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Editing Piers Plowman B:
The Imperative of am Intermittently Critical Edition
by
Robert Adams
[*]
When George Kane published his edition of Piers Plowman A in 1960, he readily acknowledged the necessity—in certain situations—of allowing one's copy-text to stand unrevised by critical scrutiny (152-156). The cases in question were those where the ambiguity of the textual evidence, or the evenness with which it was balanced, or its paucity, prevented the attainment of a valid critical reading. Fortunately, however, relatively few textual problems in A seemed to him of such obscurity as to preclude editorial discrimination. By 1975, when Kane and E. T. Donaldson published their edition of the much longer B version, even fewer situations appeared to require a merely passive assent to copytext. Now the editors believed themselves able to correct the inferred B archetype by comparing it to parallel passages in A and C, the earlier and later versions of the poem.[1] Thus they hoped to restore not only many substantive readings garbled in the extant manuscripts of B but also the minutiae of the authorial style, which scribes had tended to blur through the process of repeated copying. This attempt at restoration led them to displace many strongly attested B manuscript readings.
Shortly after the appearance of the Kane-Donaldson edition of B, several reviews expressed skepticism about this feature of the editors' approach, as well as about what the reviewers took to be an undisciplined application of eclectic methodology in general (e.g., Turville-Petre, Pearsall, Fowler). Since that time, however, only Lee Patterson and Charlotte Brewer have examined the matter extensively. Patterson's discussion, though acute in noting some of the incompatible philosophical assumptions behind the Athlone project (71ff.), is broadly enthusiastic and sounds rather naive in its notion that Kane can somehow validate his editorial practice on an abstract plane where it remains mystically immune to particular falsifications (65, 68-69).[2] Eclecticism as an editorial approach may indeed be unimpeachable by any number of examples of its imprudent application, but surely the only yardstick for measuring the success of a particular editor's practices—and the only one that Kane himself will accept (1975, 220; 1989, 185)—is our estimate of the percentage of correct reconstructions in his text. By contrast, Brewer's assessment of Kane-Donaldson is both sharper in tone than Patterson's and more consistently insightful concerning the specifics of their editorial decisions but may miss the mark in its categorical rejection of Kane's editorial criteria and the means by which they were formulated (89; see Appendix 1 for a detailed review of Brewer's argument).
Meanwhile, the Athlone editions have established themselves as the definitive scholarly texts of Piers Plowman, with the first two volumes having been reissued in 1988 and the Russell C version imminent. In the course of its success, the Athlone project has managed to bequeath its brand of eclecticism to a number of later editors, some of whom have applied the method with a full measure of Kane's boldness but with little of his intuition and philological expertise. Yet it has also stimulated, among certain younger medievalists, an unfortunate distrust of all "eclectic" approaches to textual editing (e.g., Bowers).
Reacting against the sometimes feigned, sometimes exaggerated empiricism of the Athlone B version, yet also attuned to a stylish nihilism prevalent in recent literary criticism, these scholars have sensed an erosion of the epistemological confidence necessary for systematic discrimination of textual variants and have begun urging, in effect, a return to "best-text" editions of medieval works (cf. Kane's description of this movement: 1988, 195-196). Their efforts to act as go-betweens in contemporary theory's courtship of indeterminacy are sometimes inadvertently seconded by older scholars whose
Much of this study may likewise seem—to those whose predilections are described above—aimed at undermining the possibility of any critical edition of Piers Plowman B. Nevertheless, I am generally in agreement with the Athlone editors in regarding the aforementioned trend as an unhealthy one (Kane 1989, 208). My own outlook is moderately eclecticist[4] and my only quarrel with Kane and Donaldson, though a very extensive one in its ramifications, concerns the level of evidence necessary to displace copy-text or archetype with a hypothetical reading.
Essentially, the problem with Athlone is this: while Kane allows in theory for the possibility that available textual evidence may be inadequate to support any critical judgment, in practice he and Donaldson rarely refrain from making such judgments and seldom impose on themselves exacting standards of evidence. Instead, they prefer to shift the burden of proof to the B arche-type,
A more candid and disciplined approach would begin by acknowledging that a considerable number of the paradigmatic textual situations in Piers B are so fraught with ambiguity as to preclude isolating any single variant with recognizably superior claims to originality.[5] Oftentimes the Laud or Trinity reading seems altogether plausible, but other witnesses offer one or more similarly credible competitors. In some of these cases, a close inspection of all aspects of the problem will tip the scale; nevertheless, frequently the Laud or Trinity reading can be supplanted only by arbitrarily preferring one particular hypothesis and ignoring comparable ones that might be adduced in favor of the copy-text or the inferred B archetype. In a second class of situations, the archetype is obviously corrupt, but one can readily suggest three or four possibilities that would suit all of the requirements of the text for meter, alliteration, style, and sense. In either of these circumstances, attempting to rationalize a chosen reading purely on the basis of eclectic principles seems futile and tends to undermine the authority of the method in its proper sphere. In instances of the first sort, one should simply follow the copy-text, or correct it, where necessary, to conform to the archetypal reading. As for examples of the second kind, a patently defective archetypal reading certainly cannot be allowed to remain in our edited text; one of the more acceptable readings must be selected, but the reader should be informed—in the textual notes—that the choice was, within the range of possibilities available, arbitrary rather than reasoned. Then the other viable emendations may be listed and
There is, of course, no special authority residing in any single lection of the inferred archetype of a medieval poem with such a confused textual history as that which must lie behind Piers Plowman. Even so, a neutral base of this kind serves two modest but essential purposes: it fulfills the editor's practical need for a consistent source of merely viable readings (in the numerous instances where a more probable variant cannot be located) while also reminding editor and reader alike that the critical task is not primarily speculation but adjudication—and that adjudication can only operate in the presence of sufficient evidence. Hence the best feasible text of Piers Plowman B would be one that had been critically scrutinized throughout but whose synthetic readings[7] were confined to cases where significant differences of likelihood between variants may be discerned. When offered by the editor, a synthetic reading (whether purely conjectural or not) should establish its rights by its superior "fit" in the immediate or general context, or by its ability to account for the erroneous production of its competitors, or by its greater conformity to the accepted norms of contemporary literary usage (grammatical, lexical, or metrical) and, where possible, by its correspondence to undoubted samples (or, at least, statistical profiles) of our author's own corpus. Ideally, it should also be able to show a plausible pattern of attestation in its favor.[8] Such appeals must assume the burden of proof rather than shifting it, in the manner of a French prefect, to the documentary defendants.[9]
As long ago as 1960, Kane would have found this kind of editorial policy rather timid-something less than a true eclecticism. Thus he comments in the prolegomena to A that
Whatever Kane might have thought of the latter approach thirty years ago, his own well-known audacity and rigor were considerably tempered, during the editing of A, with prudence and flexibility. Yet by the time that he and Donaldson produced their edition of B some fifteen years later, the bolder side of his editorial persona had won out. It is only natural to wonder why this occurred. Finding an answer may gain us some valuable insights into the ruminations of perhaps the greatest modern editor of medieval vernacular texts, as well as an enhanced appreciation of the perils inherent in all eclectic editing. In seeking such an answer, we must begin with an understanding of the crucially different textual traditions embodied in the A and B manuscripts. Apparently, it was a failure, early on, to appreciate the full import of this difference that led Kane to develop, in the editing of A, habits of mind, specific editorial practices, and even particular textual commitments that would serve him poorly during the B project.[10]
Seventeen authoritative manuscripts of the A version survive, arranging themselves, roughly, into one family of six (T, R, U, D, Ch, H2), one family of four (E, A, M, H3), two pairs—(V, H) and (W, N)—and three unrelated
The salient factors in this situation are, therefore, (1) that we have a rich variety of witnesses so arranged that they provide at least three or four independent sources of testimony for almost every point in the text of the poem, but (2) that those witnesses quite frequently disagree with each other over a fairly wide spectrum of textual possibilities (even within putative families), so that (3) the archetypal reading is often open to some doubt but, where inferable, generally sounds cogent, stylistically effective and, thus, very likely to be authorial. Furthermore, no single manuscript, even T (Kane's copytext), is sufficiently free from corruption to make a "best-text" edition plausible. The circumstances could scarcely be more favorable, or more challenging, for applying the methodology of "eclectic" discrimination.
Like the A version, Piers Plowman B is represented by well over a dozen manuscript witnesses. As in the case of A, most of these are from the fifteenth century though they tend, on the whole, to be datable earlier in the century than the A manuscripts. While two manuscripts of B and an authoritative printed text[11] date from the sixteenth century (G, S, and Cr respectively), between four and six may date to the last years of the fourteenth century (W, Bm, Bo, C, and perhaps L and R). By contrast, only MS V—and Z for those who reject its status as a separate version—among the A witnesses has a claim to comparable antiquity, though at least two others, the AC splices T and Ch, are thought by Doyle to have been written "in good anglicana formata of c. 1400" (46).
Though the number of authorities for the text of B is, then, roughly the same as for A—sixteen as opposed to seventeen—and of approximately the same vintage, the text to which they bear witness could scarcely be more different in its editorial status. For one thing, the family relationships among the B manuscripts are much more defined and predictable, though trivial
Unhappily, it is precisely here that B begins to pose problems unparalleled in the A tradition. While A almost always provides three or more discrete witnesses to its readings, the hypothetical stemma of B offers—at best—only two lines of independent testimony regarding its point of origin. Of these, Schmidt's limb alpha is witnessed by a mere two manuscripts, one of which has suffered sporadic losses of text (R) while the other (F) is notably eccentric and heavily sophisticated. At times, therefore, our glimpse of the common B parent is limited to a single reliable viewpoint (that of beta = W, Hm, Cr, G, Y, O, C2, C, Bm, Bo, Cot, L, M, H), and the security of any inferences about its nature is always qualified by our never having more than two angles of vision.
Far more serious in practice, however, is a second difficulty. The inferential archetype of the extant B manuscripts, though definable with greater consistency and certainty than that of A, was obviously corrupt to a significant degree. This is especially clear in the second half of the poem (Passus 11-20), where comparisons with parallel passages of C reveal more than 50 failures of alliteration alone.[13] Moreover, this common ancestor of the surviving B copies tended to lapse occasionally into lumps of two or three lines of flat, prosy paraphrase. Of course obvious versification errors also occur with some frequency in the A tradition, but they are much more troublesome in B because of the narrowness of the stemma and the tendency for such faults to affect all witnesses.
