I first met Linne Mooney in 1974 at the University of Toronto, where I had been invited to give a lecture and where she was newly embarked on a Ph.D. She was very young. Later she took up a post at the University of Maine in Orono, and when I left York to go to Harvard in 1985 I began to see more of her when she came down to attend our weekly medieval seminar, and on other occasions. At this time she was preparing an edition of the Kalendarium of John Somer, which was published in 1998 in the Chaucer Library Series. She was also working on some of the most complex and difficult of fifteenth-century literary manuscripts, most of them miscellanies, almost as if she were choosing them because they were difficult and therefore more interesting. She gave a talk at the Harvard seminar on one occasion about the lyrics in the famous miscellany in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19, beginning to make proper sense of them for the first time. She was also doing ongoing and never-ending work on the many manuscripts of Lydgate's Verses on the Kings of England, trying to establish some sort of order and coherence to their bewildering variety. Lydgate's Verses is not a work of great literary interest, to say the least, but Linne was not much worried by this, in fact she seemed to revel in it. I had to learn that my own interest in manuscripts, chiefly as valuable repositories of important literary texts, was not everyone’s. I went to a talk a long time ago by one of Linne's eminent predecessors as a codicologist and palaeographer, devoted to a description of a particular MS. I asked her afterwards, in my old-fashioned way, what was the text in the MS? ‘I don't know’, she said, ‘I don't do that sort of thing’.

In 1999 I organised a conference at Harvard called ‘New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies’, and one of the speakers I invited, keen to give her a larger hearing, was Linne. Her talk was about her work in identifying the hands of fifteenth-century vernacular scribes which appear in more than one manuscript.

THIS ESSAY IS AN attempt to find whether there is more to be said about the “Sutherland fragment,” one of the few remaining unanswered questions concerning the provenance of the manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis. The fragment is known from a photocopy of a single manuscript leaf, recto and verso, in the Huntington Library. The photocopy of the leaf was not included in the collection of manuscripts that was purchased by Henry Huntington in 1917 from the library of the Duke of Sutherland, probably then located in Bridgewater House in London. The leaf was, however, listed in the catalogue of the collection, which itself was sent with the manuscripts to the Huntington. In the 1960s, knowledge of the missing leaf encouraged the Huntington to ask about it and if possible for a photocopy of it, in order to complete their collection of the Sutherland manuscripts. A photocopy was duly sent and is now among the fragments listed in the Catalogue of the Huntington Library. That is the extent of knowledge of the fragment. What it consists of, what manuscript it is possibly missing from, why it was not sent with the original collection of manuscripts, where the original leaf is now, and what part it may have played in recent sales activity, are all possible avenues that this essay will try to explore.

For some years now, I have been engaged in the preparation of a Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis. Originally, in the 1980s, I had two collaborators: the late Jeremy Griffiths, a doctoral student with Malcolm Parkes in Oxford, and Kate Harris, a doctoral student with me at York. The former took a leading role in the original planning, including the template for the descriptions, a specimen description, and valuable notes on individual manuscripts, but he died in 1997, having long given up his interest in the work. Kate Harris completed a number of descriptions; her 1993 thesis remains invaluable in providing exact and detailed accounts of ownership and provenance for all manuscripts and a comprehensive record of all marginal comments on the text by its readers.

I have continued to work on the Gower manuscripts, but I am not primarily a codicologist and alone I made slow progress.