Preface
During my time working on Ra for the
Piers Plowman Electronic
Archive (PPEA), I have incurred many debts, first of all to the Institute for
Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia.
Since 1992, IATH, has labored to explore and expand the potential of information
technology as a tool for humanities research. During the IATH era, work on the
PPEA was supported by generous funding from the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Since 2013, PPEA has been based at North Carolina State University,
where it has been hosted and supported by the College of Humanities and Social
Sciences. Without the continued assistance of the staff of PPEA and IATH, this
edition simply could not have been created.
While institutional support is especially important to those working on editions
for the PPEA, personal support is also crucial to the work of a project of this
size and scope and I hasten to thank, in particular, Hoyt N. Duggan for the
encouragement, assistance, wisdom, and criticism that he has provided at every
stage of this project. Without his vision and careful attention this edition,
like the others published under the auspices of PPEA and SEENET, would never
have reached the state in which it is here presented to you. Alongside her
husband, Gail Duggan provided diligent and careful labor in producing and
reviewing transcriptions of Ra (and many other MSS of
Piers).
Having a second, independent transcription of the MS to place beside my own
provided critical assistance at many points in my work.
In the latter stages of preparing the edition for publication, I had the immense
benefit of ready access to the attentive services of my PPEA colleagues Timothy
Stinson, James Knowles, and (especially) Paul Broyles at NCSU. In addition to
their careful attention to the many parts of this edition, I am also grateful to
the helpful review of the penultimate draft by Thorlac Turville-Petre and
another anonymous colleague whose sustained critical evaluation and challenging
criticism of my work has helped me immensely in producing a version of my work
worthy of publication on the PPEA site.Without their knowledgeable help and
critical support this edition would not finally have come to fruition.
My work with the A Version of
Piers, and my interest in its MSS,
have their origin in my career-long relationship with my late colleague David C.
Fowler. He early on converted me from the view that Piers A was
simply to be relegated to the dust-heap as an abandoned early and incomplete
form of the poem. My engagement with this version of the poem has been informed,
and challenged, by his strongly voiced views regarding authorship and versional
independence, and I owe a debt of lasting gratitude, as much personal as
scholarly, to David's encouraging my work and championing this version of the
poem, which was the bedrock of his own distinguished and lengthy academic
career. His 1952 edition of Piers A, based on his own University
of Chicago dissertation and the previous work of Thomas A. Knott, made this
version of the poem handsomely available to beginning student and advanced
scholar alike, and helped to initiate a productive half-century of critical work
on the many texts of Piers Plowman that is being continued into a
new century by the efforts of the PPEA's editors. The monumental editions of the
Athlone Press, under the general editorship of the late George Kane, are the
foundation for modern studies of Piers, and I gratefully
acknowledge the immense benefit of having had access to these products of
sustained, diligent editorial labor. I also benefited greatly from having access
to another monumental achievement, namely the parallel-text edition of the four
versions of Piers carefully edited by A. V. C. Schmidt. His
freshly conceived edition of these versions of Piers Plowman not
only offers a critical alternative to Kane's editions but also presents them in
a format that enables ready critical comparison of the versions and their
textual bases.
In my years of study and work on
Piers, I was able to build on a
foundation provided by my early training (focused, admittedly, on B) under the
watchful (and smiling) eye of Robert E. Kaske, my graduate supervisor at Cornell
University. I have also been rewarded during my career at the University of
Washington by having worked with a number of graduate students whose interest in
Piers and in textual studies fostered my own development and
refinement as a textual critic. I number among these three especially whose
contributions, critical and practical, deserve recognition: Gerald Barnett,
Clinton Atchley, and Eric Dahl. While they may have little direct responsibility
for this present edition, their roles in shaping my thinking about
Piers A, and about the requirements for a digital edition of
the work, deserve acknowledgement, and my warm thanks. In addition, I had the
collegial good luck of having access to editorial and technical insights
provided by colleagues at the University of Washington, and especially those in
the UW's Textual Studies Program. Among these last, I would single out Terrence
Brooks, who provided technical assistance and direction at crucial moments in my
work on Ra for the Archive, and on the classroom edition (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2011) that grew from it.
Like many others, I owe especial thanks to the Curators of the Bodleian Library
as well as to the Keeper and staff of the Department of Western Manuscripts for
their cooperation and assistance in the production of this edition. Without
their permission to consult their collections and their particular assistance on
many occasions, it would have been impossible for me to have spent time in
productive, sustained, and undistracted study of Rawlinson Poetry 137 (and
Rawlinson D.913). Along with the Directors of the PPEA, I am especially grateful
to Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield and Mr. Julius Smit of the Bodleian Library's
Imaging Services for their efforts in producing, and allowing us to reproduce,
the color images of the manuscript.
Míċeál F. Vaughan
7 February 2019