The Yearbook of Langland Studies

In July 1385 an indictment was drawn up in King’s Bench relating to a homicide by Sir John Holland, Richard II’s half brother, aided and abetted by a dozen squires and gentlemen. The informality of the seventh name is difficult to understand unless important people vouched for his identity and deemed the name sufficient. The name was ‘Willelmus vocatus Longwyll’ or, in a second indictment, ‘Willelmus vocatus Longewille’. This essay argues that this man can be identified as the Long Will named as the author of Piers Plowman by early scribes, and now generally known as William Langland.

This essay explores several incidents in Piers Plowman where a male character, most often Will himself, weeps tears. Most of these incidents of weeping seem relatively straightforward in comparison with the complexity of Langland’s theological, spiritual, personal and political concerns, but they generate intriguing questions about the expression and interpretation of feeling in medieval literature and its reception history, about the relation between feeling and bodily gesture, and the contribution medieval poetry can make to the history of emotions. Emotional responses also play a role in judgements about the fluid mouvance of the poem’s versions, in the multitude of competing readings.

This essay argues that Langland brings together moral and allegorical readings of the Samaritan parable to show the complementarity of these interpretive traditions and, ultimately, to represent communal labour as integral to divine mercy. An examination of Middle English renderings of the Samaritan parable alongside Piers Plowman reveals that Langland participated in ongoing debates about how the parable characterized the nature and scope of charity. Rather than encourage imitation, Langland suggests that people should work with the Samaritan in diverse social roles. This collaboration has both ethical and Christological implications: because humans participate in the divine community of the Trinity, for Langland, acts of social responsibility are redemptive.

This article explores how the lyric forms and themes incorporated into Piers Plowman direct the poem’s investigation of the proper epistemological foundations of vernacular making. Lyric varieties such as the chanson d’aventure, which Langland periodically invokes, serve as more than mere stylistic embellishments; rather, these lyric passages model experiential modes of composition and lectio that Piers Plowman repeatedly contrasts with more authoritative textual traditions. This tension between sensory and revelatory forms of textual engagement is particularly pronounced in the poem’s third and fourth visions, where Langland’s lyric interpolations pair with Will’s epistemological inquiries to make a case for the didactic and ethical efficacy of sensory and extraclergial forms of literary ‘making’: vernacular poetry’s potential, in other words, to supplement and direct a life guided by Christian ideals.

This essay offers a quantitative analysis of the genealogical vocabulary (i.e., of terms for blood and marital relationships) in Piers Plowman A, B, and C, confirming that kinship is a central fact and rule of medieval life. Langland introduces eight new genealogical terms into English and is among the first users of about fifteen others; he exercises perhaps the largest genealogical vocabulary of any poet of his time, about 87 terms used 1156 times. His language creates a vivid, detailed sense of personal and public life in a kynde society and universe, where animals, plants, and even God are spoken of in genealogical terms.

A reflection on two of the major issues that have arisen in the authors’ reconstruction of the text of the B archetypal copy, for publication as an edition in the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. The authors firstly defend their use of the stemma, arguing that genetic and ‘direct’ analyses are not mutually exclusive editorial methods. Secondly they examine the large omissions in the alpha and beta branches of the stemma, and consider the consequences for the status of Bx.

‘The Intimate Reader’ uses the marginalia of Piers Plowman B-text manuscripts to propose an ‘intimate’ counterpart to the medieval professional reader as defined by Katherine Kerby-Fulton. The article argues that by crediting the early readers of Piers Plowman with perceptive reception of the poem (which their notes amply demonstrate), we can question the divisions between private and public reading in the late medieval period. Likewise, our own readings of Langland might be enriched by recognizing that his readers treated his work as an encyclopedia or preacher’s handbook having not just religious and political aspirations but an interest in quotidian secular concerns as well.

Wynnere and Wastoure was long considered a showpiece for a nativist alliterative poetics. This essay argues, however, that the poem’s focus is not alliteration but allegory. Beginning with an account of the fracturing of the great hall genre of romance, the Wynnere and Wastoure author devises a self-consciously extra-institutional and experimental poetry that sets an important precedent for Piers Plowman. When the author’s initial foray into vernacular heraldry fails to account for the proliferation of important actors in the public sphere, this failure becomes the premise that generates the allegorical personifications Wynnere and Wastoure.

This article examines long-dip length in the unrhymed alliterative long lines and argues that: (1) in the b-verse, the metrically required long dip must not exceed three syllables: a b-verse with a four-syllable dip is unmetrical; (2) in the a-verse, a dip of four or more syllables is permitted when this dip consists only of closed-class words that do not normally receive beat, but it seems regularly to be avoided in crowded a-verses when the dip would have to include a potentially beat-bearing word, if it were assumed that the a-verse never has more than two beats, a theory which such avoidance tends to confirm.