case study of the scribe ao3

Psychology Memory Revision Notes

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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What do the examiners look for?

• Accurate and detailed knowledge
• Clear, coherent, and focused answers
• Effective use of terminology (use the “technical terms”)

In application questions, examiners look for “effective application to the scenario,” which means that you need to describe the theory and explain the scenario using the theory making the links between the two very clear. If there is more than one individual in the scenario you must mention all of the characters to get to the top band.

Difference between AS and A level answers

The descriptions follow the same criteria; however, you have to use the issues and debates effectively in your answers. “Effectively” means that it needs to be clearly linked and explained in the context of the answer.

Read the model answers to get a clearer idea of what is needed.

The Multi-Store Model

The multistore model of memory was proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin and is a structural model. They proposed that memory consisted of three stores: sensory register, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM). Information passes from store to store in a linear way. Both STM and LTM are unitary stores.

Sensory memory is the information you get from your sense, your eyes, and ears. When attention is paid to something in the environment, it is then converted to short-term memory.

Information from short-term memory is transferred to long-term memory only if that information is rehearsed (i.e., repeated).

Maintenance rehearsal is repetition that keeps information in STM, but eventually, such repetition will create an LTM.

If maintenance rehearsal (repetition) does not occur, then information is forgotten and lost from short-term memory through the processes of displacement or decay.

Each store has its own characteristics in terms of encoding, capacity, and duration .

• Encoding is the way information is changed so that it can be stored in memory. There are three main ways in which information can be encoded (changed): 1. visual (picture), 2. acoustic (sound), and 3. semantic (meaning).
• Capacity concerns how much information can be stored.
• Duration refers to the period of time information can last in-memory stores.

Sensory register

• Duration: ¼ to ½ second
• Capacity: all sensory experience (v. larger capacity)
• Encoding: sense specific (e.g., different stores for each sense)

Short Term Memory

• Duration: 0-18 seconds
• Capacity: 7 +/- 2 items
• Encoding: mainly acoustic

Long Term Memory

• Duration: Unlimited
• Capacity: Unlimited
• Encoding: Mainly semantic (but can be visual and acoustic)

AO2 Scenario Question

The multi-store model of memory has been criticized in many ways. The following example illustrates a possible criticism.

Some students read through their revision notes lots of times before an examination but still, find it difficult to remember the information. However, the same students can remember the information in a celebrity magazine, even though they read it only once.

Explain why this can be used as a criticism of the multi-store model of memory.

“The MSM states that depth of memory trace in LTM is simply a result of the amount of rehearsal that takes place.

The MSM can be criticized for failing to account for how different types of material can result in different depth memory traces even though they’ve both been rehearsed for a similar amount of time.

For example, people may recall information they are interested in (e.g., information in celebrity magazines) more than the material they are not interested in (e.g., revision notes) despite the fact that they have both been rehearsed for a similar amount of time.

Therefore, the MSM’s view of long-term memory can be criticized for failing to take into account that material we may pay more attention to or is more meaningful/interesting to us may cause a deeper memory trace which is recalled more easily.”

One strength of the multistore model is that it gives us a good understanding of the structure and process of the STM. This is good because this allows researchers to expand on this model. This means researchers can do experiments to improve on this model and make it more valid, and they can prove what the stores actually do.

The model is supported by studies of amnesiacs: For example the patient H.M. case study. HM is still alive but has marked problems in long-term memory after brain surgery.

He has remembered little of personal (death of mother and father) or public events (Watergate, Vietnam War) that have occurred over the last 45 years. However, his short-term memory remains intact.

It has now become apparent that both short-term and long-term memory is more complicated than previously thought. For example, the Working Model of Memory proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) showed that short-term memory is more than just one simple unitary store and comprises different components (e.g., central executive, Visuospatial, etc.).

The model suggests rehearsal helps to transfer information into LTM, but this is not essential. Why are we able to recall information which we did not rehearse (e.g., swimming) yet unable to recall information which we have rehearsed (e.g., reading your notes while revising)?

