A Witness Much Abused: BL MS Harley 7334 and the Stemma of the Canterbury Tales
- Author / Editor
- Conlan, J. P.
A Witness Much Abused: BL MS Harley 7334 and the Stemma of the Canterbury Tales
- Published
- Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 10: 120-47, 1999.
- Description
- Reexamines the "paradoxical evidence" of Ha4, arguing that Manly and Rickert's discussion of it was distorted by their a priori assumptions and their concluding that Chaucer's foul papers "served as the exemplar" of the manuscript. The affiliations of the manuscript reflect methodical collation; the character of its text suggests that it was copied from a working draft. While the "tightness" in its construction indicates that the scribe had all the fragments before him, its rubrics are derived rather than copied-evidence that it was copied before circulation.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies.