Download PDF | Daniel Wakelin - Scribal Correction and Literary Craft_ English Manuscripts 1375-1510-Cambridge University Press (2014).
369 Pages
This extensive study of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore.
His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft – its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness – in an age with little other literary criticism in English.
daniel wakelin is Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, and a fellow of St Hilda’s College. He is the author of Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1430–1530 (2007) and coeditor with Alexandra Gillespie of The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 (Cambridge, 2011).
Introduction
A late fourteenth-century scribe of a priest’s Manual seems proud of his craft, for at the end he records his name ‘Hankok’ in red, and he seems proud of correcting that book, for he writes in red adjacent to that ‘corrigitur’, a common mark of noting that a book is corrected. The book has been checked well: for example, Hankok makes twenty-one corrections, most by erasing and writing on top, in the marriage service alone.1 Two of those corrections, to English vows of marriage, suggest what the people who correct are worried about: Ich .N. take þe N. to my wedded wyf .^ for bettere for wors . for richere for porere in synesse and in hethe til det vs departe ʒif holychirch it wole ordeyne and þerto y plyth þe my truthe .
Ich .N. take þe .N. to my wedded hosebound ^ for bettere for wors for richere for porere in syknesse and in helthe to be boneyre and bouxsum in bedde and at borde til deth us departe ʒif holycherch it wole ordeyne and þerto y plyʒt þe my treuthe. Hankok adds here two caret marks, marks like upward arrows signalling that something is lacking, and he then writes at the foot of the page in paler, greyer ink something to be inserted at each caret: ^ to hauin and to holden from þis day forthward2 How needful is correcting here, or elsewhere? Accurate transmission is not needed for the informational content of these vows. One might quibble that the words restored, to have and to hold from this day forward, add nothing to the sense: have is implied by take and this day and forward are implied by the present moment of speaking and by the pledge till death.
Anyway, an experienced priest might not need the vows written in full; a cue might suffice to jog the memory, as is found in some other liturgical books.3 And fourteenth-century people recognized that there could be some error in the words of the sacraments, given the poor Latin of many priests, and that such error would not matter: as John Mirk put it, one need not worry about the exact ‘wordes’ as long as just one ‘sylabul’ is right; when the ‘entent’ is clear, the sacrament will be ‘gode’.4 So if the spirit is what matters, why correct the letter? The reverence due to holy books might explain this correction: with Latin, music, handwriting in textura and red ink nearby, this is language in its best attire for the happy occasion.
These vows also need correcting as part of the Church’s discipline of the laity: they will speak with ‘the priest teaching’ (‘docente sacerdote’) and the priest will follow a book which is well ordered too. And they need correcting given the customariness, legal force and ecclesiastical sanction of these vows.5 Correcting seems designed less to preserve the content than the conventional form of words and to pay respect to them. An interest in verbal form emerges in another correction which might at first seem to preserve the content. In an extract from a poem listing Macer’s herbal cures, a late fifteenth-century scribe muddles what is needed to cure deafness. As an ingredient that would mix well with the juice of leeks and would improve his hearing, he lists goats’ milk. He is wrong: it is goats’ gall.
So he crosses out ‘mylk’ and adds ‘galle’: Iuce of lekys with gotys [mylk] galle For euyl heryng help it shall Too partys of þe Iuce þe third of gall m[a] e llyd smal and warme with all In noise or eyn wheþer it be do for grate hede wark wel it slo6 With the error ‘mylk’, the scribe might have been assuming that the text would be simple and familiar: milk is more commonly drunk and easier to get from a goat than gall is. The goats’ milk might also be eyeskip to a reference to ‘womans mylke’ which appears six lines earlier in the full poem from which this extract comes, so it might betray that this scribe is excerpting for himself from a fuller exemplar.7
Whatever thoughtlessness caused the error, though, there is attention to correcting: he too writes ‘corrigitur’ at the foot of over half his pages and in only twelve lines of this excerpt makes four corrections. Some reflect the general practices of scribes as they seek to write clearly: for example, he mends an ambiguous spelling of ought meaning anything (‘or þou tak [out] ought þerof’).8
But in turning milk to gall he attends not only to his own craft of writing; he is attending also to the poem’s craft, to its verse-form. Milk does not rhyme with shall. Of course, turning milk to gall might seem like a correction to the essential ingredients of the cure. But (to be honest) the cure would be equally useless either way, and the scribe is not rethinking, like a doctor, how to improve a patient’s hearing; what he is trying to improve is the rhyme – the verbal form of the text – for that verbal artefact is the focus of the scribe’s attention in correcting.
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