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1882
Volume 37, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 0890-2917
  • E-ISSN: 2031-0242

Abstract

Taking energy from the addition of the B-text phrase ‘meddling with making’ to the A‑text ending in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poetry 137 composed by the medieval reader John But, this article argues that a renewed attention to the reception history of and to the correspondences between certain moments in the A text and Imaginatif’s passūs in the B and C texts corroborates a genetic reading of the poem’s development. Such an approach, I contend, shows the poet to have thought about Imaginatif even before writing him as a character in the poem, and further sheds light on medieval readers’ responses to and engagement with as a multi-text literary phenomenon centred around issues of speech, craft, and the intellectual and spiritual value of poetic making.

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/content/journals/10.1484/J.YLS.5.136478
2023-01-01
2025-12-08

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References

  1. Manuscript
    Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poetry 137 [sigil R of A]
  2. Primary Sources
    Langland, William, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1995) [B text]
  3. ———, Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. by Míceál Vaughan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)
  4. ———, Piers Plowman: The Z Version, ed. by A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983)
  5. Secondary Sources
    Eldredge, L. M., ‘Some Medical Evidence on Langland’s Imaginatif’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 3 (1989), 131–36
  6. Gallacher, Patrick J., ‘Imaginatif and the sensus communis’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 6 (1992), 51–60
  7. Hanna, Ralph III, ‘Langland’s Ymaginatif: Images and the Limits of Poetry’, in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 81–94
  8. ———, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)
  9. Horobin, Simon, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137 and the Copying and Circulation of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 19 (2005), 3–26
  10. Jones, H. S. V., ‘Imaginatif in Piers Plowman’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 13 (1914), 583–88
  11. Karnes, Michelle, ‘Will’s Imagination in Piers Plowman’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 108 (2009), 27–58
  12. Kaulbach, Ernest N., ‘The “vis imaginativa” and the Reasoning Powers of Ymaginatif in the B-Text of Piers Plowman’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 84 (1985), 16–29
  13. ———, ‘The “vis imaginativa secundum Avicennam” and the Naturally Prophetic Powers of Ymaginatif in the B-Text of Piers Plowman’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 86 (1987), 496–514
  14. Mann, Jill, ‘The Power of the Alphabet: A Reassessment of the Relation between the A and B Versions of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 8 (1994), 21–50
  15. McDermott, Ryan, ‘“beatus qui verba vertit in opera”: Langland’s Ethical Invention and the Tropological Sense’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 24 (2010), 169–204
  16. Middleton, Anne, ‘Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman’, in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. by Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988), pp. 243–66
  17. ———, ‘Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman’, in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. by Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1982), pp. 91–122
  18. Minnis, Alastair J., ‘Langland’s Ymaginatif and Late-Medieval Theories of Imagination’, Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981), 71–104
  19. Quirk, Randolph, ‘Vis imaginativa’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 53 (1954), 81–83
  20. Somerset, Fiona, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
  21. Warner, Lawrence, ‘John But and the Other Works That Will Wrought (Piers Plowman A XII 101–2)’, Notes and Queries, 52 (2005), 13–18
  22. White, Hugh, ‘Langland’s Ymaginatif, Kynde and the Benjamin major’, Medium Ævum, 55 (1986), 241–48
  23. Wood, Sarah, ‘Piers Plowman’ and its Manuscript Tradition (Cambridge: Brewer, 2022)
  24. Zeeman, Nicolette, ‘Piers Plowman’ and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
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