The Trinity Gower D Scribe's Two Canterbury Tales Manuscripts Revisited.
- Author/Editor
- Thaisen, Jacob
- Title
- The Trinity Gower D Scribe's Two Canterbury Tales Manuscripts Revisited.
- Published
- Thaisen, Jacob. "The Trinity Gower D Scribe's Two Canterbury Tales Manuscripts Revisited." In Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England. Ed. Connolly, Margaret and Mooney, Linne R. [York]: York Medieval Press, 2008, pp. 41-60. ISBN 9781903153246
- Review
- Scribe D was "active in the London-Westminster area between the 1390's and the 1420's, although his linguistic origins were in the southwest Midlands" (42). Apparently he knew and worked with other prominent scribes and the major poets. He has been shown to be responsible for ("in whole or in part") the two Canterbury Tales MSS that are Thaisen's focus (Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 198 [Cp] and London, British Library MS Harley 7334 [Ha4]), a "De Proprietatibus Rerum," a "Piers Plowman," and eight "Confessios": Cambridge, Trinity College, R.3.2 (quires 9, 15-19, and parts of 14); London, British Library, Egerton 1991; New York, Columbia University Library, Plimpton 265; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 294; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 902 (fols. 2r-16v); Oxford, Christ Church College 148; Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 67. Thaisen sets out to demonstrate that orthographic variation can help establish "the number of exemplars a given scribe used and in what order he copied them" (58), since a scribe's native dialectal idiosyncrasies give way to those of other scribes as he "works in" to exemplars not in his own dialect. Ultimately Thaisen's data are intriguing, despite his admission of inconclusive results. [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. JGN 28.1]
- Date
- 2008
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies