The Afterlives of Nicholas Love

ABSTRACT

In recent years, historical pragmatics has extended its range to engage not only with lexical and grammatical features but also with other aspects of written text not generally considered ‘linguistic’. One such area is punctuation. This article investigates punctuation practices in copies, both manuscript and in print, of an important late medieval English text, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, one of the most widely circulated English texts of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It shows how changes in punctuation mirror wider social changes in a crucial period of cultural formation.

KEYWORDS:

• textual afterlives
• punctuation
• literacy
• script to print

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to the library staff of Queen’s University Belfast, notably Deirdre Wildy and Michael O’Connor, for their characteristically generous assistance with the examination of their collection of microfilms of Love’s Mirror. The collection was assembled for the Queen’s-St Andrews Geographies of Orthodoxy project (PIs Ian Johnson and John Thompson), funded by the United Kingdoms’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. John Thompson’s kind assistance and advice has been invaluable throughout the writing of this article, as will be noted inter alia by the references below; I should like to acknowledge here John’s inspirational commitment to the wider team project of which this article is part (see further e.g. Thompson forthcoming). I should also like to acknowledge with gratitude the important MPhil thesis on Love undertaken by my student Francesca Mackay, cited below (Mackay 2012), which inter alia compares the punctuation practices in two local Love manuscripts (MSS Glasgow, University Library, Gen. 1130 and Hunter 77) with those in the early prints. Although I have to come to differ from Francesca in my views on the implications of the evolving punctuation of the Love tradition, I have much enjoyed my discussions with her both on this text and on many others as she moved on to produce a distinguished doctoral thesis on Older Scots chronicles (see Mackay 2016). I am grateful for input many years ago from Malcolm Parkes, whose verbally expressed axiom that ‘the greatest mistake a paleographer makes is to forget the nature of the text being copied’ seems to me especially relevant to the arguments put forward here. And finally I should like to thank the very helpful comments on this article by two anonymous readers.

Notes

¹ Descriptions of both these manuscripts, with details of the marginal comments in MS Cambridge University Library, Additional 6578, appear at http://www.qub.ac.uk/geographies-of-orthodoxy/; see further section 3 below.

² Ad1 makes no distinction in form between thorn and y, a dialectally distinctive feature in medieval English handwriting, so none is made in the transcription above. See further Benskin 1982, supplemented by a discursive note in Laing and Williamson 1994: 115–116. Sargent places the text in Leicestershire/Nottinghamshire on the basis of the combination of forms used, but there are definite distinctive Northernisms recorded, not easily accommodated in Leicestershire/Nottinghamshire, that seem to be part of the emerging Love spelling-tradition, notably suld ‘should’, gude ‘good’, lufe ‘love’, saule ‘soul’.

³ Accessible images of this scribe’s copies of Chaucer and Gower, lodged on the Medieval Scribes website authored by Mooney’s team, include:

https://www.medievalscribes.com/index.php?browse=aspect&id=3&navlocation=Petworth&navlibrary=Petworth House, The National Trust&msid=116&nav=off; https://www.medievalscribes.com/index.php?browse=aspect&id=57&navlocation=Cambridge&navlibrary=Pembroke College&msid=181&nav=off; The York-Oxford-Sheffield Late Medieval Scribes project (PI Linne Mooney, Co-I Simon Horobin, RA Estelle Stubbs) acknowledges the support of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

⁴ Something similar can be perceived fifty years later in 1560s Scotland, in the punctuation practices found in public notices (‘broadsides’) derived from private documents; see Smith forthcoming (b).

⁵ Historical pragmatics correlates rather well with another paradigm that was formulated in literary circles in the 1990s: ‘new philology’. New philology, formulated most famously in a special 1990 number of the high-profile journal Speculum, stemmed in medievalist circles from the ‘turn to manuscripts’ in the late 1970s, emphasising the reception of texts as the focus of enquiry rather than the traditional philological and editorial goal of reconstructing authors’ original conceptions of their works. Such concerns also spoke to postmodernist agendas current in the humanities that emphasised textual fluidity and the negotiation of meaning. The key essay in the special number of Speculum is probably Nichols 1990; key theoretical works include Zumthor 1972 and Cerquiglini 1999. Other key works significant for Anglicists included Patterson 1988 and Pearsall 1977. The latter is ostensibly a textbook but in retrospect it can be seen as the inspiration for the key series of York manuscript conferences that Pearsall instigated from 1981 onwards; these conferences, and the papers that followed from them, are increasingly recognised as agenda-setting for a whole raft of initiatives, e.g. the Early Book Society. For further discussion, see also Smith 2014.