Cook, Megan

Strakhov, Elizaveta

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of1-1-2016Introduction to Colloquium: John Shirley’sCambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20 and theCulture of the Anthology in Late Medieval EnglandMegan CookColby CollegeElizaveta StrakhovMarquette University, yelizaveta.strakhov@marquette.eduPublished version. Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Vol. 36 (2016): 241-244. DOI. © 2016 The NewChaucer Society. Used with permission.Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016):241–244 2016 The New Chaucer SocietyIntroductionMegan CookColby CollegeElizaveta StrakhovMarquette UniversityThis colloquium emerges from a roundtable convened at the2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland. That con-versation sought to explore late medieval England’s multilingual manu-script culture through discussion of Cambridge, Trinity College, MSR.3.20: a large, 187-folio anthology copied in the early 1430s by thescribe and bibliophile John Shirley. Generically and linguistically, Trin-ity College, MS R.3.20 is a diverse collection, encompassing bothcourtly and religious texts and spanning the genres of lyric, prose, anddrama. The volume preserves important copies of poems by Chaucer,Lydgate, and Hoccleve, as well as longer Latin works and a variety ofFrench texts, including a lyric by Alain Chartier that is ascribed in themanuscript to the prominent contemporary English political figure Wil-liam de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, famously married to Chaucer’s grand-daughter, Alice. By the sixteenth century, the manuscript had falleninto the hands of antiquarian John Stow, who annotated it and drewfrom it when preparing his 1561 edition of Chaucer’s Works. The diver-sity of the compilation’s contents, coupled with what is known about itsproduction and early circulation, make R.3.20 an ideal site for exploringthe intersections of several vibrant areas of scholarship in Middle Englishstudies, including book history, scribal cultures, patronage and coterielyric production, medieval England’s multilingualism, and premodernperiodization practices.The essays contained in this colloquium speak to the growing interestin the late medieval compilation among literary scholars and book histo-rians.1 In the past, the bewilderingly varied contents, idiosyncratic pro-duction methods, and complex afterlives of late medieval compilations1 The surge in recent editions of late medieval manuscript compilations testifies tothe growing interest in the anthology: e.g., The Poetry of Charles d’Orle´ans and His Circle:PAGE 241................. 18941$ $CH8 12-07-16 08:26:04 PSSTUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCERhave marginalized their study as a specialist concern. Their complexityis reflected in ongoing debate over their taxonomy: when is a compila-tion an anthology and when is it a miscellany? The term “anthology”suggests—following the word’s etymology (literally, “collection offlowers”)—an assortment of like things, thus pointing to an overarchingorganizational genius behind its production and arrangement. The “mis-cellany,” on the other hand, implies a collection of disparate items,brought together by idiosyncrasies of personal whim and/or vagaries ofcirculation.2Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson use both labels in discussing com-pilations in their seminal 1989 essay “Anthologies and Miscellanies:Production and Choice of Texts.”3 Yet, as they show, the hard and fastdistinction between the “anthology” and the “miscellany” is oftenoccluded by the complexity of these manuscripts’ production and circu-lation. Booklets of texts could be produced on bespoke commission forinclusion in a specific compilation, but they could also circulate indepen-dently, to be rebound in new combinations in other manuscripts. AsRalph Hanna further points out, booklets that were circulating as inde-pendent textual units often went on to be altered, continued, split, andrecombined to produce new booklets tailored to a specific compilationfor a specific book owner.4 It is this fluidity of production that makesthe compilation so difficult to taxonomize.The complexity of their production, however, does not mean thatA Critical Edition of BnF MS. fr. 25458, Charles d’Orle´ans’ Personal Manuscript, ed. JohnFox and Mary-Jo Arn with Stephanie A. V. G. Kamath, trans. R. Barton Palmer(Tempe: ACMRS; and Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); A Facsimile Edition of the Vernon Manu-script: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1, ed. Wendy Scase (Oxford: BodleianLibrary, 2012); and The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, ed. Susanna Fein with DavidRaybin and Jan Ziolkowski, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014–15).2 See Theo Stemmler, “Miscellany or Anthology? The Structure of Medieval Manu-scripts: MS Harley 2253, for Example,” in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes,Contents, and Social Context of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalama-zoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 111–21.3 Julia Boffey and John J. Thompson, “Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production andChoice of Texts,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. JeremyGriffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 279–315(esp. 283); see also Julia Boffey, “The Reputation and Circulation of Chaucer’s Lyrics inthe Fifteenth Century,” ChauR 28, no. 1 (1993): 28–40 (esp. 33ff.).4 Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 25. See also P. R. Robinson, “The ‘Booklet’: ASelf-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts,” Codicologica 3 (1980): 46–69.PAGE 242242................. 