Afterword: A Personal Tribute

Summary

I first met Linne Mooney in 1974 at the University of Toronto, where I had been invited to give a lecture and where she was newly embarked on a Ph.D. She was very young. Later she took up a post at the University of Maine in Orono, and when I left York to go to Harvard in 1985 I began to see more of her when she came down to attend our weekly medieval seminar, and on other occasions. At this time she was preparing an edition of the Kalendarium of John Somer, which was published in 1998 in the Chaucer Library Series. She was also working on some of the most complex and difficult of fifteenth-century literary manuscripts, most of them miscellanies, almost as if she were choosing them because they were difficult and therefore more interesting. She gave a talk at the Harvard seminar on one occasion about the lyrics in the famous miscellany in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19, beginning to make proper sense of them for the first time. She was also doing ongoing and never-ending work on the many manuscripts of Lydgate's Verses on the Kings of England, trying to establish some sort of order and coherence to their bewildering variety. Lydgate's Verses is not a work of great literary interest, to say the least, but Linne was not much worried by this, in fact she seemed to revel in it. I had to learn that my own interest in manuscripts, chiefly as valuable repositories of important literary texts, was not everyone’s. I went to a talk a long time ago by one of Linne's eminent predecessors as a codicologist and palaeographer, devoted to a description of a particular MS. I asked her afterwards, in my old-fashioned way, what was the text in the MS? ‘I don't know’, she said, ‘I don't do that sort of thing’.

In 1999 I organised a conference at Harvard called ‘New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies’, and one of the speakers I invited, keen to give her a larger hearing, was Linne. Her talk was about her work in identifying the hands of fifteenth-century vernacular scribes which appear in more than one manuscript.