Stephan Batman and his Manuscripts of Piers Plowman

Stephan Batman (c.1542–1584) was a writer, protestant divine and collector of Middle English manuscripts. His interests in PPl are known to modern scholarship thanks to the survival of a manuscript copy of the poem owned by him, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 171, containing annotations in his hand. This article associates a second extant manuscript of the poem with Batman, Oxford, Trinity College MS R.3.14, and discusses his interests in the text as attested in these two volumes, as well as the evidence they provide for the circulation and reception of both manuscript and printed witnesses to L’s work in the latter half of the sixteenth century. (SH; adapted from the journal’s abstract)