Title Background

Ledeþ hire to Londoun þere lawe is yshewed’: Piers Plowman B London, London,1377

Ledeþ hire to Londoun þere lawe is yshewed’: Piers Plowman B London, London,1377

Beginning with a discussion of the London circulation of B-text manuscripts, Hanna suggests that PPl had reached ‘imaginative stasis’ in 1377 (p. 250). L’s poem is ‘more distinctively ‘Edwardian’ than ‘Ricardian’ in its focus’ (p. 248), Hanna argues, emphasizing its retrospective mode and its visualization of ‘proper historical innovation as essentially ‘ineching’, a filling in of what has always been implicit yet heretofore unstated or unrealized’ (p. 256). Hanna also explores the ‘discursive collisions’ (p. 257) in PPl between romance and devotional modes prevalent in London literature, and considers Piers ‘very much a London character’ (p. 273).

Rev. by:

  • Ardis Butterfield, YLS, 19 (2005), 211–15;
  • Caroline M. Barron, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 876-78;
  • Elizabeth Edwards, Dalhousie Review, 86 (2006), 475-77;
  • James Simpson, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 28 (2006), 292-95;
  • A. I. Doyle, Medium Ævum, 76 (2007), 123-25;
  • Oliver S. Pickering, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 8 (2007), 194-96;
  • Jordi Sánchez-Martí, Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, 29 (2007), 167-72;
  • Miceál F. Vaughan, Speculum, 82 (2007), 446-47;
  • Julia Boffey, JEGP: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 107 (2008), 408–11;
  • Ian Forrest, Modern Philology, 105 (2008), 711–13.