Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon

Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission

in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton

Edited by Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

London: Associated University Presses

Duxworth Redux: The Paris Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales

SUSAN CRANE

J E A N D'ORLEANS, COMTE D'ANGOULEME, OWNER OF THE PARIS MANU-script of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, was an impressive man of letters. He composed moral poetry in French and Latin, and wrote Latin commentaries to Boethius's Consolation of Phi-losophy and Cato's Distichs; he assembled over his lifetime a li-brary of more than 160 manuscripts, many copied or annotated by himself; he was a candidate for the papacy, according to his early biographers, and for canonization fifty years after his death.1 John Duxworth, a shadowy and unimpressive figure com-pared to Jean d'Angouleme, copied two manuscripts for the latter (the Canterbury Tales and a Dialogue of St. Anselm) during Jean's years of captivity in England (1412-45). Duxworth may also have copied works for Jean's brother, Charles d'Orleans, whose captivity in England began and ended a few years shy of Jean's.2 Noting that Duxworth is an unusual name, Manly and Rickert suggest that Jean's scribe may be the man who was granted some tenements in Cambridge near Corpus Christi Col-lege four years after Jean's return to France.3 Duxworth has left no certain trace but the signatures to his manuscripts for Jean— "Duxwurth" at the end of the Canterbury Tales', "Johannes Dux-worth" in the table of contents for the Dialogue of St. Anselm .4

A copyist, however obscure, leaves also his hand. The leading work on Duxworth's Canterbury Tales manuscript, that of Mar-tin M. Crow, has argued that Jean, not Duxworth, is the intelli-gence behind most of the manuscript's unique features, and that Duxworth is responsible only for what may be considered un-imaginative.5 Crow's conclusions are universally accepted in re-cent scholarship, but I believe they are unsubstantiated and that Duxworth's contribution is coextensive with his hand. If we can

17

18 SUSAN CRANE

accept that Duxworth is the intelligence behind the Paris manu-script, it can be considered a coherent Chaucerian editorial proj-ect with instructive similarities to more well-known editorial projects such as the Hengwrt, Ellesmere, and Corpus manu-scripts.

One of the first fifteen manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales still extant, the Paris manuscript is a paper quarto of eighty-three leaves, written in a clear but not elegant book-hand form of fif-teenth-century secretary.6 Incipits, explicits, and glosses embod-ied in the text are written by the same scribe in a somwhat larger, heavier script.7 It is particularly for the literary judgments made in a few embedded explicits that the manuscript has been of in-terest to scholars. The Knight's Tale concludes with "explicit fa-bula militis valde bona" [here ends the extremely good tale of the Knight], but three tales fare less well, cut short with notations that they are lacking in literary merit:

Ista fabula est valde absurda in terminis et ideo ad presens pretermit-tatur nec ulterius de ea procedatur sed subsequenter incipit prohem-ium fabule francolani hoc modo subsequente commendando armigerum.

[This tale is extremely absurd in its terms and therefore is omitted at present and not continued any farther, but next begins the prologue to the Franklin's tale in the following way, commending the Squire.]

(Squire's Tale, cut after line F 28)

Non plus de ista fabula quia est valde dolorosa sed consequenter in-cipiunt verba militis ad monachum sic.

[No more of this tale because it is extremely sad, but next begin the words of the Knight to the Monk.]

CMonk's Tale, cut after line B2 3212)

Maior pars istius fabule est pretermissa usque hue quia termini sunt valde absurdi.

[The greater part of this story is omitted up to this point because its terms are extremely absurd.]

(Canon's Yeoman's Tale, cut after line G 749, with closing lines G 1394-481 following the cut)8

DUXWORTH REDUX 19

Figure 1 shows the abbreviated Squire's Tale with its embedded explicit making a transition to the Franklin's Prologue. Crow's thesis is that the literary judgments in these explicits were Jean's, not Duxworth's, and were written "probably at An-gouleme's dictation."9 He also attributes to Jean nine unique ad-ditions to Chaucer's text of a couplet or more, scattered through the columns of text, for example these additions to the Franklin's discourse on patience in marriage (insertions in brackets):

Patience is an heigh vertu, certayn, For it venquysseth, as thise Clerkes seyn, Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne, For every word men may nat chide or pleyne. . . . [For yif thei do yt is but in veyn], On every wrong a man may not be wreken. [But every wrong mot redressid be Sum what by pacience and not al by cruelte].10

(F 773-76, 784)

Crow proposes that all the lines added within tales that do not simply repair losses or errors in copying were composed by Jean and express "some of the prisoner's philosophy."11

The manuscript evidence does not, on its face, suggest this con-clusion. Jean's involvement indeed leaves traces, but they indi-cate a two-stage process in which the text production was separated from Jean's interventions. In his handwriting we have a table of contents—preserving such francophone spellings as Chipman, Scuier, and Franquelin—and about three-hundred cor-rections of a word or two, written above the line or following it.12

By Crow's reckoning, which I have not recalculated, 65 percent of Jean's corrections provide better readings from superior manu-scripts of the Canterbury Tales, or bad readings attested else-where in the manuscript tradition; the remaining 35 percent of his corrections are unique, probably of his own invention, de-signed to improve the scansion or the sense.13 Figure 2 shows the latter sort of intervention in Jean's addition of "wel" above line A 2424, "Of which Arcita was wel agast," where "somwhat" has been lost; and his addition of "somhuat" above line A 2451, "Al though yt be somhuat agayn his kynde," replacing lost syllables from the phrase "Al be it that it is" in better manuscripts. Dux-worth also makes corrections from a superior manuscript, in Fig-

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DUXWORTH REDUX 21

ure 2 for example at line A 2410, where he adds "thy" over a carat to the line "And in thy temple my baner wil I hong." Of Dux-worth's 120 corrections, Crow calculates that 85 percent intro-duce better readings; the remainder attempt, like Jean's, to repair damage to the meter or the sense.14

