Confessio Amantis, abridged, a small late MS.

Provincial centre, s.xvi, first half.

Contents

(fols 1ra–191rb) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 1–VIII.3172end

Prologue (fol. 1ra); Book I (fol. 8vb, but with incipit on 8va); Book II (fol. 32rb); Book III (fol. 55vb); Book IV (fol. 70rb); Book V (fol. 87va) lacks the bottom two lines of fol. 105r (V.2923–24) as the result of erasure; Book VI (fol. 130ra, but with incipit on 129vb); Book VII (fol. 141va); Book VIII (fol. 172rb, but with incipit on 172ra). Book I wants one leaf, with I.631–814, but space is left for later insertion, so that fol. 13rb is blank after two lines at top of column, and fols 13v–14r are left completely blank, the text resuming at I.815 at the top of fol. 14va. (Curiously, the twin text in Chetham leaves most of a column blank, fol. 9va, after I.815, but no text is missing, and the text resumes after the blank at I.816.)

A carefully abridged version of the text, almost identical with that in Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 6696. Lists of lines omitted are given in Macaulay (ed., Works, II.cxli) and a complete list of omissions, transpositions, insertions and substitutions is given in Harris, ‘Ownership and Readership’, Appendix II, pp. 283–92, where there is a side-by-side comparison of the two MSS (she discussed the Garrett MS earlier in ‘Virtues of Bad Texts’, 28–29). The omissions are deliberately designed to remove many of the exchanges between Amans and Genius and thus to emphasise by contrast the greater importance of the exemplary stories (in line with much of the later response to the poem). Fuller detail is given in the description of Manchester, Chetham’s MS 6696, above. Harris notes that Princeton is the earlier of the two, but not a direct exemplar (Harris, ‘Virtues of Bad Texts’, 28–29; Harris, ‘Ownership and Readership’, 110).