New Light on Piers Plowman‘s Ownership ca. 1450-1600

Three new or overlooked identifications of PPl‘s owners. 1) One Thomas Danet (d. 1483), privy councillor and almoner to King Edward IV, owned B.L. MS Add. 35287 (M of B), undermining the belief that ownership of the poem was grounds for prosecution as a heretic. 2) One Joane Vane, ‘some tyme priories of Dartforde in Kent’, gifted a Crowley edition to William More, most likely the prominent landowner and administrator who sold to James Burbage the land that would become home to the King’s Men theatre company. Vane is the second earliest identifiable woman owner of PPl. 3) Archbishop Parker’s circle has connections with two MSS that, while known to students of Parker, have been overlooked by L scholars: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.3.14 (T of A and C), which includes additions in a sixteenth-century hand (including of the ‘two monks’ heads’ passage Warner discusses in YLS 21, to whose list of Tudor-era appearances this should be added), and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 293 (S of C). (LW)