'The Culture of Scribal Attribution in Middle English Manuscript Studies'

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Among the major developments in medieval English literary studies over the past generation has been an explosion of scribal attributions, that is, the identification of the scribes who copied the manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Gower. Before 1978, few Middle English scholars beyond the small realm of paleography exhibited much interest in these manuscripts save insofar as they contained the poets' ipsissima verba. In that year, two distinguished scholars published what has been called 'the essay that started a field' (1), which, among other things, showed that the scribe of the most important manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales had been hired, along with four other scribes, including the poet and Privy Seal clerk Thomas Hoccleve, to write out a copy of Gower's Confessio Amantis. Since then, the field has witnessed an explosion of scribal attributions, most famously that of one Adam Pynkhurst as 'Chaucer's scribe'. The impact has extended far beyond the confines of paleography; in 2018 appeared an essay in a cutting-edge theory journal placing Pynkhurst in 'queer environments' (2). If Doyle's and Parkes's essay has "implications that would make Middle English manuscript studies mandatory for the larger literary world" (Kerby-Fulton, xv), and if Adam Pynkhurst has fully entered the mainstream of literary studies, that is in large part because scribal attribution has been assumed to rest on facts. That is far from the case, as Lawrence Warner's 2018 book Chaucer's Scribes has shown (3). But even Prof. Warner, who will supervise my dissertation, in effect takes things back to where they were before Pynkhurst achieved his prominence. What is urgently needed is a stock-take of the phenomenon of scribal attribution in Middle English studies. My dissertation will provide just that. It has three goals: to study the culture of scribal attribution, that is, the theoretical underpinnings of its methodologies and broader acceptance; to overcome the limitations that have been looming over the field via the proposal of new methodologies, in particular with regard to graphetic evidence (on which topic I have already published (4)); and to produce a new, historically and theoretically responsible account both of late medieval English literary culture and twenty-first century medieval literary studies. It is no good building an image of the queerness of Chaucer's scribe if he was not Chaucer's scribe; and it is no good simply accepting or rejecting his identification and leaving the matter there. Such issues demonstrate the limitations in methodologies used for identifying scribes, on which my thesis will aim to improve. This study will primarily impact Middle English Manuscript studies but has a wider impact: on queer studies, but also animal studies, the Digital Humanities, and the basics of teaching Chaucer in the classroom. The stakes are very high. As demonstrated by the Pinkhurst controversy, among the palaeographer's tasks is in distinguishing between instances of handwriting that look very similar. The biggest challenge, which my thesis will work toward overcoming, is understanding how a scribe may change his handwriting practices and not confuse this internal variability for the work of a different scribe. Further work needs to be done to better understand the factors that motivated a scribe to change his handwriting practices. In the bulk of my dissertation, I will be looking at the handwriting of five prominent scribes who have written in various languages and across different texts with the hope of shedding light on how their handwriting practices may vary according to these factors.