Therefore, the role of rehearsal as a means of transferring from STM to LTM is much less important than Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) claimed in their model.

Research Study for both STM & LTM

Research studies can either be knowledge or evaluation:

• If you refer to the procedures and findings of a study, this shows knowledge and understanding (AO1).
• If you comment on what the studies show and what it supports and challenges the theory in question, this shows evaluation (AO3).

Glanzer and Cunitz showed that when participants are presented with a list of words, they tend to remember the first few and last few words and are more likely to forget those in the middle of the list, i.e., the serial position effect.

This supports the existence of separate LTM and STM stores because they observed a primacy and recency effect.

Words early on in the list were put into long-term memory (primacy effect) because the person has time to rehearse the word, and words from the end went into short-term memory (recency effect).

Other compelling evidence to support this distinction between STM and LTM is the case of KF (Shallice & Warrington, 1970), who had been in a motorcycle crash where he had sustained brain damage. His LTM seemed to be unaffected, but he was only able to recall the last bit of information he had heard in his STM.

Types of Long-Term Memory

One of the earliest and most influential distinctions of long-term memory was proposed by Tulving (1972).  He proposed a distinction between episodic, semantic, and procedural memory.

Procedural Memory

Procedural memory is a part of the implicit long-term memory responsible for knowing how to do things, i.e., a memory of motor skills. A part of long-term memory is responsible for knowing how to do things, i.e., the memory of motor skills.  It does not involve conscious (i.e., it’s unconscious-automatic) thought and is not declarative.

For example, procedural memory would involve knowledge of how to ride a bicycle.

Semantic Memory

Episodic memory.

Episodic memory is a part of the long-term memory responsible for storing information about events (i.e., episodes) that we have experienced in our lives.

It involves conscious thought and is declarative.  An example would be a memory of our 1st day at school.

Cohen and Squire (1980) drew a distinction between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge .  Procedural knowledge involves “knowing how” to do things. It included skills such as “knowing how” to play the piano, ride a bike, tie your shoes, and other motor skills.

It does not involve conscious thought (i.e., it’s unconscious-automatic).  For example, we brush our teeth with little or no awareness of the skills involved.

Whereas declarative knowledge involves “knowing that”; for example, London is the capital of England, zebras are animals, your mum’s birthday, etc.  Recalling information from declarative memory involves some degree of conscious effort – information is consciously brought to mind and “declared.”

The knowledge that we hold in semantic and episodic memories focuses on “knowing that” something is the case (i.e., declarative).  For example, we might have a semantic memory for knowing that Paris is the capital of France, and we might have an episodic memory for knowing that we caught the bus to college today.

Evidence for the distinction between declarative and procedural memory has come from research on patients with amnesia . Typically, amnesic patients have great difficulty in retaining episodic and semantic information following the onset of amnesia.

Their memory for events and knowledge acquired before the onset of the condition tends to remain intact, but they can’t store new episodic or semantic memories. In other words, it appears that their ability to retain declarative information is impaired.

However, their procedural memory appears to be largely unaffected. They can recall skills they have already learned (e.g., riding a bike) and acquire new skills (e.g., learning to drive).

Working Memory Model

The working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974) replaced the idea of a unitary STM. It suggests a system involving active processing and short-term storage of information.

Key features include the central executive, the phonological loop, and the visuospatial sketchpad.

The central executive has a supervisory function and acts as a filter, determining which information is attended to.

It can process information in all sensory forms, direct information to other slave systems, and collects responses. It has limited capacity and deals with only one piece of information at a time.

One of the slave systems is the phonological loop which is a temporary storage system for holding auditory information in a speech-based form.

It has two parts: (1) the phonological store (inner ear), which stores words you hear; and (2) the articulatory process (inner voice), which allows maintenance rehearsal (repeating sounds or words to keep them in working memory while they are needed). The phonological loop plays a key role in the development of reading.

