Protestant Elements in the Piers Plowman Texts of Robert Crowley and Takamiya MS 23

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Abstract Recent studies of Robert Crowley’s editions of Piers Plowman emphasize Crowley’s fidelity to the manuscript tradition and efforts to produce an accurate and comprehensible text. The present article supports this assessment by comparing Crowley’s editions with New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 23 (olim Sion College, MS Arc. L.40. 2/E), a manuscript produced about the same time as the Crowley editions and closely related to Crowley’s principal exemplar. Censorship and other doctrinal alterations are infrequent in Takamiya 23 but unambiguous. While the great majority of unique readings have no evident motive beyond linguistic modernization, the Takamiya scribe also, in a few instances, harmonized the language of the medieval poem with sixteenth-century English Bibles and made discrete interpretative changes that sometimes align with Crowley’s outlook and sometimes seemingly depart from it. Another distinguishing feature of Takamiya 23 is the scribe’s apparent lack of interest in ‘prophetic’ passages, a salient focus of recent scholarship. For a more adequate account of the sixteenth-century reception of Piers Plowman, students may need to look beyond both ‘Protestantism’ and ‘prophecy’.