A Transcription and Study of British Library MS Additional 35286
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A Transcription and Study of British Library MS Additional 35286 of Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales by Simon Horobin Submitted for the Degree of Ph.D to the University of Sheffield Department of English Languageand Linguistics August 1997 A Transcription and Study of British Library MS Additional 35286 of Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales by Simon Horobin Submitted for the Degreeof Ph-D to the University of Sheffield Departmentof English Languageand Linguistics August 1997 A Transcription and Study of British Library MS Additional 35286 of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Simon Horobin Summary Much scholarship devoted to the study of the text of Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales has focused on the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, attempting to reconcile their many differences in the content and presentation of the poem. In concentrating on thesetwo manuscripts,and a small group of other witnessesdated to the first quarter of the fifteenth century, scholars have largely ignored over forty complete manuscripts copied throughout the remainder of the century. Study of the manuscripts has relied on features external to the text of the poem itself in order to chart the development of the tradition, such as the order of tales, while details of text, languageand metre have remainedrelatively unconsidered. The subject of this study is a manuscript that has been neglectedby scholars due to its date of copying, c. 1430-50, and certain idiosyncracies in the tale-order. Despite these factors this manuscript contains a text closely related to that of Hg, the earliest extant copy of the poem. In addition to preserving an accurate copy of an early exemplar, Ad3 also shows close links with El, particularly in its ordering of the tales and the inclusion of marginalia. This is therefore an important copy of the poem, highlighting the restrictions and limitations of current attitudes to the textual tradition, and with much to offer as an independentwitness to an early exemplar, with unique accessto materials used in the production of both Hg and El. This study draws on recent technological developments, such as the availability of electronic versions of Middle English texts and collation software, in order to provide a detailed and comprehensiveanalysis of Ad3. In addition to this an electronic version of the text is included to enablefurther researchof this kind. - 0 etuu I do 116i; t It ý\'ýaf %iiv P,t aýairtc.ktrivrmc shý Wit. - - 4*c ". p ZI Inc0 -$with,'Rit 16.91 4 llýSMIC t nxr ýý J, 43 'i r I. 1l I 4C 'I'e4t. Al, 111r 4- t)u =mi. to 96V aLc Y aýr, Is- W*t ý4ti4p tt, N. I- 11 Attvoku -. -. I. WIM Ivftql wcrcr4pt Tlqc4! MCIIC. ,0 L- fts ýAc -V r PiPcxd+ .0 rlt ,%0. *) 4 . JL ty-.lul I- t, ý! 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Folio Ir CONTENTS Introduction i Abbreviations Chapter I The Canterbury Tales Textual Debate I Chapter2 A Description of the Manuscript 28 Chapter3 The Order of Tales 56 Chapter4 Omissionsand Additions 78 Chapter5 A Study of the Glosses 94 Chapter6 A Study of the Language 135 Chapter7 Minor Textual Variants 190 Conclusion 228 Bibliography 241 Appendix A Description of Lineation System 254 Appendix B Chronological List of Fifteenth-Century Witnesses 258 Appendik CA Transcription of the Text in Electronic Form Introduction The conceptionof the Canterbury Tales is traditionally datedto the late 1380'sand the composition of the poem is assumedto have occupied Chauceruntil his death in 1400. The poem remainedunfinished at the time of his death,and no manuscript of the work survives from Chaucer'sown lifetime. 1 Scholarsremain in disagreementas to whether copies of parts of the poem were circulated prior to 1400, although a reference to the Wife of Bath in Chaucer'sEnvoy to Bukton (c. 1396) and knowledge of Chaucer's poetry in contemporary works suggestsaccess to the material in some form. The century following Chaucer's death saw the production of over fifty complete manuscriptsof the Canterbury Tales, and a further four printed versions. The earliest of these witnesses is the Hg manuscript, dated to the first decade of the fifteenth century and thought to representthe first attemptto producea completecollection of the CanterburyTales. The production of Hg reveals a number of problems confronted by Chaucer's first editors; problems which continued to trouble subsequentcopyists throughout the fifteenth century. The entire century saw editors and scribes struggling to create a single coherentwork out of a seriesof incomplete and contradictory parts. In order to achieve this goal links were composed or altered, extra tales were incorporated and existing ones edited or completed, and the