The second slave system is the Visuospatial sketchpad (VSS). The VSS is a temporary memory system for holding visual and spatial information. It has two parts: (1) the visual cache (which stores visual data about form and color) and (2) the inner scribe (which records the arrangement of objects in the visual field and rehearses and transfers information in the visual cache to the central executive).

The third slave system is the episodic buffer which acts as a “backup” (temporary) store for information that communicates with both long-term memory and the slave system components of working memory. One of its important functions is to recall material from LTM and integrate it into STM when working memory requires it.

Bryan has been driving for five years. Whilst driving, Bryan can hold conversations or listen to music with little difficulty.

Bob has had four driving lessons. Driving requires so much of Bob’s concentration that, during lessons, he often misses what his driving instructor is telling him. With reference to features of the working memory model, explain the different experiences of Bryan and Bob. (4 marks)

A tricky question – the answer lies in Bryan being able to divide the different components of his STM because he is experienced at driving and doesn’t need to devote all his attention to the task of driving (controlled by the visuospatial sketchpad).

“Because Bryan has been driving for five years it is an ‘automated’ task for him; it makes fewer attentional demands on his central executive, so he is free to perform other tasks (such as talking or listening to music) and thus is able to divide resources between his visuospatial sketch pad (driving) and phonological loop (talking and listening to music).

As Bob is inexperienced at driving, this is not the case for him – his central executive requires all of his attentional capacity for driving and thus cannot divide resources effectively between components of working memory.”

Working memory is supported by dual-task studies. It is easier to do two tasks at the same time if they use different processing systems (verbal and visual) than if they use the same slave system.

For example, participants would find it hard to do two visual tasks at the same time because they would be competing for the same limited resources of the visuospatial sketchpad. However, a visual task and a verbal task would use different components and so could be performed with minimum errors.

The KF Case Study supports the Working Memory Model. KF suffered brain damage from a motorcycle accident that damaged his short-term memory. KF’s impairment was mainly for verbal information – his memory for visual information was largely unaffected.

This shows that there are separate STM components for visual information (VSS) and verbal information (phonological loop). However, evidence from brain-damaged patients may not be reliable because it concerns unique cases with patients who have had traumatic experiences.

One limitation is the fact that little is known about how the central executive works. It is an important part of the model, but its exact role is unclear.

Another limitation is that the model does not explain the link between working memory and LTM.

Research Study for WM

• If you refer to the procedures and findings of a study, this shows knowledge and understanding.
• If you comment on what the studies show and what it supports and challenges the theory in question, this shows evaluation.

Baddeley and Hitch conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to perform two tasks at the same time (dual task technique). A digit span task required them to repeat a list of numbers, and a verbal reasoning task which required them to answer true or false to various questions (e.g., B is followed by A?).

Results : As the number of digits increased in the digit span tasks, participants took longer to answer the reasoning questions, but not much longer – only fractions of a second. And they didn’t make any more errors in the verbal reasoning tasks as the number of digits increased.

Conclusion : The verbal reasoning task made use of the central executive, and the digit span task made use of the phonological loop.

Explanations for Forgetting

Interference.

Interference is an explanation for forgetting from long-term memory – two sets of information become confused.

• Proactive interference (pro=forward) is where old learning prevents the recall of more recent information. When what we already know interferes with what we are currently learning – where old memories disrupt new memories.
• Retroactive interference (retro=backward) is where new learning prevents the recall of previously learned information. In other words, later learning interferes with earlier learning – where new memories disrupt old memories.

Proactive and retroactive Interference is thought to be more likely to occur where the memories are similar, for example: confusing old and new telephone numbers. Chandler (1989) stated that students who study similar subjects at the same time often experience interference. French and Spanish are similar types of material which makes interference more likely.

Semantic memory is more resistant to interference than other types of memory.

Postman (1960) provides evidence to support the interference theory of forgetting. A lab experiment was used, and participants were split into two groups. Both groups had to remember a list of paired words – e.g., cat – tree, jelly – moss, book – tractor.