B, therefore, if approached conventionally and by itself, is deceptively easy and rather less glamorous to edit than A, affording fewer opportunities for clever reconstructions or discriminations of variants; but the resultant text will reflect some significant archetypal blemishes that cannot possibly be effaced unless one is willing to undertake an almost continuous collation of the text with those of the other two versions. Kane had been unwilling to follow such a method when editing A, and for a very good reason. As he had correctly perceived then, emending any version of an authorially revised
Yet when Kane and Donaldson came to edit the B version, they found themselves entangled in well over 1,000 "special circumstances," nearly 700 of which involved them in replacing an archetypal B-version reading with one from A and/or C. Kane realized that such a massive number of exceptions constituted a de facto change of editorial policy and admitted as much in a tersely worded note to the prolegomena of the Athlone B edition: "The editor of A now considers that he allowed insufficient weight to readings from other versions in his editing, and that his earlier view of the situation . . . was mistaken" (75, n. 15).
Was the inferential B archetype patently defective to a far greater degree than even the Athlone editors had initially suspected? Hardly. A four-year study of these myriads of "special circumstances" has convinced me that considerably fewer than half can safely be presumed to attest to archetypal B corruption. A startling number of the remainder exemplify tiny and trivial differences whose relative authenticity Langland himself would have been hard pressed to certify. How one chooses to handle cases of palpable and significant archetypal errors (comparison with A and C does reveal over 250 such instances in B) will invariably pose a number of difficulties for any editor of this multi-versional poem; had Kane and Donaldson simply failed to anticipate this problem, which is particularly acute in the B version, there would have been no need for this survey of their work. But such is not the case. Hundreds of the purported errors listed in their chapter on "The Archetypal B Manuscript" show signs of special pleading, of having been martialed in behalf of a viewpoint already formulated. Why would the Athlone editors have been drawn to exaggerate the defects of an admittedly less-than-perfect B archetype? To see why that course was tempting, we must review briefly the theoretical and practical commitments that Kane had made in the 1950s while editing A.
Faced with the impossibility of editing A by recension, but having at nearly every point a rich variety of witnesses to its text, Kane had opted to evaluate each set of A variants purely on its own merits. In doing this, he had
In general, the assumption underlying the use of these tools is that spurious readings will tend to distinguish themselves from genuine ones by the ease with which they may be accounted for as having arisen from those genuine ones, either deliberately or subconsciously, by one of several processes familiar in the copying of all handwritten texts. Of course neither of the aforementioned principles has any compelling logical force in itself; but they seem sufficiently rooted in common sense and observation to provide an editor with a means of assessing probabilities in cases where little or no other evidence can be summoned (a frequent problem with both classical and biblical texts, in which early witnesses are rare and contamination is not).
In attempting to apply and extend these rules of thumb, Kane initially measured their usefulness against a controlled sample of textual situations in A where manuscript evidence overwhelmingly favored a particular variant and where, in consequence, there was little doubt about authorial intention. He was encouraged by the discovery that they did, in fact, appear to predict originality successfully in many instances (127). So accurate did they seem that he came to believe these principles could be used even to overrule the manuscripts in selected cases where the latter plainly supported an easier or more explicit reading (148-149, 158). In other words, he employed a limited base of textual evidence to formulate canons that would allow him to overrule majority attestation in other circumstances. As Kane summarizes the entire process, one must apply to textual cruces "the knowledge of characteristic scribal behaviour gained from passages where the direction of variation is scarcely in doubt, hoping by this means to establish presumption of originality among available readings" (146).
Brewer has argued that, in doing this, Kane involved himself in circular reasoning (75ff.).[14] Whatever hypothetical force such an objection may carry,
To be sure, Kane avers, near the end of his prolegomena to A, that each crux is unique and that he has tried to prevent any of his "various resources for determining originality . . . from becoming rules" (165); readers must judge for themselves how far either of the Athlone editions actually embodies this strategic concession. My own impression is that neither does very well but that the problem remains almost wholly theoretical in A, whereas its consequences are more tangible in the B edition. The reason for the difference resides in the fundamentally different textual situations typical of the two versions. In A we frequently encounter such a wide range of viable variants, variants showing little or no correlation with assumed stemmatic relationships, that one is reduced to the bare necessity of choosing between them on the basis of some rationally plausible and consistent principle, however slender. With B, on the other hand, where the range of variants is customarily narrow and the common parent often easily inferrable, more substantial and contextually specific evidence is necessary to support a non-archetypal lection since a rebuttable presumption of authenticity, however minimal in many cases, attaches to any reading shared by the putative progenitors of B's alpha and beta limbs.
In formulating eclectic principles for editing A, therefore, Kane skirts serious theoretical difficulties; but it is hard to see what other general approach would have worked better, if one were to do more than merely publish a facsimile of MS T. In truth, no editor who aims at recreating an authorial text can avoid repeatedly using some set of heuristic principles. The greater danger is entirely practical: recognizing the specific contexts where these tools are likely to be helpful and what their limits are.
Although they are sometimes spoken of as if they were predictive and prescriptive rules resembling the laws of Newtonian physics, the usual principles of eclectic editing are, in their actual application, retrospective and descriptive, like the laws that explain historical phonological changes. When
Thus, if we have ill-advisedly chosen a very precise and vivid phrase as authentic, we will be strongly tempted to dismiss another plausible variant as scribal for its tendency toward blandness or flatness (Kane 1960, 134) or even censorship (138). Conversely, if we have been taken in by an actual case of scribal censorship or euphemism, we will easily defend our choice by labelling its more striking competitor "overemphatic" and "lacking in subtlety." Consider, for example, the famous crux in B Passus 7 concerning Piers's resolve to change his manner of life: does he swear to be less busy about his bilyue (as Kane and Donaldson emend on the basis of two A manuscripts) or about his bely ioye (as all B manuscripts uniformly attest)? Leaving aside the question of authorial revision (which can hardly be ruled out in this case), one way of addressing the issue is to ask whether bely ioye seems overemphatic to us (hence the work of a vulgarizing scribe) or whether bilyue seems somehow euphemistic and vague (produced by the vulgarizing scribe's brother—the timid, flaccid scribe).[17]
As with the issue of comparative emphasis, deciding which of two readings is the more difficult can frequently become perplexing. In a given set of variants, one word may be much rarer lexically, but its competitor may, as part of the phrase before us, reveal a subtler or richer meaning or a less
For the most part, Kane's edition of A qualifies as a consistent and rigorous example of critical reasoning in employing these standard tools of eclecticism, but it is by no means clear that he ever articulated to himself the exact nature of the practical dangers that his intuition was usually avoiding. This may partially explain why he and Donaldson are less fortunate in employing these tools in their editing of B.
Another of the snares encountered by the Athlone editors in working with B is also foreshadowed in Kane's A version: reductivism. Kane tended to approach A's cruces monistically, viewing virtually all textual anomalies as consisting of a single correct reading to be discerned plus a host of erroneous ones to be eradicated. It is probably true that the entire Greg-Bowers tradition of eclecticism vaguely encourages such an unrealistic expectation, but Kane and Donaldson did little to resist it.
The consequences are twofold. First, since in the majority of ordinary cases a single correct lection does indeed lie hidden behind the garbled readings of the various witnesses, editorial monism lures one into believing that
This is the only objection that I would register, for example, against Kane's and Donaldson's editing of the last two passus of B, where they use a number of readings from C manuscripts to repair the B archetype. Precisely because the C manuscripts reveal that there has been no substantive change in these passus—and thus authorial revision can be no factor—Kane and Donaldon were entitled to infer that C sometimes preserves a better state of this section of the B text than that reflected in the B manuscripts. In a large majority of cases involving Passus 19 and 20, then, their inferences seem astute and certainly carry a preponderance of likelihood if not inevitability.
But even here common sense tells me that they have occasionally gone too far, as when they imagine themselves able to decide between to (C21.164) and for to (B19.164) in the b-verse "Iesu to / for to seke." At least one of the C manuscripts, Camb. Ff.5.25, agrees on this reading with B and the difference is far too tiny to attempt to resolve by classical eclectic analysis anyway.[22]
The second consequence of editorial monism is that it predisposed Kane to discount the possibility that some variants in the extant A manuscripts may be authorial variants.[23] Granted our awareness that Langland repeatedly revised his poem over a period of many years, what more likely than that some of the better pairs of variants in surviving copies of A reflect ambiguities in the author's own mind and copy? Yet Kane effectually rejects this hypothesis. Why? Because it creates untidy problems to think about. Such a utilitarian attitude is patent in his offhanded and grudging acknowledgment that
In essence, authorial variation as an important factor in the determination of A readings appears to have been ruled out categorically rather than case by case.[24] To have done otherwise would have risked exposing the fragile
By the time work began on the editing of B, therefore, Kane and Donaldson were already committed to a system and a text. First, they were committed to testing variants by means of some double-edged but venerable eclectic principles that had proved quite valuable in editing A. These techniques tend to yield more ambiguous results with B, where one has not only to speculate on the usual scribal motives for departing from copy but also on possible authorial motives for fiddling with the phrasing of A. If the variant in question is relatively inconsequential and isolated, determining its authenticity can be troublesome. Secondly, Kane and Donaldson were committed to a pair of procedures that were quickly to prove incompatible when applied to B (that is, a rigorous analysis of all relevant textual evidence versus a cautious refusal to employ evidence from other versions of the poem). The problem here was that their collation of B was revealing, as already noted above, a sizeable number of corruptions in the archetype of the extant B copies. Hence
None of these problems appears to have been anticipated, and the failure to do so probably has a fairly obvious explanation: when Kane was editing the A version during the 1950s, there seemed to be no need for a close and continuous monitoring of the lectional evidence from parallel passages in the other two versions. In many cases he appears to have had only vague ideas of the attestational array or the various lectional possibilities in B and C. Nevertheless, not sloth but serious editorial scruples caused this state of affairs. To have done otherwise would have been to tamper with the jury of his own mind by introducing inadmissible evidence.[25] After all, he had already decided concerning these parallel passages that it would be "impossible to say of many lines whether their various versions originated with scribe or author" (147). Hence, "the readings of the B-version and . . . those of C, can never be treated as primary authorities in determining originality for A" (157).
One can easily imagine Kane's and Donaldson's discomfort, therefore, when they began to examine their B collations. The evidence they found there must often have seemed concocted by a malicious fate to expose the inadequacies of the reasoning adopted in Professor Kane's edition of A. Wherever there were parallel passages, the problem kept cropping up: a lection endorsed as authorial in A would turn out to be only weakly supported in B. In fact, in far too many instances it was altogether unsupported. Instead, presenting itself with unanimous or near-unanimous witness, would be a completely different reading—sandwiched into an alliterative line otherwise indistinguishable from one in A.
So what was the difficulty? Cannot authors fluctuate in revising their work, even where relatively polished phrasing is concerned? Yes, to be sure, but, as the Athlone editors must have realized, in this matter degree is everything. Hence they were willing to concede that a limited amount of trivial authorial variation does occur between the versions of Piers. Not to have done so would have seemed too self-serving. They would have had to rewrite hundreds of tiny examples like that in B7.171, which reads, "That Ioseph was Iustice Egipte to loke." Its analogue in the A-version reads identically except that the last stave word—unanimously supported by the A manuscripts—is kepe. In C we find the very same line, but now its final stave word is saue.
