Extant Manuscripts Printed by Wynkyn de Worde with Notes on the Owner, Roger Thorney.
- Author/Editor
- Bone, Gavin.
- Title
- Extant Manuscripts Printed by Wynkyn de Worde with Notes on the Owner, Roger Thorney.
- Published
- Bone, Gavin. "Extant Manuscripts Printed by Wynkyn de Worde with Notes on the Owner, Roger Thorney." The Library, 4th ser. 12 (1931): 284-306.
- Review
- Bone's concern is to discover "printer's copy"--manuscripts marked up for the press--used by pre-Elizabethan printers. He takes up Macaulay's surmise that "Caxton may have used the actual manuscript of the 'Confessio Amantis' given by Marchandine Hunnis to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1610-11" (285)--that is, Oxford, Magdalen College, MS Lat. 213. This claim he finds "highly debatable," although there is suggestive evidence (e.g., only "the minutest differences in a space of two or three hundred lines together," passages marked with crosses and circles that also begin columns in Caxton's text) at least through line 4525, when "Caxton . . . evidently begins to follow a different type of manuscript." Yet Bone found "no reading that is conclusive" (285). Nonetheless, he leaves open the possibility that Magdalen College 213 was marked up by Caxton and/or his apprentices: " . . . if we accept the evidence of the Magdalen manuscript . . . it looks as though Caxton's compositors of 1483 marked sporadically with crosses or circles" (306). [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1]
- Date
- 1931
- Gower Subjects
- Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis