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Herry Lovelich's Merlin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Recent studies have demonstrated the existence in fifteenth and even fourteenth-century England of “bookshops” to which scriveners, limners, and perhaps members of the bookbinders' craft were attached in a sort of lay scriptorium for the purpose of producing books as they were ordered by patrons. Out of such shops, located, it would seem, principally in London, rather than out of monastic scriptoria, came the bulk of English secular literature. Many of the MSS. of the Canterbury Tales are authoritatively said to be “shop-made,” and the same claim is made about the mid-fourteenth-century Auchinleck MS. Mrs. Loomis, moreover, argues convincingly that the shops of the early stationers sometimes included translator-versifiers whose routine task it was to turn French prose romances into English verse, generally into highly conventional and pedestrian couplets.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 See Laura Hibbard Loomis, “The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330-1340,” PMLA, lvii (1942), 595-627. This excellent article refers to many earlier discussions of medieval book-making. Of these, several deal more or less directly with the production of books in lay establishments, particularly Chap. xx, “Paper, the Book Trade, and Book Prices,” of James Westfall Thompson, The Medieval Library (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 630-646; Graham Pollard, “The Company of Stationers before 1557,” Library, 4th Ser., xviii (1938), 1-38; and Ernest A. Savage, Old English Libraries (London: Methuen, 1911), pp. 204 ff.
2 John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1940), i, 604-605.
3 Loomis, pp. 626, 607-608. Some translators, of course, merely turned their French originals into English prose; witness the English prose Merlin.
4 Frederick J. Furnivall ed., EETSES, xx, xxiv, xxviii, xxx, xcv (1874, 1875, 1877, 1905). Also published by Furnivall in parallel with the French prose text in Seynt Graal or the Sank Ryal, Roxburghe Club (London, 1861, 1863). Quotations from the English poem are from the more recent edition (abbreviated “Furnivall”). Quotations from the French original are taken from Furnivall's parallel text edition (abbreviated “Furnivall, Seynt Graal”).
5 Ernst A. Koch ed., EETSES, xciii, cxii, EETS, clxxxv (1904, 1913, 1932). Notes and other critical apparatus are lacking in this edition.
6 I wish here to acknowledge the generosity and courtesy of the Fellows of Corpus Christi College, and of the librarian, Mr. Bury, in permitting me to study this MS. and to have it microfilmed. The MS. is described as follows in A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, ed. Montague Rhodes James (Cambridge, 1912), i, 164: “Paper, 15¾×11, ff. 200, double columns of 65, 69, 74, etc. lines. Cent. xv. in a current band.” The MS. has elsewhere been dated the “later 15th century” (John Edwin Wells, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1400, New Haven, 1916, p. 45). But since there seems to be little reason for denying it a somewhat earlier date, say 1425, this MS. is conceivably the first and only form in which the poems of Lovelich were set forth. One might speculate that Lovelich composed his translations on wax tablets or on single sheets of paper (see Manly and Rickert, ii, 30) and then turned them over to his personal “Adam scriveyn,” who produced MS. Corpus Christi 80.
7 Loomis, pp. 609-613.
8 In addition to Lovelich's poem, the history of Merlin is preserved in the following six ME forms: (1) MS. Nat. Lib. of Scotland 19.2.1.155 (Auchinleck MS.), ed. Eugen Kölbing, Altenglische Bibliothek, iv (1890), 1-272; (2) MS. Douce 236, ed. Kölbing, op. cit., pp. 273-370; (3) MS. Harley 6223, ed. W. B. D. D. Turnbull, Abbotsford Club, xii (1838), x-xiii; (4) MS. Lincoln's Inn Library 150, ed. Kölbing, op. cit., pp. 273-370 (in parallel with MS. Douce 236); (5) MS. Brit. Mus. Add. 27879 (Percy Folio MS.): Bishop Percy's Folio MS., ed. John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall (London: N. Trübner, 1867-68), i, 417-496; (6) MS. Cambridge Univ. Lib. Ff iii 11: Merlin, a Prose Romance, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, EETS, x, xxi, xxxvi, cxii (1865, 1866, 1899). Only the last, the prose Merlin, is as long as Lovelich's work. The next lengthiest is the Auchinleck MS. (9,938 verses), and the remainder are fragmentary. See Wells, pp. 38-45.
9 In The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H. Oskar Sommer (Washington: Carnegie Inst., 1908), Vol. ii. Sommer published the same text (Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 10292) in Le Roman de Merlin or the Early History of King Arthur (London, 1894). Quotations in this paper are from the more recent edition.
