University of Virginia Library

HM140, a late fifteenth-century anthology manuscript housed at the Huntington Library, has been prominent in the renewed discussion of the early transmission of Chaucer's work, primarily because it contains an "independent" version of the Clerk's Tale. The tale, according to Daniel Silvia, was the most frequently excerpted of the Canterbury Tales. HM140 has received this attention, in part, because it belongs to a category of manuscripts that have been recently revalued by Derek Pearsall, who has argued that such manuscripts provide us with invaluable information for surmising the moral and aesthetic taste of their audiences.

HM140 has already been the subject of a groundbreaking article by Seth Lerer, who applies a codicological analysis of it to his interpretative reading of the tale. Lerer argues that the "excision" of the "Prologue" and two key transition stanzas just before the envoy strips the tale of its dramatic Canterbury context.[1] A major consequence of these changes is to narrow the aesthetic and moral scope of the story, modifying it to fit a conventionally pietistic, Lydgatean "homology" (311). This serious tone is reenforced with the addition of Chaucer's ballad "Truth" as a coda. Lerer thus gives us a useful characterization of the anthology's thematic logic, while presenting a plausible interpretation for the changes he finds in the text of the tale.

However, in his discussion regarding the "excisions" Lerer makes certain assumptions about the scribe's editing of the tale. For example, he assumes that the changes in the text of the tale were made by the scribe, and, further, that these changes reveal the scribe's "implicit reading of the Tale" (316). The suppositions that Lerer makes about the scribe's "act" bear further scrutiny because they refer to the crucial issue of "intentionality," in this case, editorial

intentionality.[2] Using the approach he initiated as point of departure, I want to examine the question of how we determine the scribe's or editor's "intention" from the remains of the manuscript. I will pursue this through a close analysis of the transcription of the texts in the first booklet of the manuscript, focusing on the Clerk's Tale. Such an analysis will give us insight into the manuscript's production process and will provide us with information for evaluating how the tale was appropriated and read.

First, I will give an overview of the transcription of the texts in the first booklet of HM140 through an analysis of the scribal work stints and an examination of its ordinatio. Second, I will analyze the transcription of the Clerk's Tale, with the aim of evaluating possible reasons for the text's "excisions." Third, I will discuss the implications of this codicological analysis for an interpretative reading of the tale. Finally, I will suggest some possibilities for employing codicological analysis in the interpretation of texts from early in our tradition.