ABSTRACT
The Poet and his Life During this century there has been substantial controversy about the authorship of the three versions of Piers Plowman. While generally allowing a William Langland some role in the work's genesis, some have sought to minimize that role and to disperse authorship of various portions of the poem among different hands.1 Although (as Kane and Donaldson indicate) the grounds for such partitionings have been imprecise because they rely upon more or less contentious discoveries of inconsequence among different portions of the poem, 2 yet they have also been profoundly generative. In 1909 Manly effectively directed attention to the poem's incoherences, a view implicitly opposed to Jusserand's efforts to see the work as unified through its references to a fourteenth-century social reality. The seminal modern study of the poem by Donaldson in 1949 is conceived as a riposte to views like Manly's; Donaldson demonstrates that the latest form of the poem, the C Version, preserves views thoroughly in keeping with those enunciated in earlier versions.
