Manuscript canonicity

ABSTRACT

Some manuscripts containing Middle English possess canonicity in modern scholarship for their own sakes, that is, for their interest as objects rather than due to the canonicity of their contents. The combination of many surviving manuscripts and a historical position largely before the coming of moveable-type print creates this manuscript canonicity; in this respect, Middle English studies stand out from comparable fields. Manuscripts with their own canonicity tend to be atypically large, and tend to gather many works, works that are often themselves not canonical. Although manuscript canonicity only rarely affects literary canonicity, the growth of manuscript canonicity shows how canonicity of all kinds emerges from teaching and research, not works or manuscripts. If literary scholars turn their attention to objects other than works, such as datasets, canonicity will develop around the new objects as it has around manuscripts. While the study of less-examined codices is worthwhile for other reasons, it can only move the hierarchy of canonicity around, and it cannot remove the stratification. However, manuscripts also invite thought on the books from the period which are now lost – the majority of books. Because research cannot make them canonical, these absent codices might help us think around canonicity.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle English
• codicology
• manuscript studies
• Chaucer
• manuscript canonicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The two lights above Chaucer and Wycliffe depict two fourteenth-century bishops of Worcester, Thomas Cobham (d. 1327, donor of Oxford’s first university library), and Henry Wakefield (d. 1395); the four windows together present a striking, if implicit, local ecclesiastical sense of historical priorities. ‘William Longland’ appears in a smaller, lower light to Chaucer’s left, with his eyes raised towards Chaucer. I am very grateful to David Morrison of Worcester Cathedral, who kindly corresponded with me about the glass and provided a photograph of the upper lights. For advice on the article as a whole, I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewer.

2 The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), cover (Ford Madox Brown, Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, 1847–51, oil on canvas, 372 × 296 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales). See Velma Bourgeois Richmond, ‘Ford Madox Brown’s Protestant Medievalism: Chaucer and Wycliffe’, Christianity and Literature, 54(2005), pp. 363–96, doi:10.1177/014833310505400308. The same painting also adorns the cover of Susanna Fein and David Raybin (eds), Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010).

3 The Norton Chaucer, gen. ed. David Lawton (New York, NY: Norton, 2019), p. 30.

4 The Huntington Library displays Ellesmere in its permanent, public exhibition, and hosts a publicly available facsimile of it online: <https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/2367> [Date accessed 9 February 2021]; the opening of the Tales can be found at MS El 26 C9, f. 1^r. When I write ‘best’, I do not mean that the Ellesmere text is free from error.

5 The page imitated is London, British Library, MS Harley 7334, f. 1^r, which can be consulted in digital facsimile at <http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_7334_f001r> [Date accessed 9 February 2021].

6 See, for example, David Raybin, review of ‘David Lawton (ed.), The Norton Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 42 (2020), pp. 421–5, doi:10.1353/sac.2020.0026.

7 Oxford, Merton College, early printed book 111.C.9; Riverside Chaucer, p. 23. On canonicity in the presentation of the start of the Tales in Riverside, see Stephanie Trigg, ‘Opening the Canterbury Tales: Form and Formalism in the General Prologue’, in Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld (eds), Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 182–99, doi:10.1017/9781108147682.010. See also Daniel Davies, ‘The Social Life of the Riverside Chaucer’, Avidly (2021) <http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2021/06/23/the-social-life-of-the-riverside-chaucer> [Date accessed 24 June 2021].

8 Anna McKie, ‘From Richard III to Boycott: Where did it Go Wrong at Leicester?’, Times Higher Education, 1 July 2021 <https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/richard-iii-boycott-where-did-it-go-wrong-leicester> [Date accessed 20 September 2021].

9 Michael G. Sargent, ‘What Do the Numbers Mean? Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’, in Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (eds), Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), pp. 205–44 (pp. 206, 210).

10 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv.

11 On the now-long history of debates over print’s effects, see Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).

12 Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1994), pp. 139–40.

13 For work on the illustrations, with references to past studies, see Maidie Hilmo, ‘Did the Scribe Draw the Miniatures in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x (the Pearl-Gawain Manuscript)?’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 20(2017), pp. 111–36. On the hand, see Jane Roberts, ‘The Hand and Script’, in The Cotton Nero A.x Project (2010) <http://people.ucalgary.ca/~scriptor/cotton/index.html> [accessed 17 June 2021].

