Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Recent Directions in Medieval Manuscript Study
- Another Fine Manuscript Mess: Authors, Editors and Readers of Piers Plowman
- A New Approach to the Witnesses and Text of the Canterbury Tales
- Prospecting in the Archives: Middle English Verse in Record Repositories
- Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities
- Representing the Middle English Manuscript
- Skins, Sheets and Quires
- Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript
- Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman
- Professional Scribes? Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript
- Manuscript Production in Medieval Theatre: The German Carnival Plays
- The ‘Lancelot-Graal’ Project
- After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Recent Directions in Medieval Manuscript Study
- Another Fine Manuscript Mess: Authors, Editors and Readers of Piers Plowman
- A New Approach to the Witnesses and Text of the Canterbury Tales
- Prospecting in the Archives: Middle English Verse in Record Repositories
- Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities
- Representing the Middle English Manuscript
- Skins, Sheets and Quires
- Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript
- Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman
- Professional Scribes? Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript
- Manuscript Production in Medieval Theatre: The German Carnival Plays
- The ‘Lancelot-Graal’ Project
- After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
This paper builds upon hobby-horses I have been riding for perhaps a decade. First, manuscript study is valuable only insofar as it addresses through material products of human labour the large issues of cultural history. Second, since books are, within certain limits, localizable, they enable the construction of historical narratives. Most particularly, I think here of the need to replace a spent Old Literary History. This, leaving aside other debilities, is far too committed to a myth of the Nation and with it, a national literary tradition. In its stead, we should be studying Middle English Literatures 1100–1413, a project which would include, inter alia, examining local or regional literary communities. I have written about one such community, Berkeley, Gloucs., and there are excellent studies of others: Thorlac Turville-Petre on Nottingham and Derbyshire, and Richard Beadle on Norfolk and transmissional communities. I choose to begin a new intervention with what may be the most paradoxical gesture I can muster: to consider the Metropolis and Capital as if it represented just another provincial locale. What you will now read is a draft out of chapter 2 (of six) of a book manuscript tentatively entitled ‘London Literature, c. 1320–1380’.
The limits of my in-progress study are largely established by linguistic data. In 1963, M. L. Samuels outlined the evidence for a transitional variety of fourteenth-century London English (his Type II). This succeeded an earlier dialect, known from the ‘proclamation of 1258’ and was, in its turn, pretty much superseded by the mid-1380s, with the arrival of Type III, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript StudiesEssays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, pp. 91 - 102Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000