Plowing Parallel Furrows? The Textual Culture of Piers and Preaching.” Response to Fletcher’s “The Essential (Ephemeral) William Langland: Textual Revision as Ethical Process in Piers Plowman

“Are these versions of Piers intended for different audiences and occasions, as the different versions of the sermon would have been?”; “Is the text of Piers a dead letter that is only animated by some kind of ephemeral performance?” The respondent then raises the question of composite PPl MSS., some of which suggest that compilers were looking to assemble the most full and complete text of the poem possible, a poem “released from the provisionality of the compositional process.” Lastly, perhaps L “resists the assimilation of his enterprise with that of reachers,”seeing as he so often depicts the very opposite of the “ethical preacher” in his criticism of preachers with a profit motive.