The Tribulations of Scribes.
- Author/Editor
- Pearsall, Derek.
- Title
- The Tribulations of Scribes.
- Published
- Pearsall, Derek. "The Tribulations of Scribes." In Simon Horobin and Aditi Nafde, eds. Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2017). Pp. 1-17.
- Review
- Pearsall offers "a plea for the working man . . . professional commercial scribes who wrote for their living and were involved in the commercial production of books, particularly those of our newly emergent poets, in the first half of the fifteenth century" (1-2). He offers examples of scribal obstacles and challenges, drawing largely on manuscripts of Chaucer's work, "Piers Plowman," Hoccleve's, and the "Confessio Amantis." He observes that "the scribes of the Confessio. . .were put under the strictest supervision, the authority for which emanated from Gower himself" (15). As time went on, scribes became less experienced, and consequently encountered greater difficulty following the exacting format. A solution was column-for-column copying, but this "came to grief where there was a change of scribe, as in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. 3. 2. and Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm. 2. 21" (16). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2017
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis