| ||
The Ordinatio of the First Booklet
The ordinatio of the manuscript, as a whole, moves from the relatively well defined and elaborate to the reduced and indefinite. But even though the ordinatio of the MS in the first booklet is inconsistent, virtually all the works are set off by clear division boundaries and discrete formatting. The
An examination of the mise-en-page of the folios reveals even more clearly the changes that occurs in the design and execution of the booklet's formatting. Although the format of HM140 is plain compared with many other manuscripts (such as the richly designed and executed Ellemere MS), the ordinatio of its first booklet changes from the fairly detailed format of St. Albon, where, for example, rubrication is used for marking text divisions and capitals, to a much simpler page format in the other works, as a comparison between St. Albon and the Clerk's Tale will demonstrate.
For St. Albon, the layout, rubrication and capitalization are clearly well planned and consistently executed throughout. The first folio has thirty-three lines of text, and there are between thirty-three and thirty-six lines per folio, with an average of thirty-five. The text is organized in a rhyme royal stanza, its form set off by rubricated initial capitals and by spacing between stanzas. Decoration of the text is simple, but the use of rubrication is extensive. Besides the initial stanza capitals, the initial line capitals are ornamented with red. In addition, rubrication is used to underline key words in the text, usually proper names or nouns. There are from twelve to twenty-two of these underlinings per folio, which I think act as a guide to reading the text.[11] Whole
The design and execution of the formatting of the text of St. Albon are done with obvious care. The work is titled and attributed. The stanza form is clearly marked with rhyme, rubrication, enlarged capitals, and spacing. Text divisions are marked in red, as are line capitals, and key words are underlined in red.
In contrast, the layout of the second work in the manuscript, Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, is both less elaborate and less clearly marked. The Clerk's Tale begins on f68 and ends on f83v. If "Truth" is considered a conclusion to the tale, as I believe it should be, the ending is on f84. Unlike St. Albon, the tale contains few signals or directions for reading in its formatting. It has no title, no headings, no division markers of its parts, and no attribution of authorship. There is no "Prologue," the text beginning at the opening of Chaucer's Tale, E57 (IV.57): "There is ryght atte the West Syde of Ytaile. . . ." "Truth" is appended directly after the end of the tale's envoy, without title or break in the continuous line format, with an "Explicit" following the ballad.
The number of lines per folio page is irregular, ranging from thirty-one lines on f68 to thirty-seven on f77, with the average being thirty-three lines. The initial letter of each line is capitalized and sometimes the initial capital of a page is slightly larger than the rest. The only large rubricated capital in the text is the tale's initial "T," which is three lines high. The other initial line capitals are only splashed with red, and this decoration ends at f78. There is no other rubrication. Except for the rhyme scheme of rhyme royal, which is disrupted, the stanza form is not marked or isolated; consequently, the text runs continuously, without spacings from beginning to end. None of the features which Parkes argues were commonly used to mark a verse format (i.e. spacing, illumination, capitals, rubrication, underlining, or paragraph markers) is present in the format of the tale ("Punctuation" 130). The tale in HM140 thus has a reduced, prosaisized format.
Comparison of the formatting of St. Albon and the Clerk's Tale clearly shows that a shift occurred in the book's production between these two works.
This downscaling in the priority of the booklet's production might have resulted from a decommissioning of the manuscript's project. But without documentary evidence it is impossible to determine what the causes were for lowering the production priority, and for concomitant changes in the bibliographical text of the booklet. Consequently, the ordinatio or intentional structure of the manuscript remains ambiguous. The alteration in the booklet's ordinatio is also reflected in the transcription of its texts, where we see a similar reduction in the quality of the scribal copying near the end of the first booklet.
| ||