A. S. G. Edwards

Middle English literary writings, 1150–1400

Any attempt to give a concise account of the history of early Middle English literature, and of the material aspects of its production and transmission, faces both quantitative and qualitative difficulties. The relative paucity of surviving materials from the earlier part of the period is striking when compared with that from the later fourteenth century during Richard II’s reign; and the extraordinary efflorescence of what has come to be termed ‘Ricardian poetry’ (to which could be added ‘Ricardian prose’) constitutes a sudden richness against which the achievement of much earlier literature looks fragmented and relatively undistinguished. To these disproportions must be added an organizational one: a significant number of works for which distinctive ‘literary’ claims have been made, most famously the Ancrene wisse, have equal reason to figure among ‘non-literary’ materials and, categorized as religious or devotional items, are discussed elsewhere in this volume. The cultural situation of English in the post-Conquest period was an extremely marginalized one that stands in contrast to the increasingly dominant status of Norman French. Throughout this period the evidence of book ownership from surviving wills and inventories indicates that cultivated readers who wanted ‘literary’ texts were likely to own these works in languages other than Middle English: that is, in French or Latin. The low status of the native tongue is a recurrent topos in writings in Middle English between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

UNRECORDED MIDDLE ENGLISH VERSE TEXTS IN A CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL LIBRARY MANUSCRIPT

Canterbury Cathedral Library, MS Add. 46 is a collection of paper leaves, now numbered 1-9. Although they have been virtually unstudied,1 these leaves are of some interest to the student of Middle English since they provide previously unrecorded versions of a number of Middle English verse texts. From the evidence of both their size and hands these leaves appear to have formed parts of two different manuscripts. Four bifolia (leaves 2, 3, 5, 7) and three single leaves (1, 4, 6) are evidently survivals from one manuscript and our initial comments below are confined to these. Two other leaves, probably originally a bifolium (8, 9), are codicologically distinct and will be discussed in section v below.All the leaves in the Canterbury manuscript arc in some degree fragmentary, particularly the bifolia, all of which have lost the greater part of one of their conjugates; all are now separately mounted. The separate leaves of the bifolia arc approximately 115 x130 mm.; no watermarks are visible; the texts are unruled and unbounded. The leaves are copied in probably two different current hands, of the late fifteenth century.Any attempt at description of the original structure of the manuscript from which these leaves come is complicated by the fact that each leaf, whether singleton or bifolium, has been given a single number. Accordingly we have differentiated the leaves of each bifolium by assigning a folio number to the first leaf, and the same number followed by an asterisk to its conjugate. The order of the leaves can be partly established through the sequence of the longest text, Gregorys Trental. If we assume that its beginning marks the beginning of a quite, then the sequence of the first five leaves and the conjugates of the first four of these can be established as set out below. It seems likely that the conjugate of fol. 1 (fol. 1*) has been lost, but this is not certain. It seems likely that fols 6 and 4 are conjugate, but again, this is not certain. Hence the surviving leaves could suggest at least two possibilities in terms of quire structure: (i) an original quire of twelve leaves, of which one conjugate, fol. 1*, has been lost; (ii) an original quire of ten leaves, together with two singletons, possibly from another quire. Further hypothetical reconstructions are possible, but unrewarding given the paucity of the surviving evidence. Because the content of fols 4 and 6 seems self-contained it is not possible to place them in order in relation to the other leaves. The contents arc distributed as follows (commas are used to mark off breaks between recto and verso):IThe longest text in the Canterbury manuscript is a version of St Gregorys Trental, a popular exemplary narrative which recounts the salvation of Pope Gregorys mother through the saying of a trental of thirty masses over the ten chief religious feasts. This occupies five of the nine leaves, most of the four bifolia and one singleton; in order: 2, 5,7, 3, 1. The text is copied throughout in single columns, unruled and unbounded. In the following transcription, as throughout, contractions have been silently expanded, with the exception of the ampersand; a single period (.) indicates an indecipherable or unrecoverable letter within a line; a spaced series of such periods within a line indicates a sequence of such letters; a series of such periods at the beginning or end of the line indicates that an undetermined number of letters or words have been lost.IMEV differentiates several versions of St Gregorys Trental in a total of ten manuscripts, under numbers 83, 1653, and 3184.2 The grounds for distinguishing these entries are not clear. All versions are in couplets, but vary in length from 240 to 350 lines. The earliest discussion of this text, by Albert Kaufman, sought to establish two versions (A and B), but the subsequent work of R. K. Root led him to suggest that Kaufmanns conclusions must be revised. He added this caveat:but until more MSS. …