Scribal Correction and Literary Craft

Abstract

This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

Scratching the surface: the use of sheepskin parchment to deter textual erasure in early modern legal deeds

“…This sentiment prevailed into the seventeenth century, when Sir Edward Coke-Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench and foremost jurist of the early modern era-noted in his seminal Institutes of the Laws of England the necessity that deeds were written on a durable material such as parchment "for the writing upon these is least liable to alterations or corruption" [9]. Wakelin's [39] survey of scribal correction found that in Tudor Royal accounts (documents likely written on sheepskin parchment) errors during writing were not scraped away and overwritten but crossed out and interlineation inserted between sentences, perhaps in acknowledgement of this risk.…”

A Newly Discovered Latin Prose Brut Manuscript at Downside Abbey

“…14 As well as translations, a number of continuations and adaptations of the Prose Brut were composed throughout the Middle Ages: the authors of these continuations may have seen their work as an act of restoration, rather than invention. 15 Downside 78291 has one such continuation, and although the end of the text is cut away, it is likely to be the version that finishes in 1437, ending with the murder of James I of Scotland. 16 The sheer number of variations across extant Prose Brut manuscripts has led to difficulties in classifying these chronicles.…”