A similar case occurs in Passus 10 of B, but here Kane and Donaldson felt obliged to intervene. Will's friendly reception at the home of Clergy is being described and the Dreamer tells us that there "Was neuere gome vpon þis ground, siþ god made þe worlde / Fairer vnderfongen" (230-231). An unexceptionable set of verses? So one might imagine; but in the A version Langland appears to have written "siþ god makid heuene" (173). In these circumstances the editors emended B to conform to A and tried to convince themselves that B's choice for its final stave word constitutes a stale scribal substitution whereas A's phrase is so much fresher as to preclude the possibility of Langland's having written both.
Thus although occasional examples of minute versional variation could be passed over with a judicious silence, Kane and Donaldson could not acknowledge the authenticity of a sizeable number of such petty changes—changes that frequently seemed to result in no measurable improvement of the line and sometimes appeared to weaken it. If they had conceded the reality of this state of affairs, they would have been undercutting the mystique of a specially privileged authorial sensibility (cf. Bowers' recent assessment of Hoccleve's many inconsequential revisions). And this kind of mystique was essential in guaranteeing the monistic inevitability of the process by which Kane had discriminated scribal variants in A.[27]
But sometimes the problem was even more acute. A considerable group of these troubling but strongly attested B lines that differed in small ways from the equivalent lines in A turned out to differ specifically in that they embodied readings that had already been rejected in the editing of A, readings that then had seemed to Kane either not quite so good or less broadly attested than the readings that had been adopted. The unique features of many dozens of these lines are clearly archetypal in B, and in a majority of these cases no one would ever have suspected these B readings of having scribal origins. Nevertheless, Kane and Donaldson presumably feared that to allow them into the Athlone B version would have invited mockery of the eclectic
This is, in fact, exactly why Kane and Donaldson could not leave the second of my two aforementioned examples as they found it in the B manuscripts, for they knew that one of the A manuscripts, Ch, also reads "seþ god made þe world" rather than "siþ god makid heuene" at this point. Consequently, denial of this lection's authenticity in B was almost a foregone conclusion: to allow it to pass there would be to concede that revising authors and erring scribes can sometimes change texts in ways that are either attributable to the same causes or, at the least, indistinguishable in their results. [29]
Identical motives appear at work in their treatment of a tiny variant in B3.284. The archetype of the b-verse of this line read: "for kynde wit me it tauʒte." Kane and Donaldson choose to excise the direct object, it, on grounds that the phrase is awkward and excessively explicit. They prefer Kane's choice from the A version: "for kynde wit me tauʒte." Most readers would fail to see how the editors can justify a change of this sort on such slender grounds. Would Langland himself have noticed such a change? But once more, what is really at stake is more subtle than the perennial editorial myopia that causes each of us to imagine himself able to distinguish fly specks invisible to others. In this case the problem is that a whole set of A manuscripts (T, R, U, D, Ch, H2) had read "it me tauʒte" and Kane had already disallowed that possibility as stylistically inferior. Unfortunately, because he lacked a computerized record of his choices, Kane's prodigious memory here failed him; hence on several later occasions in the poem—notably, passages where A offers no reading and thus no potential embarrassment—he and Donaldson were quite willing to allow that the authorial usus scribendi might encompass
Similar considerations may explain the extraordinary respect shown by Kane and Donaldson for the most eccentric of the B manuscripts, Oxford Corpus Christi MS 201 (known as F). Since nearly 100 of their emendations in B depend on this manuscript alone, the editors are obliged to opine that F's scribe had access to a B manuscript superior to the archetype of the extant copies and that he occasionally corrected himself from that source. In reality, there is no doubt that the F scribe was sophisticating, that he collated and at times conflated several copies with his own exemplar. One such copy may well have been an exceptional B manuscript, but the evidence adduced by Kane and Donaldson seems easier to account for on a more mundane supposition, one already noticed by Schmidt: i.e., F agrees many times with the Kane A version against the other B manuscripts because at least one of its conflational sources was an A manuscript (275).[30] Significantly, Kane and Donaldson invoke the authority of F in 67 different instances where an A version reading agrees with it, but in cases where there is no corresponding A line (that is, over nearly 70% of B's text!), they use it only 31 times to displace the common B reading. In only 17 cases out of the 98 where they substitute F for Bx do they employ it with support exclusively drawn from C manuscripts (the other 14 cases concern passages not found in either A or C), and in only 8 of these examples is the F reading clearly identical with the C archetype. The real proof of the pudding is seen in how often Kane and Donaldson cite F as the basis for their emendation but then actually choose a reading from Kane A that is similar to but not identical with F.[31] It is also worth noting that, in 32 out of the 67 aforementioned cases where the editors invoke an isolated F reading because of its support for the text of Kane A, one or more A-version manuscripts supports the generic B reading that Kane and Donaldson are seeking to efface!
Were Kane and Donaldson, therefore, simply deceived in imagining that the A and C versions could be used to purge archetypal corruption from B? Should they have held steadfastly to the versional impartiality and agnosticism announced in the A version? Not altogether. In some cases they must surely be correct. There are, for example, about a dozen occasions where, when B is defective in alliteration, a stave word found in both the other versions may confidently be supplied. Out of a total of some 150 instances in the Athlone edition where A and C agree against B and are used to emend it, approximately half are necessary or probable. Some of the other half are highly improbable and many fall into the category of "possible, but far from necessary and having no more intrinsic probability than the B archetype's alternative."
An example of a close call occurs in Passus 10.5a, where Kane and Donaldson emend B to conform to A and do so with some plausibility. Here the archetypal B manuscript must have read, "'Wel artow wis,' quod she to wit." By contrast, the A version archetype read, "'Wel artow wis, wit,' quod she." No great matter is involved here, but it seems somewhat unlikely that, having once composed a syntactically tight, effective half-line like A's, Langland would later have written the looser, more awkward phrase of B. Moreover, it is easy to explain how the process of copying could have started from the reading in A and ended up producing the version seen in the B archetype. In fact, it is already apparent among the A manuscripts, no less than three of which agree with the B archetype. Four other A manuscripts read the verse, "Wel artow wis, quod she" and altogether omit the vocative "wit" from the verse. Apparently, the omission resulted from eyeskip, with the phrase "wis, wit" causing "wit" to be dropped. Then other scribes, sensing the need to clarify the person being addressed in this line, restored the reference by means of a following prepositional phrase, "quod she to wit." As Greg observed long ago, the easier it is to account for a mistake, the easier it is to suppose that the mistake may have happened more than once (1927, 20, n. 1). Thus Kane must have felt fairly secure in invoking the principle of coincidental convergence to explain archetypal B's agreement here with a rejected A-version reading.
Even this example, however, is less clear than it first appears because it looks as though the C archetype also may have read "quod she to wit." When faced with this possibility we can, of course, continue to invoke the principle of coincidence. If we do, we will say, "A and B scribes made such an error, so why not the archetypal C scribe as well?" In an unknown number of cases, such a line of defense must be correct, and it will always protect our hypothesis from direct falsification. However, when summoned in the face of every attestational embarrassment, it has the correlative effect of progressively eviscerating our theory's probability. On the other hand, if we forego this defense of the proposed emendation, we are left contemplating two distasteful possibilities: (1) that some scribe in the A tradition inadvertently made the line better than it was originally; or (2) that after scribal corruption had occurred Langland either failed to notice or was content to accept the inferior reading in
There are, of course, dozens of cases where the evidence for interversional emendation is stronger than in the aforementioned example.[34] But B 10.5a
It might seem that, wherever both of the other versions agree against B in reading a shared line, we would be fairly safe in emending; but things are seldom so simple. Even if we put aside the intrinsic likelihood that Langland must sometimes have changed his mind in revising from A to B, only to change it back again while reworking B to C,[35] we are left with many cases that are hardly transparent or compelling. Sometimes the agreement of A and C is itself the questionable product of a tenuous chain of inference. That is, similar arrays of variants may exist in all three versions but with strikingly different proportions of attestation. Having chosen one of these in editing A, the editors are inclined to choose the same variant in C, however weakly attested; then, in spite of their aversion to stemmas, they vote these two inferential archtypes against a nearly unanimous B reading.[36] Convergent variation thus transmutes the most intransigent lemmata into clarity. Above all, Kane and Donaldson are unwilling to allow that Langland might occasionally have lapsed into revisions of merely scribal quality in B, only to repent and rediscover the merits of his more felicitous original in C (cf. Kane 1989, 210-211, concerning the "postulate of excellence"). And yet our own experience as writers demonstrates every day the probability of just such an occurrence.
Another curious feature of the Athlone methodology is how little scope it appears to grant to contamination as a factor in explaining some of the suspicious situations where a variant strongly attested in one version will also appear in two or three isolated copies of another. Of course Kane was well aware of gross lateral transmission between the versions and documented dozens of instances (1960, 30-31) in which whole groups of authentic B or C lines are somehow injected into A-version copies. When this happens, an editor's obligation to his version is clear: he must excise the alien material. However, neither Kane nor Donaldson ever really addressed the problems posed by the same phenomenon when it occurs on a smaller scale than that of the line or paragraph.[37] Potential cases of micro-contamination were usually
Yet the likelihood is that such micro-contamination did happen—repeatedly but unsystematically. The early copyists betray no realization that the poem exists in three different, autonomous versions.[39] The most that can be
How often it happened is less clear. We know that it took place in the sixteenth century, and there is every reason to believe that it occurred in the fifteenth as well. Among the A manuscripts, MS Harley 6041 (H2), a composite AC manuscript, shows numerous (usually trivial) marginal and interlinear "corrections" throughout in a different, later hand and ink. These interpolations all come from an unknown B manuscript. The extraordinarily high percentage of isolated, archetypal B readings in MS Society of Antiquaries no. 687 (M, another A-version copy) suggests that something similar happened to one of its ancestors. The same may be true of the now famous MS Bodley 851 (Z).[40] I have already mentioned that a process of this kind probably influenced MS F of the B tradition. The combination of many inconsequential agreements—and some highly significant ones—between early parts of B MS G and the A tradition (against the evidence of all other pure B manuscripts) invites the hypothesis that a similar process of sporadic microcontamination affected one of G's ancestors (viz., its exemplar for Prologue-Passus 7).[41]
As for the most blatant of these cases, the evidence of his ink suggests that the sixteenth-century corrector of H2 set himself the task of marking this manuscript for medial pauses (by reference to another copy already so punctuated) and scribbled interlinear corrections only when his eye happened to notice interesting discrepancies between H2 and his checking copy. Presumably the corrector used a manuscript of B for this task not because he had a deep interest in the subtleties of Piers Plowman textual variation but because it was the copy most readily available to him. From our perspective it would seem worse than counterproductive to proof a copy of one version of a poem against a copy of a different version, but such cross-checking of the text of Piers Plowman versions can be done more easily than might be imagined. The trick lies in the macaronic character of the poem. As a rule, the hundreds of Latin tags are set off by rubricated or stylized lettering, making them readily useable signposts to specific parts of the poem's three recensions, in which many passages are closely parallel.
