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In this essay[1] I undertake a reconstruction of four paper manuscripts— British Library MS Arundel 140 (Ar), British Library MS Harley 2382 (Hl3), Magdalene College, Cambridge MS Pepys 2006 (Pp), and British Library MS Sloane 1009 (Sl3)[2]—the collation of which has been characterized variously as “impossible” (Manly-Rickert 1:52, 516), “impracticable” (James 60; Manly-Rickert 1:406), “unknown” (Seymour 1966, p. 184), and “too tightly bound to be determined, even by watermarks” (Seymour 1995, p. 134). All four MSS do present interesting and challenging problems for the reasons described by Manly-Rickert and others: in Ar and Sl3, the material structures have lost their original integrity and the leaves are now mounted on guards (the guards can present problems for the detection of watermarks in 4° format); Pp is tightly bound, making problematic the detection of some of the watermarks in 4° structures; textual lacunae in Hl3 and Pp can be difficult to determine because some of their texts are extracts.
The establishment of the present structures of these MSS and the reconstruction of their original structures (to the extent that these goals are attainable) provide important information for textual editors about their texts' original integrity or incompleteness. Texts of the Canterbury Tales that circulate independently of the frame provided by the poem's General Prologue may or may not include links referring to that larger framework. The structure I suggest below for Sl3, for example, suggests that some or all of the “Words of the Host” linking Sir Thopas and Melibee could have been present in this MS. While another Chaucer text, the House of Fame, occurs as a fragment in the first part of Pp, the structure postulated below could have
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Beyond the significance of these MSS as conveyors of important medieval texts is their importance for the evidence they provide about the processes of fifteenth-century book production. Edwards raises the issue of “booklet construction”[3] for the first part of Pp and concludes that:
[Pp] does not show many indications of booklet construction on the—admittedly inconclusive—evidence of quiring. Insofar as the quire divisions are determinable, the scribes do not appear to have been constrained to define texts around them. It is, however, quite likely, given the variegated contents of the first part of Pepys, that it does reflect the collocations of booklet exemplars at some stage prior to the transcription of the exemplar of Pepys itself.
(p. xxviii)
The revised collation I offer below for Pp indicates that the first part of the MS does provide clear evidence of booklet structure for just that part of the MS where one might expect to find it: the Lydgate and Chaucer texts. This in turn clarifies the picture of how the exemplars circulated: together, assembled as a booklet.The expectations generated by the processes of paper manufacture in the fifteenth century are key to determining the structures of these books. The paper stocks in these MSS have not been well described and have in some instances been misidentified, even with respect to their generic morphology. Little, if any, regard has been paid to the principle of symmetry as it applies to the distribution of watermarks in gatherings, whether it be in folio construction (2°), quarto (4°), or some combination of these two formats (the only formats employed in these MSS). One expects, in fifteenth-century paper, to find watermarks in the left or right half of the full sheet, so that when folded 2°, one half of the sheet will bear the impression of the wire design of the watermark and the other will be blank. In 4° format, the portions of the watermark not obscured by the binding will appear at the spine-edge (i.e., in the gutter) and, of the four folios constructed from the full sheet, two will share the watermark (usually a top half and a lower half) and two will be blank. These facts create certain expectations about the structure of a gathering and, together with other facts about the manufacture of paper and its use in the production of books—whether print or manuscript—provide the bibliographer and cordicologist with invaluable tools in constructing a description of the structure of a given book.
![Click to Enlarge Page 99](https://iiif.lib.virginia.edu/iiif/uva-lib:994057/full/!200,200/0/default.jpg)
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