The most immediate thing to strike the reader who approaches Piers Plowman for the first time — and perhaps his most enduring impression thereafter — is the poem's actual appearance on the printed page. It doesn't look like any other medieval poem he is likely to have read. Interspersed among the alliterative lines of Middle English are hundreds of Latin quotations, and in numerous passages these occur every four or five lines. “No work,” observes Sister Carmeline Sullivan, “whether literary production (...) or dogmatic treatise, is so interlarded with Latin Scriptural quotations and patristic excerpta.” This physical aspect of the poem is emphasized, moreover, by the fact that in most printed editions the quotations are indented and italicized; in the manuscripts, they are often underlined in red. Thus, even before we begin reading, we are impelled to ask: “What is the relation between the quotations and the rest of the poem?” In my view, this question is more pertinent than any other to the art of Piers Plowman. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); }). (shrink)