We can observe the scribe of MS Hm 114 (or one of his predecessors) doing this very thing in the copying of Passus 3 of B. The gist of his text leaves no doubt that his primary source here was of the second version of the poem. Moreover, at this early stage in his work he has not begun the wholesale mixing of batches of lines from each version that characterizes the later passus of his copy. But several times we catch him consulting parallel passages of an A and a C manuscript and adding to his copy a Latin scriptural citation not found in the B archetype.[42] Doing this leads him to notice small differences
Thus the existence of the same pair of alternative readings in two versions of Piers does not automatically prove the presence of any error at all, nor the accidental convergence of scribal inadvertencies; rather both versions will, on the odd occasion, have originally contained a separate authorial reading and each in turn will have been deliberately "corrected" (i.e., contaminated) from the other tradition. This same state of affairs occurs at times on a larger scale. That is, an A manuscript (or several of them) will have acquired the B version of a particular passage, while one or more B manuscripts will reproduce the A version of the same passage. For example, at B 3.51-62, manuscript pair R/F omit the B version and read instead three lines that correspond to the A version of this passage. Conversely, MS N of the A tradition witnesses the much longer passage original to B/C! Various explanations are conceivable for this example, including mere coincidence.[45]
Under such circumstances, especially where versional exchanges of individual words or brief phrases are concerned, the bipolar logic of the Athlone method breaks down; so it comes as no surprise to see that the editors will have none of this. Adducing lateral transmission is all very well when one is explaining the impossibility of genetic recension within a given version (Kane 1960, 53-114 passim), but the three versions are conceived of as hermetically sealed off from each other—at least at the level of the individual lection. After all, only such a theory of independent vertical transmission will allow tacit re-introduction of stemmatics at a later stage so as to emend B by mechanically voting A and C against it.
Much of the discussion hitherto merely elaborates in a theoretical context points made by various reviewers more than a decade ago. My final point, however, has never before been addressed. As soon as we accept random lateral transmission as a significant (though far from exclusive) cause of the shared variants mentioned above,[47] another methodological difficulty comes into clear focus: Athlone B's massive application of interversional stemmatics must partially—if unconsciously—hinge on an obscure and unprovable hypothesis concerning the three versions' order of publication. The Kane-Donaldson operational assumption was that publication order corresponded to compositional order (which, since Skeat's work, has been confidently established as A>B>C). Yet only George Russell has ever articulated anything resembling a detailed description of this hypothesis—perhaps because it seemed so obvious and commonsensical to his colleagues.[48] Having overestimated
But if intermittent, often trivial, microscopic contamination did characterize the early scribal history of the versions, collating A and C variants against B to find B's archetypal errors (though far from valueless or impossible) would require more sophisticated and cautious methods than those actually applied.[49] Similarly, if the versions were not released in the same order in which they were composed, scribal perceptions of the relative authority of their divergent readings might well have differed from ours, and the direction of influence (i.e., for memorial as well as collational contamination) might not coincide with what we would expect from compositional order.
Of course any discussion of this kind must remain speculative, for—barring the discovery of fresh manuscripts—relevant evidence concerning the actual order of publication of Piers A, B, and C is slim and ambiguous. One clue—dialect distribution of the extant copies—seems compatible with the Athlone hypothesis but can hardly be said to strengthen it.[50] Several others,
What, then, are we to make of the anomaly that puzzled Russell, viz., that B, which has always been the most popular version of the poem, reveals a remarkably homogenous—though uneven—text and a tightly bifid stemma (perhaps suggesting a tradition that never consisted of many manuscripts)? The answer that seems best to account for these facts is that B was not only the earliest version of the poem released (indeed the only one sanctioned by the author himself) but that the reproduction of its text was, in the beginning, rigidly though unintelligently controlled by some presumably non-authorial agency (cf. Kane-Donaldson 42, on the production of Bm/Bo/Cot).
To conclude, though one cannot place much weight on the slender clues provided by paleography and dialectology, they do at least suggest an alternative hypothesis concerning publication, one that seems fully as likely as the one taken for granted in the Athlone project. Namely, that A (though representing an earlier state of the poem than B) was, because of its fragmentary nature, virtually unknown (may not even have circulated among a coterie) and passed with Langland's other papers and the incomplete C version into the hands of a literary executor.[53] Kane and Donaldson are themselves inclined to believe in the existence of such an executor (127). If such a set of circumstances occurred, and the transmission histories of A and C were in the beginning briefly intertwined[54] (the only A manuscript with numerous Worcestershire dialect features is Vernon, the oldest), then one of the reasons why surviving A and C manuscripts often seem textually closer
That is the essence of my methodological reservation about the entire Athlone project. Certainly one would be remiss to aim at merely reconstructing the archetype. In essence, Skeat did that. And Professor Kane is assuredly right when he reminds us that perfection is not a viable alternative. Whatever method we adopt, and however flexible we are in adapting it to unanticipated situations in our text, we will sometimes err. But in editing as in law it seems essential that we decide in which direction we will err—either by convicting some of the innocent or by letting some of the guilty go free. I think far less offense is done to the integrity of our author's text and to our own daily experience of the complexities of composition by the latter policy than by the former. I would not be understood to be invoking the analogy of an American criminal trial and to be insinuating that the archetype must be guilty beyond all reasonable doubt before emendation occurs. Civil procedure's requirement of a preponderance of the evidence is all I would ask. But the burden of proving should be on the editor, not the archetype.
Appendix 1
Charlotte Brewer believes that Kane's entire approach to editing A is vitiated by his having based it on two defective premises: (1) that only one variant in a given set can be authorial and (2) that an accurate description of scribal usus scribendi can be formulated by generalizing from cases where originality is not in doubt (i.e., in practice, those instances where one variant's correctness is vouched for by a sizeable majority of genetically unrelated witnesses). Concerning (1), Brewer notes the intrinsic likelihood that some of the "better" rejected variants in extant A manuscripts may reflect minute authorial revision within the A tradition. Regarding (2), she objects that Kane's method is circular since he begins by appealing to attestation but then uses the principles derived from these examples to repudiate attestation in other cases. Her second objection (discussed on p. 15 and in accompanying n. 14) seems, to me, to misconceive the relationship between data and hypothesis. As for the first, Kane was surely ill-advised to dismiss the possibility of authorial variation within the A tradition but I cannot concur that this (1) undermines his entire method or (2) necessitates a complete re-editing of A according to the principles applied in Athlone B (these two assertions cohere rhetorically but are probably incompatible logically).
Clearly, Brewer's most forceful argument for authorial variants having survived in extant A manuscripts lies in the fact that certain minority A readings are also widely supported in B and/or C. There are, then, perhaps slightly more than 300 separate instances (out of 2,441 lines) where Kane's editing of A would have benefited theoretically from collating the lectional evidence of the other two versions in the way that he and Donaldson did for B. Nevertheless, in only a comparatively small number of these cases does such a comparison reveal strong likelihood that Kane's choice of readings in A was wrong. In many, the manuscript evidence suggests instead that the author of B either incorporated scribal readings from an imperfect A copy that he was using or coincidentally revised away from his original A reading in the same direction already chosen by one or more A scribes. In such examples, therefore, minority A readings would indeed be witnessing to authorial variation, but not to authorial variation within the A tradition. In other instances, Kane's preferred explanation for all of these phenomena is probably correct, viz., that some A scribes coincidentally erred in the same way that the archetypal B and/or C scribes erred and thus the appearance of authorial variation is an illusion. In still others, isolated lectional contamination of A manuscripts by hypercorrection from B/C seems the likeliest explanation (see p. 32 ff.). Finally, some cases (especially, pairs of roughly equivalent A variants in lines unparalleled in B/C) appear to invite Brewer's hypothesis of authorial indecision (or "retouching") within the A tradition. However, positing the existence of an extensively (albeit sporadically) revised exemplar of A as the primary means to account for "good" minority variants in surviving A manuscripts appears to violate the principle of economy; after all, these variants themselves are the only real evidence that such a document ever existed and yet most of them can be accounted for on other grounds (including later authorial production in known, extant revisions of A, e.g., B and C).
Since Brewer has conceded Kane's judgment that the surviving manuscripts of A all derive from a single basic draft of that version (78), and differs from him only in suggesting that certain rejected variants may have originated from intermittent authorial "retouching" of that draft, one must ask what set of editorial results she would have preferred to Kane's? Do the manuscripts in which these rejected variants most commonly occur (viz., the EAMH3, WN, and VH families) faithfully reproduce the poet's "revised" choices? That seems indeterminable, for the occurrence of these variants follows no consistent pattern such as might imply that these manuscripts all derived from a single "retouched" document. Furthermore, the only common features to these variants are (1) that George Kane rejected them for Athlone A and (2) that many of them also appear in Bodley 851 (Z) and B. The notion of authorial variation
Appendix 2
Some Athlone rejections of archetypal B variants as "easier" readings exhibit a rather casual disregard for the distinctive features of versional context. Thus at 5.195 the B archetype presumably read, "And in a tawny tabard of twelf wynter age." Kane and Donaldson emend this to read, "In a [torn] tabard of twelf wynter age." The truly striking emendation, "torn" for "tawny," has a very good chance of being right. But what has happened to the archetype's "And"? The answer is that this conjunction is not found in the archetypes of either A or C. The editors have accordingly suppressed it as a symptom of the well-known scribal tendency toward explicitness and parataxis. However, they have also overlooked key differences between the versions here that make this judgment less than apt. First, the A version lacks the three lines immediately preceding B5.195, the most important of which is B5.194: "Wiþ an hood on his heed, a hat aboue." C, on the other hand, has a near-equivalent which reads "With his hood on his heued and his hat bothe." By contrast with C, archetypal B ends line 194 with a locative preposition ("above") and begins line 195, if unrevised from A, with another locative preposition ("In"). The combination is awkward and momentarily disrupts the reader's perception of what is being described: "Is Avarice's hat tucked into a tabard that he wears on his head?" The addition of "And" breaks this clumsy syntactic pattern and prevents the misreading. So Kane and Donaldson were correct in sensing that its purpose was "smoothing." But they were probably wrong in imagining that we owe this helpful touch to a scribe's intervention. When Langland came to revise B to C, he noticed a way to clarify the relationships here without sacrificing tightness, viz., by changing "above" to "bothe." The change forfeits very little in vividness and enables him to do without the clarifying conjunction introduced in B. Surely such small progressive changes are exactly what we should expect of an author?
