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Notes
I am grateful to the Committee on Research, University of California at Riverside, for support which helped in the writing of this paper; and to Robert N. Essick for suggestions which improved it.
See the following: "A Study of Some Aspects of the Transmission of English Verse Texts in Late Medieval Manuscripts," unpub. B. Litt. thesis (Oxford, 1972); "Self-Contained Units in Composite Manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Period," ASE, 7 (1978):231-238; (with Frances McSparran) Cambridge University Library Ff.2.38 (London: Scolar, 1979), esp. pp. xii-xvii, xxi-xxv; "The 'Booklet': A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts," Codicologica, 3 (1980):46-69; Manuscript Tanner 346 A Facsimile (Norman: Pilgrim, 1980), esp. pp. xix-xx, xxv; and, less relevantly, Manuscript Bodley 638 A Facsimile (Norman: Pilgrim, 1982).
N. F. Blake, in a review of the Tanner facsimile, ES, 63 (1982):73, offers an analogous qualification or extension of Robinson's views. In the Tanner volume, Robinson argues strenuously (as she did in the paper, "Some Codicological Implications for the Transmission of Chaucer's Verse," read at New Chaucer Society, San Francisco, April 1982) that the exemplars of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and minor poems may have been fascicles. Blake points out that the production of saleable manuscripts of such works in fascicular form may be more important than the conception of a fascicular exemplar. Blake's view returns to that enunciated by Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (1925), p. 179.
All the examples discussed by Robinson in Codicologica belong in the first class. "Binding accidents" of post-medieval origin abound, perhaps most notoriously in the Ashmolean collection of the Bodleian Library and in the Sloane manuscripts at the British Library.
See Graham Pollard, "The Company of Stationers before 1557," Library, 4th ser. 18 (1937):1-38, especially pp. 14-18.
Huntington Library manuscripts HM 114 (described by Robert K. Root, The Manuscripts of Chaucer's Troilus, Chaucer Society 1st ser. 98 [1914; rpt. New York: Johnson, 1967], p. 35) and HM 144 (described by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales [1940], I:289-294) are both of this sort. In HM 144, the booklets, with their separate signature systems, probably reflect a purchaser's tastes shortly after 1500. HM 114, in contrast, was apparently planned as three separate units ultimately to be joined: the final verso of each booklet, in what may be the informal script of the scribe, gives a total of quires for the booklet, in the third instance with the added notation "summa 20." The only absolutely certain way of distinguishing fascicles planned to be joined from those bought loose or joined by the purchaser is a series of consecutive signatures, all in the original scribal hand. But such a discovery does not amount to proof positive, unless the signatures are written in an ink indistinguishable from the text (not an invariable expectation even with the signatures of non-fascicular manuscripts). Like the notation of quire totals in HM 114, such signatures may have been affixed only as a way of facilitating binding; see, on this point, Nicholas Barker, "Quiring and the Binder: Quire-Marks in Some Manuscripts in Fifteenth-Century Blind Stamped Bindings," in Studies in the Book Trade in Honour of Graham Pollard, Oxford Bibliographical Society, n.s. 18 (1975):11-31.
D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen, The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91) (1975), pp. viii-ix.
"The Compiler in Action: Robert Thornton and the 'Thornton Romances' in Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91," in Derek Pearsall ed., Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England (1983), pp. 113-124, esp. pp. 119-124. Thompson's conception of how copying proceeded builds on George R. Keiser, "Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91: Life and Milieu of the Scribe," Studies in Bibliography, 32 (1979):158-179, esp. pp. 177-179.
George R. Keiser, in an unpublished paper, has suggested that Thornton refolded another one-quire fascicle later in the volume, quire 15, which Keiser believes originally began with f. 271 and the text of The Abbey of the Holy Ghost. I am very grateful to Dr. Keiser for a chance to read his paper, "'To Knawe God Almyghtyn': Robert Thornton's Devotional Book."
One-quire booklets seem to have been commonplace in certain contexts; for their use in the transmission of Chaucer's minor poems, see Brusendorff, Tradition, pp. 178-205. A great number, including some very small quires, occur in manuscripts of medieval Latin lyrics; see A. G. Rigg, "Medieval Latin Poetic Anthologies," MS, 39 (1977):281-330, 40 (1978):387-407, 41 (1979):468-505, 43 (1981):472-497; and for further medieval Latin examples, the literature cited by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors at Walter Map De Nugis Curialium (1983), p. xxix. A Middle English example, also common as a one-quire exemplar (of which thirteen copies in whole or part are known) is identified by A. I. Doyle in his unpublished 1953 Cambridge dissertation, "A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in England . . .," I:171-74. The texts in question survive in one-quire booklet form as Cambridge, Trinity College B.15.39 (181). Another Middle English example is discussed by Anne Hudson, "A Lollard Quaternion," RES, 22 (1971):435-42. See further n. 17.
