Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England by Matthew Fisher (review)

Matthew Fisher’s study “rejects the axiomatic division of scribes and authors by assessing the evidence from history writing in later medieval England” (1). As this opening salvo would indicate, Fisher’s book contains a bold, revisionary thesis. By focusing on the work of scribes copying out vernacular histories, he aims to show that such a scribal act was not limited by a desire to reproduce the text slavishly from the exemplar. Rather, scribes participated in the composition of their histories, thereby muddying our all-too-comfortable scholarly divisions between authors and textual producers. Instead of the standard model of authors who compose and scribes who copy, Fisher proposes what he calls, from the words of the book’s title, “scribal authorship,” which “may be the product of composition, emendation, compilation, and various nontransparent forms of copying” (7).

The first two chapters establish the historical foundation for the close readings that will form the final two chapters. In Chapter 1, “The Medieval Scribe,” Fisher contends that modern editorial practice has falsely dichotomized the act of writing into two discrete activities—the authorial and the scribal. Instead, Fisher argues, we need a suppler hermeneutic, one that can encompass the various ways scribes author their texts. To make this case, he surveys medieval writings about scribes, by both scribes themselves (from colophons) and authors (e.g., the Fasciculus morum, Aelfric, Richard of Bury, Chaucer, and Lydgate). These analyses reveal a tension at the heart of medieval textual culture: people wanted scribes who replicated texts faithfully, yet they simultaneously recognized that scribes inherited texts full of errors and thus relied upon scribes’ perspicacity to catch and to correct those errors. In Chapter 2, “Authority, Quotation, and English Historiography,” Fisher argues that medieval historians often engaged in what he terms “derivative textuality”: they “assembled the words of numerous source texts, typically without acknowledging their textual indebtedness” (60). Thus, the very act of writing a history was, in the Middle Ages, a bit like copying a text, in that one duplicated the text of others, while fashioning it to one’s own ends. Fisher proposes a radical change in attitudes toward historiography around the thirteenth century, at the time when vernacular histories (first in Anglo-Norman and then in Middle English) were emerging in England. The majority of this chapter takes up an earlier period of history writing, with a particular focus on the way Bede’s auctoritas was reconfigured by twelfth-century Latin historians. By the thirteenth century, vernacular historians had moved away from the acceptance of textual auctoritas as a given. Instead, we now meet with text as a rhetorically contested ground in which the new vernacular histories foregrounded textual conflicts much more openly.

The final two chapters turn to close readings of particular historical writings from the fourteenth century. Chapter 3, “The Harley Scribe,” looks at this famous literary scribe’s less well known efforts at composing historical texts in London, British Library, MS Royal 12 C.XII, ultimately arguing that the Harley Scribe was largely responsible for “authoring” some of the historical texts in this manuscript. Fisher begins by discussing the scribe’s inclusion of an Office for Thomas of Lancaster, the magnate executed under Edward II in 1322. Fisher then turns to The Short Metrical Chronicle, a Middle English historical text providing a cursory survey of the reigns of English monarchs from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the fourteenth century. By meticulous attention to textual variation across copies, Fisher is able to argue, quite convincingly, that the Harley Scribe freely adapted the text to suit his own local, Herefordshire interests, while also correcting errors based on his own personal knowledge. By analyzing textual emendations made by the Harley Scribe, Fisher convincingly demonstrates that the scribe had first-hand knowledge of intricate details regarding Thomas of Lancaster’s dispute with Edward II. Ultimately, Fisher is able to argue that the Harley Scribe...