ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: THE MEDIEVAL WORLD Volume 24 MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE A Critical Study of the Romances, the Religious Lyrics, and Piers Plowman GEORGE KANE Firstpublishedin1951byMethuen&CoLTD. Thiseditionfirstpublishedin2020 byRoutledge 2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN andbyRoutledge 52VanderbiltAvenue,NewYork,NY10017 RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,an informabusiness ©1951GeorgeKane Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedor reproducedorutilisedinanyformorbyanyelectronic, mechanical,orothermeans,nowknownorhereafter invented,includingphotocopyingandrecording,orinany informationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermission inwritingfromthepublishers. Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybe trademarksorregisteredtrademarks,andareusedonlyfor identificationandexplanationwithoutintenttoinfringe. BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritish Library ISBN:978-0-367-22090-7(Set) ISBN:978-0-429-27322-3(Set)(ebk) ISBN:978-0-367-18715-6(Volume24)(hbk) ISBN:978-0-429-19788-8(Volume24)(ebk) Publisher’sNote Thepublisherhasgonetogreatlengthstoensurethequality ofthisreprintbutpointsoutthatsomeimperfectionsinthe originalcopiesmaybeapparent. Disclaimer Thepublisherhasmadeeveryefforttotracecopyright holdersandwouldwelcomecorrespondencefromthosethey havebeenunabletotrace. IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE George Kane was of the generation who served in the Second World War. He arrived in London in the autumn of 1938 to take up a graduate place in university college London, but in August 1939, on his supervisor’s insist- ence, saw his interrupted PhD thesis, on the final three passus of the B-text of Piers Plowman, placed in storage in vaults in Aberystwyth. As he relates in his memoir,1 he enlisted in the British Army once war was declared. He took part in the stand at calais, where he was wounded. From late in May 1940 to the end of March 1945 he was a prisoner of war, and he returned to civilian life only in March 1946. With his thesis complete, he moved into an Assistant Lectureship at university college that autumn, to teach medieval literature. Wisely, he got hold of a uni- versity finals exam paper, and worked out that he was to provide background for the explication of set texts. His north American training had not prepared him for teach- ing the university of London syllabus. He hadn’t ‘read, or heard, except as sources of instances of phonological change, of Ancrene Riwle, or Handlyng Synne, or The Ayenbit of Inwit or even Havelok the Dane’, and he knew that he had found Gawain and the Green Knight ‘very IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE difficult’, as indeed ‘many passages in Piers Plowman’. He had not, of course, come across r. M. Wilson’s Early Middle English Literature or renwick and orton’s Begin- nings of English Literature, published in 1939 and 1940 respectively (p. 186), nor other recent secondary literature about the field. His first two post-war long vacations he spent in the round room of the British Museum, reading his way steadily through a great deal of Middle English literature, making notes for his first series of lectures and what turned into his first book. Middle English Literature was complete and with the publishers in 1947. there was still a paper shortage, so it had to wait its turn for publication in 1951. (In a footnote, Kane points out that it was written before the 1949 pub- lication of talbot donaldson’s analysis of the c-text and his ‘most illuminating treatment’ of the poem’s three ver- sions (p. 186 note).) once it appeared, an early reviewer pronounced it to be ‘one of the best books so far written on any aspect of Middle English literature’.2 the book’s read- ability and usefulness meant it was quickly reprinted. For undergraduates, here was an introduction that expected them to engage critically with reading whole texts for themselves and in admirably brief footnotes directed them to editions. Kane’s purpose was to assess the literary value of a body of texts defined in the subtitle ‘A Critical Study of the romances, the religious Lyrics, Piers Plowman’. In 1970, Kane refused to attempt to ‘revise it, let alone re- write it’, asserting in a note added to the original preface that it had already become ‘a period piece, such as librar- ians might wish to include in their documentation of the history of medieval studies’, and towards the end of his life he described it as ‘elementary and impressionist’.3 never- theless, readers today will welcome the present reprint just IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE because it is elementary and even more because through- out it asks them to react to Kane’s impressions