ABSTRACT
This essay first appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 119-41.
T nel no3 t scome,’ quod Scripture; ‘but scryueynes lye . . -”1
£ | UT scryueynes lye....’ We hesitate, and the hesitation lies behind all attempts at editing medieval mss. An author’s text is
L J conceived of as something pure which, once entrusted to the medium of the scribes, becomes inaccurate because it passes through secondary minds who distort everything they transmit.2 The author’s original is “corrupted” and “contaminated,” as the technical vocabulary of editing expresses itself through metaphors of moral degeneration from purity of text. The scribes can comfortably be characterized for editing purposes: they are either harmless in proportion to their doltishness, or dangerous in proportion to such intelligence as they may show. Indeed, medieval poets are themselves critical of their scribes, and with some justice from their point of view.3 But like the modem editor, the medieval poet is concerned to use the scribes as means to an end. For both poet and editor any scribal influence on the text is by definition unwanted, and in the medieval circumstances of copying mss there are many such unwanted influences. But most modem admirers of Chaucer do not come to his work as editors, and it is possible that they can use the means offered by the scribes to rather different ends. The scribal responses to Chaucer’s poetry, which are implicit in the variants offered by the mss for any work, are not to be despised as the equivalent of mere printing errors. The result of a completely different process, they are different in kind and in their literary implications. In ignoring the context of scribal responses in which medieval texts are preserved to us in the mss, the modem reader may waste a valuable resource. With varying levels of attainment, the scribes-as the near-contemporaries of Chaucer-can offer us the earliest line-by-line literary criticism of Chaucer’s poetry, a reaction to
The common, lowly view of scribes stems from considering them en masse as the intervening medium which stands between us and a completely accurate reflection of the original poet’s intentions. But when the work of individual scribes is examined, their achievements in response to the difficulties of a text are sometimes (but not, of course, always!) impressive and arresting. Yet it is not surprising that men who could read and write to gain their living and who, in the very exercise of their craft, were often exposed to a range of literary material should show some literary intelligence and feel for what they are copying. Within their times the scribes are reading men. They may not be thinking men, but their minds are the courses through which runs the literary language of their day in order to achieve its literary form. Much evidence for contemporary literary response can be ignored in misvaluing those opinions of the scribes which are embodied in their texts of the Chaucer works they have copied.5
