Reading Piers Plowman in the Fifteenth and the Twenty-First Centuries: Notes on Manuscripts F and W in the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive

Andrew Galloway, Cornell University

The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. Project Director, Hoyt N. Duggan. SEENET: Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts. Vol. 1: Corpus Christi College, Oxford MS 201 (F). Edited by Robert Adams, Hoyt N. Duggan, Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna III, John Price-Wilkin, and Thorlac Turville-Petre. CD-ROM. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999; Vol. 2: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17 (W). Edited by Thorlac Turville-Petre and Hoyt N. Duggan. CD-ROM. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. $70 per volume.

The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive will be the supreme tool for carrying forward textual work on Piers Plowman. This is not, however, chiefly because the detailed digital facsimiles and presentations of the fifty-five witnesses (plus a half dozen fragments and excerpts), two of which have so far appeared, will grant static access to the "real" archival materials of Langland's often-revised and adapted late fourteenth-century work. Nor is it because the Archive's eventual critical editions will necessarily provide more definitive texts than the Athlone critical editions by George Kane, E. Talbot Donaldson, and George Russell, monuments of daring and shrewd Middle English textual criticism that will always remain the reference points for—although inevitably not uncontroversial displays of—the complex transformations that the repeatedly revising author of Piers Plowman and his scribes respectively carried out.