The manuscript indicates, then, that each man went through the text separately, Duxworth perhaps at the end of each day's copying but in any case in his own sessions with an exemplar; Jean at different times with, it seems, more than one superior ex-emplar.15 Duxworth's corrections however are more accurate to manuscript tradition than Jean's (at 85 versus 65 percent), and this difference alone, for Crow, argues that all the Paris manu-script's unique features (except uninventive ones) must be due to Jean d'Angouleme, regardless of whose hand is holding the pen. Duxworth is "a good professional scribe who copies as exactly as he can what is set before him"; Jean in contrast has "a strong editorial tendency."16 To Jean must be attributed not only the ex-plicits containing literary judgments but all the unique variants in the text—several of which amount to two or more added lines within tales—whenever these seek to improve on Chaucer. "I be-lieve Duxworth sometimes composed certain crude spurious lines, in order to perfect the riming couplets which he had acci-dentally disarranged," Crow summarizes, "but in other places from two to eight spurious lines might be introduced for no other obvious reason than to add something to the content; these lines it would seem Angouleme might have composed."17 An extremely close relation between patron and scribe must be imagined for the daily work of copying if the many editorial choices in Dux-worth's hand are to be attributed to Jean's dictation.

Crow proposes his thesis only as a possibility: "it would seem," "might," "could," and "probably" characterize his claims that Jean so closely controlled Duxworth's hand. But subsequent scholarship has taken up the thesis without reservation. Manly and Rickert note that Jean "did not scruple to omit, and did so with opprobrious comment duly transcribed by Duxworth."18

Charles Owen echoes this assurance and asserts without qualifi-cation that Jean authored lines that Duxworth added to Chau-cer's text.19 Derek Pearsall attributes all editorial decisions to Jean, who "shows no interest in the structure or framework of the Tales, and rearranges tales to suit himself; he cuts away most of the Squire's Tale, which he calls valde absurda"20 Crow's con-

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DUXWORTH REDUX 23

jecture has become a certainty. Yet that conjecture is, I will argue, based on two major claims that cannot stand the test of the manuscript's evidence: that Jean was present and minutely in-volved in the production of the manuscript, and that Duxworth, because he was a careful scribe, could not have been a creative editor.

How closely involved was Jean in the production of the Paris manuscript of the Canterbury Tales? The conditions of Jean's captivity in England and the habits revealed in his manuscript collection provide some context for this question. Jean was a pris-oner in England from the age of twelve, one of six members of Charles d'Orleans's circle (but his only blood relative) held in lieu of a large financial settlement stipulated in the Treaty of Buzan-gais (1412). Jean might have been freed in less than thirty-three years but for the capture of Charles himself at Agincourt in 1415. During the long years in which the brothers strove unsuccessfully to buy their freedom, Jean was in the charge of the family of the Dukes of Clarence and Somerset and was held at several of their properties in turn. He lived on what could be sent to him from France and on loans from the household members with whom he was imprisoned.21

Reading and writing were pastimes of Jean's confinement, but also of his life before and after those years. His tutor accompanied him to England where his schooling continued for five years.22 At his death, Jean's library included twelve manuscripts he had cop-ied in full or in part himself; of these, a Boethius manuscript with Jean's commentary and a copy of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova probably date from his captivity, as does the Dialogue of St. Anselm which Duxworth began and Jean completed.23 According to his sixteenth-century biographer Jean du Port, in England he also wrote a commentary on the Distichs of Cato and a collection of virtuous maxims.24 Many of Jean's manuscripts, from after as well as during his captivity, show his active use of them and his engagement in making them more accessible to use: He fre-quently adds tables of contents, marginal corrections and notes, rubrics and ornamented capitals, running titles and page num-bers—modifications Dupont-Ferrier labels "les milles menus ar-tifices qui rendent la lecture plus facile."25 In these respects his Chaucer manuscript is typical of his library. The verifiable traces of Jean's interaction with Duxworth are no different from the

24 SUSAN CRANE

traces of his interaction with manuscripts he owned that were al-ready decades or centuries old: Jean delights in supplementing the text of all his manuscripts after their production, making them more useable and more accurate. In short, Jean was able to produce his own copies when he wished, but on balance he tended to acquire manuscripts and then annotate them himself.

The plain appearance and the less than beautiful hand of Jean's Chaucer manuscript suggest that Duxworth was directly commissioned by Jean, rather than that the manuscript was pro-duced for commercial sale. Duxworth may have been in the household of one of Jean's keepers and thus in everyday proxim-ity to him. But Crow's thesis that Jean dictated certain added lines and the explicits containing literary judgments presumes a level of collaboration that Duxworth's manuscript does not sus-tain. Rather, the manuscript evidence indicates a layered produc-tion that isolates Duxworth's part from Jean's: Duxworth copied and made some intralinear corrections as he wrote (see Figure 2, lines A 2398, 2417), Duxworth later added corrections from one or two manuscripts, and Jean also made corrections using better manuscripts.26 Finally, after Jean had returned to France, orna-mented capitals were added in spaces that Duxworth had re-served for them.27 Crow proposes that in the first stage of production, when Duxworth is copying and occasionally adding to and cutting from Chaucer's text, we should imagine Jean to be both the author of the additions and the intelligence behind the cuts.

Is Jean then reading the text to Duxworth? Crow's analysis of Duxworth's errors works against this hypothesis. Memory errors are frequent in the text, "evidence that the scribe tried to remem-ber a couplet or more at a time."28 For example, line A 2410 (Fig-ure 2), "my baner wol I hong," is a unique accidental variant of "I wol my baner hong" that would not be likely to occur if Dux-worth had been writing from dictation rather than attempting to remember lines from an exemplar. So Jean is not reading the ex-emplar to Duxworth. Is he instead monitoring Duxworth's copy-ing, looking over his shoulder and interrupting him very occasionally to dictate a few lines or urge an omission? The sce-nario seems implausible in that it subjugates the aristocrat to the scribe, making Jean attendant on Duxworth's production of many a line to which he makes no contribution. Or might Jean have read through the exemplar or exemplars before Duxworth

