Herry Lovelich's Merlin

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated the existence in fifteenth and even fourteenth-century England of “bookshops” to which scriveners, limners, and perhaps members of the bookbinders' craft were attached in a sort of lay scriptorium for the purpose of producing books as they were ordered by patrons. Out of such shops, located, it would seem, principally in London, rather than out of monastic scriptoria, came the bulk of English secular literature. Many of the MSS. of the Canterbury Tales are authoritatively said to be “shop-made,” and the same claim is made about the mid-fourteenth-century Auchinleck MS. Mrs. Loomis, moreover, argues convincingly that the shops of the early stationers sometimes included translator-versifiers whose routine task it was to turn French prose romances into English verse, generally into highly conventional and pedestrian couplets.