Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I International Perspectives
- 1 How English is it?
- 2 Middle Hiberno-English Poetry and the Nascent Bureaucratic Literary Culture of Ireland
- II Identities and Localities
- 3 Famous Scribe, Unrecognised Stint
- 4 The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks and the King’s French Secretaries
- 5 Seeking Scribal Communities in Medieval London
- 6 Scribes and Booklets: The ‘Trinity Anthologies’ Reconsidered
- III Scribal Production
- 7 Some Codicological Observations on Manuscripts of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection
- 8 The First Emergence of the Ricardian Confessio: Morgan M. 690
- 9 The Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ and the Significance of its Material Form
- 10 John Benet, Scribe and Compiler, and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516
- 11 The Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Glouc. D. 2): Scripts and Transcripts
- IV Chaucerian Contexts
- 12 When is a ‘Canterbury Tales Manuscript’ not Just a Canterbury Tales Manuscript?
- 13 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 and the Circulation of Chaucerian Manuscripts in the Sixteenth Century
- Afterword: A Personal Tribute
- Linne R. Mooney: List of Publications
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- York Medieval Press: Publications
6 - Scribes and Booklets: The ‘Trinity Anthologies’ Reconsidered
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I International Perspectives
- 1 How English is it?
- 2 Middle Hiberno-English Poetry and the Nascent Bureaucratic Literary Culture of Ireland
- II Identities and Localities
- 3 Famous Scribe, Unrecognised Stint
- 4 The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks and the King’s French Secretaries
- 5 Seeking Scribal Communities in Medieval London
- 6 Scribes and Booklets: The ‘Trinity Anthologies’ Reconsidered
- III Scribal Production
- 7 Some Codicological Observations on Manuscripts of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection
- 8 The First Emergence of the Ricardian Confessio: Morgan M. 690
- 9 The Anonymous ‘Kings of England’ and the Significance of its Material Form
- 10 John Benet, Scribe and Compiler, and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516
- 11 The Founders’ Book of Tewkesbury Abbey (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Glouc. D. 2): Scripts and Transcripts
- IV Chaucerian Contexts
- 12 When is a ‘Canterbury Tales Manuscript’ not Just a Canterbury Tales Manuscript?
- 13 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 and the Circulation of Chaucerian Manuscripts in the Sixteenth Century
- Afterword: A Personal Tribute
- Linne R. Mooney: List of Publications
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
- York Medieval Press: Publications
Summary
Trinity College, Cambridge [TCC], MSS R.3.19 and R.3.21 are bookletconstructed anthologies of shorter pieces in Middle English – secular and religious works in poetry and prose – with much of them ascribed to John Lydgate. Most of the booklets in both volumes were copied by a single scribe, but their separate foliation and grubby outer leaves indicate that the booklets existed as discrete units for some time. Linne Mooney's exemplary study of the division of scribal labour by booklet (Tables 1 and 2) detailed the stints of four late fifteenth-century copyists (scribes A, C, D and the ‘Hammond scribe’) and two sixteenth-century copyists (Scribe B and John Stow). She concluded that the fifteenth-century booklets were separately-produced as well as separately-used, with Scribe A's activity assigned to the 1460s and 1470s: ‘Perhaps by 1480, the exemplar booklets had passed to Caxton and from him to de Worde to serve as copytexts for their prints of English vernacular poetry and prose’. Again, more recently, Mooney viewed print's arrival as a mid-point in the timeline: Scribe A's booklets ‘remained in the London book trade up to the introduction of print’, while ‘later booklets’ by scribes C and D were ‘joined’ to those written by A (and possibly by Stow). The important consideration that underpins the earlier chronological placement of Scribe A's work is his same-booklet collaboration with the London-based Hammond scribe – and Mooney (like Eleanor Hammond before her) recognised the potential of such cooperation for what it might reveal about the circumstances of metropolitan book production on the advent of printing. Scribe A's relationship to the other producers of the Trinity booklets will be my focus, but I approach the subject via the illuminators and printers who were also certainly part of the wider environment in which these booklets were produced.
An unusually large volume of scholarship is associated with this group of unnamed fifteenth-century scribes, and with one of them in particular. The Hammond scribe (fl. c. 1458–80) is best known for preserving the shorter poems of Lydgate and Chaucer, and in copies derived in part from the manuscripts of his famous predecessor – the scribe, book collector, and man of business – John Shirley (d. 1456).
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- Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval EnglandEssays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney, pp. 146 - 180Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022