10 Skeat asserts that the same scribe wrote both the text of the poems and the side-note. Walter W. Skeat, “The Translator of ‘The Graal,‘ ” Athenaeum, No. 3917 (22 Nov. 1902), p. 684.
11 “Henry Lonelich the Skinner,” Athenaeum, No. 3914 (1 Nov. 1902), p. 587.
12 Skeat, op. cit., and also “The Author of ‘The Holy Grail,‘ ” Athenaeum, No. 3919 (6 Dec. 1902), p. 758.
13 Skeat, “The Author of ‘The Holy Grail,‘ ” p. 758. See the extracts from the will published by F. J. Furnivall in “Henry Lovelich, Skinner,” Athenaeum, No. 3924 (10 Jan. 1903), pp. 50-51.
14 William Herbert, The History of the Twelve Great Livery Companies of London (London, 1836-37), ii, 318.
15 In an unpublished M.A. thesis (New York Univ., 1947), “The History of the Holy Grail by Henry Lovelich,” Alice R. Nutis suggests that since Barton, for whom Lovelich wrote his poems, died in 1434, we can assume that the work was done about 1425. The conventional dating is circa 1450.
16 A discussion of literary patronage and of “part-time” literary men of the 15th century is to be found in H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 105 ff.
17 The fact that at least one recent scholar continues to allow Lovelich's name to be spelled Lonelich demonstrates that he has not read Merlin, v. 21596, for in that line the poet tells us unequivocally in a Latin anagram (“Gallina Ciligo Amo Similis”) the proper form of his name. See my article forthcoming in MLN, “Henry Lovelich's Name.”
18 Miss Mabel Day, until recently Assistant Director and Secretary of the EETS, informed me in a letter dated 18 April 1949 that the Society has no plans for completing Kock's edition.
19 Kölbing, op. cit., pp. xviii-xix.
20 Mead, “Outlines of the History of the Legend of Merlin,” in Merlin, a Prose Romance, ii, lxiii-lxix, esp. p. lxix, n. 1.
21 See, e.g., Bennett, p. 289; and A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), p. 300.
22 Mead (p. lxvi) notes mildly that he observed some discrepancies when comparing the proper names in the first 6,200 Unes of Lovelich with those in the prose Merlin and the French text.
23 I italicize the names under discussion and also the pertinent phrases in this and subsequent quotations.
24 The Historia Regum Brüanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Acton Griscom (London: Longmans, Green, 1929), p. 381.
25 Laamon's Brut, or the Chronicle of Britain, ed. Sir Frederic Madden, Soc. of Antiquaries of London (London, 1847), ii, vv. 15782-83.
26 Ed. cit., Dubriz vv. 17504, 24499, 24562. Dubric 24370. Dubris 24457. Only the readings in MS. Cotton Caligula A ix are cited.
27 Auchinleck MS., ed. cit., vv. 2757, 2783, 2986, 3111. Lovelich's Merlin, vv. 7019, 25805.
28 The form “Blios, the lorde of Cloadas” occurs in the prose Merlin (Wheatley, p. 321).
29 For many examples, see An Index of the Arthurian Names in Middle English, forthcoming in Stanford Univ. Publications, Univ. Ser., Lang. and Lit.
30 See Max Weyrauch, Die mittelenglischen Fassungen der Sage von Guy of Warwick und ihre altfranzösische Vorlage (Breslau, 1901), p. 41.
31 See my “Two Scribal Errors in Guy of Warwick,” Research Studies of the State Coll. of Washington, viii (1940), 81-84.
32 See the name index in The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), iii, 1661 ff.
33 Skeat states that Lovelich “follows the long French prose version tolerably closely” (EETS xxiv, 1871, p. xxxiii). Miss Nutis, who made an independent collation of Lovelich with the French, concludes, after listing a few omitted incidents, that Lovelich's poem represents faithfully his original. In this connection, an interesting remark in the prologue to the French prose version, a portion of the romance which is lacking in our Lovelich MS., cautions that if scribes copy the story badly, the author will be blamed: “La tierche raisons est pour chou, ke s'il eust en l'estoire aucune chose desauenant, ou par effachement, ou par le uice des escriuens qui apres le translataissent d'un lieu en autre, tous li blasmes en fust sour son non” (Furnivall, p. 2).
34 The Vernon MS. text of Joseph of Arimathie, which sets forth a much condensed version of the story, reads “Argos” (Walter W. Skeat, ed., EETS xliv, 1871, v. 36). Lovelich, then, was not alone in making this mistake. See Skeat's note, p. 54.
35 Some French works were probably available only in texts which had been copied by English scribes entirely ignorant of French and therefore incapable of filling in abbreviations or indistinct letters correctly.