Harley MS 7334, sometimes known as the Harley Manuscript, is a mediaeval manuscript of

Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...

's ''

Canterbury Tales ''The Canterbury Tales'' ( enm, Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's ''magnum opus ...

'' held in the

Harleian Collection The Harleian Library, Harley Collection, Harleian Collection and other variants ( la, Bibliotheca Harleiana) is one of the main "closed" collections (namely, historic collections to which new material is no longer added) of the British Library in ...

of the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

. It was formerly used as a base text for modern editions of the ''Tales'', following the examples of Thomas Wright, who used it as the basis for his 1847 edition, and W. W. Skeat, who felt it gave authoritative variant readings.

Description

The Harley MS was likely produced in a

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

workshop within a decade of Chaucer's death, and is therefore one of the earliest extant manuscripts. It has some decoration in red, blue, pink and green, with gold leaf used on borders and initials, and like the

Ellesmere Manuscript The Ellesmere Chaucer, or Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, is an early 15th-century illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tales'', owned by the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California (EL 26 C 9). It is co ...

represents a commission for a wealthy patron (the style of the decoration is very similar to that seen in Ellesmere, perhaps indicating that the same

limner A limner is an illuminator of manuscripts, or more generally, a painter of ornamental decoration. One of the earliest mentions of a limner's work is found in the book ''Methods and Materials of Painting'' by Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865). ...

worked on both).Thaisen, J. "The Trinity Gower D Scribe's Two ''Canterbury Tales'' Manuscripts Revisited", in Mooney & Connolly, ''Design and distribution of late medieval manuscripts in England'', Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2008, p.42 In the fifteenth century it appears to have been owned by relatives of the Haute family of

Ightham Mote Ightham Mote (), Ightham, Kent is a medieval moated manor house. The architectural writer John Newman describes it as "the most complete small medieval manor house in the county". Ightham Mote and its gardens are owned by the National Trust a ...

Scribe

The scribe of Harley MS 7334, conventionally referred to as "Scribe D",Shortened from "Trinity Gower Scribe D". There are five hands in total in the Trinity Gower manuscript, one of whom is Adam Pinkhurst and another of whom is the poet

Thomas Hoccleve Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (1368 or 1369–1426) was an English poet and clerk, who became a key figure in 15th-century Middle English literature. His ''Regement of Princes or De Regimine Principum'' is a homily on virtues and vices, written for ...

. is known to have been responsible for several other important manuscripts of the period, including eight copies of the ''

Confessio Amantis ''Confessio Amantis'' ("The Lover's Confession") is a 33,000-line Middle English poem by John Gower, which uses the confession made by an ageing lover to the chaplain of Venus as a frame story for a collection of shorter narrative poems. Accord ...

'' of

John Gower John Gower (; c. 1330 – October 1408) was an English poet, a contemporary of William Langland and the Pearl Poet, and a personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is remembered primarily for three major works, the '' Mirour de l'Omme'', '' Vo ...

and one of '' Piers Plowman''. He is also known to be responsible for one other manuscript of the ''Tales'', Corpus Christi College MS. 198, and his work appears in a Gower manuscript alongside that of Adam Pinkhurst, now identified as the scribe of the Ellesmere MS. Scribe D was active in London between the 1390s and 1420s, though his spellings indicate that he was originally from the southwest Midlands. Academic Jeremy Smith has characterised Scribe D as particularly interesting, as his texts display a history in which he moved to London from north

Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see H ...

, tried hard to eliminate his Worcestershire dialect from his copying, and gradually assimilated peculiar spellings particular to Gower, eventually transplanting them into his work on Chaucer's texts.Transcript of discussion on "Manuscript Studies and Literary Geography", in Laing & Nicholson (eds) ''Speaking in our tongues: proceedings of a colloquium on medieval dialectology'', Boydell & Brewer, 1994, p.113

Relation to other manuscripts

The Harley MS displays a different tale order to that of other significant manuscripts of the ''Tales'', such as the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts. As well as the ''

Tale of Gamelyn ''The Tale of Gamelyn'' is a romance written in c. 1350 in a dialect of Middle English, considered part of the Matter of England.Cartlidge, Neil and DS Brewer. ''Boundaries in medieval romance'', 2008, , 9781843841555. pp. 29–42. It is presented ...

'', now thought not to be by Chaucer, it also contains many peculiar variant readings which were, in the nineteenth century, considered to represent either a first or second draft by the author himself.Tatlock, J. S. P. ''The Harleian Manuscript 7334 and Revision of the Canterbury Tales'', 1904, p.2 Modern opinion is that the manuscript's scribe, in common with the practice of the time, would have felt it acceptable to expand or edit the author's text as they thought appropriate.Crane, S. "The Paris Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales" in Boenig and Davis (eds) ''Manuscript, narrative, lexicon'', Bucknell UP, 2000, p.34 In general, modern editors have agreed with the opinion of Stephen Knight, who noted that while Harley MS 7334 "seems so handsome and authoritative ..it is in fact heavily and even whimsically edited".Knight S. "Reading ''Gamelyn'' for Text not Context" in Field, R. (ed) ''Tradition and transformation in medieval romance'', Boydell & Brewer, 1999, p.16 However, Scribe D was, in his Gower manuscripts, known to have proceeded in a manner similar to "a

photocopier A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers ...

ndoften copied simply what was before him", so it remains possible that the idiosyncratic variant readings might have some other source.Echard, S. "Last Words: Latin at the End of the ''Confession Amantis''" in Green & Mooney (eds), ''Interstices: studies in late Middle English and Anglo-Latin texts'', University of Toronto Press, 2004, p.118 The manuscript is often conventionally referred to as Ha4, following John Manly and Edith Rickert's notation. A facsimile edition of the manuscript has been published.

References

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External links

Harley 7334
on the British Library. Literary illuminated manuscripts The Canterbury Tales Harleian Collection English manuscripts