The Lost Exemplar of the Z-Text of Piers Plowman and Its 20-Line Pages.

Questions Kane’s criticism of Rigg and Brewer’s Z version for failing to appreciate that the “new” lines were really scribal attempts to restore or reconstruct an A-text exemplar that presented illegible or defaced leaves of nineteen to twenty-one lines. Argues in rebuttal that no extant A or B MS. is so generously spaced (the average is around thirty-eight lines per side); that it would be indeed unusual to find leaves disfigured on one side only; and that two of the five lacunae posited by Kane (gaps of eighty-four and sixty-one lines, respectively) are only four lines apart -hence the improbable case of an exemplar that contained four totally illegible sides, followed by one side containing four lines, then three illegible sides.