The Text of the Canterbury Tales

Galway, Margaret; Manly, John Matthews; Rickert, Edith; Chaucer, Geoffrey

doi:10.2307/3717837

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Polysyllabic words bring visual slips of repetition or omission, say, dittography or haplology. Unsurprisingly, the longest names cause the most confusion: in The Canterbury Tales, Epicurus, Andromache and Abradatas are the most mangled, each over fifteen ways (Manly andRickert 1940: apparatus for A.336, B.4331, F.1416). And many mistakes seem caused by the slips consequent to any copying.…”

Section: Copyingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But Diana herself is safe from this mistreatment. She is named twelve times in The Canterbury Tales but only miscopied on one occasion, when her name was accidentally repeated (Manly andRickert 1940: apparatus for A.1912;Oxford, Trinity College, MS 49, fol. 26v).…”

Section: Copyingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Like other hedging idioms -what I call; I don't like to say this but -'I mene' warns that the speaker fears misprision. The name Adonis did get mistaken by scribes for other words such as the preposition down (Manly andRickert 1940: apparatus for A.2224;Schick ed. 1891: apparatus for ll.…”

Section: Composingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The manuscript variants for The Canterbury Tales (Manly andRickert 1940: apparatus for A.2062) show that in the first mention of 'Dane' seventeen scribes wrote 'dyane' instead. The scribes who made the slip, or copied it willingly from exemplars, were more familiar with Diana than with Daphne by this point in the poem; Diana had also appeared in other English poems for centuries, as early as Laʒamon's and Robert Mannyng's work.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The trick didn't work. Eight scribes repeat the wrong name 'dyane' anyway at the second, rhyming mention of 'Dane'; one even gives the odd unrhyming 'Dade' here (Manly andRickert 1940: apparatus for A.2064). For another scribe, the rhyme not only failed to distinguish the names; the lookalikes 'Diane' and 'Dane' made him skip a line, and the result makes no sense:…”

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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%

Section: Copyingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Composingmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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