In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Sir Degrevant in the “Findern Anthology” (Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6)
  • Michael Johnston* (bio)

Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6, known as the Findern Anthology (which I will hereafter call it), has long been recognized as one of the most interesting and noteworthy surviving manuscripts of Middle English literature.1 It contains extended excerpts from John Gower’s Confessio amantis, many of the shorter poems of Chaucer, and numerous texts by Hoccleve, Lydgate, Roos, and Clanvowe—in short, a veritable anthology of England’s greatest late medieval writers. But this manuscript is also worthy of note for its large number of uniquely surviving lyrics, many of which may have been composed by aristocratic women of Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Some scholars even suggest that women acted as scribes in the manuscript—hence, my gender-neutral he/she pronoun choice when referring to the scribes in what follows.2 This codex also presents us with [End Page 71] quite reliable evidence about its late medieval readership, for a number of identifiable individuals from southwestern Derbyshire and southeastern Staffordshire signed the volume, indicating that it was being rather widely handled—and, one assumes, read—by the gentry of this region in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.3 Such reliable provenance evidence is uncommon for compilations containing Middle English literature.

Yet in spite of this manuscript’s manifestly interesting and valuable content, and the great deal of attention already paid to its codicological make-up, we still know remarkably little about how it was produced and what relationship the texts bear to one another. Was it produced in the household of the Findern family, or of another local family, who subsequently gifted it to the Finderns? Was it copied out by these gentry landowners and their associates, or did the original owners pay scribes already in their employ to copy out these texts? Alternatively, might they have sent off to London to have these texts copied, piecemeal, over a period of time, or hired out a local scriptor to accomplish this? And what of the literary texts? What does the manuscript evidence tell us about what role Chaucer, central to our conception of the Middle English canon, played in the cultural imaginary of these gentry readers? And what role did the only romance in this compilation, Sir Degrevant, play? Most modern critics, after all, lump romances in this period into the broad category of “popular literature,”4 setting them against more courtly productions, like Chaucer’s and Gower’s, so to see such texts cheek-to-jowl in this manuscript raises questions about these gentry readers and their relation to the cultural pulse of their time.

In the mid-fifteenth century, when this manuscript was created, it most likely belonged to the Findern family of Findern, several of whose members signed it. We cannot, however, connect it to them with absolute certainty until the mid-sixteenth century, when two separate notes from this period were inscribed on [End Page 72] blank leaves, the first recording a “A rekenyng be-twne John Wylsun & mester fynderne” (fol. 59v) and the second a list of “the parcellys off clothys at fyndyrn” (fol. 70r). Although in this essay I apply Ockham’s razor to the production of this manuscript by calling it the Findern Anthology, were evidence to emerge that the Finderns only acquired it later and that its production should be attributed to a different neighboring family, the analysis to follow would not change substantially. As Kate Harris remarks, referring to the other families whose names appear in this manuscript, it may be just as accurate “to call the manuscript the ‘Cotton,’ ‘Frauncis,’ or ‘Shirley Anthology,’ as it is to refer to the volume as the ‘Findern Anthology.’ However, such detailed consideration places in dispute neither the social ‘milieu’ nor the geographical area in which the manuscript was produced: the opposite is the case—it apparently confirms the origins of Ff.1.6 in a country house just to the south of Derby.”5

Most questions about the manuscript’s production and early provenance remain unanswered, previous attempts to provide answers being markedly speculative. Rossell Hope Robbins...

pdf

Share