tale-order frequently rearranged. Thus the textual tradition of the Canterbury Talespresents a highly complex collection of scribal and authorial contributions, with few concreteclues as to the state of the poem left by Chaucerat the time of his death. In order to rule out the scribal and recover the authorial, modem editors of the Canterbury Tales have focusedon the evidenceof the earliest manuscripts,those dated IThe debate over the possibility of extant manuscripts dating from Chauceeslifetime is by Blake in forthcon-fing reopened a article entitled 'Geoffrey Chaucerand the Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.' to the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Discussion of this period of manuscript production has concentratedon the Hg and El manuscripts:accurate and authoritative copies carried out by the same scribe. Despite the authority of both these witnesses they presentfundamentally different copies of the poem, and much critical and editorial energy has been expendedin an attempt to reconcile their many differences in text, metre, content and tale-order. Studies of the textual tradition have tended to chart a developmentfrom Hg to El thus reinforcing an assumptionthat the progressionof the production of copies of this poem has a linear development,moving from the confusion of Hg to the certainty of El. However this picture is a simplification of the problem, and it is important that scholarslook beyond this first generationof copying to observe the developmentof the text after the production of El. Despitethe impressionconveyed by modem scholarship,matters of text, content and arrangementwere not standardised with El. Study of later manuscripts shows that the production of copies of the Canterbury Tales throughout the fifteenth century was besetby similar difficulties in obtaining and arranging the constituentparts of Chaucer'spoem. The aim of this thesis is to approachthe textual tradition from a different angle, that provided by a mid-fifteenth-centurycopy, British Library MS Additional 35286. A study of this manuscript will provide an insight into the development of the tradition after the first generationof manuscriptproduction, thus allowing a freer and wider view of the developmentof the text. The Canterbua TalesProject Much of this study draws on the materials and methodology developed by The Canterbury Tales Project, and it will be useful to set out the aims and techniques by adopted the Project as a prolegomenonto my study. The aim of the Project is two- fold: to attempt to discover what Chaucer actually wrote, and to provide complete images transcripts and of all manuscript and pre-1500 printed witnesses of the Canterbury Tales. The initial stage in achieving these goals is the preparation of the transcripts, carried out using the program Transcribe which producesSGML-encoded texts with original orthographic and abbreviativeconventions preserved. 2 Collation of this material is undertaken using the software Collate, designed specifically for the collation of Middle English texts with large textual traditions (Robinson 1994). The results of this collation process will then be made available to scholars in both regularised and unregularised forms, allowing accessto substantive and accidental affiliation. The collated material is then lemmatised to produce complete databases containing all spellings of every individual word in all manuscripts. The results of the Project's work will therefore give accessto a vast body of textual and linguistic data with a variety of applications. The publication of the material will take two forms: CD- ROM editions of individual parts of the poem in all fifteenth-centuryversions, and CD- ROM editions of complete texts of individual manuscripts. The recent releaseof the Project's initial publication has allowed accessto transcripts, images, collations and spellings of all witnesses of WBP (Robinson 1996). In addition the Project has completed a number of transcripts of complete manuscripts and this study draws on both published and unpublisheddata. 3 Underlying the Project's aims are a number of theoretical assumptions,many of which are central to this study, and it will thereforebe helpful to highlight theseat this stage. The Project adopts the assumptionthat all extant manuscriptsare in some way descendedfrom one single original archetype, and therefore that every individual reading has an independentvalue as a witness to this hyparchetype. Thus the recovery of the archetype must be approachedthrough a study of the tradition in its entirety, rather than from the considerationof a small number of early witnesses. In addition to the evidencefor the reconstructionof the archetype,the testimony of later manuscripts is significant to a study of the disseminationof the text and the stateand availability of exemplarsafter the first wave of copying of Chaucer'swork.