A Response to Robert Adams “Langland’s Ordinatio”, “Langland’s Ordinatio”

In response to Robert Adams, “Langland’s Ordinatio: The Visio and the Vita Once More” (YLS 8 [1994]: 51-84; see also YLS 9 [1995]: 209-10), it is argued that WL may well have been able to oversee production of the C-text manuscripts around Malvern; that given the state of incomplete revision of C, neither the text nor the rubrics have evidentiary value regarding the authorship of the marking system; and that Adams’s argument posits the intervention of a rubricator early in the production of B who created an ordinatio different from and more complex than any we know in professionally produced manuscripts, an ordinatio that was in turn ignored and corrupted but was somehow laterally transmitted to AC and C scribes in a less corrupt state.