An apt illustration of how one can overlook contextual complexity while seeking to apply the criterion of the "harder" reading is provided by B6.179. Archetypal B here read "Ne hadde Piers wiþ a pese loof prayed hunger to cesse," while AC presumably read the b-verse of the same line, "preyed hym byleue." At first glance one is strongly inclined to endorse the choice of Kane and Donaldson to emend B; its phrase sounds inferior by comparison and is certainly more explicit. Moreover, it eliminates an obsolescent word, byleue, replacing it with a commoner synonym, cesse. Our initial verdict begins to seem doubtful, however, once we notice that the line(s) immediately following this phrase have been revised extensively in both of the later versions. In A, this phrase describes the first of a series of actions Piers takes to protect the folk against Hunger. Grammatically, the format is of a familiar contrary-to-fact sort, cast in the past subjunctive: "Had Piers not done x, and y, and z, and had the physician not done q, they [the folk] would have been dead etc." By contrast, in B all of the stipulations separating the first subjunctive (Had not Piers prayed Hunger to cease) from the conditional conclusion (they would have been dead) are excised. The larger effect is almost certainly beneficial. Some vivid details are sacrificed, but the stylistic result seems tighter and the key idea of the passage (massive death avoided) now seems more forcefully presented. Unfortunately, the elimination of the intervening A material, where Hunger's name is reasserted, obscures the reference point of hym in preyed hym byleue; thus Langland revised the phrase so as to make it more explicit. But when he re-examined this passage in revising to C, he still appears to have been dissatisfied; and the dissatisfaction seems to have been with the wording rather than the ideas. Now he chooses to restore the key phrase from A, preyed hym byleue, which is obviously stronger on its own merits than B's preyed Hunger to cesse. But he is able to do so because he has once again
Why did Kane and Donaldson fail to note these small points? For one thing, there are countless thousands of such details in every passus—too many for any editor ever to feel certain he has observed them all. But, more important here, I suspect, was their tendency to focus too exclusively on lexical rarity (i.e., the obvious superiority of byleue to cesse). This matter rendered the entire phrase suspect in their eyes. They might well have asked themselves, "Why would an author replace a relatively rare word with a more common one in his first revision, only to revert in his final revision to the more archaic term with which he began?" In one sense, such a question is unanswerably complex and is far from being the rhetorical question (with an obviously negative answer) that they appear to have imagined it. On the other hand, one superficially plausible answer may be supplied immediately, viz., that the B version, unlike A and C in this regard, specifically addresses a London audience and shows many more concessions to the lexical limits of such an audience than A (begun either before or shortly after the author had taken up residence in the capital) and C (whose surviving manuscripts strongly suggest that he had by then retired to his native region). At any event, dozens of simple variants between the versions raise this same issue, but Kane and Donaldson appear never to have considered it from any perspective but the most narrowly editorial.
A final example of this sort, where presuppositions of textual corruption in B have caused Kane and Donaldson to overlook subtle differences between versions, occurs at 9.17. Archetypal B here read, "Ac þe Constable of þat Castel þat kepeþ al þe wacche." Athlone alters this to "Ac þe Constable of [þe] Castel þat kepeþ [hem alle]." Once more B has been brought into line with A and C; "al þe wacche" is rejected as an "easier" reading. Presumably this phrase seems more obvious or explicit to Kane and Donaldson than its cognate, but that is merely another way of saying that it is slightly more vivid and appropriate as well. It seems doubtful that they would ever have replaced it on purely eclectic grounds; rather, it is the victim of covert recensionist reasoning. Two limbs of a trifid archetypal super-stemma have been voted against it and an eclectic rationale has been invoked to legitimize, and conceal, this process. Once more, however, the editors have failed to note significant distinctions between the versions. As in the case discussed above, B has enhanced the A-version passage by several details (in three new lines) before we reach the line in question. Specifically, B tells us that "Dobest is aboue boþe, a Bisshopes peere; / That he bit moot be do; he [boldeþ] hem alle; / [By his leryng is lad þat lady Animal]" (14-16). C preserves the first and third of these added lines but cancels the second. The explanation, then, for the shift from "hem alle" to "al þe wacche" to "hem alle" once more is found in the addition of the three new lines in B (the second of which ends with "hem alle") and the ensuing cancellation of one of them in C. Langland appears to have sensed the awkwardness of the repeated line endings in B and accordingly changed the latter (line 17) to "al þe wacche." When he dropped B9.15 from the C version, he reverted to "hem alle" in the later line since no problem of repetition now existed.
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Notes
The author wishes to thank Professor Ralph Hanna for an extensive critique of this paper and for many suggested improvements that have been incorporated into its argument. Thanks are also due to Thorlac Turville-Petre, Ian Doyle, and Charlotte Brewer, with whom exchanges on this topic have always been delightful as well as instructive. Responsibility for all judgments rendered here is, of course, exclusively my own. An earlier version of this paper was delivered as the inaugural R. E. Kaske Memorial Lecture at Cornell University, 9 November 1989. Funds for manuscript research were provided by the American Philosophical Society.
Some plan for systematically emending B from A and C had been intimated by Grattan and Chambers—and by Elsie Blackman—long before Kane ever came to the Athlone project (cf. Chambers 1910, 27; Blackman 1918, 518; and Chambers and Grattan 1931).
Patterson's inexperience with applied editorial reasoning is revealed in his inapposite critique of Anne Hudson's discussion of the notorious "bilyue/bely ioye" crux (215, n. 28). The logical force behind the principle of difficilior lectio is considerably dissipated when one is examining a set of variants where there is an a priori likelihood that more than one variant is authorial (cf. n. 18 below). Likewise naive is Patterson's notion of the role of hypothesis in the natural sciences, where—he tells us—"a theory can be disproven only by a better theory" (69). To the contrary, the history of physical science is strewn with theories wrecked by mere observation of embarrassing phenomena whose hypothetical position was not satisfactorily ascertained for decades or even centuries (Kuhn 66 ff.).
Those who doubt Skeat's "three-version" account of the Piers Plowman textual history often cite with approval Donaldson's own offhandedly skeptical remarks from thirty-five years ago: "I sometimes wonder whether the C-text, the B-text, and even the A-text are not merely historical accidents, haphazard milestones in the history of a poem that was begun but never finished, photographs that caught a static image of a living organism at a given but not necessarily significant moment of time" ("R and F" 211). Despite their engaging frankness, these remarks obscure some important distinctions between the extant textual states of Piers. Thus A's particular state of truncation seems to result from a cause that is neither accidental nor fleeting, viz., a major structural (and personal?) impasse that eventually forced the author to rethink and expand his whole plan. On the other hand, B has all the appearance of a finished (albeit not final) form of the poem. By contrast with both of the earlier versions, C manifests the incompleteness and indeterminacy typical of interrupted labor (Russell 1962, 44-45) and does indeed resemble the random snapshot of Donaldson's analogy.
In terms of the labels sometimes applied in New Testament text editing (Fee 174-175), my position roughly corresponds to "rational" eclecticism whereas Kane's coincides with "rigorous" eclecticism.
Cf. Donaldson's 1955 comments (presumably withdrawn later) regarding certain cases where the majority B reading parallels the reading of A and C but the minority B reading is perfectly acceptable as well: "These involve a substitution of similars so exact that there seems little to choose between them, even if the choice were put up to the poet himself" (196; italics mine). Later in the same discussion, Donaldson notes that "In no case is there anything to choose between the variant readings despite C's support of the majority: intertextual comparison on this level is futile" (196, n. 43; italics mine). Also cf. Tim Machan's recent evaluation of the same factor (the indeterminacy of the textual micro-organism) in his discussion of variants in Chaucer's Boece (192-193).
Kane and Donaldson seldom see several emendations as equally probable (cf. the discussion of their editorial monism on pp. 20-22), so the second kind of problem is rarely discussed. However, it is exemplified in their refreshingly candid treatment of 19.442 (a case discussed by Fowler [38-39]), which in Skeat (19.439) and all the B manuscripts read: "And god amende the pope · that pileþ holykirke." By contrast, Athlone reads: "And [Piers] amende þe pope, þat pileþ holy kirke." It is obvious (pace Fowler) that the alliteration of the line has suffered damage at the level of the archetype, and indeed beyond the level of the archetype since C also reflects this reading. However, there is almost no clue as to the proper way to repair the damage. In their discussion of this crux, Kane and Donaldson readily concede not only that their offering of "Piers" is purely speculative but that they themselves can suggest at least five other appropriate and likely emendations. Four of the five that they mention ("god haue pite on," "god pardon," "god make parfit," and "preie god amende") would have enjoyed (in my view) at least one advantage over their favored one, viz., preserving the line's essential meaning—which we have no cause to believe corrupt. The editors admit that, in the circumstances, "our decision is . . . arbitrary" (208).
I would define these as readings predicated on rejection of the copy-text or even of the archetype itself, depending on the available evidence in a particular textual situation.
Plausibility must always be assessed in terms of what we know about the genetic relationships among surviving witnesses. Thus in the case of Piers Plowman B, a plausible pattern of attestation might involve no more than one or two manuscripts, provided that key manuscripts supported our preferred reading.
Readers familiar with contemporary editorial theory will recognize a number of broad similarities between my proposed methodology for rationing emendations (with its correlative notion of the burden of proof) and that of Hans Zeller. Like my assessment of Kane-Donaldson, Zeller's critique of the Greg-Bowers approach to eclecticism focuses on the inability of that system to deal realistically with the multiple authorial variants so frequently encountered in works extant in several "authorised" versions (and its consequent tendency to produce contaminated scholarly editions). Nevertheless, my own thinking on these issues evolved independently of Zeller's influence, before I was familiar with his work—from the purely practical necessity of trying to re-edit Piers B. Moreover, his adherence to copy-text would, in application, be rather more conservative than my own—and for reasons that he well understands (240, n. 13): a nineteenth-century printer's fair copy makes for a much more consistent source of "authorised" readings than any late medieval vernacular manuscript, which, almost by definition, has suffered from contamination as well as all the usual scribal inadvertencies.
Whatever may have hindered him from adapting his A methodology to B's markedly different (and more restrictive) textual circumstances, it is certainly not my intention to imply that Kane was poorly informed, at the outset of his work, regarding the actual key differences in the textual traditions of A and B. His 1948 discussion, though brief, makes clear that he was very well aware of these (5).
In referring to the Crowley prints of 1550 as "authoritative," I am, of course, rendering no judgment on the relative authenticity of their text. My intention is solely to acknowledge them as a source not descended from any other extant copy and therefore capable (at least collectively) of independent testimony concerning the readings that once may have existed in the archetype. In that respect they are no different from any of the other surviving manuscripts of Piers B.
The obvious exceptions are the sophisticated MS Oxford Corpus Christi 201 (F), the thoroughly modernized MS Sion College Arc. L.40 2/E (S), and the heavily contaminated MS Hm 114.
This unevenness suggests that archetypal B may have been copied by two scribes or derived from two exemplars, one of which was much weaker than the other.
