Lambeth Homilies: Richard Morris's Emendations

Abstract

RICHARD MORRIS was a very accurate transcriber and highly productive editor of Middle English prose and verse, more exact in details, and less idiosyncratic in his introductions than F. J. Furnivall, but less wide-ranging than W. W. Skeat, his contemporaries in that great age of late Victorian English scholarship to which The Oxford English Dictionary and the Early English Text Society owe their beginnings. Morris contributed no fewer than twenty publications in the EETS. Even before that Society was founded, Morris edited for the Philological Society, Liber Cure Cocorum (1862) and The Pricke of Conscience (1863). It is not in any spirit of cavilling that one ventures to take a critical look at some of his suggested emendations of the Lambeth Homilies: for after nearly a century and a half Morris's edition of the homilies in Lambeth MS 487 has remained the only edition of the whole.1 A good, more recent edition of some of the homilies (including homily VI, the Pater Noster in rhyming verse) by Sarah O’Brien shows that a new edition of the whole would be welcome, for Morris, though a reliable transcriber of the manuscript, does not always emend where O’Brien has shown emendation to be necessary.2 Morris is very conservative; O’Brien is more adventurous. This paper is selective in discussing only some of the more striking emendations, not, for example, the many cases where individual letters have been emended, such as replacing <d> by <ð>, and vice versa,3 or where minims have been differently analysed, inserted, or removed. At pp. xi–xii Morris himself provides an analysis of his suggestions for emendation. It is to be noted that for most of them he uses side-notes and each suggestion is introduced by a question-mark. Thus for p. 9 line 28 his text retains chuc and his side-note has ? chirc, the meaning of that word, chirc-ong being given in the translation on the facing page, ‘church-going’. The question-mark indicates that he hesitates to make the emendation seem more than a suggestion.