The transmission of alliterative poetry: scribal practice in the A text of William Langland's Piers Plowman

Abstract

The extant manuscripts of William Langland’s Piers Plowman are rich in scribal variation, with the scribes even going as far as to change words in alliterating position. This paper analyzes the variants collected in the critical apparatus of Kane’s (1988) edition of the A text in order to find out how frequently the scribes reduced alliteration in a line. It seems that some variants were introduced at such an early stage that they were passed down in the text tradition. Moreover, while it is certainly not possible to tell why exactly a scribe introduced a certain variant, there are certain patterns among the non-alliterating variants. I will, therefore, also address possible reasons for the introduction of variants that reduce alliteration, such as mechanical errors, substitutions for difficult words or semantically related words.