The experimental group also had to learn another list of words where the second paired word is different – e.g., cat – glass, jelly- time, book – revolver. The control group was not given the second list.

All participants were asked to recall the words on the first list. The recall of the control group was more accurate than that of the experimental group. This suggests that learning items in the second list interfered with participants’ ability to recall the list. This is an example of retroactive interference.

Although proactive and retroactive interference is reliable and robust effects, there are a number of problems with interference theory as an explanation for forgetting.

First, interference theory tells us little about the cognitive processes involved in forgetting. Secondly, the majority of research into the role of interference in forgetting has been carried out in a laboratory using lists of words, a situation that is likely to occur fairly infrequently in everyday life (i.e., low ecological validity). As a result, it may not be possible to generalize from the findings.

Baddeley states that the tasks given to subjects are too close to each other and, in real life; these kinds of events are more spaced out. Nevertheless, recent research has attempted to address this by investigating “real-life” events and has provided support for interference theory. However, there is no doubt that interference plays a role in forgetting, but how much forgetting can be attributed to interference remains unclear.

Retrieval failure

Retrieval failure is where information is available in long-term memory but cannot be recalled because of the absence of appropriate cues.

When we store a new memory, we also store information about the situation and these are known as retrieval cues. When we come into the same situation again, these retrieval cues can trigger the memory of the situation.

Types of cues that have been studied by psychologists include context, state, and organization.

• Context – external cues in the environment, e.g., smell, place, etc. Evidence indicates that retrieval is more likely when the context at encoding matches the context at retrieval.
• State – bodily cues inside of us, e.g., physical, emotional, mood, drunk, etc. The basic idea behind state-dependent retrieval is that memory will be best when a person’s physical or psychological state is similar to encoding and retrieval.

For example, if someone tells you a joke on Saturday night after a few drinks, you”ll be more likely to remember it when you”re in a similar state – at a later date after a few more drinks. Stone cold sober on Monday morning, you”ll be more likely to forget the joke.

• Organization – Recall is improved if the organization gives a structure that provides triggers, e.g., categories.

According to retrieval-failure theory, forgetting occurs when information is available in LTM but is not accessible. Accessibility depends in large part on retrieval cues.

Forgetting is greatest when context and state are very different at encoding and retrieval. In this situation, retrieval cues are absent, and the likely result is cue-dependent forgetting.

Evaluation (AO3)

People tend to remember material better when there is a match between their mood at learning and at retrieval. The effects are stronger when the participants are in a positive mood than when they are in a negative mood. They are also greater when people try to remember events having personal relevance.

A number of experiments have indicated the importance of context-based (i.e., external) cues for retrieval. An interesting experiment conducted by Baddeley indicates the importance of context setting for retrieval.

Baddeley (1975) asked deep-sea divers to memorize a list of words. One group did this on the beach, and the other group underwater. When they were asked to remember the words, half of the beach learners remained on the beach, and the rest had to recall underwater.

Half of the underwater group remained there, and the others had to recall on the beach. The results show that those who had recalled in the same environment (i.e., context) and who had learned recalled 40% more words than those recalling in a different environment. This suggests that the retrieval of information is improved if it occurs in the context in which it was learned.

A study by Goodwin investigated the effect of alcohol on state-dependent (internal) retrieval. They found that when people encoded information when drunk, they were more likely to recall it in the same state.

For example, when they hid money and alcohol when drunk, they were unlikely to find them when sober. However, when they were drunk again, they often discovered the hiding place. Other studies found similar state-dependent effects when participants were given drugs such as marijuana.

The ecological validity of these experiments can be questioned, but their findings are supported by evidence from outside the laboratory. For example, many people say they can’t remember much about their childhood or their school days. But returning to the house in which they spent their childhood or attending a school reunion often provides retrieval cues that trigger a flood of memories.

Eyewitness Testimony

Misleading information.

Loftus and Palmer investigated how misleading information could distort eyewitness testimony accounts.

