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Building upon Anne Middleton’s work on Langland’s audience and public, this essay offers a fresh examination of all pre-1500 manuscripts of Piers Plowman. This examination demonstrates that Langland’s poem reached a nationwide audience, with attested readers among the aristocracy, the lay commons, the secular clergy, and the regular clergy. This circulation also represents distribution among both rural and urban readers. This essay also puts such manuscript evidence into dialogue with Piers Plowman itself, suggesting that Langland’s poem, by its various appeals to nearly every social group from late medieval England, envisioned the wide readership that its manuscripts achieved.
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