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Notes
It was, for example, the second manuscript chosen for publication in full facsimile by Scolar Press: Richard Beadle and A. E. B. Owen eds., The Findern Manuscript: Cambridge University Library MS. Ff.i.6 (1977). P. x gives a full schematic collation, accurate except for quire N (see n. 12 below), and pp. xix-xxx the contents list which I follow. For convenience, I give here the corrected collation of the manuscript; the quires are unsigned, and the library's foliation includes provision for some hypothesized lost leaves: A10 (__A1,2) B16 (__B1-4; B10+bb8 [__bb1]) C10 (__C9,10) D16 (__D10,11,16) E12 (E3+e4) F8 G12 (__G12) H16 (__H15,16) I4 (__I1) K10 L8 (__L8) M6 (__M4-6) N6 (N3+n4+nn8; N5+nnn4 [__nnn4]) O14 (__O14) P8? (__P6-8). The characterization in the next sentence is that of John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (1961), p. 224.
"The Origins and Make-Up of Cambridge University Library MS. Ff.1.6," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1983):299-333; all statements I make about paper-stocks, scribes, or quiring depend on Harris's astute account, especially her appendices (pp. 327-333). Her article supersedes such earlier studies as Aage Brusendorff, The Chaucer Tradition (1925), pp. 187-190; L. F. Casson, The Romance of Sir Degrevant (EETS 221, 1949), pp. xi-xv; Rossell Hope Robbins, "The Findern Anthology," PMLA, 69 (1954):610-642; Gisela Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (1976), pp. 90-94; Richard L. Greene, The Early English Carols (2nd edn., 1977), p. 322; and Edith Seaton, Sir Richard Roos (1961), pp. 85-92. Of particular interest are the general but trenchant comments of John Scattergood, "The Authorship of 'The Boke of Cupide,'" Anglia, 82 (1964):137-149, at pp. 140-143.
"Origins," pp. 312-318; nevertheless, Harris concludes (p. 316) that only quire N is a separate production and that the manuscript developed "in the manner of an album, a loose-leaf album" (p. 318).
The reverse, a codex planned essentially as separable units with an overall plan only emerging in the course of production, seems to me inherent in the idea of the fascicular manuscript.
During the stint of scribe 21, the pages get progressively more crowded, apparently in an effort to finish at a folio boundary. Examples of similarly rational distribution of copy among two scribes occur in a prose chronicle (item 28, where scribe 23 was succeeded by scribe 24 in the middle of f. 112), La Belle Dame Sans Mercy (item 30, where scribe 6 copied the portions in quires I and L and helped out in mid-quire K, scribe 25 transcribing the remainder), and in The Parlament of Foules (item 12, where scribe 6 copied ff. 29-36r and scribe 7 ff. 38r-42v; the intervening portion shows some switching).
In addition to the alternation of scribes 6 and 7 within ff. 36v-37v and of scribes 6 and 25 in quire K, the other major example occurs in item 56, in the difficult quire N. An example comparable to all these occurs in National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.3.1, in quire 6, the sixth of nine booklets; there three scribes shared copying (including one mid-item change of hand) and a fourth hand added an item at the quire end. See Phillipa Hardman, "A Medieval 'Library in parvo,'" Medium Ævum 47 (1978), 262-273, especially p. 266.
Three or four scribes appear in one or more of the potential fascicular units. Scribe 9 is the doubtful case: he may have written the first two lines of item 33 (in quire M); in addition he wrote items 14 and 15 (in quire D). Scribe 4 wrote items 8-9 (B), 11 (bb), 35, and 37 (both M); at least the first three of these texts appear to have been written into blank leaves after the major production was finished, and quire M, as I will suggest later, was perhaps a similar afterthought. Scribe 11 copied items 17 (D) and 23 (E); the latter is probably a late addition on a blank leaf, and the two quires, it will develop, may form a single fascicle at any rate. The only scribe writing extensively in more than one possible fascicle is scribe 6: he shared the copying of Chaucer's Parlament (item 12; see n. 5 above) and La Belle Dame (item 30; see also n. 5), as well as copying Hoccleve's Epistle of Cupid (item 24) alone. He is the most prolific scribe in the volume, but interestingly, his contributions all begin at major textual breaks, a fact fully commensurate with fascicular production.
