Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewChaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432. Lawrence Warner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv+222.Michael CalabreseMichael CalabreseCalifornia State University, Los Angeles Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn this trenchant, engaging, and delightfully written book, Lawrence Warner says it’s time to take a look again at the Adam Pynkhurst question. Warner convincingly argues that the Chaucer community has accepted too readily the proposed attribution of various important manuscripts to specific figures in a comprehensive historical narrative that was sparked by a particular reading of a poem presumed to be by Chaucer that addresses “Adam the scribe.” Identifying this figure as Adam Pynkhurst led to (what seemed like) a revolution in our understanding of the production of vernacular manuscripts. Linne Mooney (and variously Simon Horobin and Estelle Stubbs) have built this narrative by naming particular scribes from the London Guildhall as copyists of particular texts. The confidence of having found “Chaucer’s Scribe” thus not only created a “vibrant Pynkhurst scholarly industry” (6) but also painted a seductive narrative about English dynastic politics, the rise of the vernacular, and the literary-political work of these copyists in relation to the major figures in our English medieval canon. In dismantling the scenarios pursuant from the “Pynkhurst phenomenon,” Warner says the evidence, now reexamined, indicates that “from the 1380s to the 1430s a wide variety of scribes and clerks in and around London got hold of a disparate body of exemplars and, in differing circumstances, produced the literature we today research, study, teach, and love” (139). This opposes the narrative that had depicted the vernacular copying centered at the Guildhall as “suggestive of a concerted Lancastrian policy to promote English,” evidenced as well by the “founding of the Guildhall Library in the 1420s” (2).Warner does not have a new narrative to replace what he calls the “magnificent one” that imagines that “senior clerks of the Guildhall spent their time copying manuscripts of Piers Plowman, the Canterbury Tales, and the Confessio Amantis” (138), but asserts that if a “positive account of the circumstances of literary production in London ca. 1384–1432 is to emerge … it cannot be grounded on the narratives produced over the past dozen or so years,” which rely “upon a large number of erroneous identifications that have been accepted as fact, [and] which, if not corrected, will generate more errors” (139). Warner, in what I think is his best book, pursues the argument in six richly detailed chapters (parts of 2, 3, and 6, he notes, are revised from “Scribes Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 [2015]: 55–100).An introduction describes the cottage industry and the virtual cult of personality (my term) around this character of Adam, with even novels being written about him (7). Mooney’s essay, Warner argues, did not uncover “previously hidden facts” but rather “creat[ed] a powerful, elegant, and hugely attractive world.” Warner promises to show that in fact Pynkhurst, while attested in a few texts and documents, “was not scribe of Hengwrt or Ellesmere, referent of ‘Adam scryveyne,’ Chaucer’s scribe, a Guildhall clerk, or copyist of the Mercer’s petition of 1387/88, and that many of the arguments that built on such beliefs, too, are inaccurate” (8).Chapter 1 reconsiders the poem called “Adam scryveyne.” Warner looks up all the (many ambiguous) words, analyzes its messy metrics, and deconstructs the romanticized scenario of Chaucer complaining to a personal scribe named Adam about the mistakes that compelled the poet to scrape away and correct errors—itself, on its face, an implausible workplace scenario. Chapter 2 goes through the paleographic evidence used to generate an ever-expanding corpus of manuscripts copied by Pynkhurst. Warner shows here that so-called signature features of Pynkhurst’s hand either are too generally characteristic of any number of scribes or themselves do not appear with any consistency in the other manuscripts attributed to him. Detailed linguistic analysis reclaiming the status of “Type III English” as not merely a Pynkhurst idiolect follows in chapter 3. Warner thus can rewrite the Pynkhurst corpus, which does, however, still include the important Piers Plowman manuscript Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17 (W), in addition to a document of receipts for the Mercers company, a deed relating to John of Northampton, and possibly the ornamentation to a fragment of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius (see 45). He is, accordingly, not Chaucer’s scribe.The subsequent chapters question the other major attributions made by Mooney and Stubbs in Scribes and the City (2013), identifications that neatly filled out the Guildhall narrative as evidence of the organized and demonstrably localized rise of the vernacular. Chapter 4 considers the scribe of Huntington manuscript 114, which contains that giant, mixed version of Piers. Mooney and Stubbs identified him as Richard Osborne, who had particular involvement in the establishment of the Guildhall library, potentially reflecting Lancastrian desire to reach and sway the commons through vernacularity. Naming scribes, we learn throughout this book, is not a politically neutral action. This chapter denies the attribution to Osborne but explains what we gain when we expand the corpus of the actual scribe of Huntington 114, who was copying records and legal documents that concerned characters, personalities, and events of the day, including lawsuits, claims, and scandals that read a lot like the stories of the Decameron. If he also copied Piers and Troilus, we see the potential for interactive understanding between these real-life stories and the events, characters, and episodes in these great poems. Warner encourages the translation and publication of these documents as important sources for the study of medieval literature.Chapter 5, “The Guildhall Clerks,” takes on some of the further attributions made in Scribes and the City. Warner acknowledges that “the image created here, of five Guildhall men, or at least five men at some point in their careers employed by the Guildhall, working in concert to promote the literature written by their own acquaintances as part of a political movement, is powerful and elegant” (96), and then he calls most of the attributions into question. The chapter ends by asserting that Hoccleve in fact “looms larger than all scribes of the Guildhall together” in the copying of manuscripts (114). This topic is also pursued in chapter 6, which nonetheless dissociates Hoccleve from a direct personal relationship with Chaucer and questions whether he supervised the copying of Chaucer’s two main manuscripts.A summary conclusion acutely recounts the book’s arguments, followed by a comprehensive works cited (preceded by a list of manuscripts) and an index. Warner has produced a wonderful detective story, and the scholarship is rich, detailed, and exhaustive. He has done a great service to the Chaucerian community by questioning the overdetermined narrative born from the Pinkhurst phenomenon. Work will have to continue until new narratives emerge—or perhaps none at all if that is where the evidence leads. The lesson this book conveys is that we should follow the evidence, even if it leads to less exciting historical conclusions than we had hoped—conclusions that fail to satisfy our desire for a familiar, coherent, and intimate narrative at the core of the production of the books we study and teach. We have been telling ourselves a story since 2004 (this reviewer, justly chided on page 1 of Warner’s book, was there at Glasgow), but that story, as well as the characters that we have animated within it, may be a convenient, and therefore dangerous, fiction. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 3February 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707065 Views: 215 HistoryPublished online November 15, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.