Langlandian Loose Leaves and Lost Histories

Abstract

In a recent monograph and series of essays, Lawrence Warner argues that early C-text drafts on loose leaves contaminated an original ‘ur-B’ Piers Plowman that lacked, among other key passages, the two final passus. Warner’s argument depends upon the peculiar state of the text in National Library of Wales, MS 733B (N), and he claims that the alternative explanation, that this copy was contaminated by a B-text manuscript, relies on ‘unprecedented’ scribal behaviours. Ample parallels for the hypothesized behaviour of N may be found, however, in the most dramatically conflated of all the Piers Plowman manuscripts, Huntington Library, MS HM 114 (Ht), with which N shares a number of readings. Like John Manly’s theory of multiple authorship, which also depended on a hypothesized ‘lost leaf’, Warner’s arguments against the integrity of Piers Plowman B might ultimately prompt a more intense formal, rather than textual, analysis.