Opportunity's Knock and Chaucerian Textual Criticism

The 1980s was a heady decade for textual critics. If bad hair, John Hughes films, and MTV defined a generation, Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie defined an entirely new way of looking at literature, its transmission, and its authorship. Introducing concepts like the "ideology of final intentions" and the "sociology of texts," they diverted textual criticism from the study of isolated variants and texts to what might be called holistic consideration of the life of literary works. How do the processes of production and reception contribute to the definition of authors, texts, and works? they asked. And how do textual-critical decisions prefigure and transcend interpretive ones?

Textual criticism of medieval literature shared in this renaissance, with the sociological emphasis fostering an enthusiasm for the relevance of codicological work to the interpretation of medieval poetry. This approach applied the details of manuscript provenance and transmission (as well as the affiliation to readings) of, say, the Parliament of Fowls to suggest that the concluding roundel might well be in part a scribal attempt to tie up a Chaucerian poem of doubt and uncertainty.¹ Seeking to define the broad scribal culture in which Chaucer's works circulated, scholars even identified individual scribes and the texts they copied. In this regard, perhaps the most controversial and discussed textual-critical issue involved the composition of the Canterbury Tales and, more particularly, the significance of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts. It seemed as if half the world's Chaucerians regarded the former as the most authoritative, and the other half the latter. All things seemed possible.

But when all things are possible, of course, they are not also necessarily probable. To look back at the decade of textual-critical controversy now—nearly thirty years since the publication of McGann's A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism—particularly from the vantage of Chaucerian studies, is to confront the fact that for all its ferment, the period promised more than it ever delivered. And it is not so much that its controversies have been resolved as that they have been allowed to fade from view.

The Hengwrt-Ellesmere issue, to which Vance Ramsey devoted significant energy, is a case in point. Manly and Rickert had presumed that large shops were responsible for the production of most of Chaucer's work and had focused their attentions on the circulation of texts and readings, not documents. In various ways, critics like C. Paul Christianson and Ralph Hanna demolished such presumptions by identifying coteries and individual professional scribes whose efforts circulated in booklets. Such critics put manuscripts back in the hands of those who produced them and made it possible to go beyond the question "What does this mean?" to "How does this mean?" What was at issue in the Hengwrt-Ellesmere dispute, then, was not merely the more authorial readings or tale order but the composition, transmission, and character of the Canterbury Tales. It was not about a manuscript as an abstract site of work but about manuscripts as material culture and how the texts we read, medieval or modern, above all reproduce the conditions of their existence. To what extent is Chaucer's metrical virtuosity owing to the influence of an early medieval editor, and how would such influence affect our understanding of his individual achievement? In what ways did the circulation of manuscripts among isolated scribes determine medieval readers' sense of Chaucer? If the tale orders and readings of later manuscripts could all be traced to Hengwrt, would this be the closest witness we have to a holograph for readings and tale order? Is Chaucer's poetry what we can reconstruct or what was read? What was Chaucer's poetry in a historical, material sense?

This textual-critical ferment yielded two editorial ideas with terrific possibilities for scholars and students alike. In an offhand way in 1985, Derek Pearsall noted that Chaucer had left the Canterbury Tales as "a partly assembled kit with no directions. This is how, ideally, it should be presented, partly as a bound book (with first and last fragments fixed) and partly as a set of fragments in...