Instructing Readers in Fifteenth-Century Poetic Manuscripts

Wakelin, Daniel

doi:10.1525/hlq.2010.73.3.433

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Many have notes in the margin or headings in the text, which highlight the proper nouns or direct us to sources for the facts. Such referencing is not, interestingly, common in copies of Troy Book but it is frequent and possibly authorial with other poems by Chaucer, such as some parts of The Canterbury Tales and The House of Fame, by Lydgate and by their imitators in Reson and Sensuallyte and Knyghthode and Bataile (Griffiths 2014: 7, 9, 23, 28, 29;Wakelin 2010). Such apparatus might have lessened scribal error sometimes.…”

Section: Copyingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not Diane: The Risk of Error in Chaucerian Classicism

Wakelin

2017

Exemplaria

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When Chaucer, Lydgate and their contemporaries made classical characters and classical allusions an important part of English poetry, they risked confusing scribes and readers. In the vein of recent studies of scribes as readers, this article explores the mistakes of scribes in copying and comprehending those details. In addition, this article explores the ways that poets' phrasing implies awareness of those risks and seeks to mitigate them. The article thus presents the creation of the text as a coproduction between agents, which might be understood in the framework of pragmatics, the analysis of speech acts in social context. These problems in transmission, and the forestalling of them, first reveal how classicism, which later became a monumental tradition, was a risky interaction in some of its earliest phases in English poetry. Second, more briefly and tentatively, these problems suggest the risks of writing for scribal transmission in general.In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, poets in English increased the variety and frequency of classical allusions. From the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower onwards, writers showed off their classical pretensions to support their ambitions for poetry in English. The stylistic shift, from Bevis of Hampton to Hecuba of Troy, is often told as part of a larger one from 'medieval to Renaissance in English poetry'; so A. C. Spearing once put it, noting Chaucer's innovation in invocation of the Muses (1985: e.g. 24-28). We are learning how a renewed classical taste shaped ethics, theology and genre, especially for Chaucer and Lydgate (e.g. recently Minnis 2016; Edwards 2016), but there is more to learn about the stylistic changes in this poetry. These allusions might seem like hackneyed clichés after centuries of gods and fauns, but the style is not trivial: a stylistic tic can carry connotations and have implications for a poem's theory of history, its rhetorical effect and its political prestige. Even if we resist the 1 For brevity and clarity, the references use short titles for the following works: Thebes = Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes = Erdmann and Ekwall ed. 1911-30; Troy = Lydgate, Troy Book = Bergen 1906-35. Troilus = Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde = Windeatt ed. 1984; Tales = Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales = Manly and Rickert ed. 1940. As citation of Tales is normally to the apparatus of Manly and Rickert ed. ( 1940), the few quotations not from MSS or Manly and Rickert's apparatus also come from their text, despite its flaws, and line-numbering is theirs.

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Section: Copyingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not Diane: The Risk of Error in Chaucerian Classicism

Wakelin

2017

Exemplaria

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“…Consequently, the participatory reading practices I focus on can be described as 'proleptic' reading, which is determined in advance of the moment of reading. 4 Writers recommend or use their texts to model a variety of practices that seek to elicit, shape, and frame the choices readers might make as they apprehend texts. Focusing on participation as a determining condition of medieval literary expression and interpretation enables a reframing of the Heather Blatt -9781526118004 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 08/05/2020 10:50:09PM via free access traditional approaches to studying relationships between writers and readers and texts in medieval literary culture, in which the work and aims of writers occupy the centre frame, and readers are considered secondarily for the evidence they provide supporting assessments of those writers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Blatt¹

2018

Participatory Reading in Late-Medieval England

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Libelle ofEnglyshePolycye, The

Lexton¹

2017

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain

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The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye is an anonymous political poem written in the fifteenth century when the Burgundian alliance with France damaged trading relations between England and Flanders. Standing against the English foreign policy of the 1430s, the poem argues for expansionism in trade based on English naval power. The poem is valuable for its literary merit, political insight, and the evidence it offers for manuscript studies. The recopying of the poem in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries indicates that its ideas remained important and relevant beyond its immediate political moment. It was included by Richard Hakluyt in his Principle Navigations , first printed in 1589.

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Instructing Readers in Fifteenth-Century Poetic Manuscripts

Cited by 4 publications

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Not Diane: The Risk of Error in Chaucerian Classicism

Not Diane: The Risk of Error in Chaucerian Classicism

Introduction

Libelle ofEnglyshePolycye, The

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