Chaucer's Scribes
London Textual Production, 1384–1432
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature Series

The 2004 announcement that Chaucer's scribe had been discovered resulted in a paradigm shift in medieval studies. Adam Pynkhurst dominated the classroom, became a fictional character, and led to suggestions that this identification should prompt the abandonment of our understanding of the development of London English and acceptance that the clerks of the Guildhall were promoting vernacular literature as part of a concerted political program. In this meticulously researched study, Lawrence Warner challenges the narratives and conclusions of recent scholarship. In place of the accepted story, Warner provides a fresh, more nuanced one in which many more scribes, anonymous ones, worked in conditions we are only beginning to understand. Bringing to light new information, not least, hundreds of documents in the hand of one of the most important fifteenth-century scribes of Chaucer and Langland, this book represents an important intervention in the field of Middle English studies.

1. Adam; 2. The Pynkhurst canon; 3. Pynkhurst's London English and the dilemma of copy-text; 4. Looking for the scribe of Huntington Hm 114; 5. The Guildhall clerks; 6. Hoccleve's Hengwrt, Hoccleve's Holographs.

Lawrence Warner is Reader in Medieval English at King's College London. His previous publications include The Myth of 'Piers Plowman' (Cambridge, 2014), which won the English Association's 2016 Beatrice White Prize for outstanding scholarly work in the field of English Literature before 1590, and The Lost History of 'Piers Plowman' (2011), which received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Textual Scholarship's 2013 Richard J. Finneran Award.