DUXWORTH REDUX 25

started copying, and indicated where Duxworth was to consult him about changes? This scenario would better suit Jean's sta-tion and his scholarly bent, but it is not attested elsewhere in his library of manuscripts in Latin and French, languages more fa-miliar to him. Jean's pattern is to intervene after the text has been produced, or alternatively to copy it himself. In his Canter-bury Tales manuscript, he writes no corrections of more than a word or two in his own hand, preferring to write only "defectus" in the margin where the couplet A 4091-92 is missing, rather than to copy out the couplet from his superior exemplars or to invent a correction that would repair the loss.29 Finally the only argument for Jean's involvement in the first layer of this manu-script's production is Crow's own: If we assume Duxworth to be a dull, dutiful copyist who can only author "crude spurious lines," then we need a heavily involved Jean to make all the cre-ative decisions about "improvements to the meaning."30

Crow's conviction that Duxworth is at best an organic type-writer derives from a genealogical philology that declares all scribal variants to be deleterious corruptions in order establish a stemma or family tree of manuscripts leading back to the au-thor's original text. Bernard Cerquiglini argues effectively that the stemma's accuracy is predicated on the scribe's inaccuracy: "Toute copie est un declin... . Le scribe est une machine, et cette machine doit fonctionner mal, afin que la pluralite et l'exces des variantes s'ordonnent, laissent apparaitre les pentes de 1'adultera-tion, dessinent les branches genealogiques de la famille manus-crite" [Every copy is a degeneration. . . . The scribe is a machine, and this machine must function badly, so that the plurality and excess of variants will fall into order, reveal the slopes of adulter-ation, and draw the genealogical branches of the manuscript fam-ily].31 Manly and Rickert, who supervised Crow's dissertation, respond at length to critiques of the genealogical method, but end by adopting its premises in modified form for their immensely complex task of attempting to recover the texts closest to Chau-cer's drafts of the Canterbury Tales.32 This philology's devalua-tion of the copyist often requires positing an interventionist editor, director, or patron to account for a manuscript's innova-tions. Crow's position that Duxworth is uninventive requires that he attribute several unique features of the Paris manuscript to the clever patron Jean d'Angouleme, despite the evidence to the contrary. Manly and Rickert accept Crow's evaluation and con-

26 SUSAN CRANE

elude that the manuscript "is interesting only as an early 'edi-tion,' " with scare quotes to diminish even that interest.33

The idea that an editor or patron should be posited for any manuscript's intelligent choices sustains the scribe's machinelike predictability. The editor is a sort of epicycle for the genealogical method, an adjustment of the premise that all copies are degener-ative to fit the evidence that some copies may make recoveries or improvements that modern editors might respect. The conviction that editors directed scribes in the production of many early Can-terbury Tales manuscripts persists even where there is no textual evidence for it. For example, in the important work of A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes on the production of these early manuscripts, the idiosyncracies of Harley 7334 are attributed to "an editor" because "some of these readings are of such high quality as to presuppose good literary taste."34 The Ellesmere manuscript, be-cause "an intelligent person has thus developed the potential of Chaucer's unfinished material," is compared to contemporary manuscripts for which editors are known.35 Yet the only copyist Doyle and Parkes study whose name is known, Thomas Hoccleve, certainly had sufficient literary taste and intelligence to assemble manuscripts on his own. In the absence of concrete evidence for editors, Doyle and Parkes invoke the differences between the Canterbury Tales manuscripts produced by the Hengwrt-Elles-mere scribe and the Harley 7334-Corpus scribe: "Since different interpretations occur in copies produced by the same scribes it seems more likely that the scribes were following different in-structions or different exemplars whilst executing different com-missions than that they were responsible for the different interpretations themselves."36 The logic of the argument remains dependent on the scribes' presumed lack of intelligence and ini-tiative—on their inability to learn from the experience of making a manuscript and their incapacity to reinterpret and reorganize what they copy.

Recent developments in textual criticism have however made it possible to believe that scribes like Duxworth both copied Chau-cer's text and made intelligent decisions about it. Malcolm Parkes and Alastair Minnis have built a richly historical argument for the importance of compilatio to learning and to manuscript pro-duction from the twelfth century onwards.37 Based in a scholar-ship that required easy access to many authoritative texts and their repeated consultation during research and writing, compi-

DUXWORTH REDUX 27

latio encompassed choices about selection, arrangement, and apparatus during manuscript production. One important implica-tion of this work for manuscript studies is that the comparative, selective, and analytical tendencies of compilatio would have been basic to the education of all clerically trained scribes. Educa-tion in scholastic and Aristotelian methods prepared all men of learning to reproduce the kinds of collections useful to them; compilatio made careful reading, accurate copying, and intelli-gent selection into contiguous features of scribal activity.

Further developments in textual criticism have contributed as well to the recognition that medieval scribes could be more than mere copyists. There is a growing recognition that scribes partici-pate in establishing an author's canon and text. Seth Lerer has brought to the early Chaucer manuscripts a historicized under-standing of authors as the creations of their audiences, and of "literary works as products of their transmission, rather than of their creation."38 Bernard Cerquiglini argues that there is a pro-found difference between the modern notion of the stable autho-rial text and a medieval "authenticity generalisee" [generalized authenticity] that encompasses many scribal variants and copies within the category of the authoritative text.39 To be sure, most modern scholars continue to be interested in attempting to re-cover an approximately authorial text, but they concede that scribes may be showing in variants their own informed respect for the author. Studies of George Kane's and E. Talbot Donald-son's edition of Piers Plowman, which retains a genealogical method but licenses modern editors to correct even the best manuscripts, have questioned the edition's premise that scribal variants are mere corruptions to be cleaned away.40 Extending Barry Windeatt's work on scribes as literary critics, Derek Pear-sall notes that "manuscripts dismissed as worthless by editors of critical texts are often the very ones where scribal editors have participated most fully in the activity of a poem."41 The concept of the scribal editor resists the older rigidity of the author-editor-scribe hierarchy, and recognizes a fluid, complex textual situation in which scribes participate in establishing the author's canon and even the author's text. If Crow were working today, he might well have concluded that all features of the Paris manuscript in Duxworth's handwriting reflect Duxworth's decisions, since scholarship on other fifteenth-century manuscripts now acknowl-

28 SUSAN CRANE

edges that scribes who copied with care also intervened to ar-range, revise, and even supplement the copied text.

