Books by Lawrence Warner
Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman,... more Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poem's localization, and medieval readers' particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the 'Protestant Piers' was a reaction against the poem's oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem by figures including the maligned Chaucer editor John Urry, and contextualizes its first modernization by a literary forger inspired by the 1790s Shakespeare controversies. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood.
Despite the recent outpouring of scholarship on Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner contends, we know ... more Despite the recent outpouring of scholarship on Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner contends, we know much less about the poem's production, transmission, and readership than one might think. When did William Langland write each of the three versions of the poem, and when did they enter wide circulation? What role did scribes and other agents play in these processes? The Lost History of "Piers Plowman" engages with these questions to bring about a fundamental shift in our understanding of the genesis and development of the Middle English poem.
Papers by Lawrence Warner
The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, 2014
The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2013
Saunders/A Companion to Medieval Poetry, 2010
Piers Plowman generated as tumultuous a public life and complex a production history as any other... more Piers Plowman generated as tumultuous a public life and complex a production history as any other work of its era or perhaps of any other. It might thus better be studied as an event comprising the actions of an author, audiences, scribes and editors than as just the work of a single ...
The medieval understanding of Cain, fratricide and "vagabond on the earth," and Nimrod,... more The medieval understanding of Cain, fratricide and "vagabond on the earth," and Nimrod, tyrannical giant and architect of the Tower of Babel, prompted the figuration of movement as an erotic act and the corollary figuration of sexuality as movement, a process I term "the erotics of ...
Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2012
The first half of this essay argues against Linne Mooney's claim that London, B.L. MS Royal 17 D... more The first half of this essay argues against Linne Mooney's claim that London, B.L. MS Royal 17 D.XVIII (sigil Ry3) is a holograph of Thomas Hoccleve's poem The Regiment of Princes. Mooney claims that the text has unique readings indicated that it records the state of England and the poet a year or two after the poem's initial composition and dissemination, but the readings are in fact shared by many other manuscripts. Ry3's spellings and meter are unHocclevean, as are its hand's aspect and letter forms and the manuscript's layout and punctuation. This cannot be in Hoccleve's hand. The second half of the essay argues that the evidence that Adam Pinkhurst copied Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17 (MS W of Piers Plowman B) is so overwhelming that it becomes impossible to accept that he had anything to do with Chaucer or his manuscripts. MS W's aspect is very similar to that of Pinkhurst's confirmation, whose dozen decorative features (e.g., descenders made into triangles, large curls above many y's) occur throughout the PPl text. The entire case that Pinkhurst copied the Hengwrt and Ellesemere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, not to mention was 'Chaucer's scribe,' thus relies on the validity of Simon Horobin and Mooney's 2004 attribution of MS W to the Hg-El scribe. Yet few have embraced this attribution, for good reasons: W's aspect, letter forms, decorative features (such as those just cited), and language (e.g., use of yoghs) differ substantively from those of Hg and El. There are no problems with the proposal that Pinkhurst did not copy Hg and El, and a long list of problems with the belief that he did. Pinkhurst is among the earliest identifiable scribes of PPl but did not copy any other known manuscripts of Middle English.
My 2011 book The Lost History of Piers Plowman revealed a case of manuscript affiliations between... more My 2011 book The Lost History of Piers Plowman revealed a case of manuscript affiliations between the C portion of National Library of Wales 733B and the beta group of B that, I argued, meant that the B archetype of Piers was heavily contaminated by an early draft of C. The other seemingly obvious explanation, beta of B>NLW 733B contamination, is impossible because it would not explain how the contamination occurred so overwhelmingly where the other manuscript tradition of B, alpha, was lacking, spurious, or agreed with C. Robert Adams and Thorlac Turville-Petre have recently argued in this journal that what I deemed impossible is in fact ‘the most straightforward’ explanation of NLW 733B’s text, though they address none of the difficulties I raised and critique not my arguments but those of straw men. They also take opposing sides of issues, as suits whatever local claim they make: on the one hand the NLW 733B scribe desired a ‘complete’ Piers Plowman, but on the other he merely replaced a few lines; he used beta throughout his copying, but used it only in his C Text; it was the scribe of his exemplar who was a denizen of the London book-trade, but it was he himself. Most difficult is that their narrative of the supposed beta of B > NLW 733B contamination relies on the belief that two separate scribes in turn consulted separate manuscripts solely for indications of what to omit from, rather than add to, their own copies. What Adams and Turville-Petre advocate is an impossible <i>Piers</i>.
Script & Print 32 (2008): 21-35
England's most popular urban myth of the later Middle Ages as found in the margins, blank folios,... more England's most popular urban myth of the later Middle Ages as found in the margins, blank folios, and flyleaves of manuscripts and early printed books
This essay argues in favor of two emendations concerning women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight... more This essay argues in favor of two emendations concerning women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: of MS "Þaʒ I [i.e., the lady] were burde bryʒtest, þe burde in mynde hade" (line 1283) to "Þaʒ [ho] were burde bryзtest, þe bur[n]e in mynde hade, " adopted by many editors but under increasing pressure in recent years; and of the convoluted MS passage in which Bertilak reveals the role of Morgan le Fay (lines 2445-55) to the clearer one resulting from Gollancz's addition of a line whereby he says that through her might he was transmogrified.
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Books by Lawrence Warner
Papers by Lawrence Warner