The Geographies of Orthodoxy team have decided to add a new feature to the online database that we believe will make this resource even more useful to scholars and students of later Medieval literary culture. We are planning to add scanned samples of scribal forms from manuscripts within the corpus, and thus to allow the scholarly community to compare and identify the hands found in the database with the habits of scribes in books beyond our Middle English pseudo-Bonaventuran corpus. The interactive structure of the database will allow our users to advance possible scribal matches and thus further enrich the database’s ability to situate the production of Nicholas Love’s Mirror and other Middle English pseudo-Bonaventuran translations within the macrocosm of fifteenth century ‘manuscript culture’.

There are already several examples of scribes who have been identified as being responsible for penning multiple copies of the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and indeed, as one would expect in this period marked by ever increasing professionalisation of book production, these hands are recognisable within textual productions other than the Mirror. The scribe known as Stephen Doddesham is among the most prolific, or at least, the best survived of the hands that transcribed Middle English pseudo-Bonaventuran translations among their scribal repertoire. Doddesham was a scribe whose long career (according to A.I. Doyle) appears to have included a period as a professional book copyist ca. 1430, before entering the brethren of Carthusians c. 1460, and continuing to produce books at the Charterhouses of Witham and then Sheen until his death in 1481-2. Doddesham’s hand occurs in at least 20 mss, of which 3 contain copies of the Mirror. Several examples of Doddesham’s productions (the Love MSS and those that contain the name of the scribe) are listed below:¹

• Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.15.15: Mirror (Doyle suggests this MS may have been completed in an earlier stage of the scribe’s career than his two other extant copies of the text)
• Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunterian T.3.15 (Hunter 77): Mirror, transcribed 1474-5, Sheen.
• New York, formerly Cockerell/Duschnes MS (stolen from the latter, and still missing): pseudo-Augustine Sermones morales ad fraters suos in heremo, ascription to ‘Stephanus Dodesham monachus’, Witham, 1462.
• Oxford, Trinity College, MS 46: Liturgical miscellany that opens with a Carthusian Calendar and includes a signature by the scribe; thought by Doyle to be written before 1474.
• Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A.387B: Mirror.

A key identification in allowing us to locate early Mirror production in professional metropolitan scriptoria is the hand tagged by Doyle and Parkes as Δ (the delta scribe).² This scribe appears to have been occupied in the professional book trade in London or Westminster in the early fifteenth-century, and his transcription of Love’s Mirror is thought to be one of the earliest extant versions of the text. Thus far his hand has been identified in the following books:

• Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS H.1: Trevisa, Polychronicon
• British Library, Additional MS 24194: Trevisa, Polychronicon
• British Library, Royal MS 18 C. XXII: Confessio Amantis
• Oxford, Brasenose College, MS 9: Mirror; a version which originally contained all but the first chapter of the ‘Middle English Meditationes de Passione Christi’ , immediately before Love’s section on the Passion. Kathleen Scott dated the decoration in the MS to c. 1410 (metropolitan), and thus at the very beginning of the dissemination history of Love’s text. Intriguingly the decoration on fol. 1r includes a shield containing the initials ‘N L’.
• Paris, Biblioteque Nationale, MS anglais 25: Guy de Chauliac, Cyrurgie (scribe A).

It is possible that we have already noticed one important hand who appears to have been active in the metropolitan area in the generation after the delta scribe, a scribe who might have originally immigrated to London from the Gloucestershire/ Worcestershire border area in the West Midlands, and who has left a layering of his provincial spelling forms in at least some of the books he produced.³ This is the hand of an important copy of the Canterbury Tales, Petworth MS 7, and the so-called Petworth Chaucer scribe’s career is evidenced by several manuscripts made c. 1420-50. The scribe has been confidently linked through his hand (a number of the identifications being made by the late Jeremy Griffiths), and indeed, through his dialectal ‘fingerprint’, to the following MSS:

• British Library, MS Arundel 119: Lydgate, Siege of Thebes; Simon Horobin refutes this identification on dialectal grounds (2003, pp. 126-7)
• Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307: Confessio Amantis
• Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 18.1.7: Mirror
• Lichfield Cathedral Library, MS 29: Canterbury Tales (scribe B)
• Oslo, Schøyen Collection, MS 615: John Walton, Boethius
• Petworth House, MS 7: Canterbury Tales
• Register of the Skinners’ company fraternity of Our Lady, (the scribe penning a portion for the years up to 1443-4)
• Tokyo, Professsor Takimiya MS 54: South English Legendary
• Tokyo, Professor Takimiya MS 45.17: A fragment of the Gilte Legende
• Tokyo, Waseda University, MS NE 3691: Mirror

Visiting the John Rylands Library in July this year, I was struck by similarities between the Petworth Chaucer scribe and the hand of Rylands MS Eng. 98, a very fine copy of the Mirror. I am currently in the process of confirming this discovery (by no means yet certain), and have already established that the dialectal forms used by this scribe appear to fit well with the dialectal template of Petworth Chaucer spelling forms that have been described by Jeremy Smith and Simon Horobin.

It is hoped that by providing samples of the scripts within the Middle English pseudo-Bonaventuran corpus that many more identifications will emerge through the engagement of the scholarly community with the Geographies of Orthodoxy database. No doubt, in a corpus as substantial as this, there is the potential for the scribes sampled in our survey to be identified in a number of other textual productions.

¹ For a full list of Doddesham’s productions and a biography of his scribal career see A.I. Doyle, “Stephen Dodesham of Witham and Sheen”, Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M.B. Parkes (Aldershot, 1997) pp. 94-115

² A.I. Doyle and M.B. Parkes, “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and Confessio Amantis”, Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts amd Libraries: Essays Presented to N.R. Ker (London, 1978) pp. 163-210; esp. pp. 206-8.

³ See Simon Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (Cambridge, 2003) pp. 125-127, 157; Jeremy Smith, “Dialect and Standardisation in the Waseda Manuscript of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ”, Nicholas Love at Waseda (Cambridge, 1997) pp. 129-41.