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Speculations on the Collation of a Lost Manuscript

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Curt F. Bühler
Curt F. Bühler*
Affiliation:
The Pierpont Morgan Library
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Extract

In my edition of The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, I pointed out that the text of the Helmingham Hall manuscript was badly disarranged towards the end of the volume. I there expressed the conviction that the confusion was due to twin faults, first that the leaves in the 'Vorlage’ (cited as V) used by the scribe of the Helmingham Hall MS. (cited as HH) had become jumbled and secondly that this scribe had mechanically and thoughtlessly followed his exemplar without paying the slightest attention to the text. Having recently had the occasion to examine this MS once again (now Glazier MS. 66), it occurred to me that some further deductions might be drawn from this scribal lapse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Summer 1968 , pp. 177 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1968

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References

1 Early English Text Society O.S. 211 (London, 1941), p. xxxviii and n. 3. The manuscript belongs to the third quarter of the fifteenth century.

2 A very similar instance will be found in MS. Royal 12. E. XVI of the British Museum. See my ‘Two Middle English Texts of the Somnia Danielis,’ Anglia LXXX (1962), 264-273.

3 Such scribal inattention is also set forth in my ‘The Fasciculus Temporum and Morgan Manuscript 801,’ Speculum XXVII (1952), 178-183.

4 See Plummer, John, The Glazier Collection of Illuminated Manuscripts (New York, 1968), pp. 36–37 Google Scholar, no. 48. The Glazier Collection has been placed on deposit in The Pierpont Morgan Library.

5 This is not strictly true, since one sentence is omitted at 63v (1. 6), but this is no more than the equivalent of a normal scribal slip. See my Dicts, p. 261,1. 30.

6 Of course, if V was irregularly constructed with varying quires and perhaps even with uneven numbers, then no conclusions whatever can be drawn from the scribal lapse. However, the conclusions set forth above have high mathematical and logical probability.

7 A series of 22 quires of 2 leaves is also possible, but both this and a series of 23 quires of 2 leaves are extremely unlikely.