Procedure : Forty-five American students formed an opportunity sample. This was a laboratory experiment with five conditions, only one of which was experienced by each participant (an independent measures experimental design ).

Participants were shown slides of a car accident involving a number of cars and asked to describe what had happened as if they were eyewitnesses. They were then asked specific questions, including the question, “About how fast were the cars going when they (hit/smashed/collided/bumped/contacted ) each other?”

Findings : The estimated speed was affected by the verb used. The verb implied information about the speed, which systematically affected the participants’ memory of the accident.

Participants who were asked the “smashed” question thought the cars were going faster than those who were asked the “hit” question. The participants in the “smashed” condition reported the highest speeds, followed by “collided,” “bumped,” “hit,” and “contacted” in descending order.

The research lacks mundane realism, as the video clip does not have the same emotional impact as witnessing a real-life accident, and so the research lacks ecological validity.

A further problem with the study was the use of students as participants. Students are not representative of the general population in a number of ways. Importantly they may be less experienced drivers and, therefore, less confident in their ability to estimate speeds. This may have influenced them to be more swayed by the verb in the question.

A strength of the study is it’s easy to replicate (i.e., copy). This is because the method was a laboratory experiment that followed a standardized procedure.

The Yerkes-Dodson effect states that when anxiety is at low and high levels, EWT is less accurate than if anxiety is at a medium level. Recall improves as anxiety increases up to an optimal point and then declines.

When we are in a state of anxiety, we tend to focus on whatever is making us feel anxious or fearful, and we exclude other information about the situation. If a weapon is used to threaten a victim, their attention is likely to focus on it. Consequently, their recall of other information is likely to be poor.

Clifford and Scott (1978) found that people who saw a film of a violent attack remembered fewer of the 40 items of information about the event than a control group who saw a less stressful version. As witnessing a real crime is probably more stressful than taking part in an experiment, memory accuracy may well be even more affected in real life.

However, a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) contradicts the importance of stress in influencing eyewitness memory. Twenty-one witnesses observed a shooting incident in Canada outside a gun shop in which one person was killed and a 2nd seriously wounded. The incident took place on a major thoroughfare in the mid-afternoon.

All of the witnesses were interviewed by the investigating police, and 13 witnesses (aged 15-32 yrs) agreed to a research interview 4-5 months after the event. The witnesses were also asked to rate how stressed they had felt at the time of the incident using a 7-point scale. The eyewitness accounts provided in both the police and research interviews were analyzed and compared.

The results of the study showed the witnesses were highly accurate in their accounts, and there was little change in the amount or accuracy of recall after five months. The study also showed that stress levels did not have an effect on memory, contrary to lab findings.

All participants showed high levels of accuracy, indicating that stress had little effect on accuracy. However, very high anxiety was linked to better accuracy. Participants who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate (about 88% accurate compared to 75% for the less-stressed group).

One strength of this study is that it had high ecological validity compared with lab studies which tend to control variables and use student populations as research participants.

One weakness of this study was that there was an extraneous variable. The witnesses who experienced the highest levels of stress were actually closer to the event (the shooting), and this may have helped with the accuracy of their memory recall.

Reduced accuracy of information may be due to surprise rather than anxiety – Pickel found that identification was least accurate in high surprise conditions rather than high threat conditions – The weapon focus effect may be related to surprise rather than anxiety; therefore, research may lack internal validity.

Real-world application: We can apply the Yerkes-Dodson effect to predict that stressful incidents will lead to witnesses having relatively inaccurate memories as their anxiety levels would be above the optimum – We can avoid an over-reliance on eyewitness testimony that may have been impacted by anxiety.

The Cognitive Interview

The cognitive interview is a police technique for interviewing witnesses to a crime which encourages them to recreate the original context in order to increase the accessibility of stored information.

The cognitive interview involves a number of techniques:

Context Reinstatement

Trying to mentally recreate an image of the situation, including details of the environment, such as the weather conditions, and the individual’s emotional state, including their feelings at the time of the incident. This makes memories accessible and provides emotional and contextual cues.

