Professor George Kane, who has died aged 92, was one of the finest scholars of Middle English of the 20th century and the editor of the definitve text and glossary of William Langland's Piers Plowman. The 14th-century poem, in its three successive versions, is an attempt to explain how to live well, full of Christian teaching, but is also a fierce satire on the corruptions of the age. Kane's work on the complex textual problems presented by the poem was distinguished by exceptional intellectual rigour, and won him a pre-eminent place in the field of textual criticism.
Kane was born in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, in Canada. In 1937 he graduated with first-class honours in English and Latin from the University of Toronto, went on to Northwestern University, Illinois, as a research fellow for a year, and in 1938 moved to Britain, to University College London, where he began work on a PhD supervised by RW Chambers. In September 1939 he enlisted in the British army. He took part in the defence of Calais, where he was badly wounded and captured by the Germans.
A scholarly career that had begun in Canada was substantially developed in PoW camps, where he read avidly in the long stretches of time between trying to escape. At the Laufen camp he worked his way through Tauchnitz fiction reprints. Later, in the Spangenberg camp, he schooled himself through classic French novels and set about learning Italian well enough to read Dante. It was at Spangenberg that he glimpsed at the bedside of a fellow prisoner a photograph of a young woman, Bridget; he met her in London in the spring of 1945, and they were wed in June 1946.
He spent most of his career in the University of London, where he was an influential and greatly respected figure. He became a lecturer with tenure in 1948 and a reader in 1953. During these years he established his reputation as the coming leader in Middle English studies, with the publication of an important paper, Piers Plowman: Problems and Methods of Editing the B-Text (1948), and of a monograph, Middle English Literature (1951), daringly a work of literary criticism at a time when historical and language-based approaches were general.
This work engaged directly with romances, lyrics and Piers Plowman, and was described by a reviewer as "one of the best books so far written on any aspect of Middle English literature".
In 1955 he became Professor of English Language and Literature and head of department at Royal Holloway College, and in 1965 returned to Central London as Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at King's College. Internationally too he had become known, lecturing in many European and North American institutions, serving on appointment panels, on the editorial boards and councils of learned societies, delivering keynote lectures.
It is not surprising that one of the century's finest Middle English scholars should have been awarded the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Prize, the British Academy's prize for English studies, but it is a mark of his distinction that he was awarded the prize twice: in 1963, for his edition of the "A" text of Piers Plowman, and then in 1999, to mark the completion of the three-volume edition of the poem (the B text, edited with E Talbot Donaldson, appeared in 1975; the C text, with George Russell, in 1997).
The writing of Piers Plowman, the greatest alliterative poem from the age of Chaucer, must have occupied most of Langland's adult years. In all three versions the allegorical poem begins in the world, in England, presenting the financial corruption of the "fair field ful of folk", and throughout the dreamer seeks to discover how to achieve salvation. Langland was probably already 30 years old when he wrote the A version (prologue and 11 or 12 passus or sections) and about 45 in the late 1370s when writing the B text (prologue and 20 passus, but almost three times as long as the 2,500 lines that make up the A text), the version most widely known.
The C version, complete by around 1387, is thought to reflect tinkering undertaken on earlier sections of the B text during his final years, when he returned to the Malvern area of his youth. It is longer again, and contains his brief description of living in Cornhill in London, "Kitte and I in a cote, yclothed as a loller [vagabond]". The text of Piers Plowman has survived in some 56 manuscripts. Kane saw every one and transcribed them with an unrivalled precision.
In 2005 he published his glossary to the English vocabulary of the three Langland texts, a superb lexicographical tool. Although Kane's scholarship will be remembered most of all for his work on Piers Plowman, there were other publications of note, not least his Middle English Literature (1951), reprinted for successive generations of undergraduates. With his colleague Janet Cowen, he edited Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (1995), and there were other books and important lectures on Chaucer as well as Langland. A festschrift in his honour, Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane (edited by ED Kennedy, RA Waldron and JS Wittig) was published in 1988.
He died on December 27, 2009, aged 92, and is survived by Bridget, his wife of 62 years, and their daughter.
Elizabeth Rambo, professor of English at Campbell University, who was a student of George Kane and offers a
few words about him here.