I have argued that, despite the apparently distinct goals and questions of recensionists on the one hand and receptionists on the other—the former apparently focused on recovering the au-thor's text and the latter on analyzing how scribes and other readers understood that text—the premises of recensionists have profoundly affected studies of historical reception. The false di-chotomy between scribe and editor that has sustained the genea-logical method has in turn falsified studies of Duxworth's reception of Chaucer's text. Having argued that the Paris manu-script shows Duxworth's hand to have been under the control of Duxworth's brain, I will go on now to discuss how Duxworth's treatment of his text fits the tendencies of compilatio and scribal editing as they are revealed in other manuscripts of the Canter-bury Tales. The Paris manuscript is not as close to Chaucer's chi-merical autograph as the earliest manuscripts are, but the Paris manuscript is consonant with the earliest manuscripts in its ways of receiving and responding to texts.

As outlined above in relation to the work of Parkes and Minnis, compilatio is a reflective, interventionist process that takes place across the reading, copying, and annotating of authoritative texts. Duxworth ties the tales of fragment A to fragment B1

neatly inside a column with the line "Explicit fabula Prepositi et subsequenter sequntur verba Galfridi Chauucers compilatoris libri" [here ends the Reeve's tale and next follow the words of Geoffrey Chaucer, the compiler of the book]. Other early Canter-bury Tales manuscripts similarly characterize the work as a com-pilation: The Ellesmere manuscript closes "Heere is ended the book of the tales of Caunterbury compiled by Geffrey Chaucer," and John Shirley's headnote to Harley 7333 characterizes its con-tents as "the tales of Caunterburye wiche beon compilid in this boke."42 In its first sense, compiling texts requires and serves clerical learning by making selected passages accessible to study and comparison. Chaucer presents himself as a secular compiler in attributing his tales to pilgrims, in claiming he must repeat each tale accurately, and in drawing on various authorities in pas-sages such as the Wife of Bath's self-defense and Dorigen's medi-tation on suicide. Compiling has lower status than the work of an auctor, and Chaucer's compiling persona may have emboldened

DUXWORTH REDUX 29

the early copyists who describe Chaucer as a compilator to fur-ther arrange and edit the Canterbury Tales. Doyle and Parkes point to many features of the Ellesmere manuscript's layout and presentation that stress the work's inherent compilatio and ex-tend compilation in the editorial process: Space is reserved for marginal glosses, headnotes stress that the tales' sources are the pilgrim tellers, and the text has been in various ways tidied and arranged to appear as complete as possible.43 Other early revi-sions such as the insertion of the Tale of Gamelyn in place of the Cook's fragment and the alteration of links or the invention of new ones can also be traced to the principle of compilatio. To be sure, Chaucer's early copyists are aware that he is only figura-tively a compiler and more accurately a "laureal and moste fa-mous poete," to quote again from Shirley's headnote.44 But in this early phase of Chaucerian transmission, reverence for au-thorship does not inhibit scribes from collaborative efforts of compilation.

Like other early manuscripts, the Paris manuscript reflects many aspects of compilatio. To begin with those most external to the text, those in Jean d'Angouleme's handwriting, Parkes has shown that it is typical of owners' treatment of their manuscripts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to add just the kind of apparatus Jean adds to this and to his other manuscripts: Tables of contents, rubrics, and running titles make works more accessi-ble to repeated reference.45 Duxworth inserts in-column Latin commentary that clarify transitions or create them when neces-sary. Such comments may indicate who is speaking, for example in the exchange between the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner (D 162-87), where Duxworth annotates within the columns "Verba Perdonarii ad Uxorem de Bathe," "Verba Uxoris ad Perdona-rium," and finally "Hie narrat Uxor de Bathe aliam partem pro-hemii fabule sue" [here the Wife of Bath narrates another part of the prologue to her tale]. Duxworth's transitions between tales and groups, which occur within the text columns and without space breaks, further contribute to the manuscript's coherence. "Explicit fabula Apparitoris et subsequenter incipit prohemium fabule Mercatoris hoc modo sequente" [here ends the Summon-er's tale and next begins the prologue to the Merchant's tale in the following manner] stitches group D to group E2; all the divi-sions between fragments are so treated.

Compilatio values both coherence and selectivity, which pro-

30 SUSAN CRANE

duces an intriguing tension between respect for authorities and cutting them. This tension may illuminate the Paris manuscript's most well-known feature, its omissions. In all, there are seven of these: The Cook's Prologue and Tale are omitted altogether, Sir Thopas is cut after eighteen lines, the Squire's Tale is cut after twenty lines, the Monk's Tale after thirty-two lines, and lines G 749-1394 are cut from the middle of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. Three leaves were left blank for the Tale ofMelibee after its intro-duction, and group I (Parson's Prologue and Tale and Retraction) is not in the manuscript, Duxworth's signature following immedi-ately upon the conclusion of the Manciple's Tale.46 The omission of the prose tales, particularly the Melibee for which space was reserved, may have more to do with available exemplars than with editorial choice.

When the silent cuts to verse tales are considered together with the cuts whose explicits note disapproval, a striking pattern emerges: All the fragmentary tales have been omitted or short-ened. I believe that cutting the fragments is compatible with re-spect for Chaucer's authorship. How many modern critics have argued that Chaucer himself was dissatisfied with these tales and therefore did not complete them? The Cook's Tale would have been repetitive after the two preceding fabliaux, the Squire's Tale and Sir Thopas have inept tellers, the Monk's Tale is as dreary as the Knight complains.47 In such analyses, Chaucer's suspension of the fragmentary tales testifies to his artistic sensitivity; by fur-ther shortening or canceling them, Duxworth may be endorsing the view he believed Chaucer held of them. The Canon's Yeo-man's Tale is the only complete tale to suffer a cut from Dux-worth, but in the plan of the tales it may have appeared an afterthought, an experimental addition that did not have the ca-nonical status of the other tales.48 This is not to say that the liter-ary judgments in Duxworth's explicits are meaningless, but rather that Duxworth's comments had textual grounds—the same grounds modern critics have stood upon: Chaucer's own suspension or belated inclusion of these tales.49 Their dubious status makes their condensation or omission compatible with re-specting Chaucer's authorship and with assembling a compre-hensive manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.