Recall from a Changed Perspective

Recall in reverse order, report everything.

The interviewer encourages the witness to report all details about the event, even though these details may seem unimportant. Memories are interconnected so that recollection of one item may then cue a whole lot of other memories.

The Enhanced Cognitive Interview

The main additional features are:-

• Encourage the witness to relax and speak slowly.
• Offer comments to help clarify witness statements.
• Adapt questions to suit the understanding of individual witnesses.

One limitation is the cognitive interview is that it’s time-consuming to conduct and takes much longer than a standard police interview. It is also time-consuming to train police officers to use this method. This means that it is unlikely that the “proper” version of the cognitive interview is used.

Another limitation is that some elements of the cognitive interview may be more valuable than others. For example, research has shown that using a combination of “report everything” and “context reinstatement” produced better recall than any of the conditions individually.

A final criticism is that police personnel have to be trained, and this can be expensive and time-consuming.

Geiselman (1985) set out to investigate the effectiveness of the cognitive interview. Participants viewed a film of a violent crime and, after 48 hours, were interviewed by a policeman using one of three methods: the cognitive interview, a standard interview used by the Los Angeles Police, or an interview using hypnosis.

The number of facts accurately recalled and the number of errors made was recorded. The average number of correctly recalled facts for the cognitive interview was 41.2. For hypnosis, it was 38.0, and for the standard interview, it was 29.4.

A-Level Psychology Revision Notes

A-Level Psychology Attachment

Social Influence Revision Notes

Psychopathology Revision Notes

Psychology Approaches Revision for A-level

Research Methods: Definition, Types, & Examples

Issues and Debates in Psychology (A-Level Revision)

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The Working Memory Model, Baddeley And Hitch (1974)

March 5, 2021 - paper 1 introductory topics in psychology | memory.

• Back to Paper 1 - Memory

The Working Memory Model (WMM) Baddeley and Hitch (1974)

Description, AO1 The Working Memory Model

Baddeley & Hitch’s (1974) Working Memory Model (WMM) arose out of criticisms aimed at the Multi-Store Model (MSM), particularly the idea that STM was a unitary store to test this Baddeley and Hitch devised the dual-task technique.

(1) Central Executive:

• Coordinates the activity of the STM
• Delegates information to the slave systems
• Limited capacity
• Modality free
• Retrieves information from the LTM

Research:  D’Esposito et al found using MRI scans the prefrontal cortex was activated when verbal and spatial tasks were preformed simultaneously but not when performed separately, suggesting the brain area indicates the working of the CE.

Evaluation, A03   Little is known about the CE, therefore it is very difficult to know exactly what its role is in memory.

(2)  Phonological loop:

• Deals with auditory information (inc written words)
• Made up of primary acoustic store & articulatory process
• Phonological Store (inner ear) stores words recently heard
• Articulatory Process (inner voice) keeps information in the Phonological Store through repetition

(3)  Visuo-spatial sketchpad:

• Deals with visual and spatial information
• Helps the individual navigate and interact with their physical environment.
• Visual cache (form & colour)
• Inner scribe (spatial, transfer into in the VC to the CE)

(4) Episodic buffer:

• Component added to the model in 2000
• Integrates information from Central Execuative, Phonological Loop and Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad
• Retrieves information from LTM

Evaluation, AO3 of the Working Memory Model (WMM):

(1)  Point:  There is physiological evidence to support the WMM:  Evidence:  For example, PET (positron emission tomography) scans have shown that different areas of the brain are used whilst undertaking visual and verbal tasks which may correspond to the visuo-spatial sketchpad and phonological loop of WMM.  Evaluation:  This is positive as it provides objective and scientific support for the view that visual and verbal material is dealt with by separate structures that may even be physically separate, this increases the credibility of the WMM as an accurate representation of memory.

