidgen, Ranulf, 21 Histories of the Worthies of England (Fuller), 26, 78–79 historiography, 10, 87, 106, 130, 140 History of Britain (Henry), 146

History of English Poetry (Warton), 42, 113, 121, 137, 141; anthologies and, 88–90, 93, 95, 97, 99; digressive style of, 179n68 Hoccleve, Thomas, 14, 43 Holt White, Thomas, 107, 146–47 Holy Church (Piers Plowman), 116 House of Commons, 120 House of Fame (Chaucer), 43 Hume, Anthea, 57 Hunger (Piers Plowman), 95; prophecy and, 37; Reformation prophecy and, 33; Wastour and, 71 Husbandman (Proper Dyalogue), 56–57, 169n52 Illustrium maioris Britannia scriptorum summarium (Bale), 22 Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen (Landor), 141 Imaginatif (Piers Plowman), 38 Inner Temple, 131–33 Introductory Discourse, 109–10, 115–17, 120, 122, 124, 127–29 I Playne Piers (anonymous), 71–73, 75, 77; authority and, 64–65; Chaucer and, 172n90; compilation of, 171n77; family and, 71; plowman figure and, 72; “Plowman’s Tale” and, 172n90; PP as prose and, 173n106; reform and, 69; rhetoric and, 65 Italy, 133, 141, 145, 147, 150 Ivanhoe (Scott), 106 Jack Upland (anonymous), 23, 136; attribution of, 186n42; plowman figure and, 65; Plowman tradition and, 169n52 Jaggard, William, 71 James I (James VI of Scotland), 6 Jansen, Sharon, 37–38 John Bon and Mast Person (Shepherd), 46 John of Gaunt, 42, 135

INDEX

Johnson, Barbara A., 74, 154n27; anthologies and, 78; Jack Upland and, 169n52 Jonson, Ben, 18 Joye, George, 57 Justice, Steven, 9, 119 Kane, George, 28, 128; “longe wille” and, 19–20 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 19 Kinde (Piers Plowman), 93, 95 King, John N., 66 Kingsley, George, 133 Kirk, Elizabeth, 45 Knapp, Ethan, 43 Knighton, Henry, 9 Kramnick, Jonathan, 82; vernacular and, 191n10 Kynde Name (Piers Plowman), 157–58n9 Laboryouse Journey & serche of Johan Leyland, The (Leland), 23 laity, 6, 57–59, 72 Lancashire, England, 112–13, 115 Landor, Walter Savage, 141 Langland, Robert, 23–25, 45, 96, 98, 102–3, 146, 160n49; authorship and, 25, 40, 42; biography and, 17–22; Crowley and, 27, 31, 40–41; Whitaker and, 110, 125; Wycliffe and, 26 Langland, William, 96–98, 105, 107–11, 121–25, 142–45; anthologies and, 82–85, 91–95, 98–101; authority and, 48–49, 52–53, 64, 67, 76; biography and, 130–33; biography of, 17–21, 25–26, 41; Catholicism and, 79, 116–20, 188n78; Chaucer and, 10, 43, 86; Chaucer friendship and, 129–30, 134, 139–41, 143; fictionalizations of, 13, 139, 142, 143–44; Godwin and, 135–38, 188n79; identity and, 92, 94, 100, 102, 104, 146–50; influence of, 45; labor crisis and, 73; literary

219

history and, 75, 86–88, 90; Lollardy and, 156n49; Piers character and, 44; plowman figure and, 47; poetic form and, 70; prophecies of, 161n55; prophecy and, 40; Protestantism and, 78; reformist writers and, 48; Robert Langland and, 23–25, 160n43; Whitaker and, 112–16, 126–30 language, 50, 52, 54–58, 82, 101–3; dialect and, 122; identity and, 8, 10–11, 13, 90, 125; Piers Plowman and, 106, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 122, 128. See also alliterative verse; rhyme; specific languages Latimer, Hugh, 159n31 Latin, 2, 64; allusions in, 182n106; anthologies and, 82–83; epic and, 102–3, 105, 107–8, 145, 147, 150; importation of, 195n86; riddles and, 182n106 Laud, William, 6 Lawton, David, 8 Lazar House, 86, 93, 180n75 Lechery (Piers Plowman), 123 Legend of Good Women (Chaucer), 17 Leland, John, 22–23, 30 Lerer, Seth, 8, 99, 149–50 Life of Chaucer (Godwin), 134–38, 141; Langland friendship and, 139–41 Life of Chaucer (Speght), 131–32, 134–35 Linguarum Vett[arum] septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico criticus et archaeologicus (Hickes), 102 Lintot, Bernard, 79 literary history, 81, 98–99, 101, 103–6, 130, 150; anthologies and, 86–89; Chaucer and, 96, 136–38, 140, 144; Cooper and, 85, 91, 93; Reformation and, 74–75, 90; satire and, 91 literary value, 7, 100, 122 Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (Winstanley), 79, 83 Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (Cibber), 92

