John Gower's Scribes and Literatim Copying.
- Author/Editor
- Scase, Wendy.
- Title
- John Gower's Scribes and Literatim Copying.
- Published
- Scase, Wendy. "John Gower's Scribes and Literatim Copying." In Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, eds. John Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Publications of the John Gower Society, no. 14. Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2020. Pp. 13-31.
- Review
- Scase takes on a fundamental question of Gower textual scholarship: why is the text of "Confessio Amantis" in some important manuscripts of such high quality, unusually consistent in grammar and orthography at a time when scribal dialects so often affected copying? Why didn't meddlesome scribes "meddle" (16) with the text of CA as they did with other texts? Traditional explanations reply that Gower must have somehow supervised the scribes directly, perhaps through a particular scriptorium or network. Scase's innovative explanation is meter: Gower's extraordinarily regular metrical verse "'depends' upon variant forms" (20; original emphasis), an unusual variety of linguistic forms--orthographical, morphological, and dialectical--and in order to maintain that meter, scribes had to reproduce the linguistic forms carefully, copying, in effect, "litteratim" or letter by letter, because meter demanded it. Verse less metrically regular than Gower's allowed for greater meddling, although rhymed verse tellingly, Scase observes, had long encouraged scribes to reproduce unfamiliar dialect forms to maintain rhyme pairs; similarly, perhaps by extension, she argues, Gower's scribes reproduced his orthography, morphology, and dialect to reproduce his meter with considerable success. By way of demonstration, Scase examines a sample passage (CA 1.203-34) from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 3, showing how closely metrical regularity depends upon varied uses of final --"e," other inflectional endings, infinitive forms, elisions, optional nasals, etc., and effectively "'required' intensive literatim reproduction" (22; original emphasis). She comments further on how and where Fairfax corrections in the text reflect sensitivity to meter, and then analyzes the sample passage in three more CA manuscripts (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Bodley 902, 294, and 693), adding nuance to her argument about meter, linguistic variety, and careful copying, and generalizing, for example, that Bodley 902 and 294 "comprise literatim output when it is important for meter, but not when it is unnecessary" (24) while Bodley 693 and Fairfax 3 share this "general aim and practice" but differ in "details of implementation and in the degree of skill they displayed in doing so" (24-25). Scase analyzes other passages from CA that were copied by the "five Trinity Gower scribes" in Trinity College, MS R.3.2 (Scribes A, B, C, D, and E, labeled by A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes), further evincing the relations between meter and Gowerian linguistic forms. She opens her arguments out to broader application by noting attention to meter in manuscripts of non-Gowerian, less regular metrical poetry copied by these scribes, especially Scribes D and E. In this way, Scase suggests that a "dynamic process" was underway, undertaken by a group of perhaps "networked" scribes, probably based in London, engaged in "trying to improve their outputs" (31). Sensitivity to rhyme led scribes to imitate dialectical forms in the rhyme-pairs; then, sensitivity to strict meter led to dialectical forms elsewhere in the verse lines, and accurate copying was set on course. The opening and closing notes in Scase's essay indicate that the essay is part of a larger project on interconnected developments of verse and copying in late-medieval England, and she here gives Gower an important place in these developments. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]
- Date
- 2020
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Confessio Amantis