Reading Chaucer's Words to Adam

Gillespie, Alexandra

doi:10.1353/cr.2008.0004

Cited by 24 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…In an elegant meditation on Mooney's methodology, Alexandra Gillespie has argued for the importance ofand nebulousness ofthe "literary" in using scribal and similar palaeographical evidence; Gillespie forcefully asserts that the identity of a scribe should not put to rest questions of interpretation and the validity of new readings. 38 More recently, in a wholesale re-evaluation of the evidence, Lawrence Warner has disputed some of Mooney's key claims and shown how tricky the secure identification of scribal relationships is, albeit while using a similar methodology of forensic identification to that used by Mooney. 39 The question of Kempe's authorship is perhaps even more explosive, and fraught with ideological identifications and gendered silencing, than Chaucer's.…”

Section: Margery Kempe At Norwichmentioning

confidence: 99%

Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the Scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe

Bale

2017

The Chaucer Review

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Introduction: "Jhesu mercy quod Salthows" "Jhesu mercy quod Salthows" (" 'thanks be to Jesus!' says Salthouse") are the last words of the unique surviving manuscript (now London, British Library Additional MS 61823) of The Book of Margery Kempe. It is an unremarkable and conventional scribal signing-off for the singular account of the remarkable life of Margery Kempe (d. c. 1439). In recent years Kempe's Book has been mined by literary scholars and historians for the information it provides about lay piety, women's devotion, and lifewriting in late medieval England, but "Salthows", the scribe of the unique surviving manuscript of her Book, has been given little attention. In this essay I suggest that Salthouse is an important figure in establishing the circumstances of the Book's reception and early reiteration. Since its rediscovery in 1934 (when the unique manuscript was happened upon in a country-house) the physical manuscript of the Book has received far less attention than its protagonist. 1 This is, perhaps, because the notes of the first critical edition, published in 1940 by the Early English Text Society and edited by Sanford An early rehearsal of some of the ideas in this essay appeared as "The Woman in White," The Times Literary Supplement,

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Section: Margery Kempe At Norwichmentioning

confidence: 99%

Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the Scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe

Bale

2017

The Chaucer Review

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“…Although Gillespie deliberately shies away from an engagement with form qua new formalism, her article is concerned explicitly with the literariness of a text and the manner by which that can be recovered through those formal features framed by the manuscript in question. Knowing there existed a scribe named Adam Pinkhurst does not tell us what the poem ‘Chauciers Wordes’ means nor how it means it: instead it reveals that neither literature nor book history can fully resolve the ‘perennial human desire for origins and endings’ (Gillespie 272).…”

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New Formalism and the Forms of Middle English Literary Texts

Marshall

Buchanan

2011

Literature Compass

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Recent work in Middle English literature addresses the emerging relationship between formal analysis and book history. This article, emerging from the 2009 Conference on Editorial Problems in Toronto, seeks to clarify the way in which formalist approaches intersect with trends in English literary manuscript studies. How, we ask, can the lively field of book history take new direction through contact with the ‘new formalisms’ articulated in literary studies? More precisely, how does the form of the medieval book produce literary meaning in a distinctive and historicizable manner? We explore critical approaches to the formal features of medieval manuscripts, addressing medieval and modern theories of the book’s form, the relationship between written and oral forms of texts, the dialect of scribes, authorial composition of manuscripts, scribal corrections, the layout and illustration, and the binding of the codex. We suggest that close readings of manuscript form can shed light on aspects of texts obscured by the printing technology and formatting changes of modern editions. Furthermore, we point to new avenues for contextualizing the book within late medieval literary culture.

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Chaucer: Shorter Poems

Cawsey

2017

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain

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Chaucer's “Short Poems” include complaints, love lyrics, and philosophical, religious, and political short verse. They are primarily written in courtly lyric forms taken from the French tradition, but most do not have direct French sources. The short poem that has drawn the most scholarly attention is the poem to “Adam Scriveyn,” both in terms of positing the actual scribe to be Adam Pinkhurst and more literary approaches which analyze the metaphors and images used. Other poems have garnered attention in terms of source study, formalism, gender study, historicism, and more.

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Reading Chaucer's Words to Adam

Cited by 24 publications

References 18 publications

Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the Scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe

Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the Scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe

New Formalism and the Forms of Middle English Literary Texts

Chaucer: Shorter Poems

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