Marginalia of Piers PlowmanWilliam Langland’s 14th-century poem The Vision of Piers Plowman was one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages, inspiring many of its copyists and readers to leave their own notes in their copies of the poem. This website presents the marginal annotations from 15 manuscripts and early print editions, together with the text of the poem so that they can be compared and studied in context.
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The hundreds of annotations in Piers Plowman manuscripts give us valuable insight into how medieval and early modern people copied, read, and treated their books. This project presents side-by-side the poem and the marginalia from twelve manuscripts and three early print editions of the B Text (the second of Langland’s three versions, and the most familiar to today’s readers). The purpose is to allow students of medieval literature, history, and culture—be they established scholars, undergraduates, or even amateur dabblers—to compare the annotations across the textual tradition and in context with the poem that they annotate.
Cross-manuscript Comparison: Comparison can help us see what tended to draw readers’ attention across time; we might learn more not just about medieval reading habits but about what authors might have expected their readers to read for. (Many poets, like Langland, had connections with the clerical class of scribes and would have known the styles of annotation that would accrue to their books. Some of them, like Thomas Hoccleve, even added “official” annotation of their own.)
Editing: Where manuscripts share corrector-styled marks or unusual annotation, we might learn more about contemporary comparison of manuscripts as well as cross-pollination of versions within the tradition.
This website owes a great deal to the work of Marie-Clare Uhart, C. David Benson and Lynn Blanchfield, and the editors of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. All of these scholars have done vast amounts of work in recording, transcribing, and studying the marginalia of Piers Plowman.
Benson and Blanchfield’s book The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman (hereafter BB) is the print counterpart of this website, but because of the hard-copy format, it is not possible for them to present the marginalia in context; in fact, the complexity of the many tables intended to make such cross-manuscript reference possible simply points to the usefulness of an electronic counterpart that can take advantage of digital flexibility.
The editions of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (hereafter PPEA) are the inspiration for the digital format of this project, and although many of the transcriptions represented here originated with PPEA editions, any errors are the fault of this project’s editor and should not be attributed to PPEA.
The Piers Plowman copies whose marginalia are transcribed on this website are cited in the following order:
L (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 581)
M (London, British Library, MS Additional 35287)
W (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.17)
Hm (San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Hm 128)
C (Cambridge University Library Dd.1.17)
G (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.31)
O (Oxford, Oriel College, MS 79)
C2 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS L1.4.14)
Y (Newnham College Cambridge, Yates-Thompson MS)
R (London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 398; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38)
F (Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 201)
S (Sion College MS Arc. L.40.2 2/E)
Cr1 (Robert Crowley’s First Impression; transcription copy: digital images by Lehigh University)
Cr2 (Robert Crowley’s Second Impression; transcription copy: digital images by Lehigh University)
Cr3 (Robert Crowley’s Third Impression; transcription copy: British Museum 11623.C.37)
This arrangement follows the citation order used in the PPEA volumes, with L being considered the closest to the archetype and M slightly farther down the line, etc. R and F, the only surviving representatives of a separate branch of the B-text tradition (the “alpha branch”), are grouped together but should not be understood as being of lesser value than the more numerous representatives of the “beta branch.” S is a manuscript from 1550, and being post-medieval, it is separated from the other beta manuscripts and set alongside Cr1, 2, and 3 (the printed editions of the same year) because they share in an early modern culture that leads to different kinds of annotation than those that characterize medieval manuscripts of the previous century.
For further information on the date and provenance of each manuscript, the reader is referred to the first part of Benson and Blanchfield’s book and to the website and published editions of the PPEA.
The text of the poem presented here is based on Manuscript L, which also serves as the basis for the B Archetype (ancestral copy) forthcoming from PPEA. The line numbers are based on Kane-Donaldson’s influential edition of the B Text (hereafter KD), to allow easy comparison of variants in the text by reference to the apparatus of that edition.
This transcription is semi-diplomatic: that is, it represents the text as it appears in the manuscript, with line-breaks and hyphens in place, but it expands abbreviations and represents them in italic font. Line breaks are noted both by an actual break and by a vertical line to disambiguate between breaks necessitated by the display and breaks present in the manuscript.
A note accompanies each piece of marginalia. This note gives the annotation’s hand, folio, and location on the page, as well as any further information that might prove useful for the reader.
All annotations have been compared with those in BB; where they disagree and the disagreement cannot be resolved (for instance, where an abbreviation might be expanded in multiple ways), the discrepancy is recorded in the note attached to each annotation. Minor differences in so-called “accidents” (spelling and punctuation) are not recorded.
Following the PPEA practice, the hands at work on the manuscript are numbered based on frequency; therefore, Hand 1 is always the main scribe, who writes more than does Hand 2, etc. Hand X indicates any (usually post-production) hand that cannot be identified; hence, there may be many Hand X’s in a single manuscript all grouped under the same rubric. Where they can be distinguished from one other (for instance, because they initial their notes or use a peculiar style of nota), they are numbered X1, X2, X3, etc.
There is something patently artificial in combining marginalia from many manuscripts, each of which contains a very different copy of Piers Plowman, with a single version of the poem’s text (drawn from Manuscript L), but it actually poses less of a problem than one might expect: only in three instances is a passage annotated in a manuscript when that passage is missing from L: 12.116-125α and 12.116-125α and 15.573b-576a. In these instances, the poetic text is given here in the spelling of the manuscript that contains the annotations.
Readers should be aware that annotations are not always indications of reaction to content: Manuscript C, for instance, often has marks that simply indicate where a line is missing or where there is an error, or possibly where the rubricator missed paraph signs (see 13.422). This website transcribes, as much as possible, everything written in the margins of the books, without judging its intent or nature.
Often the placement of a note is ambiguous: it could apply to a line above or below, particularly in the case of pointing hands. Any scholar wishing to make an argument based on a particular annotation is advised to check the manuscript or other transcriptions such as those by PPEA or BB.
This transcription does not for the most part represent headers, running titles, or paraph signs. While they are of great interest for the study of book culture, due to limitations of time this website instead aimed to represent the often-ignored verbal annotations, signs, and symbols that do not necessarily reflect the organization (ordinatio) of the poem.
This transcription does not currently represent brackets except where they were already noted by PPEA editors; this is simply the result of a limitation in time.
For the same reason, this transcription does not include marginalia from splices of multiple versions of the poem (AC, AB, or ABC).
Sincerest thanks are due to the editors of PPEA, who made their many resources available to me; to the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, who funded and host this project; and to the staff of the Digital Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia, who turned raw XML into a functioning website.
While every effort has been made to represent all the marginalia with accuracy, errors in a project of this sort are inevitable. Mistakes can be reported to the editor by writing to cms8ud [at] virginia [dot] edu, and corrections are welcome. Ultimately, this website is a tool in progress, not an end: any scholarly argument about the annotations of Piers Plowman should be based upon examination of the manuscripts in question. This project hopes simply to spur and enable further projects on the subject of medieval reading as reflected in marginalia.
Because this project was undertaken primarily for practical purposes and not for the purpose of generating a complex website, the display is currently not as robust as the XML from which it is generated. For those who might wish to access the full range of detail contain in the raw file, the XML is available for download by right-clicking here .
Benson, C. David, and Lynne S. Blanchfield. The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: The B-Version. Cambridge: DS Brewer, 1997.
Piers Plowman Electronic Archive Editions
Uhart, Marie-Claire. The Early Reception of Piers Plowman. Dissertation. University of Leicester, 1986.
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