5 - Piers Plowman and His Travelling Companions

Summary

Readers are often surprised to discover that the text that occurs most commonly alongside Piers Plowman in the manuscripts is Mandeville’s Travels. In light of the evidence I presented in the two previous chapters, however, the poem’s appearance alongside another ‘life’ of worldly and spiritual marvels perhaps looks less surprising, and less like the merely coincidental conjunction of two popular Middle English texts. One cannot be sure, of course, that manuscript compilers in fact joined these works together on the basis of perceived similarities between them rather than because of more mundane factors like the supply of exemplars. We do, however, as I will show in the next two chapters, possess some exceptionally alluring evidence from medieval scribes who copied both works and whose response to Piers Plowman appears to have been shaped by their reading of Mandeville. And whether or not the items had been deliberately joined in the same manuscript, a medieval reader who encountered Piers Plowman alongside Mandeville’s Travels was likely to have experienced Langland’s poem quite differently, as I will demonstrate, from its modern interpreters. In its Mandevillean manuscript contexts, Piers Plowman’s affinities with the Travels as a popularised and experiential mode of knowledge become freshly visible to the reader today.

Piers Plowman is now not often studied alongside Mandeville, of course, and the Travels does not enjoy the same formidable reputation for intellectual difficulty. The shared manuscripts challenge, however, some of these general preconceptions about the two works. One of the two copies that I examine in this chapter, Dd.1.17, combines Piers and Mandeville with the Latin sources and analogues for their respective treatments of Islam. Piers Plowman occurs here in what appears an impressively learned setting, but a more detailed look at the other contents of the volume reveals that Mandeville, in fact, not Piers, aligns more closely with the respectable, scholarly sources on the subject, while Langland deploys markedly more ‘popular’ materials.