It is ironic that Brewer brings against Kane substantially the same objection (i.e., petitio principii) that Kane had earlier offered to classical recension. In neither case does the objection seem conclusive to me, but it underscores the problem of circularity implicit in all editorial reasoning and should remind us of the perils of any method when applied inflexibly. The pure recensionist believes that he can discover the controlling genetic relationship among his extant documents by concentrating on test cases where the relationship seems especially clear. He then merely surmises that in the more difficult or obscure cases the same fundamental relationship usually subsists. Such suppositions fly in the teeth of common sense and experience, which attest that many medieval documents are of contaminated parentage and that shared errors in them often occur through coincidence rather than affiliation. Despite its obvious differences, Kane's method involves a strikingly similar sort of rigid inductive generalization. By concentrating on sets of variants where originality seems indisputable, Kane believes that he can discern reliable, uni-directional scribal habits (a paradigm as idealized as any stemma) and thus resolve by appeals to usus scribendi the same textual anomalies that the recensionist would dissolve genetically. Yet such a programme offers its own offenses to common sense and experience, which aver that real scribal habits (as opposed to those described in manuals for editors) can go in several directions unpredictably, cancelling out or contradicting each other: "one may not assume scribes always to have gone in one direction" (Fee 185). Kane tries to place the recensionist in a logical box by asking why, if he is able to detect error without his stemma (and he must do so in order to develop the stemma in the first place), he doesn't just make all such decisions empirically, as the eclecticist would. But the question may be turned around on him, as Brewer does in essence, by asking why, if he must employ patterns of attestation to formulate his rules for scribal error, he doesn't just use attestation all the time, like a sensible recensionist or "best text" editor would. An illuminating recent discussion of ways to escape from the methodological circle faced by all editors may be found in Hoyt Duggan's "Langland's Dialect and Final -e," 160-170, esp. 163. Also cf. his "The Evidential Basis for Old English Metrics," 157-159.
Brewer has generously conceded this point to me—a matter of frequent past discussion between us—in her recent assessment of Kane's work (77, n. 10), and she is quite right in also noting that Kane and Donaldson never explicitly avail themselves of such a defense. I think they took it for granted. She, however, believes that they became completely skeptical about the value of majority attestation during their editing of B (thus undermining the principles behind Athlone A) and cites as evidence their statement that "unanimous attestation even in several traditions [is] by no means surely reliable evidence of originality" (129). Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that this statement applies, not to the unreliability of broad patterns of attestation throughout the manuscripts of the three traditions but rather to the tenuousness of even the most massive attestation as proof in any single case.
Lee Patterson seems momentarily oblivious to the existence of this fallacy, offering in defense of Kane-Donaldson a line of reasoning that involves both a tautology and an unintended parody of Kane: "this edition validates each individual reading in terms of every other reading, which means that if some of the readings are correct, then—unless the editorial principles have in an individual instance been misapplied—they must all be correct (69; italics mine).
It should be noted that this example is merely illustrative of a type of problem; in choosing to emend B's bely ioye with A's bilyue, Kane and Donaldson do not pose the question between these variants so simply as I have done here. For them the issue is indeed involved with the principle of authorial subtlety versus scribal overemphasis, but it is also bound up with a related question of possible mislineation in Bx at 7.129-130 (i.e., they believe that by foweles has been transposed to the end of 129 when its proper position is, as in A, at the opening of 130). Such an error, if it occurred, would have necessitated scribal adjustments to both the head and tail of line 130. They conclude, therefore, that bilyue and bely ioye are equally authorial in both versions but that Bx has dropped the subtler reading, bilyue, that properly attaches to Piers; has promoted the more emphatic one, bely ioye, from its original position (descriptive of the "foweles" of 129/30) to replace bilyue; and has smoothed the resultant truncated line with worldes blisse (of dubious metricality). Cf. Anne Hudson's observations on this crux in her essay on "Middle English."
See, for example, my discussion of baches versus bankes (B5.514) in "Editing and the Limitations of the Durior Lectio," Yearbook of Langland Studies 5 (1991), 7-15. In many instances where Kane and Donaldson invoke the "harder reading" to reject a B variant that I accept as authentic, the difference between us has less to do with the respective merits of the readings than with our assessments of the general textual situation. Often I would agree with their choice—if we had sufficient reason to believe no authorial revision had taken place. Among such cases, I would include 5.554 ("he"/"wy"), 6.190 ("dryue awey"/"ditte out"), 7.146 ("in þe"/"euene"), and 9.178 ("togideres"/"ysamme"). Unfortunately, we can never have that kind of security (unless we adopt the programmatic meliorism of Greg—cf. n. 24 below) since the surviving evidence suggests a pattern of sporadic and unpredictable revision, with some passages receiving only isolated, small changes while others were completely rethought.
The obvious case is that of Haukyn's wife. See Alford, "Quotations," 89-94, and Alford, "Review of Kane and Donaldson," 1003, for possible theological ramifications of this reference and for a discussion of how the Athlone editors arrived at their mistaken conclusion that "wife" is impossible.
Cf. Fee's discussion (194-197) of the many instances in New Testament textual criticism where one eclectic test (e.g., usus scribendi) may yield results that contradict those derived from another (e.g., which reading best accounts for the others?). In such examples, a "rigorist" will either follow an ad hoc rule of priorities or will resort to whim.
Consider, for example, Kane's treatment of such a clichéd and indifferent variant pair as ful/wel. These two adverbs occur in phrases like "And seide ful/wel softely," "wel/ful pensif in herte," "þriueþ wel/ful late," and "in a wel/ful perilous place." For all four of these examples, as well as two others, the unanimously attested B archetype reads ful. But Kane had chosen wel when editing each of these in the A version. Ignoring the impossibility of making any meaningful distinction between these two words on grounds of their intrinsic value, he managed to convince himself that ful was more emphatic than wel and thus always more likely to be scribal. Consequently, though a majority of A-version manuscripts also support ful in each of these instances, Kane chose wel as the authorial lection in that earlier edition. Therefore, when he edited B he had no choice but to veto all of these archetypal occurrences of ful. Not to have done so would have been to invite speculation about the accuracy of his judgment in editing A. There is, nonetheless, at least one instance in B where Kane and Donaldson allow ful, 6.109: "Oþere werkmen þere were þat wroʒten ful faste." Here, for some reason, Kane had chosen ful in the A version (though against 6 A mss attesting to wel) and thus had to choose ful in B. If he hadn't found it there among the B variants, he would have been forced to conclude that B was corrupt.
On the other hand, if one accepts (as I do in general) the results of Hoyt Duggan's and Thorlac Turville-Petre's recent application of metrical and syntactical analysis to the editing of Middle English alliterative verse (e.g., Turville-Petre, "Editing," 155ff.; Duggan, "Alliterative Patterning," "The Shape of the B-verse," and "Notes Toward a Theory," passim), it may be possible—in certain cases—to judge the competing claims of such tiny variants as those discussed above with some probability of success. Should Kane and Donaldson prove (by the yardstick of these newly devised criteria) to have guessed rightly more often than not, it may enhance their reputation for intuition but it can do nothing for their editorial method, whose rules are inapplicable to this level of analysis.
Cf. Brewer. One must, however, distinguish between variants in A manuscripts that are "authorial" because they originated (or were authorially endorsed for the first time) in Langland's B or C revisions and variants that are "authorial" because they reveal unresolved alternatives unique to the A tradition itself. The latter situation seems fairly inconsequential when compared to the problem involving variants shared with B or C, but it may, nevertheless, comprise several dozen cases.
An aversion to the notion of authorial variants is one of the most important threads running throughout Kane's illustrious career as an editor. First voiced in 1960 in the prolegomena to Piers Plowman A, his reluctance to concede the widespread existence of such variants—and to grapple with consequent complexities for editorial philosophy—is still apparent in two recent essays, one on the Manly-Rickert edition of the Canterbury Tales and the other on the two versions of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (which includes his unconvincing efforts to reclassify many variants in the Gg 4.27 text of the Legend as scribal). Yet he is hardly alone in adopting this viewpoint. In his essay on Manly and Rickert, Kane assures us that "when the author made a change he had an object in view and that it has been realized" (1989, 203); this merely restates an idealist editorial assumption traceable back to Sir Walter Greg, viz., that any authentic authorial variants will prove themselves genuine by their excellence and that the burden of proof is on their shoulders rather than the editor's: "a later variant that is either completely indifferent or manifestly inferior, or for the substitution of which no motive can be suggested, should be treated as fortuitous and refused admission to the text" (1966, 387; italics mine). Without apologizing for the inherent meliorism of this approach, one must, nonetheless, acknowledge that Greg's principle was formulated for dealing with a particular sort of problem (Elizabethan plays surviving in more than one edition) and that he explicitly excludes from its purview all cases where "complete re-writing" is involved. Unfortunately, Piers Plowman B overlaps Greg's categories since it exists as a complete rewriting of A but offers in addition many instances of isolated, minute revisions. John Bowers has proposed "hostility to authorial variants" as a defining characteristic of the entire last generation of English and American editors and sees it as a reaction against their own predecessors' credulity in such matters (445-447; cf. Hanna's evaluation of the work of George Pace on "Truth"). However that may be, authorial revision (with the resulting multiplication of "authorised" variants) constitutes a stumbling block to the theoretical framework of traditional eclecticism since it undercuts a major enabling hypothesis: the uniqueness of creative genius, for which there can never be more than one best way of phrasing a particular thought (cf. Pope, headnote). Zeller suggests that this misconception stems from a failure to appreciate the fundamentally different ways that authors and readers approach a given text: "The exegete presumes that the author's text arose not by chance but of necessity, that it is unique, unrepeatable, artistically complete, a text of maximum significance. Similarly the editor searches in the transmitted text for the one authentic text, in comparison with which all else will be textual corruption. . . . For the author on the other hand a text is something to be created by selection from the semantic inventory of the language, from the quantum of synonyms. . . . In the end the author has made a decision one way or the other, but he could have decided differently. For him creative writing does not mean necessity, but the possibility of variation" (258).
Ironically, Chambers and Grattan—by contrast—had decided long ago that it was essential (where possible) to establish the authorial text of B (whose author used a much better A manuscript than any now extant) before one could establish the text of A (1931, 1-2).
Cf. Pearsall, who derides the "belief in the poet as the practitioner of a divine mystery, attentive to the significance of very minute differentiation of wording" (1985, 99). While Hanna quite rightly contrasts the idiosyncratic nature of Langland's style to the purely stereotyped qualities of King Horn—in arguing that the difficilior lectio is more applicable to the former than the latter (1985, 937)—it also remains true that the compositional habits of any alliterative poet, however sophisticated, operate within a framework of stylized, formulaic, and even clichéd phrasal patterns. Many of these variations are probably attributable not to fussiness but to the author's attention having been focused at a higher semantic level than that of the individual word. Thus, even in the case of a Langland, our use of the lectio difficilior must be cautious, for this rule assumes a self-consciously bookish author (e.g., Vergil, not Homer) weighing every syllable (cf. Russell 1962, 43: "no medieval author in the alliterative tradition would have felt sufficiently strongly about the minutiae of his line structure to attempt a word-by-word check of his manuscript").
