- The Ownership and Sale of Manuscripts of John Gower's Confessio Amantis in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
The value of examining the history of the post-medieval trade in the manuscripts of the lengthy and widely circulated Middle English poem, Confessio Amantis, by Chaucer's friend and contemporary, John Gower, lies in what it can contribute to an understanding of the poem's reception in commercial, bibliophilic and bibliographical terms: that is, what copies of it were worth at a specific moment, who owned manuscripts of it, and how many manuscripts of it appear to have existed. Such issues have not hitherto received consideration.1
The question of the commercial value of manuscripts of Gower's poem has not received much consideration.2 The earliest record of a price for a Confessio manuscript is for one that was owned by Henry V, in a suit of 1413 involving a stationer, Thomas Marleburgh. It was valued at £5.3 The next to have a specified value was that owned by the Mundy family in Derbyshire in June 1545, now Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307, which was inventoried at 'vjs viijd'.4 The significance of these prices is not easy to interpret. The Marleburgh suit specifies values for a number of other [End Page 180] books: a Polychronicon, a Gregory, Moralia in Job, a Latin bible, and two psalters, each worth ten marks, a Catholicon worth £10 and an English bible worth £5.5 It may be noteworthy that the least expensive books were those in Middle English. In the Mundy inventory the only other manuscript of Middle English verse is what is described as 'a booke of parchement of the syege of Troye xiijs iiijd' that is identifiable as Manchester University, John Rylands Library, MS English 1, a sumptuously decorated and extensively illustrated copy of Lydgate's Troy Book. Its high production values probably explain why it was felt to be worth twice as much as the Confessio manuscript.6
Both these prices were based on assessments made for legal purposes. They do not signify a market value, a price set by a vendor or by competitive bidding. A commercial price for Gower's work is first recorded in 1666 when Edward Boothe sold to the Chetham's Library a Confessio, now MS 6696, for two shillings.7 But other early information of this kind does not seem to exist. The rarity of such early price records is in part explained by the fact that most of the manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis had an almost entirely unrecoverable but probably very limited commercial history. Forty-nine complete or once complete manuscripts are currently recorded, as well as a number of fragments or extracts.8 A significant number of the complete manuscripts had found permanent homes in institutional libraries by the end of the seventeenth or early to mid-eighteenth centuries, if not earlier. Nearly all those in the Bodleian Library (eight) had arrived there in the course of the seventeenth century,9 as had nearly all those (six) in Oxford college libraries.10 The two in Cambridge University Library, MSS Dd. 8. 19 [End Page 181] and Mm. 2. 21, came there in 1715. Those in Cambridge colleges (five) had arrived by around the middle of the eighteenth century at the latest, most of them far earlier.11 In London, the Harley manuscript collection, which included MSS Harley 3490, 3869, 7184, was frozen in 1741 with the death of Edward Harley although the collection did not pass into the British Museum until 1753. The Royal collection, including MS Royal 18 C. XXII, had been closed since the sixteenth century. In addition to those collections that passed into the British Museum, College of Arms MS Arundel 45 had been in place since 1678.12 Together with the Chetham's manuscript, noted above, this means that twenty-six manuscripts out of the forty-nine now recorded were fixed in institutional homes by the early or mid-eighteenth century at the latest. The Chetham's manuscript is the only one which has a recorded purchase price.
There are other manuscripts for which early provenance records...