Other unique features of the Paris manuscript contribute more obviously to comprehensiveness. Where they overlap, the Paris manuscript and Harley 1239 are closely related, but the Harley

DUXWORTH REDUX 31

manuscript contains only five tales (Knight's, Man of Law's, Clerk's, Wife of Bath's, and Franklin's). In contrast to the Harley scribe's selectivity (or his exemplar's), Duxworth drew on more than one exemplar in copying to produce what Manly and Rickert call a "pick-up" manuscript.50 As discussed above, Duxworth and Jean both corrected the text from additional exemplars. Indeed, to my knowledge the Paris manuscript shows influence from more exemplars than any other Canterbury Tales manuscript. The effort to find and incorporate as many texts as possible re-flects the scholarly impulse of compilation although the composite results are less than rewarding for the genealogical method of re-constructing Chaucer's own decisions about compilation.

Duxworth incorporates into his columns of text some of the longer Latin glosses from the manuscript tradition (see Figure 3). These glosses are distinguished orthographically but not spatially from Chaucer's English text. For Doyle and Parkes, Duxworth's layout would be less "sophisticated" than the Ellesmere layout, where space is reserved from the outset for marginalia.51 It might be argued, however, that Duxworth's simplified layout follows the principle of inclusiveness that partly characterizes com-pilatio. As Graham Caie notes, the Latin glosses in the best Canterbury Tales manuscripts "provide contemporary—if not authorial—comment, and were considered as an integral part of the text by scribes for a hundred years."52 He argues for the prominence of glosses in the fifteenth-century Canterbury Tales manuscripts based on the width of margins allotted for them and the equivalent size of the writing of glosses and text; by these measures Duxworth has emphasized more than most that the glosses are "an important part of the work."53 The glosses' slightly larger and more formal script indeed elevates the status of the gloss above that of Chaucer's text, sustaining compilations veneration for authorities. In Dorigen's lament, for example (Fig-ure 3), the layout reflects Dorigen's own deference to what "bookes telle" (F 1378), intercalating the glosses neatly into her own references to their lessons. At the same time, the difference in scripts opens the possibility of a tension between text and gloss reflective of the tale's problematic differentiation between what Dorigen cites and what she herself does with regard to suicide. The look of the page reinforces the tale's sense that glossing, in Robert Hanning's excellent formulation, is "a strategic and usu-ally coercive operation performed on people" rather than "a

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DUXWORTH REDUX 33

scholarly operation performed on texts."54 The full engagement of gloss and text in Duxworth's layout emphasizes both Dorigen's deference to authorities and her resistance to obeying them. In more general terms, Duxworth's layout reminds readers of both the authorities' cultural power and compilations revisionary po-tential—of the interpretive and judgmental activity latent in compilations apparently reverential selecting and arranging.

Duxworth also makes numerous small revisions to Chaucer's text that fall outside the principles of compilation. The mechanics of copying generate some of the unique variants in the Paris manuscript. At several points, an invented line or couplet con-ceals a mistake in copying: For example, misled by the recurrence of the rhyme, Duxworth copied line A 2738 after A 2732, and cov-ered the miscopying by adding the spurious line "To alle that ther were ful wurthilye." He then recopied line A 2738 in its proper place.55 The last line visible in Figure 2, "The derke tresons and the castes olde" (A 2468), has become in Duxworth's copying "the derknesse and the prisons in the castell old," presumably because he could not decipher "tresons" or "castes" in his exem-plar. Some lesser revisions can be traced to the rapid evolution of English in the first half of the fifteenth century.56

In contrast to these relatively minor deviations are nine pas-sages of one to eight lines that expand Chaucer's text. After A 3208 comes an extension of the description of Nicholas's student paraphernalia:

Grayel myssal and holy Evaungel Of marke alkyndys wryten fayre and wel The book that hight non est judicium His astrelabyr and his albyon And his instrumentys everichon Of smale and grete many on For to makyn his equacyouns And roots of his verificaciouns.

Three passages expand the Friar's sententious talk in the Sum-moner's Tale, one in the Friar's Tale elaborates on the devil's dis-guises, one extends a rhetorical question in the Merchant's Tale, and three in the Franklin's Tale emphasize the lesson of patience and the pain of Aurelius's lovesickness.57 Crow, in attributing these passages to Jean rather than Duxworth, proposed that they

34 SUSAN CRANE

express "some of the prisoner's philosophy," but they more accu-rately expand the content of the adjoining lines, with the effect of an enthusiastic endorsement rather than a modification or resis-tance to the text.58

The major challenge that Duxworth's variants present to tex-tual scholarship is that they make sense. Across their full range, not just in the most obvious additions and deletions, the variants reflect scribal editing, often informed by principles of compilatio. The recovery of Chaucer's text would be more straightforward if scribes were simply either accurate or careless copyists. Dux-worth's contemporary John Shirley presents an easier case for the traditional textual scholar, according to Aage Brusendorff: Shirley's texts "were not consciously altered, but unconsciously corrupted."59 But Duxworth's changes are typical of the most au-thoritative manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. It requires intel-ligence of an editorial kind to substitute a familiar for an unfamiliar word, to write supplementary lines, to correct the meter of a line, to render a confusing line more clearly, and to plan for cuts and transitions where exemplars are incomplete. This kind of intelligence characterized many of the early Canter-bury Tales copyists.