14 Shamma Boyarin, ‘The Alexander Romance in the Age of Scribal Reproduction: The Aesthetics and Precariousness of a Popular Text’, in Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds (eds), Bestsellers and Masterpieces: The Changing Medieval Canon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), pp. 199–214 (pp. 208–9).

15 Wilma Fitzgerald, Ocelli Nominum: Names and Shelf Marks of Famous/Familiar Manuscripts (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992), p. 1; New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS Takamiya 32. The counterintuitive disyllabic pronunciation of Cholmondeley would make this name for the book especially unhelpful in oral discussion.

16 The Harley Lyrics, ed. G. L. Brook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1948), p. 1. For a more modern edition of this manuscript’s complete contents, which contextualises the famous Middle English poems with their now less well-known Latin and French fellow-texts, see The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Susanna Greer Fein, trans. David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015). The title of this more recent edition perhaps registers the greater focus on manuscripts in present-day scholarship.

17 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1.

18 Nicola McDonald (ed.), Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

19 Bevis of Hampton, ed. Jennifer Fellows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), lxvii–lxxvii; see also Jennifer Fellows, ‘Author, Author, Author  …  An Apology for Parallel Texts’, in Vincent McCarren and Douglas Moffat (eds), A Guide to Editing Middle English (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 15–24.

20 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS English poetry a. 1.

21 The Vernon Manuscript’s leaves measure roughly 545 × 395 millimetres, and it is thought originally to have contained more than 400 of these. About seventy leaves are now lost, but even in its present-day form the codex weighs twenty-two kilograms.

22 London, British Library, MS Add. 22283.

23 See Stephen G. Nichols, ‘Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture’, Speculum, 65 (1990), pp. 1–10, and the other essays in the same issue; Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989).

24 Machan, Textual Criticism, pp. 136–76 and throughout.

25 Paul Eggert, ‘Brought to Book: Bibliography, Book History and the Study of Literature’, The Library, 7th series, 13 (2012), pp. 3–32 (p. 28), doi:10.1093/library/13.1.3.

26 Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), e.g. p. 3.

27 The first proceedings volume from these conferences is Derek Pearsall (ed.), Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983); such volumes eventually formed a series, starting with A. J. Minnis (ed.), Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989).

28 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Susan VanZanten Gallagher, ‘Contingencies and Intersections: The Formation of Pedagogical Canons’, Pedagogy, 1 (2001), pp. 53–67, doi:10.1215/15314200-1-1-53.

29 Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 210–13, doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226736273.001.0001.

30 Joan L. Brown, ‘Constructing our Pedagogical Canons’, Pedagogy, 10 (2010), pp. 535–53 (pp. 541–2), doi:10.1215/15314200-2010-006.

31 Elaine Treharne, ‘Raw Materials: The Role of Paleography in Medieval Studies’, in Stefan Jurasinski and Andrew Rabin (eds), Languages of the Law in Early Medieval England: Essays in Memory of Lisi Oliver (Leuven: Peeters, 2019), pp. 155–75, doi:10.2307/j.ctv1q26xqz.17.

32 Ian Gadd, ‘The Use and Misuse of Early English Books Online’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), pp. 680–92, doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00632.x; Michael Gavin, ‘How to Think about EEBO’, Textual Cultures, 11 (2017), pp. 70–105, doi:10.14434/textual.v11i1-2.23570; Peter C. Herman, ‘EEBO and Me: An Autobiographical Response to Michael Gavin, “How to Think about EEBO”’, Textual Cultures, 13 (2020), pp. 207–16, doi:10.14434/textual.v13i1.30078.

33 Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), pp. 140–5.

34 Andrew Prescott, ‘Slow Digitisation and the Battle of the Books’, in Catherine E. Karkov (ed.), Slow Scholarship: Medieval Research and the Neoliberal University (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 143–61, doi:10.1017/9781787447042.008; Daniel Wakelin, ‘A New Age of Photography: “DIY Digitization” in Manuscript Studies’, Anglia, 139 (2021), pp. 71–93, doi:10.1515/ang-2021-0005.

