Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510 by Daniel Wakelin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510 by Daniel Wakelin Rory G. Critten Daniel Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii, 345. $99.00. Under the influence of scholars such as Jean Rychner, Paul Zumthor, and Bernard Cerquiglini, the closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed an important reevaluation of scribal labor. The inevitable points of difference among manuscript versions of a given work came to be seen not solely as the unfortunate products of human error but also, potentially, as evidence of scribes’ critical engagement with the works that they were engaged in copying. The effects of this trend on Middle English Studies are often traced back to Barry Windeatt’s seminal article on “The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics” (SAC 1 [1979]: 119–41), in which Windeatt read the slips and aberrations among the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde as evidence of their copyists’ responses to Chaucer’s poetry. Studies of the critical and editorial work of Middle English scribes have since proliferated, but their focus continues to fall on the elements of a piece of writing that a given scribe has changed. In response to this trend, Daniel Wakelin’s new book makes a compelling case for rethinking the question of scribal agency, so that it also include a consideration of those moments in which scribes make clear their determination to reproduce their exemplars accurately. Just like aberrance, Wakelin argues, correctness can make scribal priorities visible; when scribes correct their own or their colleagues’ work, they manifest a series of attitudes toward both their craft and the texts whose transmission they ensure. Indeed, their corrections can be viewed as an implicit form of literary criticism that anticipates the more overt theorizing of writing in English that begins to be produced in the early modern period. In his introduction (Chapter 1), Wakelin explains that he has pursued his account of correction in English manuscripts from two angles. On the one hand, he has made a broad survey of the corrections in eighty manuscripts containing Middle English that are now in the Huntington Library in California; on the other, he has conducted a series of case studies of individual manuscripts kept in the Huntington collection and elsewhere. In combination with the survey, the case studies allow Wakelin to offer a series of observations that are at once broadly relevant and nuanced, as his individual chapters move from general discussion into the analysis of specific manuscripts. The book is divided into two [End Page 332] halves. In the first, Wakelin outlines the pains that some scribes took in order to produce accurate versions of the works that they copied. Preliminary chapters cover the cultural influences that promoted this pursuit of accuracy (in the case of Chapter 2) and demonstrate the degree of fidelity that scribes frequently attained. If it is unsurprising that divergences are few between known direct copies and their exemplars, for example (how else would we be able to identify them as direct copies?), it is nevertheless noteworthy that the majority of the corrections made by scribes to a sample of such known direct copies further reduce those divergences (Chapter 3). Turning to his Huntington corpus, Wakelin goes on to demonstrate that most of the corrections made in these books are in the hand of their main scribes, further implicating individual copyists in the pursuit of accurate reproduction (Chapter 4). Chapters 5 to 7 discuss correcting techniques, as well as the frequency and the nature of scribal corrections in the Huntington corpus and in the books selected for closer study. The result is a rich account of the intelligence and the resourcefulness of Middle English scribes, whose engagement in the process of correcting their work often appears to reflect a sense of responsibility toward the texts that they reproduce. One among several intriguing observations made at this stage is that the majority of corrections that Wakelin logs in a sample of the Huntington manuscripts bring the texts thus corrected closer into line with modern critical editions of those works. While the limitations of such comparisons are clear, as Wakelin is well aware...