Thomas Hoccleve in Another "Confessio Amantis" Manuscript.
- Author/Editor
- Mooney, Linne R.
- Title
- Thomas Hoccleve in Another "Confessio Amantis" Manuscript.
- Published
- Mooney, Linne R. "Thomas Hoccleve in Another 'Confessio Amantis' Manuscript." Journal of the Early Book Society 22 (2019): 225-38.
- Review
- The manuscript in which Mooney finds Hoccleve's hand is London, British Library, MS Egerton 913: "an incomplete copy, perhaps better classified as a fragment, containing in its present state only the Prologue and the first 1709 lines of Book I" (225). The text is copied in single-column, undecorated, on cheap paper, by three scribes. The first scribe ("Scribe A"), whom Mooney argues is Hoccleve, "is responsible for the greatest part of this copying: 1,835 lines of English plus the Latin verses and summaries in his portions of the manuscript, while Scribes B and C are responsible for only 205 and 777 lines of the English text, respectively, besides the Latin in their portions" (226). In claiming this copying for Hoccleve, Mooney disagrees directly with John Burrow and Ian Doyle, who note similarities to Hoccleve's hand elsewhere, but conclude that BL MS Egerton 913 is "certainly not by him" (229). Citing Doyle's later "mellowed" view in "private communication," and in support of her identification, Mooney provides a detailed analysis of the significant letter-forms (230-33). More speculatively, she offers three provocative hypotheses: 1) that Hoccleve, for a time in possession of an exemplar, "began to make a copy to keep as an exemplar for himself to make further copies to offer his patrons, resulting in the hastily copied Egerton fragment, principally written by himself, with the second hand filling the gap left by his copying from a faulty exemplar and the third adding a third quire (perhaps originally more) to carry on the copying" (233). 2) that the Egerton fragment, with its Ricardian opening, was copied from the same exemplar as Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2, a manuscript lacking the Prologue and some lines following, which heretofore alone was agreed to contain Hoccleve's work; and 3) therefore "answers Macaulay's doubts about the wording of the Preface [sic] that would originally have stood at the beginning of Trinity" (234). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis