'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者归属的爆炸性增长，即抄袭杰弗里·乔叟、威廉·朗格兰和约翰·高尔手稿的抄写者的身份。1978年前，除了这些手稿包含诗人的ipsis sima verba之外，很少有中世纪英语学者对这些手稿表现出太大的兴趣。在那一年，两位著名学者发表了一篇被称为《开启一片田野的散文》(1)，其中显示，《坎特伯雷故事集》最重要手稿的抄写员已受雇与其他四名抄写者一起撰写高尔的《忏悔录》(Confessio Amantis)。从那时起，这一领域见证了圣经作者的爆炸性增长，其中最著名的是亚当·平克赫斯特被认为是“乔叟的抄写员”。它的影响已经远远超出了古文字学的范围；2018年，一家尖端理论杂志发表了一篇文章，将平克赫斯特放在“奇怪的环境”中(2)。如果多伊尔和帕克斯的文章具有“使中世纪英语手稿研究成为更大文学世界的必修课的含义”(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者的归属被假设为建立在事实的基础上。但事实远非如此，正如劳伦斯·华纳2018年出版的《乔叟的抄写者》一书所展示的那样(3)。但即使是华纳教授，他将指导我的论文，实际上也让事情回到了平克赫斯特出名之前的状态。当务之急是对中世纪英语研究中的抄写者归因现象进行评估。我的论文将提供这一点。它有三个目标：研究抄写者归属的文化，即其方法论的理论基础和更广泛的接受；通过提出新的方法论，特别是在图形证据方面(我已经就这个主题发表了4)，克服该领域隐约可见的限制；以及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产生一个新的、历史上和理论上负责任的解释。如果乔叟的书记员不是乔叟的书记员，给他树立一个怪异的形象是没有用的；简单地接受或拒绝他的身份，然后把事情留在那里也是没有用的。这些问题表明了用于识别抄写员的方法的局限性，我的论文将致力于改进这一点。这项研究将主要影响中古英语手稿研究，但也有更广泛的影响：对酷儿研究，但也对动物研究，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。正如平克赫斯特的争议所证明的那样，古文学家的任务之一是区分看起来非常相似的笔迹。我的论文将致力于克服的最大挑战是，理解抄写员如何改变他的书写习惯，而不是将这种内部可变性与不同的抄写员的工作混淆。要更好地理解促使抄写员改变笔迹做法的因素，还需要做进一步的工作。在我的大部分论文中，我将研究五位著名抄写员的笔迹，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如何随着这些因素的变化而变化。

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.