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Six Hundred Years Later, "The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive" Will Help Scholars Find Truest Versions Of An Influential Medieval Poem 
March 28, 2000 -- It was an instant hit when it first appeared in the 14th century, well before Gutenberg invented the printing press. It stayed popular long after Middle English had stopped being spoken and influenced such important authors as Edmund Spenser, John Milton and John Bunyan. But its very popularity now causes major problems for modern scholars and editors trying to pin down its history: all 56 of the surviving medieval copies of the great religious poem of the English Middle Ages, William Langland’s "Piers Plowman," vary from each other and contain errors or changes made by scribal copyists. Using cutting-edge computer technology, an international project based at the University of Virginia English department has now begun publishing a groundbreaking electronic archive of textual scholarship that will eventually include CD-ROM editions of all the manuscripts and early printed texts of the influential medieval poem. Because electronic editions allow sophisticated searches and comparisons of manuscripts, scholars will be able to demonstrate in ways not previously possible the recovery of an authentic original text from the ravages of time and hand copying, said U.Va. English professor Hoyt N. Duggan, who heads the project. The University of Michigan Press released this week the first of approximately four dozen planned volumes of "The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive." Each electronic volume will present two scholarly texts and a color facsimile of an entire manuscript version of the lengthy poem. The first text is a literal transcription of the manuscript as the scribe wrote it; the second is a critical edition which corrects the scribal corruptions. Both texts are hypertextually linked to a full scholarly apparatus and to color images of the manuscript. The completed archive will constitute a valuable research tool for all who study late medieval English culture – literary historians, linguists, paleographers, and historians of religious thought, Duggan said. The project also is intended to serve as a model of highest standards for electronic textual scholarship, he said. "Editing ‘Piers Plowman’ poses editorial problems only slightly less complex than the problems of editing the Greek New Testament," Duggan said. Langland himself composed three versions of his poem during a period from the late 1360s until his death, in about 1390. Of the 56 surviving manuscripts, none is signed by Langland, and none can be dated certainly even as being in the poet's lifetime. Like most medieval poets, Langland lacked control over the reproduction of his work, Duggan said. "Enthusiastic early readers produced inexpert copies for their own use, which became in turn the bases for yet other copies, with each copying accumulating fresh errors, conjectures, ‘corrections,’ and contamination within and between versions." Authentic lines were garbled or omitted. Inauthentic lines were introduced when scribes acted as amateur, self-taught editors, sometimes mixing lines from the three authorial versions, or adding words or lines of their own. The editorial board of the project includes scholars from Oxford University and the University of Nottingham in England as well as from the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan, Sam Houston State University, and Gustavus Adolphus College. Also contributing are scholars from the University of London, the University of Washington, the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, California State University in Los Angeles, Maryville College, Princeton University, and Berkeley. In its five-year history of scholarship to date, the archive has enjoyed the financial support of the IBM Corporation and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as support from many of the universities involved. U.Va.’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities played a key role in supporting initial research on the project. Additional background information on the project is available in a research report from the Institute for Advanced Tech in the Humanities at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/piers/archive.goals.html For interviews or additional information Hoyt Duggan may be reached at (804) 924-6630 or hnd@virginia.edu. Contact: Bob Brickhouse, (804) 924-6856 |
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