III. The Methodology of Reassessment
Allowing that any true reassessment of Thornton must approach his scribal
contributions as legitimate objects of study, the present inquiry employs a two-
step process that first contrasts his manuscripts against other witnesses to
isolate
unique readings and then seeks explanations for those variants
consistent with
what is known of his background. When this strategy is
followed, patterns of
change emerge that commonly involve the insertion of
extraneous dialogue at-
tributions, conjunctions, negations, and
intensifiers as well as more generalized
stylistic smoothing through the
rearrangement of word order and explicit iden-
tification of a sentence's
subjects or objects. On occasion these changes seem
indifferent in effect,
but more often than not the copyist sacrifices poetic fea-
tures like
metricality to make basic syntactic structure and narrative content
more
explicit even when these elements should be perfectly clear to any reader.
Evaluating these elements of his scribal profile in light of what we can ascertain
about Thornton, the cumulative evidence suggests that he engaged in
predictable
interventions motivated by a desire to present these tales
orally for the moral
education of his family.
Providing a factual basis about Thornton's characteristic habits on which a
broader analysis and interpretation of his scribal agenda can rest presents its
own
challenges. Foremost among these difficulties is the selection of
specific works
from which reliable evidence regarding scribal habit may be
inferred. Given that
the purpose of this study is to differentiate one
scribe's emendations from those
originating with either the author or other
copyists, the most fundamental criteria
in choosing texts must be the
existence of independent witnesses to contrast with
the Thornton redactions.
This basic principle rests on the assumption that shared
readings between
related manuscripts often represent inherited text, whether ar-
chetypal or
not, whereas unique passages imply an original scribal intervention.[15]
Among those writings that meet this requirement, it would also seem
reasonable
to limit the study further to the same poems that have focused
scholarly attention
on Robert Thornton to ensure some homogeneity within the
evidence.[16]
These
prerequisites yield a basic corpus of six Middle English
romances: Sir Degrevant
(which survives in one other manuscript), Octovian
(existing in two manuscript
besides Thornton's), The Siege
of Jerusalem (for which eight other witnesses are
known), The Parlement of the Thre Ages (partially preserved in
another manuscript),
The Awntyrs off Arthure (recorded in three other
manuscripts), and Richard Coer de
Lyon (existing in
six other witnesses).[17]
With the issue of which works to include resolved, the next step in defining
the scope of this investigation involves choosing specific passages in each work
for collation. Since an acceptable policy must minimize the chance that
unchar-
acteristic copying stints or problematic stretches of text will skew
the study's
conclusions, selecting lengthy passages far removed from one
another seems the
most conservative approach. With these criteria in mind,
one finds that groups
of one hundred lines near the beginning and end of the
manuscript witnesses for
each text will serve admirably in almost every
case. An exception to this deci-
sion only appears justified when looking at
Richard Coer de Lyon, where accidental
duplication
of twenty lines by Thornton generates unique evidence outside these
boundaries equally deserving of inclusion in the study.[18]
The total body of text
under investigation according to these
standards will therefore be more than
four thousand lines in six texts
witnessed across twenty-seven manuscripts, an
extensive collection
of data that should provide enough material to accurately
characterize
Thornton's scribal habits.
Having established this study's textual boundaries, we can now address the
crucial matter of adopting guidelines to differentiate Thornton's scribal
interven-
tions from variants introduced by other copyists. Considering the
wide-spread
confusion evident in previous scholarship on this topic, it is
only sensible that
these principles set a standard for acceptable evidence
that is both concise in its
definition and equally clear about its
limitations.[19]
Consequently, no variant in
Thornton's manuscripts will be
definitively ascribed to his intervention in this
study unless analogous
readings appear several times across multiple texts in
his copies while
similar passages not found in his texts occur rarely in other wit-
nesses.
This simple procedure will allow for the swift identification of features
deserving closer evaluation and eliminate from consideration those of ambiguous
provenance: for example, if comparisons between the manuscript witnesses re-
veal that both Thornton and other scribes regularly omit pronouns, this
tendency
could not be credited with certainty to any one copyist even if
each instance were
singular; evidence that Thornton alone inserts
disproportionately large numbers
of extraneous conjunctions in his romances,
on the other hand, would signal
that this idiosyncrasy represents an aspect
of his individual copying habits. Such
enumerative analysis is admittedly
incapable of establishing the scribal nature of
particular readings, no
doubt explaining its dismissal in the past by editors con-
cerned with
authority, but it will allow for the description of those broad patterns
in
variation relevant to the issue of scribal intent. While this strict methodology
might disqualify some lightly attested features contributed by Thornton to
his
works, guidelines less restrictive would certainly lead to uncertain if
not errone-
ous attributions that would undermine the conclusions
extrapolated from this
investigation.
