When Scribes Won’t Write: Gaps in Middle English Books

Abstract

When Scribes Won’t Write:Gaps in Middle English Books Daniel Wakelin “Ther lakketh no thyng to thyne <gap> eyen” Geoffrey spirleng, who copied the Canterbury Tales with his son in Norfolk in the 1470s, had a special concern with finishing. As he completed his copy, he wrote an elaborate colophon in a decorative handwriting modeled on textura, with a prayer ending “amen” and a proud description of himself and his son. Sadly he had stopped too soon. Because of problems in his exemplars, he had duplicated two tales and omitted two entirely. He noticed this omission and so crossed out his colophon with a note explaining that “the book of Canterbury is nat yet ended,” and added the missing tales after.1 The wording is telling. A scribe should not stop when the text “is nat yet ended”; a scribe should copy all of the text and only stop when it does. That makes it odd, then, that Spirleng does sometimes stop writing not at the end, nor even at the joins between Chaucer’s tales which gave many scribes pause, but in the middle of the text. He stops writing in the middle of lines before carrying on, leaving a gap or blank space: “Ther lakketh no thyng to thyne <gap> eyen,” he writes, for instance. The missing word is “outter.” He leaves a gap like this thirty-six times for passages shorter than [End Page 249] a line. Four other times he leaves a gap for a whole line.2 Spirleng is not alone among the copyists of English in leaving these little gaps of a line or less; lots do it. These are not, on inspection, erasures of words; the words were simply not written in the first place. What is going on when scribes won’t write? There are (as emerges below) two main causes for these gaps. The first sort of gap occurs when a scribe thinks that there is text missing from his exemplar and so leaves a space in order to slot in what’s missing later. As it happens, one of Spirleng’s exemplars survives, so we can see that there was one occasion when he left a whole line blank where his exemplar had skipped a line; he worked out that something was lost and so in his copy left room to supply it.3 There is a dislike of incompleteness here like that which made him retrieve two omitted tales after he had finished. The second sort of gap, though, occurs when a scribe does find the text in his exemplar but does not believe it is right or that he has read it rightly and so leaves a gap to solve the puzzle later. For instance, in nineteen other gaps for which Spirleng’s exemplar survives, the exemplar does have the word required but Spirleng leaves space for it. This second sort of gap is the main focus of this article. For leaving a gap deliberately seems odd, given his concern for completeness elsewhere. What were he and other scribes thinking when they refused to write the words they saw in their exemplars? Given the effort needed to let the pen jump forward, not writing thus looks like a conscious choice. As such, the gaps raise a larger question about how far scribes exercised agency in their work, and about the forms that agency might take in concentration, attention, precision, improvisation, intellection, invention. Did scribes think as they put pen to paper and, if so, what did they think about, how did they think? Matthew Fisher stresses that “writing is always intended. Whether that writing is composition or copying, medieval manuscripts did not come [End Page 250] into being by accident.”4 Yet the intention in copying can be invisible, especially when scribes do copy what is in front of them, in what Fisher calls “replicative” copying or Richard Beadle calls “verbatim copying.”5 Such copying entails following the exemplar from the beginning through to the end, in every word; it involves reproducing other people’s words and not one’s own; so the evidence for what the copyist thinks is sparse and implicit. In...