Adam Pinkhurst and the Copying of British Library MS Additional 35287 of the B Version of Piers Plowman, MS Additional 35287 of the B Version of Piers Plowman

British Library MS Additional MS 35287 [M] is an early fifteenth-century copy of the B text copied by a scribe using a provincial dialect and an inaccurate exemplar.  The text was subsequently heavily corrected by a contemporary scribe who made numerous changes to its text and to its dialect and spelling. This essay argues on palaeographical, linguistic, and textual grounds that the hand responsible for these corrections was the professional London scrivener Adam Pinkhurst, also responsible for copying the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, using an exemplar closely related to Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17 [W], a manuscript argued by Horobin and Mooney to have been copied by this same copyist. The remainder of the essay considers the implications of this identification for our understanding of Pinkhurst’s role in the London booktrade and the production and circulation of early copies of the B version of PPl. (SH)