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Introduction Langland As an Early Modern Author 1 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 152 NOTES Justice, “Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427,” New Medieval Literature 1 (1997): 59–83. 6. 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. 7. 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 four- teenth or early fifteenth century. Collectively, about 57 percent of the sur- viving manuscripts are from within a generation of the poem’s composition. Hanna, William Langland, 37–42. 8. 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 mod- ern 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. 9. Benson and Blanchfield, 206. 10. Benson and Blanchfield, 206. 11. Benson and Blanchfield, 163. 12. 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. 13. 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. 14. 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. 15. Benson and Blanchfield, 144; the annotator’s marginalia are transcribed on 144–147. 16. Benson and Blanchfield, 146, 145. 17. Benson and Blanchfield, 145. Although sixteenth-century readers were more likely men, there is one known female reader of the poem in the NOTES 153 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. 18. 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. 19. Grindley, 101. In chapter 1, I discuss further Ayscough’s application of details in Langland’s poem to current events. 20. Grindley, 113. The annotation is to C.15.65 in the Russell-Kane edition of the C text. 21. 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. 22. 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). 23. 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. 24. 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 phenome- non focused neither on Chaucer nor on Middle English: Allen J. Frantzen, 154 NOTES Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). David Matthews has stud- ied 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). 25. 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. 26. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 3. 27. 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 allu- sion. 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. 28. 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.
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