Early manuscripts illustrate all the kinds of deviation Dux-worth practices. The scribe of Cambridge Gg miscopies the end of F 1109, "Under his brest he baar it moore secree," and adds a spurious line to complete the couplet: "Under his brest he bar it sore / And so fer forth it grevede hym moore." Harley 7334 omits line A 2655 and conceals the omission by adding the line "Ne noon schal lenger unto his felaw goon" after A 2656. Egerton 2726 similarly conceals its omission of D 2229 by adding after D 2230 "That a fart shold be departed nowe." More interventionist is Egerton's addition of a couplet to the Franklin's Tale after line F 922, "For which she was in thought and in woo / And she wost nat what was best to doo." Bodley 686 intercalates lines into the fragmentary Cook's Tale to produce a semblance of completeness, and Harley 7334 adds three couplets to the Summoner's Tale which expand the Friar's sententiousness just as Duxworth's ad-ditions endorse and expand the text.60 The Harley manuscript adds:

Schortly may no man by rym and vers Teilen her thoughtes, thay ben so dyvers

(after D 2004)

DUXWORTH REDUX 35

Ire is the grate of synne as saith the wise To fle ther fro ech man schuld him devyse

(after D 2012)

An irous man is lik a frenetik best In which ther is of wisdom noon arrest

(after D 2048)61

The eight lines Duxworth adds to this tale similarly press the Fri-ar's case harder than Chaucer pressed it, by extending the sense of the authentic lines (additions in brackets):

Ful hard it is with flesshook or with oules [For to alure haukis and make hem come to hand And harder yt is yee may wel undirstand Any of yow to wynne hevyn without good dedis Yee most gyfe to us pouer freris ther as gret nede is]

(after D 1730)

And for hir lewednesse I hem diffye [That in such thing setten al her delyte For in tyme to come God wil hem sore smyte]

(after D 1928)

Thomas, that jape nys nat worth a myte. Youre maladye is for we han to lyte. [For I sey pleynly without more advysement That your testament is no wurth a bent]

(after D 1962)

For early copyists, reverence for the author is compatible with ex-panding his text. Even small revisions within single lines may have had literary and aesthetic aims, such as Duxworth's line A 2433, visible in Figure 2: The voice of Mars becomes "lowde" in-stead of "ful lowe and dim," perhaps to stress the importance of its message, as the inked box around "victorie" also seems to do. The scribe of Egerton 2726 makes a similar literary revision by completing the Wife of Bath's "Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal" (D 45) with the spurious line "I woll hym nat for-sake nothing at al," which replaces the more ambiguous "For sothe I wol nat kepe me chaast in al" (D 46) .62 Such editorial in-terventions are difficult or impossible to discern in the very oldest manuscripts, but there is no reason to assume that none were

36 SUSAN CRANE

made, particularly in view of the incomplete, even scattered, con-dition of the tales at Chaucer's death.

John Duxworth is, I conclude, typical of the early Canterbury Tales scribes in the kinds of revisions (and errors) he makes, and in conceiving his role as compilator to encompass choices about ordering, selecting, and omitting text. His added lines, reduced fragments, and collating explicits follow the tendencies of the other early scribes and need not be explained by an exceptionally interventionist patron. More generally, that scribes perform com-pilatio in addition to copying implies that from the earliest manu-scripts of the Tales, exemplars, even Chaucerian autographs, are being altered as they are copied. To the degree that modern read-ers desire access to Chaucer's words, they will continue to find the version of scribal activity in "Adam Scriveyn" both congenial and frustrating:

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe, Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle, But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe; So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe, It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.63

Adam makes apparently pointless changes that are not "trewe" to Chaucer's texts and that he must "correcte"; no motive can be imagined for those changes but "negligence and rape." According to this lyric, the author is the sole intelligence behind the scribal copy, and the scribe is the imperfect machinery of reproduction. "Adam Scriveyn" could well be nominated the anthem of the genealogical method. But Chaucer's lyric is inaccurate to the relation between scribe and text, as his own more subtle repre-sentations of himself as copyist and compiler recognize. In Troi-lus and Criseyde he repeatedly claims to echo his auctor, for example in the prologue to Book II: "Disblameth me if any word be lame, / For as myn auctor seyde, so sey I." But immediately he also conceives that he may speak differently from his auctor: "Ek though I speeke of love unfelyngly, / No wondre is," for he has no personal experience of love.64 A similar account begins the Trea-tise on the Astrolabe, where Chaucer declares that "I n'am but a lewed compilator of the labour of olde astrologiens" just after

DUXWORTH REDUX 37

explaining that he has chosen to use simple language ("rude endi-tyng") and repetition (" superfluite of wordes") in order to teach his son more effectively.65 To be sure, in both cases the claim merely to repeat or compile is closer to a humility topos than a literal truth, but my point holds even if Chaucer is only figura-tively copying or compiling: In both cases, to repeat an author or compile from several does not preclude interventions. This cre-ative relation of source and copy characterizes the early manu-scripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as well as Chaucer's own figuration of his work.66

NOTES

1. Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, "Jean d'Orleans, Comte d'Angouleme, d'apres sa bibliotheque," Bibliotheque de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Paris 3 (1897): 39-92; Dupont-Ferrier, "La captivite de Jean d'Orleans, Comte d'An-gouleme (1412-1445)," Revue historique 62 (September-December 1896): 42-74; Gilbert Ouy, "Recherches sur la librairie de Charles d'Orleans et de Jean d'Angouleme pendant leur captivite en Angleterre, et etude de deux manuscrits autographes de Charles d'Orleans recemment identifies," Academie des Inscrip-tions et Belles Lettres. Comptes rendus des seances de l'annee (1955): 273-87. Ouy has identified seven manuscripts from Jean's library that were not identi-fied by Dupont-Ferrier, including one in Jean's hand (275).

2. Mary-Jo Arn and Gilbert Ouy are considering whether Duxworth's hand appears in manuscripts that belonged to Charles d'Orleans. On the brothers' interactions during their captivity, see Ouy, "Recherches sur la librairie," and the less conclusive work of Lucy de Angulo, "Charles and Jean d'Orleans: An Attempt to Trace the Contacts Between Them During Their Captivity in En-gland," Miscellanea di studi e ricerche sul quattrocento francese, ed. Franco Si-mone (Turin: Giappichelli, 1967), 59-92.

3. John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 1:405; see 1:399-405 for their description of the Paris manuscript.

4. Manly and Rickert, Text, 1:403; the Canterbury Tales manuscript is Paris, B.N.F., MS anglais 39, and the Dialogue of St. Anselm is Paris, B.N.F., MS Latin 3436. Both are listed in the 1467 catalog of Jean d'Angouleme's manuscripts: Dupont-Ferrier, "Jean d'Orleans," 64, item 37; 86, item 134.