In "Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations," Studies in Bibliography, 39 (1986):100-111 I suggest why mere self-contained texts will prove inadequate in identifying fascicles; I also attempt to prioritize various codicological details to suggest which are most persuasive in identifying fascicular units. These are, of course, the criteria which I invoke in the following pages.
Neither of these units can originally have been part of the quires because they sit as balanced sets of bifolia whose centers do not correspond with the centers of the large quires in which they are found—bb follows original leaf 10 of quire B16 and e follows leaf 3 of quire E12.
Unusually, quire O is fully paginated (as a-z, &, 9 on ff. 166-178r), another feature which marks its status as fascicle. As the collation given above, n. 1, indicates, no two adjacent quires originally contained the same number of leaves (the thirteenth quire began, not as N6, but as n4; see n. 12).
In addition there is a blank page in mid-quire G—f. 95v. This simply reflects the aesthetic preferences of the scribes—the desire to begin the next (substantial) work in a prominent position at the head of a recto.
This quire differs from B and E, which simply have insertions, and here the collation diagram of the Scolar facsimile must be supplemented by Harris's important new arguments based on the watermark evidence; see "Origins," pp. 315, 329. The leaves designated N are the conjoints 143+164, 144+159, 145+158. Ff. 143-145 and 164 all seem originally to have been blank; items 40-41 on ff. 143v-145r and 59 on f. 164r (as well as 58 on f. 162v) all appear later additions. These outer leaves, I think, are actually wrappers, rather than the body of the quire later stuffed with additional sheets. Copying appears to have begun on f. 146, with item 42; scribe 32 copied this and eventually eight other works. He added to n4 the second quire nn8 to handle these texts. Additional scribes and texts filled this quire, and the whole unit ff. 146-157 was probably then placed within the two bifolia 144+159, 145+158, with copying continuing through f. 159 and beyond. This additional material necessitated a new quire, nnn4, together with yet another wrapping bifolium 143+164. The original copying ceased with item 57, which ends on f. 161v.
See, for example, discussion of the two examples in Robert Thornton's ms. Lincoln Cathedral 91: John J. Thompson, "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; and George R. Keiser, "'To Knawe God Almyghtyn': Robert Thornton's Devotional Book," in James Hogg ed., Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache, 2 (1984):103-129.
A fundamental purpose of fascicularity is to postpone, so far as possible, decisions about the ultimate shape of the codex in production. Such a goal is furthered by opening booklets with extensive texts and building up the manuscript out of sequences introduced by such substantial works. The last question the compiler will settle, probably only at the time of binding, is the actual order of these "top-heavy" units. Such a procedure occurs in vernacular codices very early on, for example in The Auchinleck Manuscript (National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS. 19.2.1, c. 1340).
The authorial order of the poem may be determined from the holograph, Huntington HM 744. The prominent Chaucerian anthologies of s. xv med. called "The Oxford Group" (Bodleian Fairfax 16, Tanner 346, Bodley 638, here joined by Digby 181 as well as Ff.i.6), derived their text from a disordered archetype. This was an eight-leaf booklet in a typical five stanzas to the page format (excepting f. 1r, with a heading and only four stanzas); at some point in its history, one of the bifolia came loose and was misbound so that the leaves were left in the order 1, 2, 4, 6, 3, 5, 7, 8. (For a different view, see Robbins, "Findern," PMLA, 69 [1954]:631, n. 119.) This disruption produces the distinctive "Oxford Group" order of stanzas 1-19, 30-39, 50-59, 20-29, 40-49, 60, 61-68 (with further internal disorder), followed, so far as the extant text extends, by Findern.
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