ABSTRACT
William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer’s contemporary, is a much more shadowy figure, yet his life-work, Piers Plowman, in the words of one of his most recent editors, ‘has a good claim to be the greatest English poem of the Middle Ages. It was certainly one of the most popular.’1 More than fifty manuscripts survive, and the all but impossible task of establishing something like a ‘reliable’ or ‘authentic’ text has exercised generations of scholars.2 Indeed, the debates about authorship, possible versions, revisions and transmission of the poem have been at the very centre of Langland studies for the last century. This, of course, could only happen because the text itself, in whatever editorial guise, is so startlingly original and full of urgent uncertainties, concerning religious, theological, social and poetic issues, that it has provoked continuing discussions from the time of its first being composed down to this day.