5. Martin M. Crow, "Scribal Habits Illustrated in the Paris Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales," Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1934. Crow published most of the material in the dissertation in a series of articles on the manuscript: "Corrections in the Paris Manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: A Study in Scribal Collaboration," University of Texas Studies in English 15 (1935): 5—18; "Unique Variants in the Paris Manuscript of Chaucer's Canter-bury Tales," University of Texas Studies in English 16 (1936): 17-41; "The Reeve's Tale in the Hands of a North Midland Scribe," University of Texas Stud-

38 SUSAN CRANE

ies in English 18 (1938): 14-24; and "John of Angouleme and His Chaucer Manuscript," Speculum 17 (1942): 86-99.

6. Crow describes this as a "neat, pointed, rather cursive charter hand, here adapted to book purposes" ("Corrections," 6). Manly and Rickert call it a "small chancery hand" (Text, 1:400).

7. Manly and Rickert call this script "Latin book hand" (Text, 1:400), but the letter forms change very little from the English to the Latin passages. Don-ald Bullough has suggested to me that the scribe changed pens but not script. Crow describes this script as "the same pointed hand but with fewer cursive qualities. The strokes are firmer and heavier" ("Scribal Habits," 14).

8. I use the letter designations rather than Roman numeral designations for fragments to facilitate cross-reference to Crow's and other earlier articles; my citations from Chaucer's texts, unless noted as taken from the Paris or other manuscripts, are from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1987). The order of the fragments in the Paris manuscript is A, Bl, El, D, E2, F, C, B2, G, H (that is, the Clerk's Tale comes before rather than after Group D). In all my citations from the manuscript I have modernized spelling for the letters u and v and the letters i and j, transcribed thorns as th, expanded abbreviations, and added some capitalization and punctuation.

9. Crow, "John of Angouleme," 97. 10. See Crow, "Unique Variants," 26-27. 11. Crow, "John of Angouleme," 97. 12. On Jean's handwriting see Dupont-Ferrier, "Jean d'Orleans," 70-71; on

his corrections in the Paris manuscript see Crow, "Corrections." 13. Crow, "Corrections," 10-15. 14. Ibid., 8-10. 15. On the exemplars for corrections, see ibid., 9-10, 15; and "John of An-

gouleme," 88 n. 5. 16. Crow, "Corrections," 10; "John of Angouleme," 96. 17. Crow, "John of Angouleme," 96-97. 18. Manly and Rickert, 1:403. 19. Charles A. Owen, Jr., "The Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales," Chau-

cer Studies 17 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991), 27. 20. Derek Pearsall, "Texts, Textual Criticism and Fifteenth-Century Manu-

script Production," in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984), 131.1 quote from leading textual schol-ars to demonstrate the impact of Crow's thesis, but de Angulo imagines the scene most vividly: "more than once he stopped Duxworth in the midst of a tale, bidding him to go on to the next one; and Duxworth did as he was told, after putting down in Latin the reasons for the omission" ("Charles and Jean d'Or-leans," 78).

21. See Dupont-Ferrier, "La captivite de Jean d'Orleans"; Ouy, "Recherches sur la librairie"; and, with caution, de Angulo, "Charles and Jean d'Orleans" for details of Jean's years in England.

22. Dupont-Ferrier, "Jean d'Orleans," 50-52, and "La captivite de Jean d'Orleans," 52-53.

23. Ouy, "Recherches sur la librairie"; Dupont-Ferrier, "La captivite de Jean d'Orleans," 52-53, and "Jean d'Orleans," 74 (no. 85 in the inventory), 79 (no. 100 in the inventory), 86 (no. 134 in the inventory).

DUXWORTH REDUX 39

24. Dupont-Ferrier, "La captivite de Jean d'Orleans," 53. 25. Dupont-Ferrier, "Jean d'Orleans," 43. 26. Crow, "Corrections," and "John of Angouleme," 88 n. 5. 27. Christopher de Hamel has deduced that the capitals were added in

France from the fact that, even where the guide letter for capital letters is clearly a W, the rubricator adds capital U (w not being a letter in use in France); the absence of capitals where guide letters are not provided sustains his deduc-tion: For example, in Figure 1 the first six lines of the second column are slightly offset to make space for a capital I (to begin the Franklin's words to the Squire, "In feith esquuer thou hast the wel quytte"); the capital is missing perhaps be-cause the French rubricator needed a guide letter.

28. Crow, "Unique Variants," 29-39 (quotation, 30). 29. See Crow, "Corrections," 10-15; the diffidence indicated by providing

"defectus" (fo. 23 recto) rather than a correction or unique variant is character-istic of Jean's literary identity: commenting on Jean's own compositions, Du-pont-Ferrier concludes, "Prose ou Poesie, en realite, Jean d'Angouleme parait bien n'avoir jamais compose un livre original. . . . Ainsi, lire, resumer, compiler infatigablement, ne jamais secouer la tyrannie de sa propre memoire, eternelle-ment vivre sous le joug de la pensee d'autrui, et faire servir l'accumulation des connaissances ainsi acquises ä l'harmonieux developpement de sa nature reli-gieuse et de sa nature morale,—telle nous parait avoir ete la täche double que s'imposa Jean d'Angouleme" [Prose or poetry, in reality Jean d'Angouleme seems never to have composed an original work.... Thus to read, to summarize, to compile tirelessly, never to challenge the tyranny of his own memory, to live eternally under the yoke of others' thought, and to make the accumulation of knowledge thus acquired serve the harmonious development of his religious and his moral nature—this seems to us to have been the double task that Jean d'An-gouleme imposed on himself] ("Jean d'Orleans," 53-54).

30. Crow, "John of Angouleme," 96, and "Unique Variants," 23. 31. Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge de la Variante: histoire critique de la philolo-

gie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 76. 32. Manly and Rickert, 2:12-45. 33. Ibid., 1:401. 34. A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, "The Production of Copies of the Canter-

bury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century," in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scholar Press, 1978), 192-93.

