incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Matthew Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (2012): a monograph in two halves. The second half has brilliant moments in its exploration of scribal authorship---Fisher's phrase---as it pertains to two little-analyzed texts written down by two much-studied scribes.[*] Though it shies away from certain big topics that I hope Fisher explores in subsequent work, it contributes meaningfully to the field. The first half is intellectual pottage, even as it wedges in some important assertions[**]; it overdetermines itself with sentences such as "This is not to say that the prose Brut wasn't copied, but to argue that it was not only copied" (p. 28). The genius, if one can call it that, of the monograph's first half is to frame matters almost entirely in terms of scribal/authorial activity and to talk almost not at all about multilingualism or formal/generic considerations. Suits him, and I'm not being sarcastic. One lack, given this bipartite approach, is the failure to name his earliest teachers in the book's acknowledgments, because a good chunk of the pottage (and thus the basis for his important assertions) is instantly recognizable to any reader who knows those teachers' work and mental habitus...so I will give their surnames here: Middleton, Justice, Miller.

If this post's tone is unlike the hesitance I usually fold into book write-ups when confronted by seeming shortfalls, consider that I've read ~80+% of the book's eighteen-page bibliography independently, including a decent chunk of the two pages given to medieval manuscript citations. Can't say that of most scholarly books I've met.

* These are obscure even to many Eng-lit medievalists. The scribes are the prime movers behind and primary contributors to British Library MS Royal 12 C.xii, which Fisher inexplicably cites as "12.c.xii", and National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.1, better known as the Auchinleck MS; the texts are each codex's short history of English kings, which have been edited confusingly by E. Zettl in aggregate and no less confusingly in a single-text rendition of 12 C.xii by U. O'Farrell-Tate. If you work on these manuscripts, even if you don't care about historiography, you ought to read Fisher's book.

** For Fisher, the "scribal equivalent of word-for-word copying" is "duplicative copying," separate from "replicative" or verbatim copying in which the "primary concern is the reproduction of text, not gloss, of content, not context"; both duplicative and replicative modes "can translate the dialect of a source text partially or completely without otherwise changing either the layout or even a single word of an exemplar" (pp. 37-38).

What I'm reading: since phone reading has had even less love than paper reading during the past month, I'm considering converting what I can to .mobi so that I can read it in sunlight on the Kindle that I otherwise disdain. Ha. Library loans must be read on phone, and they've crowded out .epub-on-phone time. Anyway, still tiptoeing through Smith's Fleeing Peace (epub), Welcome to Bordertown (library epub now re-borrowed because I exceeded the loan period), Dvornik (paper), Lee's Hanji Unfurled (paper); also now Elliott's Cold Fire (paper, nearest thing as I headed out for a longish train ride) and Ridgway's The River of No Return (library paper, a hold/request based upon a chance review sighting). Whatever, I'll get through all of it at some point. Didn't touch Crnja this week.

What I've read: Herzog's Knit to Flatter: The Only Instructions You'll Ever Need to Knit Sweaters That Make You Look Good and Feel Great! (library paper), which is for another post, a brief one, but I'm splitting it off lest this space go silent because the scheduling queue has only two posts left; the third Nell Sweeney mystery (mobi); Budd's Knitter's Handy Book of Top-Down Sweater (library paper); the final pages of Lim's In Search of Korean Folklore (library paper), begun nearly two years ago. See, I do get through things at some point. It helps that knitting books read for general knowledge take about twenty minutes apiece.

What I'll read next: I foolishly picked up a paperback when collecting the most recent batch of library holds---the county has many knitting books, most of which live at branches 20-30 miles away---and thus it's to be nibblings plus two? three? more knitting books plus Seanan McGuire's A Local Habitation.