Chaucer's Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384—1432.

摘要

Scholarship has increasingly recognized the fluidity of the networks accommodating textual activity in an urban centre, where scribal and other forms of labour were needed for administrative records of many kinds just as much as for literary manuscripts. In late medieval London, the already flourishing business of textual production faced a new challenge as the demand for copies of long poems in English—especially of works by Chaucer, Gower, and Langland—made itself felt. Landmark studies of the production of manuscripts in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century London include a 1978 essay by A. I. Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, an account of London Literature 1300—1380 by Ralph Hanna (2005), and C. Paul Christianson's directory of London stationers and book artisans (1990); but much about the commissioning, supply, and remuneration of scribal and other relevant labour, especially outside institutional contexts, has remained unclear. In Chaucer's Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384—1432, Lawrence Warner assesses the plausibility of recent studies that have connected the scribal hands of certain manuscripts with named individuals at work in various London contexts, and have foregrounded the Guildhall, the city's administrative hub, as a centre for the copying of literary works (the fullest expositions of these arguments are Linne Mooney's 2006 article on 'Chaucer's Scribe' and her 2013 book Scribes and the City, written with Estelle Stubbs). Warner's book thus takes on claims that Adam Pynkhurst, whose name appears in the Scriveners' Company Common Paper, worked closely with Chaucer, and was responsible for (among much else) the earliest and best-known manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales; that a further group of important city officers copied Chaucer's and other literary works; and that Thomas Hoccleve, poet and privy seal clerk, had a significant position in this milieu.