“Everything that Skeat says aboutPiers Plowmanis worth attending to,” begins Derek Pearsall’s essay in this volume, and our motive curiosity is one to which Skeat gave voice.Piers Plowman“is a true autobiography in the highest sense of the word,” he said in his A-text edition.¹ All the essays here presented take as a point of departure or of conclusion the single C version passage in which Langland seems explicitly to offer autobiographical detail. (Derek Pearsall’s revised edition of these lines, with facing modern rendering, appears immediately after this introduction.) None of the contributors, I think, would subscribe...

Most recent discussions ofPiers Plowmanhave found the dreamer-poet and his status one of the most problematic features of the poem. What should one make of his whole enterprise, one which every character who addresses the issue tells him is in some measure misconceived?² And if this is the case, what is Will supposed to be doing anyhow? More bluntly, just what should constitute Will’s work, his vocation?

The most explicit answers to these questions necessarily center around the C version and the dreamer’s extended self-defense (or autobiography orapologia; 5.1–108).³ And in such discussions, E. Talbot Donaldson’s...

This essay looks at Langland’s C-textapologiain relation to the political conditions and conventions of medieval publication.¹ Langland inserted more plausible and extensive reference to his own authorship in theapologiathan he did in any other passage in the three versions of the poem, yet little effort has been made to locate the historical andbibliographicalmoment which might have prompted it.² The fact that we know so very little about Langland might seem good reason for refraining from such an attempt, but in fact I believe that we are beginning to know more than we realize, thanks...

Nearly one hundred years ago J. J. Jusserand pointed to a problem that arises as a consequence of thinking ofPiers Plowmanas an antifraternal poem. Why did William Langland make his Dreamer an itinerant beggar at the same time that he singled out the mendicant orders as the most immoral of the clergy?¹ Jusserand also argued that the “goddes mynstruls” of the C-text were derived from Francis’sjoculatores dei, “minstrels of God,” without offering any explanation for why the poet should include in his poem ideal types of those persons whom he most despised. There matters seem to have...

Everything that Skeat says aboutPiers Plowmanis worth attending to, and the comment quoted above, from his note to C Prol. 6 (C 1.6, in Skeat’s passus numbering), makes a good introduction to an essay on Langland’s London. What Skeat says is broadly true, at least of the literal level of the poem, but he exaggerates, for two reasons: one is that Skeat, like most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readers of the poem, was thinking principally of theVisioof B (Prologue and Passus 1–7), where London (including Westminster) is much more prominent than in the rest...

This essay begins with a “factual” claim: that the waking interlude between the first and second visions of the C version (C 5.1-104), often called the poet’sapologiaor “autobiography,” takes its premises and development as a narrative event from the provisions of the second Statute of Laborers—more accurately and centrally a statute concerning vagrancy—enacted by the Cambridge Parliament of September 1388. The statute, I shall demonstrate, provides the most immediate and pervasive “pre-text” for the encounter of Will with Reason and Conscience, and supplies a narrative matrix and occasion upon which the poet reframes, at a complex...