The Yearbook of Langland Studies

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.

The traditional methods of philology and historical linguistics have served well to reveal the metrical patterns of older poetry. In particular, we have gained a fuller understanding of Middle English alliterative metre, including that of Piers Plowman, during the past forty years. Investigators have been careful to avoid subjective impressions of rhythm, using instead objective categories such as parts of speech. However, this discussion of the sound of the poetry cannot be complete without consideration of the perceiving consciousness. We show how the many experiments of phonetics labs establishing norms of perception, prediction, and entrainment fit with our subjective impressions.

Different attitudes towards payment distinguish effective from ineffective healers in Piers Plowman. When leches approach healing with a charitable spirit, they typically succeed in curing their patients, whereas those that are overly concerned with making a profit invariably fail. Piers Plowman and associated texts, such as Mum and the Sothsegger, praise the virtues of those healers who resist professionalization and commercialization, performing lechecraft as one part of a greater charitable role. These tensions between commerce and charity are not merely literary issues but also reflect contemporary concerns surrounding efforts at regulating medicine and surgery in late medieval English cities. This article contends that texts of the Piers Plowman tradition add to an existing body of medical satire and serve as valuable sources in the social history of medicine, voicing concerns surrounding the commercialization of lechecraft in Langland’s London.

Daniel Wakelin, Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England: Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xv + 284, reviewed by Jessica Brantley

Thorlac Turville-Petre,ed. andtrans, Pearl. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 210, reviewed by Susanna Fein

Sarah Wood, ‘Piers Plowman’ and its Manuscript Tradition. York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 5. Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press / The Boydell Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 243, reviewed by Jim Knowles

Andrew Kraebel, Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 302, reviewed by David Lawton

Jordan Kirk, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. Pp. 187, reviewed by Adin E. Lears

David Aers, Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2020. Pp. xvii + 330, reviewed by John Rogers

Eve Salisbury, Narrating Medicine in Middle English Poetry: Poets, Practitioners, and the Plague. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Pp. xii + 224, reviewed by Sarah Star

Eric Weiskott, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. xviii + 297, reviewed by Myra Stokes

Joëlle Rollo-Koster, The Great Western Schism, 1378–1417: Performing Legitimacy, Performing Unity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 406, reviewed by Zachary E. Stone

Philip Knox, The ‘Romance of the Rose’ and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. viii + 320, reviewed by Elizaveta Strakhov