of Middle English romances by chaucer, the Gawain poet and many others, to a wide range of religious lyrics and to a reading of Piers Plowman, whether A, B or c version, as the work of a single author. In particular, they will find, in the last of these three essays, as good a short introduction to the poem as is available anywhere. This 1951 essay is the first of Kane’s major publications on Langland.4 Here he points out that Piers Plowman was written for ‘a much wider public than were most of the alliterative poems’ (p. 188), many of which he had already discussed in his chapter on romance, and he demonstrates ‘the greatness of both the poem and its author’ (p. 248) through short quotations, taken, ‘where any one of them will do equally well’ (p. 182 note), from the B-version in Skeat’s edition, based on oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 581. For example, a line he cites twice, ‘How fele fernȝeres are faren and so few to come’ is for him ‘at least as apt as eheu fugaces’ (p. 211 and cf. p. 233). Arguing that the ‘relation of a man’s personality to his poetry is sel- dom as strikingly revealed as in Piers Plowman’ (p. 191), he presents its author as ‘stern’ and ‘fiercely outspoken’ (p. 193), a writer with ‘an unusually powerful visual im- agination . . . stronger and clearer even than chaucer’s’ (p. 236), yet capable of a tenderness that is ‘the source of some of his most moving poetry’ (p. 196). curiously, at no point does he give the author a name,5 contenting himself with an oblique reference: ‘By his own account he was tall to the point of deformity, and conscious of his abnormality’ (p. 192). In later publications Kane did give the name Langland to the poet, but he came to find the at- tribution William (de) rokele attractive, and in his ODNB IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE biography he pointed out that the hunt for just who the poet was would continue.6 With Middle English Literature at press, Kane set about editing the B-version of Piers Plowman, thinking ‘it would not take long’.7 It soon became clear that before a B-text could be edited there must be a new edition of the A-version, to which he should first turn his attention. The A-text went to press early in 1956, appearing in 1960. In the 1950s donaldson joined Kane on work towards edit- ing the B-version, and together they took the controversial decision to change the base text. there was, after all, ‘the trinity college B copy [cambridge, trinity college, MS B.15.17] in best fourteenth-century London English: Piers Plowman would have been more easily accessible and, for all we know the poet might have written in that dialect, whatever regional form Langland had learned in child- hood’.8 their edition of the B-version appeared in 1975. the c-version, edited with George russell, was published in 1997, followed by Kane’s invaluable Piers Plowman glossary in 2005. Questions of authorship and of the pro- gressive revision of the poem’s three versions are still de- bated, and Kane himself entered into such discussion from time to time, most devastatingly with a blistering response to the proposition ‘that the short or A form of Piers is a re- daction, probably by Langland himself, made after he had revised B to c’.9 nevertheless, the three volumes edited by Kane and his colleagues, in which collations from the manuscripts are scrupulously recorded, remain the stand- ard editions for Piers Plowman.10 Jane roberts Institute of English Studies, university of London IntroductIon TO THE REISSUE Notes 1 Kane from Canada, ed. Mary Kane and Jane roberts (tempe, Arizona: Arizona center for Medieval and renais- sance Studies, 2016), pp. 77−78. 2 A. I. doyle, The Review of English Studies, nS 4 (1953), 69–70. 3 Kane from Canada, p. 234. 4 For a full list, see ‘George Kane 1916–2008’, in Biograph- ical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XI (2012), 420−45, at <https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/ default/files/11_14-George_Kane.pdf>. 5 In his review, J. r. Hulbert, Modern Philology 49.3 (Feb., 1952), 206, points out that the name Langland appears no- where in the book or its index’ 6 ‘Langland, William (c.1325–c.1390)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (oxford: oxford university Press, 2004) <http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/ view/article/16021>. Cf. Kane from Canada, p. 271. the Rokele identification has gathered a great deal of discussion in recent years. 7 Kane from Canada, p. 248. 8 ibid., p. 263. 9 ‘An open letter to Jill Mann about the sequence of the ver- sions of Piers Plowman’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies 13 (1999), 7–33 at 7. 10. For digital editions and the new work under way of the ‘Piers Plowman Electronic Archive’, see <http://piers.chass.ncsu. edu/>.