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
accommodated all of the poem
(Edwards' collation, detailed below, notes telegraphically that the MS
“lacks 3 leaves containing end of
House of
Fame” [p. xxiii], but the structure he proposes does not
indicate how these might be included). Other texts in Pp may or may not have
been fragmentary; only a clear sense of the structures available for those
texts will provide us with an understanding of whether they
could have been complete in their original form.
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.
