What's in a Paraph?

Auchinleck Scribe 2 and the West Midlands

In her innovative study of scribal dialects within the Auchinleck manuscript (National Library of Scotland Advocates' MS 19.2.1), Alison Wiggins compellingly suggested that the Worcestershire/ Gloucestershire dialects of Scribe 2 and 6 could be a clue to uncovering the textual communities which may have given rise to this important manuscript. She describes a model of production that would depend upon “the existence of sustained, long-standing professional relationships between scribes who moved between different regions and exchanged texts, exemplars, and ready-made booklets as and when required” (18). Scribe 2 remains the key to understanding such a model.

While many scholars have overlooked Scribe 2 in favour of the more prolific Scribe 1, the former represents a unique figure within the manuscript and within fourteenth book production—a “professional shape changer” (18). He collaborated on booklets with multiple scribes in addition to completing at least one on his own. His habits of ruling and decoration are often divergent from those maintained throughout the rest of the manuscript. Additionally, both Orietta Da Rold and myself have detected similarities between layout, aspect and decoration between the stints of Scribe 2 and those of the scribe of British Library Egerton 1993, a manuscript version of the South English Legendary dated to the second or third quarter of the fourteenth century.

This paper will interrogate how the layout and decoration of Scribe 2’s stints may shed light on his role within the Auchinleck MS and its connection to the West Midlands. At the LOMERS conference on the Auchinleck MS (July, 2008), Timothy Shonk identified four styles of paraphs that appear within the manuscript. Modifying his conclusion, I argue that Scribe 2 may have been responsible both for his own paraphs in booklets 2 and 12 as well as those of Egerton 1993 on the basis of their distinctive colour, form and position on the page. This identification will allow me to reassess the independent nature of Scribe 2’s booklets, the working relationship between Scribe 2 and Scribe 1, and finally the ties between textual communities in the West Midlands.

Textual Production and the South English Legendary

In a paper given at the New Chaucer Society in Swansea, 2008, William Robins argued that the verse form of the saint's lives within the South English Legendary invited a "modular" assembly of texts.  Their length, simplistic language, and uncomplicated meter allowed bookmakers to easily compose or add new texts to fit the interests of a particular audience.  Such an argument, however, does not take into account the physical structure of those manuscripts of the South English Legendary.  My paper will seek to address this gap by examining how this modularity extends into the use of booklets, marginalia and later textual additions.  Specifically, I will interrogate Cambridge, Parker Library MS 145 – an early fourteenth-century manuscript from the Southwyck Priory – in order to determine how the physical arrangement of the last sections of the book may have been a result of the modularity of the content.  In addition to providing a codicological analysis, I will examine palaeographical and dialectal features of these latter portions in order to determine when these texts were included and what their textual history may have been.  Finally, I will contextualize the production of MS 145 by comparing it briefly to other South English Legendary manuscripts composed of multiple booklets such as British Library, MS Egerton 1993 and the “Vernon” manuscript.  Such an investigation will add to our understanding of how aspects of a developing literary aesthetic may well have influenced the production methods of bookmakers – particularly those bookmakers responsible for collections of vernacular literature created as demand for English material increased throughout the fourteenth century.

Chaucer’s Frankenstein Text

Jill Ross, a leading Toronto scholar, has begun to map out how the body acts as a structuring metaphor within the texts of major Classical and medieval authors.  Such an investigation makes connections between the way that the body acts as a nexus point for concerns about wholeness, fragmentation and auctoritas.  Drawing upon her work, I will examine the image of the woman with the head of a horse and the tail of a fish, first introduced by Horace within the Ars Poetica and later adapted by the medieval rhetorician Geoffrey of Vinsauf.  I will demonstrate how medieval authors mapped the form of certain kinds of “monstrous” bodies—those constructed from pieces not wholly integrated—against the structure of texts.  My paper will proceed in two parts.  Firstly, I will interrogate the way that this metaphor informed notions of book production in the fourteenth century, specifically those compilatio-books such as the Canterbury Tales that were produced when different fragments were stitched together.  Secondly, I will address how Chaucer’s adaptation of Horace’s metaphor within Troilus and Criseyde creates a rhetoric for the form of the text that may, at times, be at odds with the form of the book.  Such a discussion will clarify how within both texts Chaucer locates the fragmented book as caught between notions of deterioration and disruption on one hand and a constant striving towards unity and integration on the other.  

“Olde Books” and “Drasty Rymyng”:

The Structuring of Early Vernacular Compilatio-Texts

Recently, scholars such as Micéal Vaughan have made connections between the fragmentary structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the booklet-based production of the Auchinleck MS (NLS Adv MS 19.2.1).  Such investigations have begun to draw parallels between both the formal relationship that Chaucer's work holds to earlier vernacular compilations and the material concerns of production and dissemination that influenced the form a given work would take.  The Auchinleck MS models a style of book in which authoriality emerges jointly from several possible sources, with the main scribe as an editor of sorts whose control over the production of portions of the book creates slippages from which alternative creative voices may surface, whether they be those of his fellow scribes, his exemplars or his buyer.  I argue that in writing the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer deliberately harnesses the artistic energy of the polyvocal manuscript through his use of different genres and taletellers.  Furthermore, the fragmentary form of the Canterbury Tales allows for further creative voices to emerge—those of the producers of later manuscripts and printed versions of his text ranging from Adam Pinkhurst to Larry Benson.  A comparison between the role of the scribes of the Auchinleck manuscript and Chaucer’s literary engagement with the textual construction of his manuscripts will reveal that by structuring the Tales as a compilatio in the style of vernacular collections such as the Auchinleck MS, Chaucer was able to create continuity between his own work and the earlier vernacular tradition while simultaneously adapting the form of the miscellaneous book for a new, dramatically charged mode of literature.