Manuscripts and Readers of Piers Plowman

In this chapter Horobin explores the various types of evidence available for reconstructing the readership of PPl. Focusing on the evidence preserved in manuscript copies of the poem, Horobin devotes a series of sections to coats of arms, scribal copyists, dialects, and later owners. In a final section titled ‘Reception’, Horobin considers a broader range of evidence (the poem’s inclusion in anthologies, marginalia and other kinds of annotation, as well as its treatment by sixteenth-century antiquarians) to gain insights into the ways the poem was consumed and repackaged.