Contact between Piers Plowman and The Prick of Conscience in Rawlinson Poetry 139

Abstract

This note identifies a group of inserted passages in a manuscript of The Prick of Conscience which contain Latin quotations borrowed from Piers Plowman. These short passages, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poetry 139, modify The Prick’s discussion of pardons and draw on the Latin of Piers in making their new claims. The note identifies these passages and shows that their most likely source is in a now-lost B-text manuscript of Piers, examining alternatives including pastoral and penitential texts in Middle English and Latin. Alongside this new evidence for the transmission of the B text to the north-west Midlands, where Rawlinson is localized on the basis of its dialect, the note explores what the passages indicate about the reviser’s response to both Piers and The Prick. It argues that the reviser read Piers mostly for its Latin, paying relatively little attention to its English verse, in contrast to the approach taken by most modern readers. It ends with the suggestion that accounts of medieval reading should engage more thoroughly with trends in the medieval reception of Middle English texts which are misaligned with our own interest in these writings.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.