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II. Past Assessments of Robert Thornton
Studies in bibliography |  |
II. Past Assessments of Robert Thornton
Before we move forward with an investigation of Thornton's idiosyncrasies
focused on his scribal agenda, however, it is instructive to examine those conclu-
sions reached by critics whose primary concern has been with reconstructing
authorial texts. These analyses, well-argued and reflecting sincere
conviction,
highlight in their range and contradiction the impressionistic
character of many
between the appraisals of Thornton offered by L. F. Casson and Mary Hamel:
siderable amount of tidying up.… But, as always happens when a text is emended by
hit-and-miss methods, when attempting to set right a passage they did not understand,
they sometimes emended away from the true reading rather than towards it, and the result
was a series of new errors.[10]
in the transmission of rare and unfamiliar words, though sometimes in disguised form;
there is little evidence of scribal rationalization, normalization of alliterative patterns, or
other sorts of editorial tampering.… Thornton and his predecessors, in short, all seem
to have been of the "mechanical" school of copyists.…[11]
ous readers might perhaps imagine that inherent differences between the texts
under consideration led to these incompatible assessments. Unfortunately, the
arguments of Sir Israel Gollancz and Stephanie Trigg regarding Wynnere and
Wastour undermine any such glossing interpretation:
misreading, substitution of words, and other causes.… The substitution of more modern
words for difficult, rare, and archaic forms, and the obvious attempts to make some sense
of corrupt passages, must be referred to scribal intention, whether on the part of Thornton
or a predecessor.… There is perhaps no more corrupt Middle-English manuscript than
this of Wynnere and Wastour.[12]
Fortunately, Thornton seems to have had a strong sense of responsibility to his exemplars.
He was presumably not working under supervision, but on a number of occasions he can
be observed checking his text against his exemplar and correcting his own work.[13]
note here that Casson and Gollancz represent an earlier generation of scholar-
ship and contend that it should be expected that their work lacks the critical
nuance of more enlightened days. Frances McSparran's recent and persuasive
work, though, complicates that condescending narrative by taking a more skepti-
cal view of Thornton's reliability:
on the one hand, casual carelessness and garrulity, on the other a zeal to clarify things by
identifying speakers.… We must think of the scribes who copied [Octovian's versions]
and similar romances as scribe-editors, revising content and recasting form as they write,
partly deliberately and partly automatically.[14]
in textual evidence or critical acumen, it would seem that the obstacles faced
by editors in identifying authorial readings have most influenced their findings
about scribal intent: those casting doubt on Thornton's faithfulness arrive at their
readings through collations of independent witnesses (Casson and McSparran) or
appeals to an aesthetic ideal (Gollancz) ultimately posited on the imperfection of
all surviving documents; those defending his work (Hamel and Trigg) invariably
lack the resources for the former approach and doubt the validity of the latter.
Bluntly speaking, explications of Thornton's habits to date have told us much
more about how certain editorial methods encourage assumptions about scribes
generally than how one fifteenth-century copyist interacted with his exemplars.
The elimination of such bias is the most important reason to stop discussing
scribal habit only in the context of authorial intent and instead begin treating it
as a subject worthy of investigation in its own right.
L. F. Casson, ed., Sir Degrevant, EETS O.S. 221
(1949; London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1970), xxix.
Mary Hamel, ed., Morte Arthure (New York: Garland,
1984), 4. Hoyt Duggan has ef-
fectively countered her
interpretation of Thornton's self-corrections by pointing out the impos-
sibility of drawing any sound conclusions about the scribe's
reliability without an independent
witness for verification of
archetypal features (Hoyt N. Duggan, "Scribal Self-Correction and
Editorial Theory," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen:
Bulletin de la Societe Neophilologique 91:2 [1990]:
215–227).
Stephanie Trigg, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure, EETS
297 (London: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1990), xxx. As her introduction
makes clear, Trigg bases a great deal of her charac-
terization of
Thornton the scribe on Mary Hamel's conclusions regarding the copyist's
self-
correction. As has already been noted, however, there are
serious flaws in how Hamel reaches
her conclusions.
Frances McSparran, ed., Octovian, Edited from Lincoln
Dean and Chapter Library MS 91
and Cambridge, University
Library, MS Ff.2. 38, EETS 289 (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1986),
16. It must be stressed that I am not implying that every
interpretation referred to here is neces-
sarily flawed, but rather
that the context in which scribal habit is commonly studied encourages
scholars to shape their opinions of copyists to suit specific
editorial aims. I would suggest in
McSparran's case that, given the
textual evidence available in relation to Octovian, there was
no need for her to adopt uncritical
assumptions like those that undermine those other findings
cited
here. Still, her reasonable decision to only detail evidence taken from
the poem she edited
means that McSparran's findings are necessarily
incomplete.
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II. Past Assessments of Robert Thornton
Studies in bibliography | |