35 The Ellesmere Chaucer Reproduced in Facsimile, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1911); The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’: A Working Facsimile, ed. Ralph Hanna (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989); ‘The Canterbury Tales’: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Monochromatic Facsimile of Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1997). A colour facsimile for collectors was produced in Tokyo as part of the same project: ‘The Canterbury Tales’: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile (Tokyo: Maruzen-Yushodo, 1995). The Huntington Library’s digital facsimile can be found at <https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/2359> [Date accessed 25 May 2021].

36 Treharne, ‘Raw Materials’, p. 165.

37 H. L. Spencer, ‘F. J. Furnivall’s Six of the Best: The Six-Text Canterbury Tales and the Chaucer Society’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 66 (2015), pp. 601–23, doi:10.1093/res/hgv004.

38 Susanna Fein, in particular, has coordinated several examples of this type of publication, for which scholarship owes her a significant debt of gratitude. Instances include Susanna Fein (ed.), Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000); Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (eds), Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014); Susanna Fein (ed.), The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016); Susanna Fein (ed.), Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019). The Vernon Manuscript has prompted not one but two collections of this sort: Derek Pearsall (ed.), Studies in the Vernon Manuscript (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990); and Wendy Scase (ed.), The Making of the Vernon Manuscript: The Production and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).

39 For example, Susanna Fein, ‘The Contents of Robert Thornton’s Manuscripts’, in Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (eds), Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), pp. 13–65.

40 The manuscript is one of the copies adduced in Angus McIntosh, ‘Two Unnoticed Interpolations in Four Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 77 (1976), pp. 63–78. One researcher has used its rhyming opening summary of The Prick of Conscience as evidence of the mnemonic absorption of that poem: Daniel Sawyer, Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 56–7. The book is also notable for its striking ratio of weight given its size: see Sawyer, Reading English Verse in Manuscript, pp. 102–3.

41 Specifically, MS Laud Misc. 486, f. 1^r is notably dirtied compared to its conjoint counterpart, the other half of the first quire’s outer bifolium, f. 10^v.

42 Oak boards (Szirmai type [b]) covered in leather (corner turn-ins are Szirmai type [g]), with white leather sewing supports and endband supports (pathing Szirmai type [b]), inner board lacing paths mix (Szirmai types [E] and [B]). For these typologies, see J. A. Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (Farnham: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 219, 223, 231. On the shift in binding style which helps to date this binding, see Nicholas Hadgraft, ‘English Fifteenth-Century Bookbinding Structures’, unpublished PhD thesis (University College, London, 1998), p. 245; for its possible cause, see Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Bookbinding’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (eds), The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 150–72 (p. 170), doi:10.1017/cbo9780511976193.009.

43 The manuscript’s collation is I¹⁰, II–X¹², XI⁸, XII–XIV¹², XV¹⁰, XVI perhaps¹⁰ (perhaps -3-5, -8-10). The transition between texts occurs at ff. 122^r–123^r, that is, in the middle of quire XI rather than at a quire boundary. This is, however, the one atypical quire of eight leaves in a long run of quires of twelve leaves.

44 MS Laud Misc. 486, f. 175^v: ‘Margareta de eston nata erat in die sancte mathie apostoli inter horam x.am et xj.am anno regis Eddwardi iijii post conquestum viij’ (‘Margaret of Eston was born on the day of St Matthew the Apostle, between the tenth and eleventh hours, in the eighth year of the reign of Edward III’), in a mixed hand of the second half of the fifteenth century. Since the new year began on 25 March, to a fifteenth-century person Edward III would have begun his reign in January 1326 (our January 1327), and so this date is 21 September 1334.

45 Robert E. Lewis and Angus McIntosh, A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the ‘Prick of Conscience’, Medium Ævum Monographs, New Series, 12 (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1982), p. 106. Scribes could, of course, move, potentially taking their idio(grapho)lect with them, so dialectal localisation of this sort must be treated with some care.

