ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the question of what Piers Plowman is in a different way by considering a series of manifestations of the poem in physical and digital media, including one medieval manuscript, Crowley’ s print editions, the Athlone critical edition of the B text edited by George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, and two digital editions published by the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, edited by Michael Calabrese, Hoyt N. Duggan, and Thorlac Turville-Petre, and a critical edition of the B archetype edited by John Burrow and Turville-Petre. The goal is to consider the ways in which digital editions of past literary works are bound up with and inextricably linked to specific physical iterations of those works. Printed texts are built from and constituted by manuscript texts and other printed texts, and digital editions encompass the handwritten, the printed, and the digital within themselves.
