'Meddling with Making': Speech, Poetic Craft, and the Spectre of Imaginatif in Piers Plowman A

Taking energy from the addition of the B-text phrase ‘meddling with making’ to the A‑text ending in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson poetry 137 composed by the medieval reader John But, this article argues that a renewed attention to the reception history of Piers Plowman and to the correspondences between certain moments in the A text and Imaginatif’s passūs in the B and C texts corroborates a genetic reading of the poem’s development. Such an approach, I contend, shows the poet to have thought about Imaginatif even before writing him as a character in the poem, and further sheds light on medieval readers’ responses to and engagement with Piers as a multi-text literary phenomenon centred around issues of speech, craft, and the intellectual and spiritual value of poetic making.