Two Professional Readers of Chaucer and Langland: Scribe D and the HM 114 Scribe

Two Professional Readers of Chaucer and Langland: Scribe D and the HM 114 Scribe John M. Bowers University of Nevada Las Vegas The vagaries of manuscript survival provide at least two instances in which individual scribes copied works by both Chaucer and Langland. Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes have identified a London copyist, Scribe D, who produced the Ilchester manuscript of Piers Plowman and the landmark Corpus Christ 198 and Harley 7334 manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. These were probably bespoke manuscripts produced under commission during the years 1400–1410 in association with professional limners and bookbinders in Paternoster Row. As a second instance, Piers Plowman and Troilus and Criseyde were copied by a commercial scribe and preserved together in Huntington HM 114. This manuscript is composed of three trade booklets produced around 1430, perhaps ‘‘on spec’’ by a textwriter providing no-frills merchandise for a stationer, and later assembled in one volume for some down-market customer. Different in most other respects, both scribes represent the enterprises of professional readers ‘‘whose job it was to make decisions on behalf of the medieval reader about how the text should go down on the page—conscious decisions, that is, about editing, annotating, correcting, rubricating, or illustrating a text.’’1 The extant productions of these two I would like to thank Andrew Cole, Bryan Davis, Hoyt Duggan, Frank Grady, Ralph Hanna, Steven Justice, Linne Mooney, James Morey, Derek Pearsall, Wendy Scase, and Vance Smith for commenting on earlier versions of this essay. I am grateful to the Fletcher Jones Trust, which funded a 2002 summer research fellowship at the Huntington Library. 1 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ‘‘Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman,’’ in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies, ed. Derek Pearsall (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell for York Medieval Press, 2000), pp. 103–29 at 103. PAGE 113 113 .......................... 10906$ $CH4 11-01-10 13:57:43 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER London-based copyists therefore have much to tell us about differing attitudes toward texts by Chaucer and Langland during the first three decades of the fifteenth century, when the foundations were laid for the English poetic tradition. Scribe D, who worked throughout the first decade of the century concurrent with the statute De Heretico Comburendo (1401) and Arundel’s Constitutions (1409), moved on from Piers Plowman and joined other savvy copyists, such as the Ellesmere Scribe, producing substantial freestanding copies of the Canterbury Tales and representing Chaucer as a named author. On the other hand, working during the decade after Henry V’s death in 1422, the HM 114 Scribe compiled anonymous vernacular texts without discriminating much between poetry and prose, between old-fashioned alliterative verse and more courtly rhyme-royal compositions. His enterprises represent a transitional phase toward the more broadly based book-buying public that would become William Caxton’s commercial clientele later in the fifteenth century. Scribe D The career of the textwriter dubbed Scribe D affords an important paradigm for the divergent values placed upon texts by Langland and Chaucer during the first two decades of the fifteenth century, corresponding to the reigns of the first two Lancastrian monarchs (1399–1422). He was probably a professional scribe and part-time purveyor of vernacular writings who proved himself one of the period’s most prolific copyists and most consistent team-player on collaborative projects. His hand has been detected so far in at least twelve major English manuscripts. In addition to two stints in BL Add. 27944 of John Trevisa’s translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum,2 he contributed to the production of an astonishing series of manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Bodleian MS Bodley 902 (first two quires only), Oxford Corpus Christi MS 67, Oxford Christ Church MS 148, Columbia University Plimpton MS 265, BL MS Egerton 1991, Bodleian MS Bodley 294, and Cambridge Trinity 2 On the Property of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus ‘‘De Proprietatibus Rerum, gen. ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:xiii, uses as his base-text BL Add. MS 27944, which contains this scribe’s contributions on fols. 2a...