An Electronic Edition of Piers Plowman in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.31

The aim of this project is to edit the text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman as it appears in the sixteenth-century MS Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.31, as part of The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. The Archive has been established with the goals of creating a multi-level, hypertextually linked, textbase of the complete textual tradition, with colour digital facsimiles of every authoritative witness, and of developing a model for computer generated archives of texts transmitted in complex documentary traditions. As with other editions for the Archive, the edition records and annotates all the physical features of the manuscript, including erasures, subpunctions, suspensions and abbreviations, marginal and interlinear additions or corrections to the text, changes in scribal hand or script, as well as contemporary and later glosses. The introduction to the text studies the character and significance of the manuscript, both its record of the text of Piers Plowman and its role in an age of renewed religious controversies. Full analysis of language and dialect is also provided as a contribution to the history of medieval and early modern developments in the language. The information contained in this and other editions will provide a textbase permanently useful to cultural and literary historians, as well as the foundation for all future work on the poem by editors, linguists, palaeographers and codicologists.