Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Cheese and the Worms and Robert Thornton
- 1 The Contents of Robert Thornton’s Manuscripts
- 2 Robert Thornton: Gentleman, Reader and Scribe
- 3 The Thornton Manuscripts and Book Production in York
- 4 The Text of the Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Prolegomenon for a Future Edition
- 5 ‘The rosselde spere to his herte rynnes’: Religious Violence in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript
- 6 Constantinian Christianity in the London Thornton Manuscript: The Codicological and Linguistic Evidence of Thornton’s Intentions
- 7 Apocryphal Romance in the London Thornton Manuscript
- 8 Thornton’s Remedies and the Practices of Medical Reading
- Afterword: Robert Thornton Country
- Bibliography
- Index of Manuscripts Cited
- General Index
- York Medieval Press: Publications
6 - Constantinian Christianity in the London Thornton Manuscript: The Codicological and Linguistic Evidence of Thornton’s Intentions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: The Cheese and the Worms and Robert Thornton
- 1 The Contents of Robert Thornton’s Manuscripts
- 2 Robert Thornton: Gentleman, Reader and Scribe
- 3 The Thornton Manuscripts and Book Production in York
- 4 The Text of the Alliterative Morte Arthure: A Prolegomenon for a Future Edition
- 5 ‘The rosselde spere to his herte rynnes’: Religious Violence in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Lincoln Thornton Manuscript
- 6 Constantinian Christianity in the London Thornton Manuscript: The Codicological and Linguistic Evidence of Thornton’s Intentions
- 7 Apocryphal Romance in the London Thornton Manuscript
- 8 Thornton’s Remedies and the Practices of Medical Reading
- Afterword: Robert Thornton Country
- Bibliography
- Index of Manuscripts Cited
- General Index
- York Medieval Press: Publications
Summary
Of late, scholars have expressed an increased interest in the activities of scribes as interpreters of literary texts and as co-participants, along with authors, in the creation of meaning. No longer are such author-centric views of literary culture, like George Kane’s, taken as a priori truths, with both errors and conscious emendations on the part of scribes mere white noise to be filtered out in the act of recovering the words of the author:
To sentimentalize such scribal response or to dignify it by calling it ‘criticism’ is unrewarding. … At the level of style it is the response of mediocrity to distinction. By its nature as variation it damages the work of art that evoked it. Scribal variation from the text of such a work cannot have ‘intrinsic’ value. The scribal variant is a deplorable circumstance of the manual transmission of texts. It has value only as evidence for the authorial reading it supplanted.
Of course, Kane is writing from the perspective of a critical editor, for whom recovering the words of the author is, by definition, paramount, and hence his Platonic view of textuality makes sense. But those Aristotelians among us, whose interests are in historicizing medieval literary-cultural practice, have turned to scribal activity, seeing scribes as exhibiting cultural agency – to varying degrees – and seeing it as the scholar’s job to retrieve that agency, which is rendered opaque by the critical edition. Studies have shown the diversity and creativity of scribal responses to Middle English religious literature,Chaucer’s Troilusand Canterbury Tales,Gower’s Confessio amantis,Piers Plowman,the work of John Lydgate, and Middle English romance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Robert Thornton and his BooksEssays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts, pp. 177 - 204Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014
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