19 - Knott and Fowler, Donaldson, Mitchell, and Russell

Summary

In 1952 an important new development took place. The first scholarly edition of Piers Plowman since the appearance of Skeat's Parallel-Text in 1886 was published under the joint names of Thomas A. Knott and David C. Fowler, the eventual outcome of the project undertaken in 1907 by the multiple-authorship adherent Knott, pupil of Manly. Knott had completed a critical text of A up to Passus VIII 126, but subsequently turned his interests towards other aspects of Middle English research. His work was continued by David C. Fowler, in a posthumous collaboration, who reproduced his text of A ‘virtually as he left it’, and added the text he himself had prepared for his Chicago Ph.D. dissertation (completed in 1949), which picked up from where Knott had finished and continued until the end of the poem. The edition is now little used, having been superseded by Kane's Athlone edition of the A-Text in 1960, in which Kane set out the justification for his own textual method by means of demolishing that of Knott-Fowler (see pp. 358ff. below).

Knott-Fowler is the first edition designed for a mainly academic audience. Undergraduates were provided for with a set of explanatory notes, a glossary, and an Introduction with sections on the authorship, metre and alliteration of the poem together with a substantial account (nearly thirty pages) of its historical background, and a bibliography. Fowler's summary of the authorship question tries to steer an equal path between single- and multiple-authorship adherents, but, not surprisingly, presents the case for the latter more persuasively.