My note, “More Prophetic Piers Plowman,” appears in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. In a previous essay, I announced the discovery of two previously unrecognized prophetic excerpts from Piers Plowman in a sixteenth-century manuscript. This note identifies five more excerpts from Piers Plowman in five other late manuscripts. Here is the opening paragraph:
A key conclusion of recent bibliographical scholarship is that William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1370–90) circulated as political prophecy in manuscript and print in the sixteenth century. Evidence for prophetic Piers Plowman includes an early sixteenth-century manuscript presenting the poem as “The Prophecies of Piers Plowman,” complete with glosses and table of contents; excerpts of two prophetic Piers Plowman passages (B.6.321–31 and 10.322–35) in sixteenth-century manuscripts; sixteenth-century annotations of these and other prophetic passages in earlier Piers Plowman manuscripts; sixteenth-century verse prophecies alluding to the same two Piers Plowman passages; and Robert Crowley’s anxiety about a prophetic interpretation of Piers Plowman in the preface to his 1550 printed edition of the poem. This essay registers five new entries in the sixteenth-century archive of Langlandiana, representing two textually distinct excerpts. I present transcriptions of the five texts and discuss their textual relationship to one another and to other texts of Piers Plowman.
My review of Michael Calabrese, An Introduction to “Piers Plowman” (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016), appears in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. Here’s the opening of the review:
The alliterative poem Piers Plowman survives in three distinct versions (‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’), composed in the 1370s and 1380s by one William Langland. The A version consists of a prologue and eleven ‘passūs’ or sections; B extends A to twenty passūs; and C reorganizes B into twenty-two passūs. The B text has received the most attention from literary scholars and is most often taught to students. James Simpson’s Piers Plowman: An Introduction (Exeter, 1990; rev. ed. 2007) and Emily Steiner’s Reading “Piers Plowman” (Cambridge, 2013) both focus on B, with glances at A and C.
The book under review is the first introduction to devote equal attention to all three versions. Michael Calabrese presents an integrated, passus-by-passus summary of Piers Plowman A, B, and C in twenty-four short sections (“Narrative Reading Guide”). Exposition begins from the earliest version for each passus, with generous discussion of insertions, deletions, and revisions in later versions. Surrounding the reading guide is a variety of supplemental material: a preface advocating the study of Piers Plowman in contemporary America; a chronology of significant people and events; essays on Langland’s biography and political contexts (“Life of the Poet”) and the relationship between Piers Plowman and other canonical medieval literature (“Langland and His Contemporaries”); an appendix listing characters or actants in the poem (“Persons, Personifications, and Allegorizings in Piers Plowman”); an appendix introducing Middle English pronunciation and alliterative meter (“Pronunciation Guide: Reading Piers Plowman Aloud”); and a partially annotated bibliography.
The preface makes a strong case for the urgency of Piers Plowman in the twenty-first century. […]
My essay on medieval British prophecy as a precursor to fake news appears in The Atlantic. I argue that medieval and early modern Britain experienced post-truth politics, that prophecy entangled the most and least powerful members of society, and that comparing the past and the present equips us to be more critical consumers of mass media.
Believe it or not, this essay began as a tweetstorm. Special thanks to David M. Perry for encouraging me to work it up into something more.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 368 (mid or late twelfth c.) contains one of eight complete surviving copies of the Vita et miracula Sancti Kenelmi (1066–1075). The Vita is the earliest substantial account of the career of Kenelm, whose story would go on to feature in the South English Legendary and later English and Anglo-Latin texts. The narrative recounts Kenelm’s premonitory vision, decapitation, surreptitious burial, and posthumous rediscovery. In the climactic scene, the location of the saint’s murdered body is divulged to the pope in Rome by a dove carrying in its beak ‘a snow-white parchment inscribed with golden letters in English’ (‘niueam menbranam aureis litteris anglice inscriptam’, §10). In Douce 368 and other early manuscripts of the Vita, the English inscription is reported as a rhyming Latin couplet. However, three thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts gloss the passage with an English alliterative couplet: ‘In Klent Koubeche | Kenelm kunebearn/ liy under yorne | heaved bereved’ (‘In Clent Cow-valley, Kenelm the royal scion lies under a thorn-bush, decapitated’). The English alliterative couplet survives elsewhere in a free-standing late twelfth-century copy. An early eleventh-century application of the epithet cynebearn to Kenelm suggests that the alliterative poem predates the Vita. Like Cædmon’s Hymn, another miraculous English poetic utterance, the alliterative snippet on Kenelm seems to have moved from memory (in the earliest manuscripts) to the margins (in later manuscripts) and finally to the main text (in later redactions of the legend).
The Douce 368 text of the Vita opens on folio 80r with a historiated initial D depicting a resplendent Kenelm crowned and enthroned, a globus cruciger in one hand and a lily in the other. A dove with wings spread and beak open occupies the upper right corner of the illustration, over Kenelm’s shoulder. To the extent that they take notice of such details, scholars offer contradictory interpretations of the function of the dove. A note in a modern hand in the manuscript describes ‘the dove bringing the narrative of his murder’, evidently mistaking Kenelm for the Pope. F. W. Potto Hicks remarks only that ‘the dove refers to the legend of the letter announcing his death being carried to Rome’. Miriam Gill offers, ‘a bird to the right of his head must refer either to his premonitionary dream or to the dove which brought the news of his death to the Pope’. Rosalind Love, in a thorough description of the manuscript, has Kenelm ‘attended by a bird bearing something in its beak—perhaps the letter delivered to the pope in Rome’. Judith Collard sees the dove ‘touching his crown’.
Each of these interpretations captures a partial truth, but I see a possibility to improve on them by more closely connecting the illustration to the narrative of the Vita and by allowing the illustrator more artistic license. […]
The opening of the Vita et miracula Sancti Kenelmi in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 368 (mid or late twelfth c.). St. Kenelm, enthroned, holds orb and lily; a dove places a crown on his head.
In a recent article in this journal, A. S. G. Edwards casts doubt on the traditional attribution of Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn to Geoffrey Chaucer. Edwards begins by questioning the reliability of John Shirley’s attribution of the poem to Chaucer in the unique surviving manuscript copy, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20 (second quarter of fifteenth c.). He then mobilizes generic, lexical, and thematic evidence indicating that Adam Scriveyn (I will use this short title) was composed not by Chaucer but by ‘a person with overall responsibility for overseeing the writing of a manuscript or manuscripts of Chaucer’s works’, in whose voice, Edwards argues, the poem is most comfortably read. The present note supplements the case against Chaucerian authorship of Adam Scriveyn with metrical evidence.
Adam Scriveyn is composed in the English pentameter, the accentual-syllabic metre that Chaucer invented and popularized. It comprises a single stanza of rhyme royal (rhyming ababbcc), one of the stanza forms invented by Chaucer. […]
Eric Weiskott 
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