My review of The Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman”, ed. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), appears in Speculum. Here’s the opening of the review:
This volume is the second of its kind. A Companion to “Piers Plowman”, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley, 1988), marked a high point of sophistication and diversification in the study of this challenging Middle English poem. Following in the tradition of Alford’s volume and capitalizing on research progress since 1988, Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway’s Companion offers a panoptic view of major issues in the historical and literary interpretation of Piers Plowman.
The contributions are organized into three parts: “The poem and its traditions” (Helen Barr, Ralph Hanna, Steven Justice, and Jill Mann), “Historical and intellectual contexts” (Robert Adams, James Simpson, Matthew Giancarlo, Cole and Galloway, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari), and “Readers and responses” (Simon Horobin, Lawrence Warner, and Nicolette Zeeman). The volume’s tripartite arrangement (for a medieval poem obsessed with trios and trinities) invites linear reading, leading, in a familiar critical arc, from the poem qua literature, to its wider historical contexts, and finally to its importance for subsequent histories. At the same time, each essay is designed as a self-contained introduction to the poem.
Eric Weiskott 