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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.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Daniel Wakelin is Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford. He is the author of Humanism, Reading and English Literature, 1430-1530 (2007) and co-editor with Alexandra Gillespie of The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500 (Cambridge, 2011).
Summary
Daniel Wakelin's authoritative survey of manuscripts and their corrections combines challenging ideas about medieval scribes and about medieval attitudes to literature. Focusing particularly on the works of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, this book will change the way in which both medieval literature and the history of the book are studied.
