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Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

Derek Pearsall
Affiliation:
Former Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, York, and Professor of English at Harvard University
Ralph Hanna
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This paper builds upon hobby-horses I have been riding for perhaps a decade. First, manuscript study is valuable only insofar as it addresses through material products of human labour the large issues of cultural history. Second, since books are, within certain limits, localizable, they enable the construction of historical narratives. Most particularly, I think here of the need to replace a spent Old Literary History. This, leaving aside other debilities, is far too committed to a myth of the Nation and with it, a national literary tradition. In its stead, we should be studying Middle English Literatures 1100–1413, a project which would include, inter alia, examining local or regional literary communities. I have written about one such community, Berkeley, Gloucs., and there are excellent studies of others: Thorlac Turville-Petre on Nottingham and Derbyshire, and Richard Beadle on Norfolk and transmissional communities. I choose to begin a new intervention with what may be the most paradoxical gesture I can muster: to consider the Metropolis and Capital as if it represented just another provincial locale. What you will now read is a draft out of chapter 2 (of six) of a book manuscript tentatively entitled ‘London Literature, c. 1320–1380’.

The limits of my in-progress study are largely established by linguistic data. In 1963, M. L. Samuels outlined the evidence for a transitional variety of fourteenth-century London English (his Type II). This succeeded an earlier dialect, known from the ‘proclamation of 1258’ and was, in its turn, pretty much superseded by the mid-1380s, with the arrival of Type III, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Type
Chapter
Information
New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies
Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference
, pp. 91 - 102
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2000

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