Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewScribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510. Daniel Wakelin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii+345.Seth LererSeth LererUniversity of California at San Diego Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDaniel Wakelin’s Scribal Correction and Literary Craft presents a brilliant and potentially revisionary account of how medieval literature survives in manuscripts and what the processes and presuppositions were among the scribes who copied them. The book argues that “correcting is ubiquitous in manuscripts in English from the late fourteenth century to the very early sixteenth” (5). Behind this argument is a large cultural as well as technical understanding of how vernacular textual production was an ongoing process: how the act of copying was less a matter of preserving authorial intention than it was of maintaining a living, intellectually engaged, and at times personally felt relationship to a verbal heritage. “The craft of correcting,” Wakelin intuits, “is analogous to things we call philology and literary criticism” (4). Thus, at the heart of this book is an attempt to recover how medieval English writings were read and understood, how they were valued as literature, and how concepts such as authorship and authority were articulated through the processes of scribal manipulation.Wakelin acknowledges what generations of medievalists have known: that the idiom of correcting is not simply a scribal habit but a literary pose. Chaucer frequently invites the “correctioun” of his readers, whether they be the knowing clerks in the Parson’s Prologue of the Canterbury Tales or the learned compeers John Gower and Ralph Strode at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, or the fictive participants in the literary coteries of his dream poems. Many Middle English writers of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries similarly invite such acts of audience engagement. Are these genuine requests, posed by a anxious authors in an age of variable transcription? Are these disingenuous humility tropes, voiced by imaginative writers assured of their excellence and not expecting anyone to change their wording? Are they something in between? Do we smile knowingly when Chaucer asks us to “correct” him but smirk patronizingly when his less-adept epigones ventriloquize their master?Wakelin offers a far more subtle and sophisticated set of questions and potential answers to these relationships between the pose of fiction writers and the practices of historical scribes. What he excavates here is “an implicit likeness between poetic theory and scribal practice” (41). He argues that these literary moments, whatever acts of writing they may urge, invite particular acts of reading. They ask the reader to read closely, to engage in a relationship of making meaning with the author—not simply to emend an error or update a claim but to produce, with every new encounter, a text that shifts meaning culturally and personally.When a professional writer writes, he works according to particular conventions and traditions. Late medieval English scribes used distinctive sets of “hands” to form their letters and arrange their words. The book-hands that emerged from years of literary, official, commercial, and intellectual scribal work had meaning in themselves. They signaled the distinctive kind of discourse that was being written. When scribes, for example, began to use letterforms designed for official documents in works of vernacular imaginative literature, that act signaled a new sense of value or importance for those works of literature. Similarly, when scribes attended as carefully to copying Chaucer or Gower or Langland or the Prick of Conscience or the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ as they did to documents of law or court or church—when scribes did this, it also signaled a new value to the literary text.Wakelin’s book is thus about many things, but in the end what it is most compellingly about is this sense of attention and attentiveness. Works of literature demand attentive reading. In the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, they came to demand attentive copying. That, in a nutshell, is Wakelin’s argument. Literature became “literature” when it was thought worthy of accurate transmission. The processes of that transmission—copying, scratching out, rewriting, marginally annotating, interlineally emending—form the bulk of Wakelin’s detailed evidence.For while this is very much a book of arguments, it is also a book of evidence. Its methodology depends on what Wakelin calls “counting and close reading” (10). There is an enormous amount of stuff here: lists of scribal corrections in manuscripts, statistical tables of particular usages and forms, accounts of gaps left in missing lines, of interlineations, of changes to spelling (some of which are cataloged as “needless”). I know enough about myself to know that I could never do this kind of work. Few could. It demands patience, care, uninterrupted time, and a quality of Sitzfleisch enviable in a nineteenth-century German philologist, let alone a twenty-first-century English paleographer. What it does demand, as well, is an absolute assurance that such evidence is necessary to the argument.Wakelin narrativizes much of this material: that is, he does not simply offer lists and tables, but he integrates their findings in his exposition. He uses this material not simply for its own sake but for larger arguments, one of the most provocative being the idea that Chaucer’s scribes would “distort” their “ordinary language” “to preserve the particular utterance”—that is, that they were conscious of the differences between Chaucer’s literary idiom and everyday Middle English speech and writing. Behind this insight is an important claim about the history of the English language itself: do literary manuscripts really preserve “normal English,” or do they offer something “abnormal” (227, 229)? Part of the answer to this question is that no single literary manuscript may offer full and exemplary witness to the state of the “English language” at any given time or place. Instead, we must look at the aggregations of manuscripts in process: different copies of the same text, with the strata of reading and rewriting embedded in them. Only then can we approach something of the fine line between literary language and everyday usage.Such a project dovetails with several recent works of scholarship that reassess our notions of the literary and the everyday. Tim Machan has recently interrogated just what the textual traditions of Chaucer tell us about “Middle English” (“Chaucer and the History of English,” Speculum 87 [2012]: 147–75). Simon Horobin has excavated histories of spelling to illuminate the wide varieties of form and function throughout late medieval England (Does Spelling Matter? [Oxford University Press, 2013]). Together with Wakelin, they invite us to question long-held assumptions about how representative our major authors are of various linguistic periods and, in turn, how and why we often want those major authors to be innovators in language, both in their own time and for future readers and writers.Scribal Correction and Literary Craft is very much a book for specialists, but its implications are for everyone. While full of evidence, the book is, by and large, bereft of jargon. While rich with detail, it provides a straightforward exposition. Personally, I’d like to see a distillation of its arguments and implications for a broader literary readership, or for the undergraduates and graduate students who, increasingly in United States, have less and less of the philological and paleographical training than they did two generations ago (or than they still apparently have in the UK). Perhaps it will be up to Wakelin’s scholarly generation not to just to restore but reinvigorate these technical disciplines and show how “our own disciplines of literary study” (310) have their origins not just in the meditations of the scholiasts but also in the ministrations of the scribes. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 4May 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/684755 Views: 329Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 16, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.