(2)  Point:  Support for the working memory model comes from the case study of KF.  Evidence:  For example, KF suffered a motorcycle accident and was left with considerable damage to his memory. His short-term forgetting of auditory information was greater than for visual information, suggesting that his memory damage was restricted to the phonological loop.  Evaluation:  This is a strength because it demonstrates that it’s possible to damage just part of the short-term memory, which can be accounted for by the WMM, as if all short-term memories were stored in the same place KF’s entire STM would be damaged.

Weaknesses:

(1)  Point:  A weakness of the WMM is that it fails to account for musical memory.  Evidence:  Evidence for this comes from Berz (1995) who demonstrated that participants could listen to instrumental music (music without words) without impairing performance on other acoustic tasks.  Evaluation:  This is problematic because it appears that 2 auditory tasks can be completed at the same time which suggests memory is more complicated than the WMM suggests. According to the WMM we would expect participants to not be able to complete both tasks as they would use the same store.

To learn about the alternative model of memory, The Multi-Store Model of memory,  click here.

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Summary of The Scribe by Kristin Hunter

The narrative revolves around James, residing above the Silver Dollar Check Cashing Service, who observes people treated like criminals when cashing checks, subjected to a minimum fee of 50¢. The story highlights the struggles of those unable to read, write, or handle finances, emphasizing the challenges faced by hundreds in the city who lack literacy.

The Plight and Wisdom of the Older Generation

The mother, wise and perceptive, explains the educational disadvantages faced by many older individuals in the city who had to quit school early for work. She draws a parallel to ancient times, referencing a special class known as scribes who could read and write. The narrative touches on Jesus' criticism of these scribes for their pride and the necessity to document his teachings.

Sonny's Venture as the "PUBLIC SCRIBE"

Sonny establishes "PUBLIC SCRIBE—ALL SERVICES FREE" to aid people with writing letters, addressing envelopes, and handling intimidating official documents. The story unfolds with a confrontation with a cop, warning Sonny about conducting a business without a license, leaving him feeling uncertain and angry.

The Fear of Banks and a Lesson Learned

Sonny's parents avoid cashing checks at Silver Dollar, opting for a bank where they maintain an account for free check cashing. The narrative delves into the fear of banks rooted in historical events, such as the Depression, and racial prejudice. Eventually, the characters learn to overcome their fears, realizing the true nature of banks and swans in the lake.

James's Journey to Encourage Banking

James attempts to help his community by charging for unnecessary services, attracting the attention of a cop who warns him about operating without a license. James decides to change his approach and encourages people to cash checks for free at a local bank, challenging their perceptions and overcoming their fears.

Encouragement from an Old Lady's Wisdom

An old lady, who arrived from Alabama 44 years ago, serves as a source of encouragement for James. She motivates him to embrace new opportunities, apply for a license at City Hall, and overcome his fear of trying something new, emphasizing the importance of exploration and personal growth.

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6 The Role of the Scribe: Genius of the Book

Martha Rust is an associate professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix (Palgrave, 2007) and has published many articles on late-medieval English manuscript culture, most recently ‘“Qui bien aime a tarde oblie”: Lemmata and Lists in the Parliament of Fowls’, in Chaucer: Visual Approaches, ed. David Rubin and Susanna Fein (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); and ‘Of Piers, Polltaxes and Parliament: Articulating Status and Occupation in Late Medieval England’, co-authored with Lawrence Poos in Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts, 2017.

• Published: 02 September 2020
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This chapter explores the several roles of the scribe through the lens of the genius figure: the genius of antiquity and especially the character of Genius in Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature . Like Alan’s Genius, scribes are responsible for giving abstract forms material and individualized substance. Like that Genius, Chaucer’s scribes also serve custodial and tutelary functions, assuring the continuity of his work with respect both to its written form in books and to its legibility to readers. Also like Alan’s Genius, these scribes function at times as a mirror or other self of the author whose work they produce. And finally, like the genii loci from which Alan’s Genius descends, the scribes of Chaucer’s work are associated with specific places: namely, the books of his oeuvre they worked to bring forth. In this way, these scribes function as the spirit of the locale each book encloses.

