"A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English
Middle Ages, Piers Plowman is the one that most deserves and needs
annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it
is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and because
it is characteristically knotty and deploys a language of unusual
richness, density, and allusiveness. Much of this allusiveness is
to areas of learning that are not at every modern reader's
fingertips. A particular difficulty is the existence of the poem in
three authorial versions of almost desperate complexity. It will be
an immense triumph to have a commentary which elucidates their
relationships as a matter of policy and not simply as the result of
conflating annotation on the different versions."-Derek Pearsall
The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late
nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first
two of its five projected volumes. The detailed and wide-ranging
Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers
Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual
contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of
critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship
while offering original materials and insights throughout. The
authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus
commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of
its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning
while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive
scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and
open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is
unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and
intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn
Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B,
or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have
detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature,
possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and
literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly
difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others,
with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and
detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to
avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought
about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Andrew Galloway's
Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through
Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's
final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A
texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the
commentary, dealing with the final three passus of the poem, extant
only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work
of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton. Overall, The
Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated
yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and
literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object
of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the
capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full
commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than
Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination
with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable
generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of
experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the
difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English
literature. Andrew Galloway is Professor of English and Medieval
Studies at Cornell University.
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