Title Background

The Manuscripts of <i>Piers Plowman</i>.

The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman.

Eyler and Benson describe the diversity of the surviving manuscripts of PPl and survey major points in the editorial history of the poem, including the division and ordering of the A, B, C, and Z texts, and the use of manuscripts in recent work on  scribal production and studies of the poem’s reception. They call attention to two tools available for studying PPl manuscripts: The Manuscripts of ‘Piers Plowman’: The B-Version, a study by C. David Benson and Lynne Blanchfield transcribing each of the B-text manuscripts with all marginal notations; and the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA), directed by Hoyt Duggan, which allows comparison between manuscript and editorially emended versions of the text.