Early readers left tantalising traces of their engagement with Langland’s work in various forms throughout the surviving corpus of fifty-two complete manuscripts and fragments. Textual alterations and continuations, marginal annotation and illustration and, implicitly, copies that join Piers Plowman with other works all offer fascinating, if ambiguous, insight into the sometimes-unexpected ways the poet’s earliest audience understood his work. Yet scholars have barely begun to excavate this richly layered field. With a few exceptions, studies of the Piers manuscripts remain confined to a small number of well-known copies of the B and C versions, generally those with particularly heavy annotation or textual alteration. A great mass of books languishes virtually unknown to most readers except as sigla in editions.

As well as promoting just a few copies to prominence, past work on the manuscripts tends also to foreground some familiar themes and concerns. George Kane early demonstrated the scribes’ ‘lively, but not necessarily intelligent participation’ at those spots where ‘the content of the poem refers clearly to contemporary life’. More recent work typically credits Langland’s copyists with greater literary intelligence than Kane was willing to grant them, but it has wholeheartedly embraced the suggestion that the poem’s topical reference most excited its medieval audiences. Many studies of the last few decades place the spotlight particularly on those manuscripts in which readers’ responses to Piers Plowman’s ‘reformist’ interests might be detected. John Bowers, for example, surveys the surviving books as documents in an ideological struggle over the meaning of a ‘cultural text’ that found itself at different times open to ‘appropriation by Lollard sympathizers’ and the victim of ‘orthodox suppression’. He and Michael Calabrese separately study the prolific annotator and corrector of the important C-text copy X, commenting upon this reader’s alertness ‘to topics of religious dissent [and] reformist themes’, his concern ‘with clergy, confession, and pastoral care’ and his possible sympathy with Lollardy. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton explores the manuscripts of a ‘poem transmitted among reformist political thinkers within the civil service’, examining the work of readers who respond enthusiastically, in her account, to Piers Plowman’s ‘Westminster-related material’.