220

INDEX

Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune (Pizan), 17 “Logic of Textual Criticism, The” (Patterson), 128 Lollards, 44, 48, 66–67, 118, 135; Langland and, 156–57n49; nonclerical estates and, 63; plowman figure and, 58; Plowman texts and, 67; PP imitations and, 195n94; Protestantism and, 58, 167n17; Reformation and, 115; reformers and, 69, 188n78; rhetoric and, 66; texts of, 170n58 London, England, 4, 145; dialect of, 13; Rising of 1381 and, 148 London Lyckpenny (anonymous), 77 “longe wille,” 19–20; allegorical use of, 158n13 Long Will, a Romance (Converse), 143–44, 147; Everyman edition of, 194n65; Rising of 1381 and, 148 Lounsbury, T. R., 131 Lutherans, 55, 63 Lydgate, John, 14, 104, 129; anthologies and, 77 Lyf (Piers Plowman), 6 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 114–15 Lytell geste how the plowman lerned his pater noster (anonymous), 71; plowman figure and, 72

Maunsell, Andrew, 41; Catalogue of English Printed Books, 40–41, 71; I Playne Piers and, 173n106 Mede (Piers Plowman), 70, 91, 95–96, 129, 137; biblical texts and, 32; literary history and, 87 medievalism, 7–10, 15, 87, 109; Chaucer and, 10; Chaucercentrism and, 153n24; individuals and, 87; Romanticism and, 109, 179n60; seventeenth century and, 174n1 Mercy (Piers Plowman), 95 Middleton, Anne, 19, 41, 155n40; authorship and, 23; C text visions and, 73; satire and, 40 Midlands dialect, 3, 95 Milton, John, 87, 93, 96, 107; Lazar House and, 180n75; vernacular and, 191n10 Minnis, A. J., 157n1 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (Scott), 109 miscellanies, 79–80; anthologies and, 176n16 Modern Language Association, 82 Muses Library, or a Series of English Poetry from the Saxons to the Reign of King Charles II, The (Cooper), 82–84, 92, 101, 103

Machan, Tim William, 14, 77 Macrobius, 142 Mad-merry prankes of Robbin Good-fellow, The (anonymous), 174n116 Magnus, Lucy, 141 Malory, Thomas, 14 Malvern, John, 39–41; authorship and, 42 Mandeville, John, 78 Mann, Jill, 43 Manson, Colard, 151n2 marginalia, 4–5, 27, 31, 34, 38, 50; typography and, 125 Marprelate, Martin, 65–66, 74 Matthews, David, 112

nationalism, 10, 140, 145, 147–49; anti-French sentiment and, 194n81, 195n87; English identity and, 11, 46, 90, 146–49; language and, 13; literary history and, 90 Newes from the North. Otherwise called the: Conference betvveen Simon Certain and Pierce Plowman (anonymous), 72 “New Year’s Gift” (Leland), 23 Nokes, David, 91 Normans, 106, 113, 185n34; anthologies and, 90 Norton Anthology, 99

INDEX

notoriety, 15, 87, 135 “Nut- Brown Maid, The” (ballad), 104 Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (Warton), 145 Observations on the First Three Volumes of the History of English Poetry (Ritson), 95 “Of the Old English Poets and Poetry” (anonymous), 80, 103–4 “On the Origin of the English Stage” (Percy), 105 orthography, 111–12, 114. See also typography Oxford University, 25, 81; Latin riddles and, 182n106 Paradise Lost (Milton), 86–87; Lazar House and, 180n75; PP juxtaposed with, 95 Parallel Extracts from Twenty-Nine Manuscripts of Piers Plowman (Skeat), 110 Patience (Piers Plowman), 5, 35, 144; clergy and, 63; Dowell and, 35; heavenly reward and, 20 Patterson, Lee, 128 Pearl-Poet, 45, 144 Pearsall, Derek, 187–88n69 Peirs Plouhman (Whitaker edition), 109 Pepys, Samuel, 104 Percy, Thomas, 106, 109–11, 122; “Essay on the Metre of Pierce Plowman’s Vision,” 103, 105; Reliques, 105–6, 109–10 Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede (ed., Thomas Dunham Whitaker), 41, 46, 48, 67, 96, 108–9, 118; archaism and, 53, 55; attribution of, 186n44; Crowley and, 163n79; glossaries and, 49–50, 170n57; glossary of, 53, 59; Piers character and, 44

