Of late, scholars have expressed an increased interest in the activities of scribes as interpreters of literary texts and as co-participants, along with authors, in the creation of meaning. No longer are such author-centric views of literary culture, like George Kane’s, taken as a priori truths, with both errors and conscious emendations on the part of scribes mere white noise to be filtered out in the act of recovering the words of the author:

Of course, Kane is writing from the perspective of a critical editor, for whom recovering the words of the author is, by definition, paramount, and hence his Platonic view of textuality makes sense. But those Aristotelians among us, whose interests are in historicizing medieval literary-cultural practice, have turned to scribal activity, seeing scribes as exhibiting cultural agency – to varying degrees – and seeing it as the scholar’s job to retrieve that agency, which is rendered opaque by the critical edition. Studies have shown the diversity and creativity of scribal responses to Middle English religious literature,Chaucer’s Troilusand Canterbury Tales,Gower’s Confessio amantis,Piers Plowman,the work of John Lydgate, and Middle English romance.