The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490
- Author/Editor
- Pearsall, Derek
- Title
- The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490
- Published
- Pearsall, Derek. "The Rede (Boarstall) Gower: British Library, MS Harley 3490." In The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths. Ed. Edwards, A.S.G. and Gillespie, Vincent and Hann, Ralph. London: British Library, 2000, pp. 87-99.
- Review
- For many years now we have been patiently but eagerly awaiting the publication of the Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the Works of John Gower, which was first mentioned in JGN in vol. 2, no. 1, in February 1983. Jeremy Griffiths was involved in this project at the time of his sudden death. Now that Derek Pearsall is free of teaching duties, though not, we hope and presume, retired in any other sense, we are promised that the work will soon be brought to completion, and Pearsall provides a glimpse of what we may expect in a sample description of Harley 3490 (Macaulay's "H1”) in this collection of essays in Griffiths’ memory. The new description occupies ten pages, compared to the half page in Macaulay (Works 2.cxlii-cxliii). It includes a photograph of a sample page from the MS (in this instance, the passage describing Nebuchadnezzar’s statue in the Prologue), illustrating the scribe’s mid-fifteenth-century hand, his handling of the Latin portions of the text that Macaulay printed as marginalia, and the decoration. It also provides much more detail on the distribution of the text, the illumination (including reference to other work by the same artists and identification of the 10 coats of arms that appear throughout the copy), the layout, the hand, later additions to the text, and both the original and later owners. The editors’ presumption, Pearsall writes in his introduction, was that “everything about a literary manuscript, from the choice of material to write on and the kind of writing employed to the smallest comments and notes made by later readers, is significant to the understanding of the texts that it contains” (p. 87). But significant how? As with any reference work, the uses that will be made by the information in the new catalogue cannot be anticipated by the compilers and will depend entirely on the imagination of the users. Some of the editors’ choices are suggestive, however, of what kind of results we might expect. Harley 3490 is not a very important copy for the traditional sorts of questions that editors asked, when all interest was focused on the single idealized moment when the poem took its final form: it falls into the middle group of Macaulay’s “recension one” but it has unpredictable affiliations with other copies, both within that group and outside it, and there are thus many far better copies for establishing the “text.” The uncertainty of its relation to other copies , however, is what makes it interesting to more recent textual scholars. If we could determine more precisely the relationship between this copy and its exemplar (or exemplars), we would know a great deal more than we do about the transmission of the text and the role of the scribes in producing the surviving copies, information that would be directly relevant to the assumptions that we must make whenever we choose one manuscript as superior to another. One of the great differences between the new description and the one given by Macaulay, apart from but not unrelated to its very length, is the editors’ self-imposed neutrality on questions of this sort. Where Macaulay presented a minimum of observed detail, organized in support of his own conclusions on Gower’s own role in the development of the text, the editors of the new catalog have abandoned all presumption on how variations in the text arose, and no longer refer, for instance, to “recensions,” leaving open the question of authorial participation. Their greater attention both to the ownership of the MS and to later marginalia (neither mentioned by Macaulay at all) and their promised attention to the selection of contents in other copies are also consistent with the more modern notion of the text as both the possession and the product of many others besides the poet himself. There is a great deal with which to work here. Of course, the description of this one MS will be of greatest value when it appears in the company of all the others, and with the example before us, we now have even greater reason to hope that the entire catalogue will soon be complete. The original owner of Harley 3490 is also mentioned in Pearsall’s essay on “The Literary Milieu of Charles of Orleans and the Duke of Suffolk, and the Authorship of the Fairfax Sequence,” in Charles d’Orleans in England (1415-1440), ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p. 149 n. 14, which supplies a great deal of useful information on the culture in which this MS was written. [Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 19.2.]
- Date
- 2000
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies