An Electronic Edition of Piers Plowman in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.31
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Nottingham
Department Name: School of English
Abstract
We have completed an edition of the text of Piers Plowman as it appears in the sixteenth-century MS Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.31. William Langland's long poem is a fourteenth-century religious and social allegory, which was immediately embroiled in the politics of its time and quoted by the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt 150 years later it stirred new interest as a precursor of the Reformation. The special interest of the text we have now edited is that it is the latest manuscript of the poem, written in the mid sixteenth century, at the height of religious controversy and argument.
Langland composed at least three versions of his poem, but none of the 50-plus manuscripts can be taken as authoritative. To students of Piers Plowman, therefore, electronic texts now offer unprecedented advantages, and consequently The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive has been established with the goals of creating a multi-level, hypertextually linked, textbase of the complete textual tradition, with colour digital facsimiles of every authoritative witness, and of developing a model for computer generated archives of texts transmitted in complex documentary traditions. The texts are accompanied by codicological, historical and linguistic annotations; they can be searched and manipulated and compared with other versions of the poem. An electronic edition satisfies those readers who want to study an individual manuscript as well as those who want the best possible editorial reconstruction, which will come at a later stage in the work of the Archive.
As with other editions for the Archive, this edition of MS Gg.4.31 records and annotates all the physical features of the manuscript, including erasures, subpunctions, suspensions and abbreviations, marginal and interlinear additions or corrections to the text, changes in scribal hand or script, as well as contemporary and later glosses. The Introduction to the text examines the character and significance of the manuscript, both its record of the text of Piers Plowman and its role in an age of renewed religious controversies. It gives a technical description as well as material on collation, contents, handwriting, punctuation, decoration, provenance and binding. Full analysis of language and dialect has been provided as a contribution to the history of medieval and early modern developments in the language. The reasons for the later corrections have been considered, and it is suggested that they are motivated in part by a desire for clarity and in part out of a concern for spelling. It is argued that the production of a further manuscript copy or perhaps a printed edition may have been envisaged.
The information contained in this and other editions will provide a textbase permanently useful to cultural and literary historians, as well as the foundation for all future work on the poem by editors, linguists, palaeographers and codicologists.
Langland composed at least three versions of his poem, but none of the 50-plus manuscripts can be taken as authoritative. To students of Piers Plowman, therefore, electronic texts now offer unprecedented advantages, and consequently The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive has been established with the goals of creating a multi-level, hypertextually linked, textbase of the complete textual tradition, with colour digital facsimiles of every authoritative witness, and of developing a model for computer generated archives of texts transmitted in complex documentary traditions. The texts are accompanied by codicological, historical and linguistic annotations; they can be searched and manipulated and compared with other versions of the poem. An electronic edition satisfies those readers who want to study an individual manuscript as well as those who want the best possible editorial reconstruction, which will come at a later stage in the work of the Archive.
As with other editions for the Archive, this edition of MS Gg.4.31 records and annotates all the physical features of the manuscript, including erasures, subpunctions, suspensions and abbreviations, marginal and interlinear additions or corrections to the text, changes in scribal hand or script, as well as contemporary and later glosses. The Introduction to the text examines the character and significance of the manuscript, both its record of the text of Piers Plowman and its role in an age of renewed religious controversies. It gives a technical description as well as material on collation, contents, handwriting, punctuation, decoration, provenance and binding. Full analysis of language and dialect has been provided as a contribution to the history of medieval and early modern developments in the language. The reasons for the later corrections have been considered, and it is suggested that they are motivated in part by a desire for clarity and in part out of a concern for spelling. It is argued that the production of a further manuscript copy or perhaps a printed edition may have been envisaged.
The information contained in this and other editions will provide a textbase permanently useful to cultural and literary historians, as well as the foundation for all future work on the poem by editors, linguists, palaeographers and codicologists.