221

Piers Plowman (Langland), authorship of, 10–11, 23, 24, 27–28, 30–31, 39, 40–42; 166n135 Pithy pleasaunt and profitable workes of maister Skelton (Skelton), 70 Pits, John, 79 Pitt, Humphrey, 105 Pizan, Christine de, 17 plain style, 61, 63, 70, 74, 77; complaint and, 74 plowman figure, 24, 41, 43–47, 53–55, 69, 71; agricultural laborers and, 75; anti-clericalism and, 59; archaism and, 61, 65; authority and, 57–58, 60, 61, 71, 73; complaint and, 74; conservative uses of, 71; greed and, 72; iconic nature of, 57; Jack Upland and, 169n52; rhetoric and, 66; works in, 167n8 Plowmans complaint of sundry wicked liuers, and especially of the bad bringinge vp of children, The (R. B.), 71; authorship of, 173n107 “Plowman’s Tale” (anonymous), 66–68, 132–33, 136; Chaucer and, 74; I Playne Piers and, 172n90; Lollardy and, 66; Piers Plowman and, 118; reform texts and, 69 Plowman texts, 50, 63, 65, 67–68, 70, 77; Dauy Dycars Dreame and, 70; social order and, 73 Political Justice (Godwin), 135, 139 Polychronicon (Hidgen), 21 Polyolbion (Drayton), 87 Pope, Alexander, 81, 177n28, 180n69; Dunciad, 81–82 Porter, Roy, 85 Posterior Pars (Bale), 22–23 Piers Plowman, 2–3, 41, 45, 102–3, 106–10, 118; agricultural laborers and, 65, 75; anthologies and, 77–78, 80–82, 84–85, 91, 93–96,

222

INDEX

Piers Plowman––continued 98–100; appropriation of, 48; archaism and, 49, 67; authority and, 64, 73, 76; authorship and, 22–23, 31, 40, 42, 155n40; ballads and, 105; bindings and, 152n8; censorship of, 44; Chaucer and, 8, 134–36, 138, 142–43; clergy and, 41, 63; Cobler of Caunterburie and, 74; complaint and, 74; Cooper on, 86; Dawe the Dyker and, 70; editors and, 15; Fortescue and, 39; glossaries and, 50; historical records and, 5; identity and, 145, 147, 149–50; influence of, 43; I Playne Piers and, 173n106; Langland’s biography and, 17; literary history and, 75, 86–87, 90; Lollards and, 170n58, 195n94; plowman figure and, 47; Plowmans complaint of sundry wicked liuers and, 71; polemics and, 70; prophecy and, 33, 37; reform and, 69; Reformation status of, 173n110; revisions to, 114, 128; rhetoric and, 66; role of, 72; social order and, 73; “Somer Sunday” and, 160n49; structure of, 121; vagrant laborers and, 170n69; Whitaker and, 111, 113–17, 119–23, 125, 127–29 Piers Plowman A text, 39; authority of, 113; literary history and, 75; Robert Langland and, 25; selfreferentiality and, 21 Piers Plowman B text, 4, 6, 28, 91, 99, 110–11, 113; biblical texts and, 32; Crowley and, 156n49; dating of, 174n120; identification of, 113; laborers and, 170n69; “longe wille” and, 20; name-pun in, 19; Prologue of, 99; prophecy and, 35, 37–38; Robert Langland and, 25–26; self-referentiality and, 21 Piers Plowman C text, 5–6, 110; author’s intention and, 114;

dating of, 174n120; editing justified for, 187–88n70; enclosure in, 71; Fortescue and, 39; identification of, 113; Langland’s biography and, 10; political unrest and, 43; prophecy and, 34–37; self-referentiality and, 21; visions and, 73 Prayer and Complaynt of the Ploweman unto Christ (anonymous), 56, 118; anthologies and, 79; archaism and, 65; Preface to, 68–69; Protestantism and, 59; Reformation and, 61 Prayer Book of 1549, 55 Prendergast, Thomas, 131 Pride (Piers Plowman), 95 print, 1–2; cultural identity and, 151n2; literary history and, 75; modernization and, 65; plowman figure and, 47 Prologue (Piers Plowman), 2, 6, 34; imagery of, 116; prophecy and, 36 Prolog (Wyclif ), 29 Proper dyaloge, A (anonymous), 63, 65; Jack Upland and, 169n52 prophecy, 33–34, 37–38, 40, 118–20; Crowley and, 35–36; Henry VIII and, 161n55; prophetic nature and, 118 Protestantism, 46, 52–54, 58, 98, 125–26, 136; accusations against, 57; accusations turned against, 159n31; antiquarianism and, 49; authorship and, 22; biblical texts and, 32; Catholic Emancipation and, 12–13; Catholicism and, 116–21; Chaucer and, 67; Crowley and, 26, 31–32, 38–40, 42; England and, 55; Englishness and, 116–21, 149; Fortescue and, 39; identity and, 10, 12–13, 22; ideology and, 42; Langland and, 78; Lollards and, 167n17; Lollard texts and, 59, 67; plain style and,

