A New Fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose

A New Fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose Simon Horobin University of Glasgow Among the nineteenth-century papers of the Reverend Joass, part of the Sutherland collection housed in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, an envelope was recently discovered that contains a single vellum leaf folded in half.1 The leaf measures 185mm x 170mm and contains twenty-four lines of text in single columns on both recto and verso, written in a professional secretary hand of the mid- fifteenth century. The envelope reads ‘‘?Lydgate c.1460’’ in a nineteenth -century hand, though the text preserved in this fragment is in fact lines 2403–50 of the Middle English translation of the Roman de la Rose, known as the Romaunt of the Rose. This text survives in a single manuscript, now Glasgow University Library Hunter 409 (V.3.7), and the discovery of a single leaf testifying to the earlier existence of a further copy of this work is therefore of considerable interest. The text of the Romaunt is traditionally divided into three separate fragments, and the current scholarly consensus is that Chaucer was responsible for only fragment A.2 The section of text in the NLS fragment derives from fragment B. It is impossible to determine for certain whether this single folio was originally part of a complete copy of the Romaunt, though there seems no reason to doubt this. The Hunter manuscript now contains 151 folios, although a further eleven leaves are missing, and the text is left incomplete. The leaves of the Hunter 1 The fragment was discovered by Anna Tindley and Helen Brown of the Scottish History department, Edinburgh University. The identification of the text as the Romaunt of the Rose was made by Dr. Sally Mapstone of Oxford University. I am very grateful to each of them for allowing me to carry out my study of this fragment. 2 For a recent summary of the extensive literature concerning the authorship of the Romaunt, see Charles Dahlberg, ed., A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume VII: The Romaunt of the Rose (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 205 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER manuscript are larger than the NLS fragment, yet the writing space is of a similar size and each folio carries twenty-four lines. So it seems likely that the NLS fragment represents the sole survivor of a book originally comprising at least 160 folios. No justification is provided for the date of 1460 given on the envelope in which the leaf is found, though it would seem to be supported on the basis of a study of the handwriting. The majority of the palaeographical features are characteristic of the secretary script, including the use of single compartment a, kidney-shaped s in final position, singlecompartment g with horns and a tail that loops back and upward, and unlooped w.3 Ascenders have small rounded loops characteristic of secretary , rather than the more exaggerated looped ascenders found in anglicana and early secretary hands. Two-shaped r is regular after round letters, such as e, o, while secretary r is found in most other environments , with an exceptional occurrence of anglicana long r in desire (fig. 2, line 15). The hand shows only modest use of the horns that commonly appear at the tops of letters and at points of breaking in secretary hands, especially of the first half of the fifteenth century, with horns appearing regularly on g, but not on e or s. These features, combined with the lack of letter forms characteristic of anglicana, point to the mid-fifteenth century as the approximate date of copying of this fragment . The text is in black ink throughout, with a single decorated initial appearing at the beginning of line 17 of figure 1. The initial is in blue ink decorated with red penwork and has been used to indicate the beginning of a new paragraph in the text. The fragment is too short for an analysis of the dialect and spelling to be particularly revealing, though certain potentially diagnostic forms do occur. The spelling eyghen ‘‘eyes’’ has a patchy distribution and is limited to occurrences...