Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to present a new interpretation of the pardon passus of Langland's Piers Plowman, an interpretation justified by a gloss in the Psalter commentary of Hugh St.-Cher, which, as I will show, was Langland's source. The proof that he was reading this commentary depends in part on our recognizing that medieval books, because of their physical character, were most likely to have been read in a certain way. It depends in part on our seeing that the Z-text of the poem, recently published by George Rigg and Charlotte Brewer, is indeed the first draft, because the quotations in the A-text but not in the Z-text can be more easily understood as added in a revision than as included from the beginning. One group of these quotations can be seen as added because they all treat, or come from contexts which treat, a common theme justifying Langland's assembly of them. Another group occurs in a single gloss from Hugh's Psalter commentary on a verge Langland quotes, and which itself belongs to the group made coherent by a common theme. These two groups account for all but one of the quotations in question, and may account for that one as well