35. Ibid., 191-92. 36. Ibid., 194. Doyle and Parkes argue against the existence of commercial

bookshops in this period (197-203); the bookshop model of production (owner/ employee) used to reinforce the conception that scribes could take little initia-tive.

37. A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship (London: Scolar Press, 1984), especially pp. 190-210; M. B. Parkes, "The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book," in Medieval Learn-ing and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alex-ander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 115-41.

38. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 9.

40 SUSAN CRANE

39. Cerquiglini, 79. Ralph Hanna's more conservative "On Stemmatics," in his Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 83-93, presents its genealogical inves-tigation "as a transmission history, not as the tool that at most places has en-abled us to edit the text" (87).

40. See especially Lee Patterson, "The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective," in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 55-91; Charlotte Brewer, "Authorial Vs. Scribal Writing in Piers Plowman," in Medieval Literature: Texts and Inter-pretation, ed. Tim William Machan (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renais-sance Texts and Studies, 1991), 59-89; on scribal versus authorial variants in the Kane-Donaldson method and in Chaucer texts see Ralph Hanna III, "Autho-rial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, The Truth About Truth," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 23-40; and Hanna, Pursuing History, 203-43 ("On the Versions of Piers Plowman").

41. Barry Windeatt, "The Scribes as Chaucer's Early Critics," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 119-41; Pearsall, "Texts, Textual Criticism," 128. See also Pearsall, "Editing Medieval Texts: Some Developments and Some Prob-lems," in Textual Criticism, ed. McGann, 92-106; and Bernadette A. Masters, "Anglo-Norman in Context: The Case for the Scribes," Exemplaria 6 (1994): 167-203.

42. San Marino, Huntington Lib. MS EL 27 C 9; London, Brit. Lib., MS Har-ley 7333. Especially useful for checking the compilatio of manuscripts is William McCormick, with Janet E. Heseltine, The Manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); for the examples cited here, see 153,200.

43. Doyle and Parkes, 185-92; see also Ralph Hanna III, "Compilatio and the Wife of Bath: Latin Backgrounds, Ricardian Texts," in Latin and Vernacu-lar: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cam-bridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), 1-11.

44. On Chaucer as compiler and author see Parkes, "Influence of the Con-cepts," 130-31.

45. Parkes, "Influence," 135-37. 46. Most accounts note that the Paris manuscript has one leaf reserved for

the Tale ofMelibee, but Crow discerned that originally there were three leaves reserved for Melibee at the end of the sixth quire, the last two of which are no longer in the manuscript ("Scribal Habits," 12).

47. Notes in the Riverside Chaucer will guide the curious reader to these ar-guments.

48. Patterson calls CYT "an innovative tale of the last moment," tying its content to its dramatic "urgency and belatedness," although he finds merit in its exceptional qualities rather than grounds for censure: "Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 25-57 (quotations, 29, 31).

49. The best argument that taste alone guides the cuts is Paul Strohm, "Jean of Angouleme: A Fifteenth Century Reader of Chaucer," Neuphilologische Mit-teilungen 72 (1971): 69-76. But the consonance of cuts and fragmentary tales is so striking as to deserve notice. In addition to respecting Chaucer's own "cuts"

DUXWORTH REDUX 41

to these tales, Duxworth may be taking advantage of it: he cuts his own labor by further shortening what is already incomplete.

50. Manly and Rickert, 1:401. 51. Doyle and Parkes, 191; see also Stephen Partridge, "Glosses in the Manu-

scripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: An Edition and Commentary," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992.

52. Graham D. Caie, "The Significance of Marginal Glosses in the Earliest Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales," in Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), 77. Par-tridge, "Glosses," renews the argument that Chaucer is responsible for the longer Latin glosses in early manuscripts.

53. Graham D. Caie, "The Significance of the Early Chaucer Manuscript Glosses (with Special Reference to the Wife of Bath's Prologue," The Chaucer Review 10 (1975-1976): 350. Caie adds of the Ellesmere manuscript that the off-centered text gives such prominence to the glosses that "in a sense it is a misno-mer to call them 'marginalia' at all" (350); again Duxworth's layout more di-rectly expresses that status for the glosses.

54. Robert W. Hanning, " 'I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose': Versions of Tex-tual Harassment in Medieval Literature," in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1987), 28; see also Susan Schibanoff, "The New Reader and Female Textuality in Two Early Commentaries on Chaucer," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 71-108.

55. Crow, "Unique Variants," 20-21. 56. Where final e is lost or not counted in scansion, Duxworth adds a word to

fill in the meter. For example, "This Emeleye with hert [ful] debonayre" (A 2282) is supplemented because the final e of "herte" has dropped away, no longer recognized as a syllable. Duxworth also substitutes familiar words for words that were becoming obsolete: hooly replaces unwemmed (B 924), creature replaces wight (D 135), maners replaces thewes (E 1542), comaundementz re-places heestes (C 640), turne replaces recche (B 4086), ryden replaces priked (G 561): see Crow, "Unique Variants," 20, 23-24.

57. Crow prints all the additions in "Unique Variants," 26. 58. Crow, "John of Angouleme," 97. 59. Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (London: Oxford Univ. Press,

1925), 207-36 (quotation, 234). 60. Cambridge, Univ. Lib., MS Gg. iv. 27; London, Brit. Lib., MS Harley

7334; London, Brit. Lib., MS Egerton 2726; Oxford, Bodleian Lib., MS Bodley 686. Quotations are from McCormick, Manuscripts, 40-41, 121-22, 174, 210-11 .

61. These lines from Harley 7334 are in the view of Doyle and Parkes "appar-ently the work of an editor" in that they show "good literary taste" ("The Pro-duction of Copies," 192-93).

62. See McCormick, 121. 63. "Chaucers Wördes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn," in Riverside Chau-

cer, 650. 64. Troilus and Criseyde, in Riverside Chaucer, 2:17-20. 65. A Treatise on the Astrolabe, in Riverside Chaucer, 662.

42 SUSAN CRANE

66. For advice at many stages of this project I am grateful to Ralph Hanna, Mary-Jo Arn, Donald Bullough, Christopher de Hamel, Antonia Tripolitis, and Patricia Sommers.

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