18941$ $CH8 12-07-16 08:26:04 PSINTRODUCTIONcompilations, particularly when they contain formally or genericallysimilar texts, lack discernible shapes and organizational strategies, andin the case of manuscripts—such as Trinity College, R.3.20—in whichboth the identity of the compiler and something about his backgroundare known, these strategies can shed particular light on late medievalliterary cultures. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet enjoins scholars to focuson this figure of the compiler, and identifies three dominant anthologiz-ing impulses in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.5 The first isthe meticulous anthologization of one’s own collected works (e.g.,Machaut, Christine de Pizan), where texts are recopied agglutinativelyover time to foster literary self-preservation. The second impulse is thatof a coterie of friends and peers, composing lyrics for and with oneanother, sharing incipits and refrains in friendly dialogue and genial com-petition.6 The third impulse Cerquiglini-Toulet defines as having anexplicitly memorial function, where texts are being brought together inthe service of literary canon-building. These concerns intersect, in provoc-ative and sometimes surprising ways, in John Shirley’s life and works.Focusing on John Shirley himself, A. S. G. Edwards looks at the com-piler’s relationship with John Lydgate, the author featured most promi-nently in R.3.20 and Shirley’s other anthologies, and suggests thatShirley’s compilatory activities have commercial motivations. Also look-ing at Shirley, Kathryn Veeman draws on new archival evidence to placeShirley in close social proximity to Geoffrey Chaucer towards the end ofthe latter’s life. Julia Boffey makes the case for a sequential reading ofShirley’s anthologies as a larger body of work responding to contempo-rary sociopolitical events by tracking his choice of texts across compila-tions. Arguing for the need to look more closely at his inclusion ofFrench texts in R.3.20, Kara Doyle explores the ways in which Shirley’sarrangement of French and English lyrics within the manuscript distin-guish between Chaucerian and Lydgatian approaches to women andcourtly love, while Stephanie Downes directs our attention to the didac-tic French works that Shirley includes to shape his presentation of both5 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “Quand la voix s’est tue: La mise en recueil de lapoe´sie lyrique au XIVe et XVe sie`cles,” in La pre´sentation du livre: Actes du colloque de ParisX-Nanterre, ed. Emmanuelle Baumgartner and Nicole Boulestreau (Paris: Centre derecherches du De’p. de franc¸ais de Paris X-Nanterre, 1987), 313–25.6 On such collections, see the seminal study by Jane H. M. Taylor, The Making ofPoetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).PAGE 243243................. 18941$ $CH8 12-07-16 08:26:05 PSSTUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCERdidactic Lydgatian and courtly French material. Finally, R. D. Perryconsiders Shirley’s loquacious headnotes as a form of community-building that, following Lydgatian models, construct “virtual coteries”of textual agency.Thinking about Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20 in all of itscomplexity provides a means of expanding our thinking about JohnShirley beyond his role in the transmission of Chaucer’s works and pavesthe way for a richer understanding of Shirley’s productions in the con-text of calls by scholars such as Seth Lerer and Arthur Bahr to attend tothe compilation as a material object.7 Moreover, in their close engage-ment with features of cross-Channel literary exchange, as well as in theirheavy attention to Lydgate, the essays in this colloquium are symptom-atic of both new directions in the study of the late medieval compilationand of the current “fifteenth-century turn” in Middle English studiesaway from a Chaucer-dominated understanding of late medieval Englishliterary culture.7 See Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA118, no. 5 (October 2003): 1251–67; and Arthur Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages: Form-ing Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).PAGE 244244................. 18941$ $CH8 12-07-16 08:26:05 PS

Introduction to Colloquium: John Shirley’s Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20 and the Culture of the Anthology in Late Medieval England

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Introduction to Colloquium: John Shirley’s Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20 and the Culture of the Anthology in Late Medieval England

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