A Makeover Story: The Caius Manuscript Copy of Guy of Warwick

This study analyses the way that a much older romance was made over to meet the tastes and demands of a later fifteenth-century readership. Produced in the 1470s, the copy of Guy of Warwick in Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, MS 107/176 has been subjected to linguistic revision and literary reshaping. The result is a special rendition of the romance, an airbrushed version, in which the hero and his exploits are partially modernized and sanitized. The high quality of the manuscript's material production and visual presentation, especially by comparison with other manuscripts of non-canonical Middle English metrical romance, suggest a number of further questions and conclusions regarding the book's origins, audience, and level of "intentionality."¹ The ultimate aim of this study is to locate the book culturally: to describe its origins and to assess the value and function it had for its early reading communities.²

It is well known that late medieval verse romances underwent verbal change during transmission, and a number of studies give attention to the roles of scribes and editors in this process.³ The Caius copy of Guy of Warwick is an especially complex instance of verbal evolution. Comparison with the other extant manuscript copies of Guy of Warwick indicates that the Caius Guy has been adjusted and revised at a number of different linguistic levels and is comprised of at least two different redactions. The first half of the text, Caius pp. 1-149, is based on Redaction 1 of Guy of Warwick, whereas the following and penultimate sections, 150-75 and 195-242, are from Redaction 4 (there are two earlier Redaction 1 texts: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Adv. MS 19.2.1, the "Auchinleck Manuscript," fols. 108ra-46vb, and the single-folio fragment British Library Sloane MS 1044; there is one later Redaction 4 text: Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, fols. 161-239).⁴ The section of text between these two, 175-95, and the final section, 242-71, are not based on any other existing redaction and will be referred to here as Redaction α.

		The Caius Guy of Warwick
MS pages	Redaction	Lineation (from Zupitza)	Total number of lines
1-149	1	1-7444	4412
150-75	4	7445-8218	774
175-95	α	8219-8809	591
195-242	4	8810-10,231	1419
242-71	α	10,232-11,095	964

The sections of the Caius text from 1-175 and 195-242 can be confidently identified as descendents of Redactions 1 and 4 through close line-by-line comparison with the Auchinleck, Sloane, and Cambridge University Library (CUL) texts. Here the Caius Guy is very closely affiliated with Redactions 1 and 4 from these manuscripts, and the texts are consistently either identical or very close in their rhymes, phrasing, and couplet order. The only notable exceptions, and an important feature of the Caius text, are the repeated omissions of long and short passages from Caius Redaction 1, 1-149. This disparity in length between Caius and the earlier Redaction 1 texts is marked. Whereas the Auchinleck couplet Guy is 6922 lines, the corresponding section of narrative from the Caius text is only 4412 lines; that is, Caius is 2510 lines, or 36% shorter than the earlier Auchinleck version. Similarly, the Sloane fragment is 216 lines, whereas the corresponding section of narrative in Caius is only 84 lines; that is, Caius is 132 lines, or 61% shorter than Sloane.⁵

How, then, should these textual complexities in the Caius Guy be accounted for? One possibility is that the scribes were working from one or more damaged exemplars. This explanation has, in fact, been suggested by Maldwyn Mills, who regards the Redaction a passages as simply a continuation of Redaction 1, which due to loss or damage of some kind was patched together with the two passages from Redaction 4.⁶ The idea of an exemplar pitted with holes would also account for the substantially shorter length of the Redaction 1 section of the Caius text, 1-149. The model implied imagines scribes who had to...