Chaucer's Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384-1432 by Lawrence Warner

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

MLR, .,   e final section of the book, ‘Contexts’, contains five bibliographies, each covering a particular travel topic: trade, politics and war, navigation, practical matters, and pilgrimage. e lists are broadly conceived and generally skewed towards more recent scholarship. is is a welcome anthology as the field turns to a deeper understanding of and interest in the global Middle Ages. Medieval English Travel provides a thoughtful guide for studying the literature of travel in medieval England. Moreover, it entices readers to explore the topic further and gives them the tools to do so. I recommend this book for those teaching a class on medieval travel literature and those wishing to learn about it on their own. U  I M M Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, –. By L W. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Over the past fieen years or so, through numerous publications, Simon Horobin, Linne R. Mooney, and Estelle Stubbs have proposed a series of identifications of late medieval scribes, focusing in particular on some of the most high-profile manuscripts of some of the most high-profile Middle English authors. In response to these identifications, a few scholars cautiously advised pumping the brakes a bit. In this monograph Lawrence Warner insists that we slam on the brakes—and pull the handbrake, to boot. Warner works systematically through some of the most important scribal identifications proposed so far, attempting to dismantle them on palaeographical, dialectal, and metrical grounds. In most cases he argues that previous identifications—which he revises in this monograph—were faulty, having relied on petitio principii and having played fast and loose with evidence. As with all that Warner writes, the argument is rendered clearly, and Warner does not pull his punches. Lack of space precludes a detailed discussion of each chapter of the book, but his revisionist narrative can be summarized quite straightforwardly: Chaucer’s lyric to Adam, on which the case for the Adam Pynkhurst identification heavily depends, is only doubtfully canonical (Chapter ); Pynkhurst copied the W manuscript of Piers Plowman but not the Hengwrt and Ellesmere Manuscripts of e Canterbury Tales (Chapters  and ); the scribe of HM  was not named Richard Osbarn, and he worked much more for the Goldsmiths’ Company than the Guildhall (Chapter ); excepting John Carpenter, none of the so-called Guildhall Clerks has a very firm association with the Guildhall (Chapter ); and the purported autograph manuscript of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes is not an autograph, nor can we assume Hoccleve had any major role in supervising the production of literary manuscripts in post-Chaucerian London (Chapter ). Unlike much work in the Humanities, this book’s arguments are factually right or wrong, and it might thus seem neglectful or even pusillanimous for a reviewer to demur from taking sides. But in truth, I do not think the value of this book lies in whether Warner has rightly corrected previous scribal identifications. To this  Reviews reviewer at least, the lasting value of Warner’s argument comes not in his siing of such minutiae, but rather in the larger model he proposes and forcefully articulates for the production and circulation of vernacular literary texts. He urges us to envision scribes adopting more flexible, less centralized methods of book production than have come to dominate much thinking of late—which he usefully terms the ‘fluidity of these clerks’ associations’ (p. ). In doing so, he persuasively calls for us to return to the central insight of Mooney’s  essay (which Warner rightly labels ‘brilliant’ (p. )), which argued that scribes worked in ad hoc ways throughout all pockets of London: ‘[F]rom the s to the s a wide variety of scribes and clerks in and around London got hold of a disparate body of exemplars of those and other works and, in differing circumstances, produced the literature we today research, study, teach, and love’ (pp. –; see Linne R. Mooney, ‘Locating Scribal Activity in Late Medieval London’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. by Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, ), pp. –). e best example of this comes from Chapter...