The Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales by Charles A. Owen, Jr. (review)

REVIEWS component of human nature, and who also employ the modes of address that Neuse associates with epic theater. PAUL G. RUGGIERS University of Oklahoma CHARLES A. OWEN,JR. TheManuscriptsa/The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer Studies,vol. 17. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,1991. Pp.xii,132. $70.00. I find Charles Owen's book a necessary prolegomenon to a major and desired study-a full narrative history of the transmission of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Such a study would rest upon extensive hands-on exam­ ination ofall the manuscripts, regardless ofwhat may have been said in the past about their textual centrality. And Owen's volume, predicated on just such studies (and, importantly, on a chronologically ordered narrative history), offers some substantial and important rethinkings of basic facts about the transmission. Yet, like all other prolegomena, the volume will lend itself to protracted expansion-and expansion which avoids the de­ bilities of Owen's scholarship-underreliance on modern codicology and illogical argumentation. Owen makes very clear at the outset the goals and emphases ofhis study. Past reconsiderations of the problem, he says, fail to meet what I have come to see as the two crucial tests for theories about Canterbury Tales manuscripts. They do not account successfully for the Hengwrt manuscript; they do not explain the wide difference in the number ofindependent textual traditions for different parts of the Canterbury Tales. [P. 2] Although rather different claims, these two goals often interface produc­ tively in Owen's account of Canterbury Tales manuscripts. On the one hand, Owen staunchly and wisely opposes Norman Blake's theories of the origins of the Hengwrt manuscript. Blake argues that Hengwrt came directly from Chaucer's papers, that it comprised a full single set of exemplars, and that those exemplars remained intact for use by all other 247 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER early Canterbury Tales compilers;1 in contrast, Owen adopts the more probable view that Hg is but one product ofseveral early efforts at collect­ ing membra disiecta and that its archetypes, although they apparently remained collected and could very occasionally be accessed by much later scribes (notably the one who copied Christ Church [Oxford] manuscript 152), in fact had no universal availability. Yet more productively, Owen generalizes the situation faced by the Hengwrt production team and in doing so essentially inverts the broad textual history usually constructed for the Tales. This, in spite ofa salutary article by Daniel S. Silvia,2 has usually privileged Manly-Rickert's3 "constant groups"-i.e., those where full Tales exemplars remained intact for several generations of copyists-and has found these the central (and typifying) mode by which The Canterbury Tales was transmitted. Against this view Owen vigorously and largely successfully contends. He demon­ strates, especially in a variety of post-1450 instances, the palpable un­ availability to many scribes of any single full archetype for the Tales and those scribes' necessary involvement in collection procedures precisely like those engaged in by the Hengwrt team and other early copyists.Owen thus resituates our sense ofthe transmission by arguing that the Tales as such did not commonly exist but that separate bundles ofsmall groups of Tales were widely available. This demonstration, for him, fulfills his second stated argumentative goal. But does it? Owen shows in a generally logical way how multiple tradi­ tions for individual tales might develop. In the context ofmany individual loose tales one should discover substantial scribal dissimilation ofthe text. But such a view does not logically address the more important question Owen has posed-why the multiple traditions are differently multiple for different tales or why, given the manuscript survival, they should have the exact distribution (two lines ofdescent for The Parsons Tale, twelve for The 1 See, most extensively, N. F. Blake, The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (Baltimore, Md.: EdwardArnold, 1985). I have offered one formofrebuttal to Blake'sproject, which is in most ways in conformity with Owen's views, in "The Hengwn Manuscript and the Canon of The Canterbury Tales," English Manuscnpt Studies, 1100--1700 1 (1989): 64-84. 2 DanielS. Silvia, "Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts ofthe Canterbury Tales," in Beryl Rowland, ed., Chaucer and Middle English Studies in...