English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Pro

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Presents AI Discovery search usage as a premium feature

AI Discovery

Presents AI Discovery explain and summary usage as a premium feature

Content Analysis

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

1500 Top-up

3000 Top-up

Zendy Basic

2500 Top-up

Zendy Unlimited

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

The copy of  Piers Plowman  in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 851, the so-called ‘Z text’, has recently attracted renewed attention as a scribal version of considerable intrinsic interest. I here reexamine Z alongside another notorious scribal version, the ABC splice in Huntington Library, MS HM 114 (Ht). The promulgation of  Piers Plowman  in multiple versions encouraged the scribal redactors of both manuscripts to reimagine the poem in creative ways. While the Ht redactor enhanced the role of Piers Plowman at the expense of the dreamer Will, the Z redactor offered a more sentimentalized version of Piers and often expanded the ‘I’ of the dreamer. By inserting himself into the ‘I’ of the dream vision, the Z redactor authorized his own compositions while simultaneously enhancing those ‘monologic’ moments at which the dreamer offers apparently authoritative interpretation of his visions. Z’s most notable textual omission, which concludes the poem just before the tearing of the pardon, belongs to a consistent pattern in which the redactor eliminates moments of debate and opposition and expands passages of monologic commentary. Rather than an authorial draft as sometimes argued, the Z text represents an intriguing scribal misapprehension of the original poet’s ‘contentious’ compositional style.

Monologic Langland: Contentiousness and the ‘Z Version’ of Piers Plowman