Lawrence Warner

The Lost History of "Piers Plowman": The Earliest Transmission of Langland's Work

Preface Chapter 1. Piers Plowman Before 1400: Evidence for the Earliest Circulation of A, B, and C Chapter 2. Scribal Conflation, Convergent Variation, and the Invention of Piers Plowman B Chapter 3. The Poison of Possession: B Passus 15 Chapter 4. The Ending, and End, of Piers Plowman B Conclusion. Lollars, Friars, and Fyndynges: C Passus 9 and the Creation of Piers Plowman Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst

Ahistory of middle english literary production in London c. 1380–1420 remarkable for its richness, elegance, and detail has taken shape over the last decade or so, thanks to a series of stunning studies by Linne Mooney and her collaborators Simon Horobin and Estelle Stubbs.1 In the 1370s, so we learn, one Adam Pinkhurst, king’s archer, became acquainted with Geoffrey Chaucer, fellow member of Edward III’s household. This Adam eventually retired to his family’s home region of Surrey–Sussex, but in the meantime his son or nephew, and namesake, came to be Chaucer’s scribe, copying Boece and Troilus (perhaps in copies fragments of which are still extant) for the poet in the 1380s and earning a notorious place as addressee of a light-hearted stanza bemoaning his copying errors. He also did bureaucratic work for some guilds and John of Northampton and produced a beautiful Piers

Mary, Unmindful of Her Knight: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Traditions of Sexual Hospitality

On the third morning of his visit to Bertilak’s castle, Gawain is subjected to one final attempt at seduction by his host’s wife, followed by her more successful offer of the green lace. Nestled between these episodes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are a few lines that have generated what T. A. Shippey calls ‘‘perhaps the most subtle and influential theory of the poem’s intentions, that it is designed to lead the knight up to a moral crux, a clash of values, in which he is obliged to abandon either his social courtesy or his individual honour—choosing the former.’’1 The lady has urged Gawain so insistently, ‘‘depresed hym so 3ikke,’’ that he must either accept her advances or discourteously refuse (1766–72):

'Piers Plowman' and the Poor (review)

Parergon 23.2 (2006) delicate touch if the interests of the monarch, the church and those of the everimpatient Gothic aristocracy are to be disentangled. He believes that there was a constant confrontation between the kings, who sought to found dynasties, and the aristocrats and the church who favoured an elected monarch. He shows that although Isidore of Seville had in the early 620s reformulated kingship as service, Leovigild and Chindasvind were using Late Roman and Byzantine imagery to bolster the presentation of kingship as sacred. He also shows that there was a traditional form of the elective procedure – acclamation, acceptance after a ritual refusal, a delay of the ceremony of unction and then the rites of accession at Toledo. This included the taking of an oath to the people. The initial refusal was a necessary part of the candidate’s behaviour, indicating that he was no dictator and would accept the position only because it was a duty. Julian’s account of Wamba’s unction was apparently the earliest extant in Western Europe. Its importance is underlined by the fact that the would-be usurper, Paul also styles himself ‘unctus rex orientalis’. This is an impressive and scholarly study of a critical document in the history of the Spanish Visigothic state. Sybil M. Jack History University of Sydney

Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (review)

Parergon 23.1 (2006) the book’s accidental survival and the fictional Joan Martyn point to the small amount of medieval women’s writing that has been preserved and seems to mirror concerns about the precarious relationship of feminist scholarship to the academy expressed elsewhere in the book. The last two chapters of the book focus on the relationship between medieval popular devotional literature for women and modern popular romances of the Mills and Boon or Harlequin variety. Both Jenkins and Wogan–Browne illustrate that the female readers of such literature, both medieval and modern, were neither conventional nor uncritical consumers of what they read. Such an innovative book will also hopefully inspire others who are not medievalists to raise similar questions and issues for their own historical periods. Natalie Tomas School of Historical Studies Monash University

Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (review)

Parergon 22.1 (2005) in 1127. While the events present an interesting story, the place of assemblies in the story is hardly central. In the conclusion, though, we are presented with some interesting thoughts on the nature and impact of assemblies, including the notion that ‘celestial beings’, that is saints present through their relics, were significant participants. Edward Coleman (‘Representative Assemblies in Communal Italy’) traces the increasingly important role of the assembly throughout the formation and development of the city communes. The combination of onomastic, archaeological, historical and literary approaches in this book is very appealing. The occasional typographical errors are irritating; proofreading seems not to have been intensive. A greater frustration results from the untranslated quotations in many of the papers. Even if one shares the view that all scholars of the medieval should read Latin and therefore excuse Latin texts from translation, surely one has a right to expect that in a book of such diversity quotations from pre-modern French (p. 127) ought to be translated. Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages contains some fascinating material. It is primarily a useful resource to be consulted for specific information about assemblies at a particular time or place or under particular circumstances. Unfortunately, the decision to include only a limited index impairs this usefulness. Pamela O’Neill Department of History University of Melbourne