Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature 1375–1425 by Linne R. Mooney, Estelle Stubbs (review)

This book seeks to offer what it terms a ‘new vision’ of ‘the copying and dissemination of Middle English literature in the age of Chaucer’ (the same phrases appear on both pp. 1 and 7). In fact, it offers rather less than this. It is concerned to identify the scribal corpora of a number of clerks in London associated with the Guildhall who, it is claimed, were active from the end of the fourteenth century on into the early decades of the fifteenth. The chief of these clerks are identified as Richard Osbarn, John Marchaunt, Adam Pinkhurst and John Carpenter; their putative activities form the bulk of this study.

Such a study of the identification of scribal corpora depends crucially on the methodology employed to establish secure identifications that can link diverse manuscript materials, both literary and documentary, to specific individuals. On the cogency of such criteria everything in this book depends. The basis for such identifications is clearly stated. They are made ‘through matching idiosyncratic elements in the handwriting of London documents with literary manuscripts’ (p. 7). Later we are told that ‘key letter-forms for the identification of late medieval scribes are a, d, g, h, r, s, w and y’ (p. 42). It is not explained why, or in what ways these forms are ‘key’: a footnote (no. 11) refers the reader to a website, but this does not appear to contain any further substantial information on the matter.

The enunciated methodology presents a number of problems inviting consideration that they do not receive here. One is the possibility that beginning scribes may either have received shared training or have been trained by a scribe whose hand they sought to imitate. In such circumstances the existence of shared letter forms in different documents would seem to be of limited, if not wholly dubious, value. A second problem is the demonstrable fact that scribes could write more than one form of the same letter, sometimes several, within even short sequences of text copying. Given such matters one might reasonably have expected a more extended discussion of the methodology of scribal identification and some explanation as to why (for example) there is no consideration of such criteria as duct and aspect.

These general difficulties can be focused at times where the use of letter forms is employed as the criterion for identification of particular scribes. On p. 44 (Fig. 3.7), for example, samples are given of the range of letter forms for r, s, w and y as employed by John Marchaunt. What is immediately striking is the extent of variation between the different forms that are illustrated here: twelve forms of r, fourteen of s, fourteen of w, variations that are so considerable at times as to call into question their evidential value. There are instances elsewhere where, on the evidence of the illustrations, different forms of the same letter appear in text or document, but are nonetheless attributed to a single scribe, without discussion of the range of tolerance for variant individual letter forms. Such tolerances seem at times to be so wide as to preclude the possibility of using them as a secure basis for scribal identification.

One example that I found particularly striking was Figures 2.3 to 2.5, which display forms of hands ascribed to Richard Osbarn in both literary and documentary materials. We are told that Figure 2.3 displays ‘his characteristic ductus’ but not what that ‘ductus’ is; it certainly seems different from those in the other documents on this page (p. 23, Figs 2.4 and 2.5). Moreover, Figure 2.4 (line 8 and final line) shows a form of –w– clearly different from those in Fig. 2.3 (lines 4, 10). And there is a different...