Literary scholarship and the life of editing

The Review of English Studies, 2010

This chapter considers how illuminators responded to the challenges presented by the emerging concept of a contemporary author of English poetry at a time when no such profession existed, focusing on all extant representations of Chaucer in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. These challenges also formed a central preoccupation of the texts that illuminators illustrated; yet limners’ responses to these challenges do not replicate in picture the anxieties that are voiced in the texts they illustrate. Rather, manuscript producers, informed by the dynamics of their profession, parallel in a uniquely visual mode the anxieties then in literary circulation. To those who authored images, who is the author of a text? And how is an authorial identity negotiated via pictorial allusions that substituted for the rejected convention of the writing auctor in manuscripts of Middle Enghlish verse? In responding to these questions, I show that the limners of the earliest major works in Middle English verse produced authors through a concatenation of voices and pictures, a repertoire deriving from pictorial media extending far beyond the parameters of their own texts. When tasked with pinning a face to a text, illuminators had no choice but to consult their own notions about a text’s ontology and the author’s ontological status with respect to it. This quandary was particularly pressing when it came to illuminating the metafictional and, following A. C. Spearing’s coinage, the autographic works that populated England’s literary scene in the later Middle Ages. The arguments that illuminators frequently offered arose not only from the texts in front of them but also from the cache of images that made up the intellectual storehouse of their profession. From these images, I argue that the tradition of authorial portraiture for Middle English poets is an indeterminate one that discloses, more than anything else, the hesitations and reluctance of its makers. The consequence of this argument, to be explored in later chapters, is that whatever authority is allowed the rhetorical “I” of the text is a contingent authority, drawn not from the virtuosity of language, truth of content, or prestige of its author but rather from copy-specific features of the manuscript itself. Without a sense of the “true” origins of a text, literature was, in this period, a flexible cultural production open to opportunistic manipulation and instrumentalization that illustrative programs could—and did—provide.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020

Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the yearbook of the New Chaucer Society. It publishes articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). SAC also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chau cer-related publications.

Florilegium

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2008

The poetry that modern editorial practice assigns to Chaucer may be charming, astute, and, simply, beautiful, but the stable Chaucer whose agency determines this achievement-the Chaucer who serves as a canonical center against whom the marginal voices of vernacular culture have been defined-is more the creation of a Shakespearian-focused textual criticism than a historical medieval reality.-Tim William Machan 1 Few would deny that Chaucer's work has distinctive value.-Peggy Knapp 2 Th e origin of this essay lies in a bad-faith pedagogical practice for which I am perhaps seeking to do some penance. When I teach the Canterbury Tales, on the first day of the course, despite attempts to forestall the impulse, I inevitably cast the work as a wonderfully complex linked set of short stories, wholly conceived as such in all its details-a much more capacious and generically adventurous version of, say, Dubliners. Of course, such a characterization of the Tales is an utter fiction, a fact that, on that same first day, I make no attempt to conceal from the students. And yet-in the same way that, although Milton continuously reminds his readers that Satan is, well, Satan, we nonetheless remain fascinated by the character-no matter how much I empha-For their helpful feedback on this article, I owe thanks to Matthew Giancarlo, Ashby Kinch, Frank Grady, and the anonymous readers of SAC. None should be blamed for its opinions, however.

Variants

Just as in recent years many editors have paid insu cient (or inconsistent, or even contradictory) attention to the authority of the metre in editing early modem play-texts, so more recent editions have begun to discard even the rather basic assistance that has traditionally been supplied to the metrically unsophisticated reader: the Arden 3 editions, for example, no longer indicate the syllabic status of preterite su xes in the text (perhaps fearing that the occasional grave accent might frighten the horses), and Jonathon Bates' recent RSC edition rejects the helpful practice, normal since Edmond Malone and George Steevens, of indicating the structure of shared lines by indentation, on the cogent grounds that the First Folio didn't do it. Ironically, this retreat from the authority of the metre has coincided with large advances, based in part upon linguistics, in our understanding of how metre works. But if metre is not some arid formality but rather a signifying system, this kind of negligence is doing that reader a disservice. This paper will explore some of the ways in which editors might discreetly assist the reader in grasping metrical and prosodic variation (where such variation seems relevant or important), and in exploring (without oppressing the reader with unnecessary detail) the kinds of editorial choices o ered by two equally but variously substantive witnesses, such as Q2 and FI Hamlet: one role of the editor here is to draw attention to meaningful variation while filtering out mere noise.

Notes and Queries, 2003

Modern Philology, 2001