Scribal Correction and Literary Craft
English Manuscripts 1375–1510

An authoritative account of what manuscripts and their corrections reveal about medieval attitudes to books, language and literature.

Daniel Wakelin (Author)

9781107076228, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 November 2014

368 pages, 6 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.68 kg

This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

1. Introduction
Part I. Contexts: 2. Inviting correction
3. Copying, varying and correcting
4. People and places
Part II. Craft: 5. Techniques
6. Accuracy
7. Writing well
Part III. Literary Criticism: 8. Diction, tone and style
9. Form
10. Completeness
Part IV. Implications: 11. Authorship
12. Conclusion: varying, correcting and critical thinking
Bibliography
Index of manuscripts.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Palaeography [history of writing CFL]