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Methods in Medieval Studies, Chaucer, and Book History mythodologies Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) mythodologies: methods in medieval studies, chaucer, and book his- tory. Copyright © 2018 by Joseph A. Dane. This work carries a Creative Com- mons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books en- dorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-sa/4.0/ Translation published in 2018 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-56-1 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-947447-57-8 (ePDF) lccn: 2018941289 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Dane, Joseph. Mythodologies: Methods in Medieval Studies, Chaucer, and Book History. Earth: punctum books, 2018. Contents Introduction: An Exercise in Bad Faith · · · · · · · · · · · 15 Part 1 · Noster Chaucerus Chapter 1 · How Many Chaucerians Does It Take to Count to Eleven? The Meter of Kynaston’s 1635 Translation of Troilus and Criseyde · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·29 Chapter 2 · Chaucer’s “Rude Times”· · · · · · · · · · · · · 53 Chapter 3 · Meditation on Our Chaucer and the History of the Canon· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 79 Coda · Godwin’s Portrait of Chaucer· · · · · · · · · · · · · 105 Part 2 · Bibliography and Book History Chapter 4 · The ingularitiesS of Books and Reading · · · · · 113 Chapter 5 · Editorial Projecting· · · · · · · · · · · · · · 135 Chapter 6 · The auntingH of Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea (1646) · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 165 Coda · T.F. Dibdin: The Rhetoric of Bibliophilia· · · · · · · 191 Part 3 · Cacophonies: A Bibliographical Rondo Section 3.1 · Fakes and Frauds: The “Flewelling Antiphonary” and Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius · · · · · · · · · 201 Section 3.2 · Modernity and Middle English· · · · · · · · · 215 Section 3.3 · The Quantification of Readability · · · · · · · ·223 Section 3.4 · The Elephant Paper and the Histories of Medieval Drama· · · · · · · · · · · · · · 231 Section 3.5 · The Pynson Chaucer(s) of 1526: Bibliographical Circularity· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·243 Section 3.6 · Margaret Mead and the Bonobos · · · · · · · ·257 Section 3.7 · Reading My Library· · · · · · · · · · · · · ·267 Bibliography· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 271 Acknowledgments I thank various institutions for providing materials and permis- sions: the Henry E. Huntington Library of San Marino, Califor- nia; the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine; University of Southern California Libraries, Los Angeles. I thank also Eileen Joy and Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei at punc- tum books for seeing this through press. Special thanks also for help and support to Linda Carpenter, Percival Everett, Mary Far- ley, Karen Grindle, Linda Pence, Alexandra Gillespie, Seth Lerer, Sidney Evans, Michael Peterson and Michaeline Mulvey, Scott Staples, Laura Scavuzzo Wheeler, and David Yerkes. List of Figures 1. Kynaston, Amorum Troili et Creseidae (1635) · · · · · · · · 28 2. Spurgeon, Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 3: Index, 10–11 · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·74 3. Furnivall, A Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Minor Poems· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 84 4. Supposed portrait of Chaucer from William Godwin, Life of Chaucer· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 104 5. Gruninger Terence (1499) with hand-written interlinear commentary· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 122 6. Chaucer Soc. Publ. on my shelves · · · · · · · · · · · · 141 7a. Classical Stemma · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·148 7b. Cladogram by Hölldobler and Wilson, Ants, 25· · · · · · · 149 8a. Title Page of Suckling, Fragmenta Aurea (1646)· · · · · · · 166 8b. Title Page of Suckling, FRAGMENTA AUREA (1646)· · · · 166 9. The Flewelling Antiphonary· · · · · · · · · · · · · · 200 Introduction An Exercise in Bad Faith For, brother myn, of me taak this motyf: I have now been a court-man al my lyf, And God it woot, though I unworthy be, I have stonden in ful greet degree Abouten lordes of ful heigh estaat; Yet hadde I nevere with noon of hem debaat. I nevere hem contraried, trewely; I woot well that my lord kan moore than I. What that he seith, I holde it ferme and stable; I seye the same, or elles thyng semblable. — Chaucer, Merchant’s Tale, ll. 1491–1500 The proven best way in evolutionary biology, as in most of science, is to define a problem arising during empirical research, then select or devise the theory that is needed to solve it. Almost all research in inclusive- fitness theory has been the opposite: hypothesize the key roles of kinship and kin selection, then look for evidence to test that hypothesis. — Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth The best introduction can keep you from reading the book: it summarizes what it cannot present, and even indicates to other scholars what they can expect to cite in the chapters that fol- low. It presents a thesis, which the rest of the book will sup- port (see Section 3.5 later in this volume). To write one here, as I am attempting to do, is to conclude or imagine that a project is complete, that there is unity in the project, whether abstract 15 mythodologies and intellectual or merely material. But that unity has always eluded me. Instead, I keep focussing on the important things: the necessary conditions for a book, the big number. In the days of typewriters, that meant the number of pages; now, it means the number of words. When I reach it, I can start revising, and in some senses, I am done. This project began in a discussion with a particle physicist about differences, real and imagined, between the fields of sci- ence and humanities. This is a now standard argument, popu- larized in several books by Stephen A Gould, E.O. Wilson, and even Steven Pinker, that bête noir, I see, of many humanist ac- quaintances. We argued about politics, a book on bundling from the nineteenth century, diet, the proper way to share expenses, automobiles, public transportation, dress codes, the correct way to conduct oneself in department meetings. The ashes of those discussions are scattered here (particularly in the final section) and remain active in conversations not recorded here: the chiv- alric deference I show to those who can work out difficult ab- struse math problems I don’t understand, the tolerance by both of us for the less convincing rants of the other. We both know that the attempt to find some common ground is futile, or, for fields as diverse as ours, despairingly describable (with some de- spair) as a search for the “least common denominator” (if I have this metaphor right); we cannot communicate in any way except on the most general or obvious of principles; and we realize that finding what those principles are, and attempting to build on them (that is, to find our way back to the areas that really inter- est us — the way books are constructed, editions are defined, or the way subatomic particles behave or if they behave and exist at all) — all this is an instance of petitio principii: we find a standing point that is so banal and obvious it is almost embarrassing to mention it. (Did you ever notice, for example, that Physics and English are housed in different buildings on a college campus?) The thesis or purpose of this book is a bit more abstract, but no less straight-forward: I am concerned here with the tenu- ous connection between what we define as evidence and what we construct as the narrative, scholarly or historical, that makes 16 introduction sense of that evidence, the gap between the impressive but of- ten cryptic footnotes (which graduate students were once in- structed to arrange first before writing) and the narrative they seem to be supporting. Chaucer vs. Chaucerians; book history as an event (the life of book copies) vs. book history as a field commonly known as bibliography. The principal le problem here is not difficult or abstruse; doubtless we all claim to know it, but most of us (“us” meaning those I read and listen to) act, write, and edit as if we did not. I would like to think that our methods and ways of thinking are determined by the object that seizes our attention: literature, history, humanistic vs. scientific inquiry. But I can’t find any convincing foundation on which to make that claim or to refute it. Scholarly method quickly merges into scholarly myth — thus the portmanteau word in my title. Such considerations run throughout these studies. At mini- mum, my hope is that readers (at least some of them) come away knowing more about Chaucerian metrics than they did going into it, more about the annoying rifts in the logic and conven- tions of, say, basic cataloguing conventions in bibliography, and realize also that these apparently diverse subjects are related and that they are variants of similar problems in scholarly methods in all fields. I also hope they consider how we think about these and other things, how we find or invent problems and imagine we have solved them.
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