Despite solemnly avowing that his purpose "is not to cast doubt upon [Athlone B's] . . . editorial procedures," Patterson shrewdly puts his finger on this pattern of self-vindicating textual choices. He notes that when one compares A to B and C together, the latter versions appear to have corrupted A (if we accept Kane-Donaldson verbatim) at a rate of 1 mistake per 14 lines. However, when A is compared to B alone (in passages not found in C), the rate of B corruption would appear to jump to 1 mistake per 1.3 lines! How, wonders Patterson, can one credit the apparent implication of these and other relevant figures, which would suggest that B by itself is ten times more corrupt than when it shares readings with C? After all, when B and C alone are compared (where A has no reading), C shows a rate of superior originality that amounts to only 1 reading per 25 lines. Patterson concludes that A is thus being granted by Kane "a quite remarkable degree of originality . . ." (217, n. 52).
Unlike Charlotte Brewer, I incline to think the vast majority of Kane's A choices are valid and that one is not entitled to infer their wrongness there merely because they are likely to be wrong as emendations in B/C. It seems preferable to concede that revising authors do sometimes independently hit upon—and at other times simply endorse—changes, whether felicitous or merely fluid, already chosen (perhaps unconsciously) by their copyists (cf. Zeller 250-256, for examples from nineteenth-century German poetry). Pearsall implicitly concurs, noting that "An intelligent contemporary editor, with an intimate knowledge of his poet's language and idiom, may hit upon readings that seem preferable, not only to him and his modern counterpart, but that might even have been preferred by the poet himself if he had thought of them" (1985, 95).
In a number of cases, such as 10.142 (Kane A = [1] "dore" [2] "asid"; MS F = [1] "dore nail" [2] "aside"; Bx = [1] "deeþ and" [2] "arere"), only isolated agreements with A can be detected within an F text otherwise clearly B in origin. In discussing these cases Schmidt seems more flexible than Kane but similarly reluctant to acknowledge the likelihood of micro-contamination (lateral transmission at the level of the trivial isolated phrase or even the individual word) and thus cannot bring himself to reject altogether the hypothesis of F's having occasionally been proofed against a (now lost) superior B manuscript (280). And yet B MS C2's having been visibly "corrected" to the A readings at 10.142—which it shares with F (cf. my discussion of the "correction" of A MS H2)—probably attests to the presence of such micro-contamination. Chambers and Grattan allege B 19.236-237 in suggesting that F also occasionally contaminated his copy from a C manuscript (1931, 6).
Notable examples of this phenomenon include those cited by Kane and Donaldson at 8.49, 8.80, 8.103, 8.112, 9.33, and 10.142. In the last two instances, I also would support an emendation based on F; nevertheless, their treatment of each of these cases makes clear that F functions for Kane and Donaldson less as a witness to authorial B than as an excuse for printing Kane A. Cf. E. C. Colwell's scathing observation concerning the practice of "rigorous" eclecticism in editing the New Testament: "Such an editor relegates the manuscripts to the role of supplier of readings" (cited in Fee 179).
In the authorship controversy, it was Professor Manly who appealed to a standard very like Kane's "postulate of excellence" in arguing that the man who wrote the powerfully vivid and figurative Skeat A/B Prologue lines 11-16 could not possibly have spoiled it with the drearily explicit expansion found in the analogous lines of C. More circumspect, Chambers and Grattan contented themselves with observing that "we should ourselves hesitate to say how far it is inconceivable for an author, in revision, to spoil his own work" (1931, 11).
Hans Zeller's approach to the editorial problem posed by such extensive authorial revisions seems astute: "for the production of a new version the source of the elements which the author uses in the text is immaterial; it does not matter whether the variants are original or extraneous, misprints . . . or variants introduced by a publisher's editor. In other words, for the elements of a text to be authoritative, and thus for the text itself to be authorised, it is not necessary to assume that the author recognised extraneous elements included in the text (compositor's errors and editorial intervention) as such; he may have regarded them as original text. The necessary condition for our establishment of text is only that he should have registered [i.e., endorsed] the readings in question (256; italics mine). Zeller goes on to observe that our judgment that the author of a revised version did, in fact, "register" its characteristic readings represents "a generalisation made on the basis of the demonstrable cases" (256). He then concludes by drawing this distinction between his own method for treating such matters and that of Greg: "we assume that the demonstrable and the undemonstrable cases are fundamentally the same; that is to say, we assume that the author took note of individual readings in the text which formed the basis of the revision. . . . The contaminating edition, however, . . . assumes rather that the [revising] author not only ignored the misprint [= scribal error] as such, but also the whole of the passage in question including wording, etc., unless the opposite can be proved; thus it is assumed that the two cases belong to two fundamentally different categories, but that the demarcation line between them coincides with the borderline between the demonstrable and the undemonstrable. I cannot imagine how one could account for this agreeable coincidence" (257).
Examples of defective B passages convincingly emended by Kane and Donaldson from the other two versions of Piers may easily be found in all three possible sets of circumstances, viz., from A alone (e.g., 3.36, 3.71, 6.219, 6.249, 7.164, 8.43, 9.32, 9.123, 10.109, 10.166, 10.189, 10.207, and 10.353); from C alone (e.g., Prol. 201, 2.84, 3.316, 3.341, 5.152, 5.181, 5.329, 5.508, 11.233, 11.372-373, 12.204, 13.95, 15.98, and 15.102); and from A and C in tandem (e.g., Prol. 41, 1.165, 1.200, 3.222, 3.223-224, 5.47, 5.190, 5.617, 6.26, 7.96, 7.148, 7.180, 8.22, 9.7, 9.190, 10.54, 10.176, and 10.384).
Kane (and before him, Chambers) was aware of this possibility but discounted it (1948, 9, n. 2).
For example, at B2.10, Kane-Donaldson reads 'in' from AC, while B reads 'wiþ'. But some A and C manuscripts agree with the unanimous B lection. The same situation occurs in many other cases, viz., BProl.217 ('bondage' AC; 'bondemen' B), B1.103 ('ʒeftis' AC; 'siluer' B), B2.128 ('abigge' AC; 'abiggen it' B), B3.117 ('What' AC; 'To wite what' B), B3.210 ('men mede' AC; 'mede to men' B), B4.106 ('Lepe' AC; 'For lope' B), B5.214 ('softe' AC; 'oute' B), B5.220 ('beste' AC; 'beste ale' B), B5.514 ('baches' AC; 'bankes' B), B6.20 ('werche' AC; 'to werche' B), B6.92 ('my catel' AC; 'catel' B), B7.175 ('passiþ' AC; 'passed' B), and B10.55 ('take' AC; 'and taken' B).
In his most recent discussion of Piers textual questions, Kane offers an illuminating, though much too brief, survey of the problem of minute scribal correction—and thus contamination—between different limbs of the same version (1988, 187-188) but seems to overlook the possibility of the same phenomenon occurring interversionally. Hanna draws our attention to the potential complexity of such problems when he notes the difficulty in deciding whether the scribe of Hm 114 corrected trivial errors in his exemplar from free guesses or an independent source (127).
Examples of multi-versional lections where coincidental convergence seems, to varying degrees, less likely than micro-contamination include the following ones shared by A and B alone: B Prol.36, where Bx + MS H of A = 'Feynen' versus 'Fonden' of Ax; B1.103, where Bx + MSS R, U, and E of A = 'siluer' versus 'ʒeftis' of Ax; B2.160, where Bx + MS M of A = 'bad hem alle' versus 'alle' of Ax; B3.41, where Bx + MS E of A = 'bedeman' versus 'baudekyn' of Ax; B5.126, where Bx + MSS E, A, M, and H of A = 'þe beste' versus 'good' of Ax; B5.214, where Bx + MSS E, A, M, and H3 of A = 'oute' versus 'softe' of Ax; B6.16, where Bx + MSS M and H3 of A = 'comaundeþ' versus 'wile' of Ax; B7.17; where Bx + MSS H, M, and K of A = 'þe heiʒe' versus 'here' of Ax; and B9.179, where Bx + MSS A, M, H3, W, and H2 of A = 'þe same' versus 'riʒt also' of Ax. Those found in passages shared by all three versions include B1.165, where Bx + MSS E and H of A = 'bygynneþ' versus 'comsiþ' of Ax/Cx; B2.200, where Bx + MSS A, M, and W of A = 'þyng' versus 'tresour' of Ax/Cx; B3.222, where Bx + MS M of A = 'teche children' versus 'kenne clerkis' of Ax/Cx; B3.223-224, where Bx + MSS D, E, and M of A misdivide 323 by adding the beginning of 324 to it and MSS E and M then pad the ensuing short line with the same filler phrase used in Bx; B5.190, where Bx + MSS A, M, and H3 of A (presumably contaminated in their shared ancestor since their sibling, E reads a distorted version of the same phrase) = 'eiʒen as a blynde hagge'/'eyne blynd as an hagge versus 'eiʒen' of Ax/Cx; B5.303, where Bx + MSS H, N, and V of A = 'Hastow (ouʒt) in þi purs' versus 'Hast þou' of Ax/Cx; B6.5, where Bx/Cx + MSS E, A, M, and H3 of A = 'and (also) sowen (it) after' versus 'scribal omission of entire b-verse' in Ax; B10.54, where Bx + MS K of A = 'a tale ouþer tweye' versus 'how two slowe þe þridde' of Ax/Cx. Because no complete critical edition of C is yet available, it seems imprudent to attempt compiling a similar list of variants shared exclusively between B and C. The evidence available from materials ready to hand (i.e., Pearsall, Skeat, and Kane-Donaldson) suggests that there is comparatively little interversional contamination of C manuscripts from B.
Hanna believes the scribe of Hm 114 was aware of the existence of different versions of Piers: "The conflated Piers Plowman presupposes a scribe who knew that there were three versions of the poem, who knew how to recognize them with some facility, and who knew where to find copies of them" (123). The Hm 114 scribe appears to have operated within the London book trade (Doyle 41), and either he or his sponsor may, indeed, have known that the author of Piers Plowman had completely reworked the poem several times. The mere existence of Hm 114 certainly proves that, whether by chance or choice, he had his hands on copies of all three versions and carefully noted many of the differences between them, but it still seems to me unlikely that he understood them to be (as we now take for granted) distinctive authorial drafts of the poem. His conflating the three suggests instead his perception that none of his copies preserved the poem in its entirety, or, as Hanna describes it, his "awareness of deviant textual detail which needs to be concorded to produce a full and . . . acceptable text" (128). An identical motive probably accounts for the much higher incidence of contamination (both gross and micro) among the A manuscripts generally than among the B and C ones, viz., the perception that this version of the text, on account of its abbreviated and truncated appearance, lacked authoritative status and required careful corroboration (and sometimes expansion) from the longer forms.
