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

在过去的一代人中，中世纪英国文学研究的主要发展之一是抄写员归因的爆炸式增长，也就是说，对抄写杰弗里·乔叟、威廉·朗兰和约翰·高尔手稿的抄写员的鉴定。在1978年之前，很少有中古英语学者在古文字学的小领域之外对这些手稿表现出很大的兴趣，除非它们包含了诗人的“ipsissima verba”。在那一年，两位杰出的学者发表了一篇被称为“开创一个领域的论文”(1)，这篇文章表明，坎特伯雷故事集最重要手稿的抄写员，以及其他四位抄写员，包括诗人和枢密院书记员托马斯·霍克莱夫，被雇佣来撰写高尔的《忏忏者》。从那以后，这个领域见证了抄写员的爆炸式增长，其中最著名的是亚当·平克赫斯特（Adam Pynkhurst）被称为“乔叟的抄写员”。这种影响已经远远超出了古生物学的范围；2018年，在一本前沿理论期刊上发表了一篇文章，将平克赫斯特置于“酷儿环境”中(2)。如果道尔和帕克斯的文章具有“使中古英语手稿研究成为更大文学界的必修课题的意义”（Kerby-Fulton, xv），如果亚当·平克赫斯特已经完全进入文学研究的主流，那在很大程度上是因为抄写物的归属被认为是基于事实的。正如劳伦斯·华纳（Lawrence Warner） 2018年出版的《乔叟的抄写员》（Chaucer’s Scribes）所展示的那样，情况远非如此。但即使是指导我论文的沃纳教授，实际上也把事情带回到平克赫斯特成名之前的状态。我们迫切需要对中古英语研究中的抄写归因现象进行盘点。我的论文将提供这一点。它有三个目标：研究抄写归因的文化，即其方法的理论基础和更广泛的接受；通过提出新方法，特别是关于图形证据（关于这个主题我已经发表了文章），克服已经笼罩在该领域的限制；并对中世纪晚期的英国文学文化和21世纪的中世纪文学研究做出新的，历史上和理论上负责任的解释。如果乔叟的抄写员不是乔叟的抄写员，那么塑造他的古怪形象是没有用的；简单地接受或拒绝他的身份，把事情留在那里是没有用的。这些问题表明了用于识别抄写员的方法的局限性，这是我的论文旨在改进的。这项研究将主要影响中古英语手稿研究，但有更广泛的影响：酷儿研究，动物研究，数字人文科学，以及在课堂上教授乔叟的基础知识。赌注非常高。正如平克赫斯特争议所证明的那样，古生物学家的任务之一是区分看起来非常相似的笔迹。最大的挑战，我的论文将努力克服，是理解一个抄写员如何改变他的书写习惯，而不是混淆这种内部的可变性的工作不同的抄写员。为了更好地了解促使抄写员改变书写习惯的因素，还需要做进一步的工作。在我的论文中，我将研究五位杰出的抄写员的笔迹，他们用不同的语言和不同的文本写作，希望能揭示他们的笔迹实践是如何根据这些因素而变化的。

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.