INDEX

77; prophecy and, 38; protoProtestants and, 156n49; religious writing among, 48; Wycliffe and, 26 proto-Protestantism, 12, 31, 48, 93, 115, 136; authorship and, 22; Catholicism and, 117–18, 121; Chaucer and, 66, 192n21; literary history and, 75, 90; prophecy and, 40 Puttenham, George, 40, 92; anthologies and, 86 Pyers Plowman’s Exhortation (anonymous), 59–61, 63–64, 68–69, 72–73; authority and, 64; reform and, 69; Reformation and, 69 “Quelques Remarques Hist: sur les Poëts Anglois” (Spence), 81 R. B., 71; works attributed to, 173n107 Randal Of Chester (anonymous), 80 Rappaport, Rhonda, 85 “Reader to Geoffrey Chaucer, The” (anonymous), 81 Reason (Piers Plowman): biblical texts and, 32; prophecy and, 37 Reformation, 29, 31, 41, 117, 119, 137; authorship and, 22–23; Catholic Emancipation and, 13; England and, 55; goals of, 115; justification for, 12; literary history and, 74–75, 90; plowman figure and, 69, 71; Plowman texts and, 67; PP’s status and, 173n110; Prayer and Complaynt and, 61; prophecy and, 33, 37–38, 40; Pyers Plowman and, 69; theology of, 11; writing and, 61 Religion (Piers Plowman), 95–96, 119–20 Reliques (Percy), 103, 105–6, 109–10 “Review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer” (Scott), 134 rhyme, 65, 70, 87, 107, 142–44, 146–47

223

Richard II, 29–30, 87 Richard the Hermit, 45, 104 Richard the Redeless (anonymous), 44–45 Riches of Chaucer, The (Clarke), 124 Rising of 1381, 45, 48, 143, 154n29; Long Will and, 148; Piers Plowman and, 9, 19, 41, 43 Ritson, Joseph, 41, 99, 103, 106, 110–13, 132; anthologies and, 180n83; authorship and, 42; Bibliographia Poetica, 85, 111; B text and, 162n59; Canterbury Tales and, 93–97; Warton’s style and, 179n67 Robert of Gloucester, 80 Robin Goodfellow (folk character), 72–73; Cobler of Caunterburie and, 74; as ballad character, 174n116 Robin Hood, 80 Rogers, Owen, 41, 99, 107, 109–10; anthologies and, 77; glossaries and, 67; I Playne Piers and, 173n106; Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and, 163n79; plain style and, 70 Rokayle, Stacey de, 10, 21–22; Despenser family and, 159n30 Rolls Series, 21 Romanticism, 115–16, 124; ChaucerLangland friendship and, 138; Langland’s poetry and, 114; medievalism and, 109; typography and, 125; Victorianism and, 178n59 salination of the sea, 84–85 salvation, 38, 93, 117; works and, 38 satire, 2, 23, 40, 46, 70, 133; anthologies and, 77, 81, 86, 91, 93–96; identity and, 44, 66, 90, 98, 125, 146–47; literary history and, 91; rhetoric and, 66; Whitaker and, 114, 117, 121, 123 Saturn (Piers Plowman), 70 Saxons, 102–3, 106, 108, 112–13, 124, 145–47

224

INDEX

Schaap, Tanya, 5 Schultz, H. C., 24 science, 84–85, 117; anthologies and, 89 Scott, Walter, 111, 119–20, 125, 134–35, 140–41; Ivanhoe, 106; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 109 Selden, John, 78, 87 self-referentiality, 21, 157n1 Serpent of Division (Lydgate), 129 Seven Deadly Sins, 80 Shakespeare, William, 1; ballads and, 105; Chaucer and, 8; literary history and, 86; Robin Goodfellow and, 174n116; social meaning of, 11; vernacular and, 191n10 Shepheardes Calendar (Spenser), 74, 117 Sherbo, Arthur, 82 Sidney, Philip, 79, 104 Simon Certain (Newes from the North), 72 Skeat, Walter W., 110–11, 122, 169n56; glossaries and, 50; importance of, 189n107; Parallel Extracts from Twenty-Nine Manuscripts of Piers Plowman, 110 Skelton, John, 8, 70, 102 slave trade, 121 Sloth (Piers Plowman), 80, 86, 92, 129, 137 social orders, medieval, 46 Society for the Encouragement of Learning, 92 “Somer Sonday” (lyric), 160n49 Song of the Husbandman, The (anonymous), 44 Southey, Robert, 119 Sparke, William, 23–24 Spectator (magazine), 104 Speght, Thomas, 30–31, 53, 68, 131–32; anthologies and, 81 Spence, Joseph, 81, 176n22 Spenser, Edmund, 46, 117–18; Chaucer and, 8;