I have no firm opinion on the question of whether the unique material in Bodley 851 is authorial or evinces a proto-A version of Piers. However, the statistical pattern formed by the unique B variants in this manuscript (i.e., those not witnessed by any other A manuscript while being clearly archetypal in the B tradition) is very similar to the pattern of this class of variants found in M (Society of Antiquaries MS 687), an A copy whose exemplar (as well as a more distant ancestor) appears to have been sporadically "corrected" from the B tradition.
Elsie Blackman raised this question concerning G more than half a century ago (513-515) but ultimately rejected contamination as a significant factor in accounting for G's peculiarities. Instead she preferred to regard all of G's trivial agreements with A as coincidental (many doubtless must be) and most of the striking ones as evincing G's partial derivation from a B exemplar superior to the common archetype of the other extant copies (she was unaware of MS H, a BA splice that sometimes shares G's eccentric readings—also, presumably, in part, through lateral transmission from the A tradition). Blackman's reluctance to conceptualize the problem as one involving intermittent contamination of G from the A version is, of course, understandable. She was accustomed to thinking of contamination as both more purposeful and larger in scale than what she detected in MS G (cf. Chambers and Grattan: "It is absurd to imagine a collator comparing his MS systematially with another one, and altering . . . trivial details quite frequently, whilst leaving untouched . . . large common blunders" [1931, 14]). Her training would have led her to expect isolated transfers of words or phrases only through memorial contamination, and that process would automatically have restricted itself to memorable linguistic units (cf. Donaldson 1955, 184, n. 17, where Blackman's view is rejected and G's actual character is attributed to correction plus memorial contamination). However, the still visible work of the H2 corrector (and that of the Hm 114 scribe) shows that interversional collation of Piers is practicable and can be sporadic as well as systematic. Similarly, the numerous trivial "corrections" observable in B MS M (no less than those of H2) demonstrate that a reader / corrector need not have been governed by any coherent purpose in order to alter considerably the apparent parentage of his "corrected" manuscript. Once such a copy produces progeny of its own and, in the course of time, disappears, the way is clear for someone to argue that its descendants represent a "uniquely valuable witness" to the authorial text.
Such behavior may seem less improbable when set beside that of the corrector(s) of MS Harley 6579 (a copy of Hilton's Scale of Perfection). Here one version of a prose work has been cross-checked and corrected (both minutely and sporadically—most heavily in Book I) against a significantly different version of the same work. The most prolific "editor" of the Scale manuscripts, James Grenehalgh (a Carthusian monk of the late fifteenth century), is said to have made nearly 1,000 critical annotations and corrections to the text of four different copies of the work. In all, notes Michael Sargent, "The scribes and annotators of nearly one-fifth of the surviving MSS [43] seem, then, to have been aware of more than one form of the text, and to have gone out of their way to draw attention to the fact. This in itself demonstrates a degree of lateral contamination among the MSS. . . ."
If so, this would certainly be ironic since he has managed to replace a line whose metrical form (though rare) is attested by many other examples in the Langland corpus with one whose form (ax/ay) is unquestionably deficient. Cf. Duggan, "Notes Toward a Theory," 53-67.
Cf. another microscopic example long ago noted by Chambers and Grattan (1931,, 13-14), where the Hm 114 scribe "corrects" an obviously meaningless phrase in B, "by þe souþe" (5.329), by substituting A's parallel half-line, "was red for to ryse." Unfortunately, he should have used his copy of C here, for it would have revealed to him that Bx was corrupted from "þei bi souhte."
That is, ancestors of R/F on the one hand and N on the other might both have suffered loss of text at this point and been repaired, quite by accident, through consulting a manuscript of an alien version. In the case of N, damage to the exemplar appears less likely here than a deliberate intention to enhance this A copy with material from one of the longer versions (cf. Kane 1960, 30ff., esp. 35-36). Similar phenomena involving versional exchanges of the same brief phrases or whole sets of lines are too frequent for coincidence alone to seem a comprehensively plausible hypothesis.
Donaldson's observation (1955, 193) that archetypal corrections or insertions tend to remain insertions "in subsequent transcripts" seems relevant in this regard since it implies that such confusions could be perpetuated and amplified by descendant copies for several generations after the authorial foul copy had ceased to be available.
For purposes of this argument, it is immaterial whether one, two, or none of the variants in a particular shared set is authorial in origin.
Russell is more concerned with the publication history of B and C than with that of A (39-41, 45), so that one is simply left to infer that A was the earliest version publicly available: "the short and essentially incomplete A-text finds readers and copyists in numbers from the beginning" (39; cf. the more forthright, but utterly unsupported, formulation of Chambers and Grattan: "During the fifteen years intervening between the two texts [i.e., A and B], friends and admirers no doubt copied the author's unfinished MS" [1931, 10]). Russell acknowledges (36) that A was particularly prone to contamination from the later, longer versions, but he overlooks possible implications for A's place in the versions' sequence of appearance. As for B, the uniformity of its text and the narrow scope of its stemma lead him to postulate that, unlike A and C, B was never widely distributed and was, presumably, withdrawn from circulation almost immediately (by its author or by the authorities) on account of its radicalism and was quickly superseded by C. C, we are told, "circulated among a large number of readers without any of the disadvantages of A- or B-" (41). Nevertheless, Russell candidly concedes that this theory of C's broader circulation and B's early withdrawal (based on a higher number of surviving C copies?) seems contradicted by dialect evidence (cf. Samuels, 240). Seen from this perspective, the audience for C was mostly limited to "the valley of the Severn and its vicinity" (41) while A and B manifest a much wider popularity!
Positing extensive interversional contamination might seem to rule out any critical edition for Piers Plowman, but in actuality we are far from such an impasse—for two reasons. First, many of the effects presumably produced by this process are so trivial that one could almost never hope to distinguish them by rational criticism anyway (i.e., matters on which the only sane policy is following one's copy-text). Secondly, where it is most palpable, micro-contamination appears to move predictably in the same direction as that seen in the large-scale borrowings (i.e., from B toward the other versions, especially toward A). What this means for the editor of A is that, when faced with variants of approximately equal merit, he should prefer those which are not present (or are less well attested) in B manuscripts. Fortunately, the broad scope of A witnesses makes it unlikely that any particular B micro-contaminant will appear in more than two genetically distinct groups of A manuscripts. In the case of B, the problem is much less acute since most of the lateral transmission is outbound rather than incoming. Even so, one must be on guard against the isolated evidence of several key manuscripts (F, G, and H) presumed to have been collated against A copies. Here one's hardest choices occur when F, G, or H offers the only satisfactory reading (a reading identical or similar to that of A), but one seemingly incapable of accounting plausibly for the scribal production of the common B reading.
In his recent study of "Langland's Dialect," M. L. Samuels points to a wide dialect dispersion for the A copies, observing that "They demonstrate a situation that is found elsewhere in the history of textual criticism, in which the oldest MSS of a work (or their descendants) are found on the periphery of the culture" (238). It should, however, be noted that Samuels is not arguing for A's precedence as the "first edition" of Piers). He is simply invoking the "commonsense view" as a means of accounting for the striking fact that many extant copies of A appear to have originated in the geographic and cultural hinterlands. In reality, this distribution may tell us nothing about the relative antiquity of A's circulation and evince no more than its locus of popularity. This provincial popularity, in turn, may owe much—as Ian Doyle has suggested to me—to its having filled a role as a sort of Reader's Digest condensed version of Piers Plowman, with much of the dreary exposition and hairsplitting theology left out. Such a humble function and audience may also be implied in the fact that nearly 40% of extant A copies are on paper, "while it is almost unknown for the B- or C-Texts to be written on paper" (Lyall 14).
That all traces of the earliest copies of Piers A should have disappeared is not without parallel. Doyle alleges the example of Richard Rolle and suggests (36-37) that early A copies may have been quickly displaced by the reading public's preference for the longer versions. Nevertheless, one is not obliged to offer any explanation for the disappearance of such materials, whose very existence is very much open to question.
Cf. Doyle's observation about Caxton's "business sense endorsing contemporary taste" in omitting Piers from his printing programme (36); also his conclusion that Piers "was not a leading article of commerce in the metropolis after the earlier years" of the fifteenth century (47-48).
I incline to agree with Chambers and Grattan that the "A-MSS. have very much the appearance of having been derived from originals which go back, if not to the author's actual autograph, at any rate to something very near it. There are passages where all the extant A-MSS. are [variously] confused or imperfect. This may sometimes be due to confusion in the author's autograph" (1931, 10; my italics and interpolation—cf. n. 48 above and related text). Chambers and Grattan proceed to contrast this state of affairs with that of the B manuscripts, all apparently descended from a carefully controlled copy full of invisible scribal errors. They fail to see, however, that this set of circumstances suggests a late release of the A autograph (Vernon, the earliest extant copy, is the only A witness to reflect a Worcestershire dialect, but it can be dated only to the 1390s) and a very informal process of publication, as compared to B.
The exclusive use of C to complete various A manuscripts (occurring on at least four separate occasions) is, perhaps, indicative of an early cohabitation between these two texts but may be an unrelated accident, especially since the inferior text states of W, N, and K (A sigils), as opposed to that of the inferred T-Ch-H2 ancestor, suggest an advanced degree of decay. Unfortunately we have no way to ascertain whether the corruptions in W, N, and K (some of which are shared with unmixed A copies) gradually accreted through the reproduction of a long series of AC parents or whether the splicings took place after most of the blatant textual error had been introduced. The mere fact that these manuscripts sometimes share errors with A manuscripts of unmixed parentage need not, as Professor Kane has often reminded us, be taken to prove common descent (and thus a late date for their splicing)—it may only demonstrate the insidious effects of convergent variation.
Though Kane appears not to have taken much account of this possibility in his editing of A, Chambers and Grattan were very well aware of it (i.e., "backwash of B- and C-readings upon MSS. of the A-text") and of its cause ("all the extant MSS. of the A-text are later than the B-text, and the majority are much later"). Moreover, their refutation of Mabel Day's argument for multiple authorship depends, in part, on their contention that individual readings, as well as occasional lines, from the B archetype imposed themselves randomly on isolated A manuscripts as well as on the ancestors of certain extant A families (1931, 28-40, esp. 36-37, 39).
Although "coincidental convergence" is incapable of accounting for a number of unexpected and striking agreements in error and, in the light of extant patterns of sporadic contamination, is unlikely to have caused as many of the trivial ones as we might otherwise have supposed, there still can be no doubt that, in thousands of cases, genetically unrelated Piers Plowman manuscripts agree by coincidence in trivial errors generated merely by their scribes having shared a common grammar and lexicon (cf. Chambers and Grattan 1931, 15-16).
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