Authorship and Error: Reconsidering the B Revision of Piers Plowman

This study re-examines Langland’s revisionary process from the A to B version of Piers Plowman, challenging one of the most widely accepted theories of Piers textual history. It suggests that the corruption in the B version, commonly assumed to have been introduced in the archetype, may have taken place before B was ever composed and that Langland may have revised the original B-text from a scribally corrupt copy of A. This exploration of Piers’s textual history also has important implications for literary theory more broadly, examining the nature of authorship in the poem and the relationship between author and scribe.