Faerie Queene, 46, 117; literary history and, 87, 90; Shepheardes Calendar, 74, 117; vernacular and, 191n10 Statute of Laborers, 73 Stow, John, 4–5, 30, 40 Stratford, England, 4 Straw, Jack, 143 Sudbury, Archbishop, 43 Summarium (Bale), 22–23 Survay of London (Stow), 4 Swinford, Katherine, 135 Tarlton, Richard, 72 Tarltons Newes out of Purgatorie (anonymous), 72–73 Testament of Criseyde (Henryson), 75 Testament of Love (Usk), 130–31 Theatrum Poetarum, 177n34 Thesaurus (Hickes), 102–3, 183n2 Thorne, J. R., 50 Thorpe, William, 61 Thynne, John, 9, 30, 68, 153n22; Canterbury Tales and, 181n88 Thyrnbecke, Thomas, 27 Tinker of Turvey, The (anonymous), 77 Tomline, William Edward, 120 “To the Reader” (Wolfe), 55 Tottel, Richard, 79 Tout, T. F., 131 transubstantiation, 46, 71 Trigg, Stephanie, 53 Tuke, Brian, 155n34 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 39 Tyler, Wat, 143 Tyndale, William, 57, 61, 63; authorship and, 169n43 typography, 105, 108–9, 125; Chaucer and, 186n39 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 68, 97, 106–7, 117, 133–34, 141; authorship and, 42; Robert Langland and, 160n43

INDEX

Uhart, Marie-Claire, 50 Unity (Piers Plowman), 116 Urry, John, 68, 107, 141–42 Usk, Thomas, 130–31 Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare), 1 vernacular, 2, 23, 82, 87; archaism and, 109; canon and, 191n10; literary history and, 87 Virgil, 105, 107 Vision of Pierce Plowman, The, 102, 111, 146 Vision of Piers Plouhman, 122 Visio Willi[am] de Petro Plouhman, Item Visiones ejusdem de Dowel, 42, 111, 170n69 W. T., 69; Prayer and Complaynt and, 68 Walsingham, Thomas, 9 Warton, Thomas, 10, 42, 99, 103, 113; Canterbury Tales and, 93–97; Chaucer comparison and, 181n97; digressive style of, 179n67; literary history and, 89–90; Piers Plowman and, 95, 121, 129, 137–38, 141, 145–46 Wastour (Piers Plowman), 71 Watkins, John, 31 Waverly (Scott), 125 Welsted, Leonard, 180n69 Weston, Rowland, 135 Whitaker, Thomas Dunham, 10, 99, 107–11, 122–26, 135, 137–38; attribution to, 186n44; biography and, 127–30; Catholicism and, 117–21; Chaucer-Langland

225

friendship and, 129–30; omissions by, 123; Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and, 108; Piers Plowman and, 112–16; Skeat compared to, 187n54 White, Thomas Holt, 107, 145 Wife of Bath, The (Gay), 8 Will (Piers Plowman), 7, 45, 91, 102, 134; clergy and, 63; Robert Langland and, 25; selfreferentiality and, 21 Winstanley, William, 79, 87, 131–32; Chaucer and, 175n6; Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, 79, 83 Wisdom, John, 23, 28 Wolfe, Reginald, 49–50, 53, 55, 65 Wood, Andy, 60 Woodward, John, 84 Wordsworth, William, 114–15 Workes ( Jonson), 18 Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames, The (anonymous), 18 Works (Chaucer), 18, 29–31, 77, 107, 116, 155n34; anthologies and, 77, 81, 91, 94; Caxton and, 18; Langland and, 138, 141–42, 145; “Plowman’s Tale” and, 66 Wotton, William, 102 Wright, Thomas, 122–23, 125 Wycliffe, John, 23, 28–31, 129, 161n54; authorship and, 42; Langland and, 26; prophecy and, 33; Robert Langland and, 25 Wycliffites, 48, 132–33, 135, 137; prophecy and, 38; Reformation and, 12

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