Similarly Robert Thornton's different booklets seem associated with different paper stocks. These are identified by Sarah M. Horrall, "The Watermarks of the Thornton Manuscripts," N&Q, 225 (1980):385-86. When aligned with the quires of the Lincoln text, these allow one to see examples of unique paper-stocks beginning and ending at booklet boundaries. For example, the Liber de Diversis Medicinis forms a single booklet, entirely on Horrall's stock P, not found elsewhere; the introductory prose Life of Alexander also occupies a whole booklet, about half on stock K, found elsewhere only in three odd sheets within quire 10.
Codicologica, 3 (1980):48, criterion 9 for booklet identification. Such a procedure occurs, for example, at the end of quire 3 of Lincoln Cathedral 91, where Robert Thornton cancelled eight leaves.
A closely-related but clearly distinguishable case may be mentioned in passing—that of manuscripts copied by several scribes from dismembered exemplars. Here the codex is planned as a sequence of bundles of quires, booklet-like units. And textual boundaries are not apt to be relevant to the separateness of the codicological units. Moreover, such parcelling out of the text may show not simply changes in handwriting but also awkward junctures of units reminiscent of Lambeth 491. Two examples would include "The Trinity Gower" (Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.2), discussed by A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, "The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century," in Parkes and Andrew G. Watson eds., Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker (1978), pp. 163-210; and Cambridge University Library Ff.v.40, where apparently a portion of the exemplar containing Scale of Perfection I was given to two scribes, one of whose work was eventually cancelled. But such production should be distinguished from the booklet insofar as it generally involves the planning of a fixed unit, the codex, rather than an evolving one. In her discussion of the similar production of Tanner 346, Robinson seems not to wish to make this distinction; see Tanner 346, pp. xix-xx, xxv.
One might expand this conception by renaming it "signs of casting off copy," since that idea is clearly present in the expansion or contraction of the normal quire size. Such an expanded notion would allow one to include examples like Lambeth 491 discussed above.
Qualifications are necessary, since "filler" items of several folios duration may be derived from a different source. Such is the case, for example, with Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C.285, ff. 64-73, a one-quire booklet, into which one scribe (also responsible for the booklet ff. 40-63) copied the text printed C. Horstmann, Yorkshire Writers (1895-96), I:112-21. Into the blank remainder of the booklet, a second scribe copied two pieces of filler, longer than the original text (printed ibid., pp. 122-128); a third added Latin notes (printed ibid., p. 128).
The first of these procedures is suggested by A. I. Doyle in his study, "University College, Oxford, MS. 97 and its Relationship to the Simeon Manuscript (British Library Additional 22283)," in Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels eds., So Meny People, Longages, and Tonges: Philological Essays . . . Presented to Angus McIntosh (Edinburgh: privately, 1981), pp. 265-282. I expand upon Doyle's findings in my forthcoming article, "Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3."
See, for example, the bemusement of M. B. Parkes and Richard Beadle about the quiring procedures of Cambridge University Library Gg.iv.27 at III:39 of their facsimile (Norman: Pilgrim, 1979-80). For a further example, see that manuscript of the ps.Bonaventuran Meditationes Vite Christi sold at Sotheby's, 6 December 1983, as lot 61 (Catalogue of Western Manuscripts and Miniatures, p. 62). The codex may be collated as 1-58 6-76 8-108 116 128 136 144(—4); the entire text is present in the hand of a single scribe "Braybrook" (s.xv1/4), and the alternations between 8's and 6's appear totally unmotivated. Indeed the last such alternation, in quire 13, is thoroughly irrational. Had the quire been constructed as an eight, Braybrook could have finished the text on its last leaf (f. 98v; the text now ends on that folio); he would not have needed to form the extra, deliberately short, quire 14, nor, having done so, to leave its last two leaves blank and wasted. (A slightly later hand has added as filler on f. 99 excerpts from Isidore of Seville's Synonyma; the original f. 100 has been cancelled.)
Category 10, when the texts have been added in hands subsequent to the main scribe, I take as the functional equivalent of category 9.
The inverse, however, is untrue: consistent quire signatures throughout a manuscript may join together units originally planned as booklets. Such is, for example, the case with the texts discussed by Kathleen L. Smith, "A Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Manuscript Reconstructed," BLR, 7 (1966):234-241. Bodleian Library, Douce 324, for example, forms quires designated I and K in a later hand but was planned to form a single fascicle, identifiable on the basis of Robinson's criterion 8.
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