I first met Linne Mooney in 1974 at the University of Toronto, where I had been invited to give a lecture and where she was newly embarked on a Ph.D. She was very young. Later she took up a post at the University of Maine in Orono, and when I left York to go to Harvard in 1985 I began to see more of her when she came down to attend our weekly medieval seminar, and on other occasions. At this time she was preparing an edition of the Kalendarium of John Somer, which was published in 1998 in the Chaucer Library Series. She was also working on some of the most complex and difficult of fifteenth-century literary manuscripts, most of them miscellanies, almost as if she were choosing them because they were difficult and therefore more interesting. She gave a talk at the Harvard seminar on one occasion about the lyrics in the famous miscellany in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19, beginning to make proper sense of them for the first time. She was also doing ongoing and never-ending work on the many manuscripts of Lydgate's Verses on the Kings of England, trying to establish some sort of order and coherence to their bewildering variety. Lydgate's Verses is not a work of great literary interest, to say the least, but Linne was not much worried by this, in fact she seemed to revel in it. I had to learn that my own interest in manuscripts, chiefly as valuable repositories of important literary texts, was not everyone’s. I went to a talk a long time ago by one of Linne's eminent predecessors as a codicologist and palaeographer, devoted to a description of a particular MS. I asked her afterwards, in my old-fashioned way, what was the text in the MS? ‘I don't know’, she said, ‘I don't do that sort of thing’.

In 1999 I organised a conference at Harvard called ‘New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies’, and one of the speakers I invited, keen to give her a larger hearing, was Linne. Her talk was about her work in identifying the hands of fifteenth-century vernacular scribes which appear in more than one manuscript.

Confessio Amantis, a fine MS, much maltreated, at least twenty leaves lost. London, s.xv, first quarter, early.

Contents

(fols 1ra–171vb) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 504–VIII.2791.

Prologue (fols 1ra–3vb) wants 1–503 (three leaves missing) and 984–I.343 (three leaves missing after fol. 3); Book I (fols 4ra–18vb) wants 1–343, 1531–1890 (two leaves missing after fol. 10), 2405–2558 (one leaf missing after fol. 13) and 3423–II.130 (one leaf missing after fol. 18); Book II (fols 19ra–36vb) wants 1–130 and 779–1117 (two leaves missing after fol. 22); Book III (fols 37ra–52vb) wants 2701–IV.86 (one leaf missing after fol. 52); Book IV (fols 53ra–69vb) wants 1–86, 1622–1806 (one leaf missing after fol. 61), 2492–2854 (two leaves missing after fol. 65), 3555–V.16 (one leaf missing after fol. 69); Book V (fols 70ra–111vb) wants 1–16, 3265–3450 (one leaf missing after fol. 87) and 7763–VI.91 (one leaf missing, but for a stub, after fol. 111); Book VI (fols 112ra–124vb) wants 1–91 (leaf missing after fol. 111); Book VII (fols 125ra–155vb) wants 1192–1359 (one leaf missing after fol. 131); Book VIII (fols 155vb–171vb: fol. 155vb has the Latin verses only; English begins at top of 156ra, with full bar-border) breaks of at 2791, on fol. 171vb, with probably at least two further leaves lost, containing 2792–end, and perhaps Latin concluding material. NB The foliation used in this description does not count missing leaves.

In addition to the twenty leaves missing, others are mutilated. The top halves of fols 2 and 3 are torn away, with loss of text, as also most of the outer side of fol. 6, with a tear down the recto of the first column; a stub (not numbered) follows fol. 111, which would have had V.7763–end and VI.1–91; the lower third of fol. 125 is cut out. In addition, fols 88–89 are misbound.

Text: not collated by Macaulay, but allocated to recension I by Eileen Gardiner (see Doyle and Parkes, ‘Production of Copies’, 195 and note 176).