What Owen Rogers Really Did to Piers Plowman

Abstract Since the late nineteenth century, Owen Rogers’s edition of Piers Plowman (1561) has been viewed as an unimportant, badly produced knockoff of Robert Crowley’s third edition of the poem (1550). While Rogers based his edition on Crowley’s work, this dismissal ignores the extent to which Rogers’s alteration of Crowley’s format, his deletion and reordering of the paratextual material and his suppression of the authorial and historical context transformed the text from a poem that directed its appeal to those who were congenial to reform into something more open-ended, a more saleable work that offered a range of different possible literary meanings.