46 On this point I differ from Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, p. 106.

47 MS Laud Misc. 486, f. 15^r, ‘Com holy goste eternall god proceedynge from above … ’. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life, rev. edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), p. 331. Cranmer first published this translation in his 1550 ordinal – The forme and maner of makyng and consecratyng of Archebishoppes, Bishoppes, Priestes and Deacons (London: Richard Grafton, 1549), STC2 16462 – and it was incorporated in subsequent versions of the Book of Common Prayer. On the complexities of confessional affiliation arising from sixteenth-century uses of earlier manuscripts, see Margaret Connolly, Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

48 Ralph Hanna and Sarah Wood (eds), Richard Morris’s ‘Prick of Conscience’: A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 342 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 407; Lewis and McIntosh, Descriptive Guide, pp. 163–8.

49 Merja Stenroos and Jeremy J. Smith, ‘Changing Functions: English Spelling before 1600’, in Vivian Cook and Des Ryan (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 146–63 (pp. 151, 161–2); Mark Faulkner, ‘Quantifying the Consistency of “Standard” Old English Spelling’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 118 (2020), 192–205, doi:10.1111/1467-968X.12182.

50 Laura Saetveit Miles, ‘Canon, Anon., or a Nun? Queering the Canon with Medieval Devotional Prose’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 42 (2020), pp. 295–310 (p. 295), doi:10.1353/sac.2020.0009.

51 Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, in Heather Blurton and Dwight F. Reynolds (eds), Bestsellers and Masterpieces: The Changing Medieval Canon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), pp. 1–20 (p. 1).

52 Miles, ‘Canon, Anon., or a Nun’, pp. 295–6; Thomas A. Prendergast, ‘Canon Formation’, in Marion Turner (ed.), A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Oxford: Wiley, 2013), pp. 239–50 (pp. 239–40), doi:10.1002/9781118328736.ch15; Sargent, ‘What Do the Numbers Mean?’

53 A soup to nuts – undergraduate to doctorate – literary (as opposed to historical) discipline designed around Latin writings of this period would also be impractical given the competencies and training opportunities (un)available in the present-day academy and (at least in the UK) the gross inequalities which have persisted and indeed intensified in language learning in primary and secondary education: see further Mark Thakkar, ‘Duces caecorum: On Two Recent Translations of Wyclif’, Vivarium, 58 (2020), pp. 357–83 (pp. 382–3), doi:10.1163/15685349-12341391.

54 J. P. Gumbert, ‘Fifty Years of Codicology’, Archiv für Diplomatik, 50 (2004), pp. 505–526, doi:10.7788/afd.2004.50.jg.505.

55 The number of manuscripts surviving but as yet undiscovered is comparatively tiny, but is probably greater than zero; a recent example is Edinburgh, Advocates Library, Abbotsford MS, which returned over the scholarly horizon in 2004: Osbern Bokenham, Lives of Saints, ed. Simon Horobin, 3 prospective vols, vol i, Early English Text Society Original Series 356 (2020), pp. xiii, xxii–xxvi.

56 Scholars disagree in their estimates of loss rates for European manuscripts in this period, and disagree over the best methods of estimation, but nevertheless agree that the missing books significantly outnumber those that survive. See, for example, Uwe Neddermeyer, Von der Handschrift zum gedruckten Buch: Schriftlichkeit und Leseinteresse im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit; quantitative und qualitative Aspekte (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998); David D’Avray, ‘Printing, Mass Communication, and Religious Reformation: The Middle Ages and After’, in Alexandra Walsham and Julia Crick (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 50–70; Eltjo Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and John L. Cisne, ‘How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts’ “Demography” and Classic Texts’ Extinction’, Science, 307.5713 (2005), pp. 1305–7, doi:10.1126/science.1104718, and critiques: Nicholas D. Pyenson and Lewis Pyenson, ‘Treating Medieval Manuscripts as Fossils’, Science, 309.5735 (2005), pp. 698–701, doi:10.1126/science.309.5735.698e, and Georges Declercq, ‘Comment on “How Science Survived: Medieval Manuscripts’ ‘Demography’ and Classic Texts’ Extinction”’, Science, 310.5734 (2005), p. 1618, doi: 10.1126/science.1117462. Estimates of loss rates for works, rather than or alongside loss rates for copies, are much rarer, but some can be found for chivalric and heroic narratives in Mike Kestemont and others, ‘Forgotten Books: The Application of Unseen Species Models to the Survival of Culture’, Science, 375.6582 (2022), pp. 765–9, doi:10.1126/science.abl7655.