In his exposition of the four modes of making a book, St Bonaventure (1221–74) provides a succinct description of the role of the scribe: ‘someone [who] writes the materials of others, adding or changing nothing’. Emphasizing the lowliness of this part in producing a book, Bonaventure goes on, ‘this person is said to be merely the scribe’. 1 Given such a minimal role, the best scribal performance renders itself invisible to an authorial text; by the same token, a scribal act that warrants notice is necessarily amiss. References to the work of scribes from antiquity through to the present day bear out this paradoxical lot of the scribe: that his fame will always tend towards infamy. Authors from Cicero and Jerome to King Ælfric, Roger Bacon, and Petrarch have trumpeted the damages done to texts by scribes, and a full-text search in JSTOR on the adjective ‘scribal’ reveals contemporary scholars echoing their complaints. 2 The single noun that most frequently follows ‘scribal’ in scholarly writing of the past several decades is ‘error’, seconded by the plural, ‘errors’. Runners-up situate ‘scribal’ in an unflattering semantic field that stretches from the deviant to the daft: from ‘scribal corruption’, ‘slips’, ‘losses’, and ‘omissions’; to ‘scribal interference’, ‘preference’, and ‘alteration’; to ‘scribal peculiarities’ and ‘whimsies’. Words and phrases that precede ‘scribal’ include ‘merely’, ‘more substantive than’, and ‘simple’, as in ‘a simple scribal error’. Confronted with such an array of scribes’ failures to fulfill their duty to copy texts ‘adding or changing nothing’, authors and scholars alike might well sympathize with Chaucer when he calls down a dermatological affliction upon the head of his own scribe Adam: ‘Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle, / But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe’ (Adam 3–4).

While ‘Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn’ vividly evinces the conventional view of the role of the scribe—that is, from the perspective of an author or scholar—a consideration of the poem’s generic antecedents shows that scribes themselves understand their role as multi-faceted, including duties to readers as well as to authors, and responsibilities for books as well as for texts. As Glending Olson has recently pointed out, the malediction Chaucer lays against his scribe is an adaptation of the book curse, a genre that is functionally more invested in the labour of scribes than in the ‘makying’ of authors. 3 In this way, a curse appended to a Middle English verse paraphrase of the Psalms and written in the voice of a scribe expresses a custodial concern for the book even as it also evinces an awareness of scribes’ tarnished reputation as copyists of texts: ‘Should anyone steal it, let him be anathema! / Whoever should find fault with the text, let him be accursed’. 4 Another mixes malediction with benediction, for the book-thief and the scribe, respectively:

May he who wrote this book with his pen Ascend to Heaven full well; If anyone takes it away again May his soul rot in Hell. 5

Olson notes that this particular book curse protects ‘not only the completed codex but also scribal ego’ and that as such it is affiliated with that category of finishing note that comments on the life of a copyist. 6

Along with a wide range of sentiments—from relief with having completed a writing task, to eagerness to be paid, whether with money, a drink, or a pretty girl—these notes often give further expression to scribes’ view of themselves as the guardians of books; in addition, they provide glimpses of scribes acting as readers’ and book-users’ tutors. 7 A colophon written by one Warembert, a ninth-century scribe at the Abbey of Corbie, expresses his care for the book in his directions to readers on how to use it:

Friend who reads this, hold your fingers in back lest you suddenly blot out the letters; for a man who does not know how to write thinks it isn’t work. His latest line is as sweet to a writer as port is to a sailor. Three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body toils. Thanks be to God. I Warembert wrote this in God’s name. Thanks be to God. 8

Mundane as these scribes’ specific instructions are, these colophons may strike a modern reader as surprising and bold: first, for the attention each draws to the individual scribe’s work; and second, because each portrays that labour in priestly terms. Beyond his proclamation that he has written the text ‘in the name of God’, Warembert’s vividly descriptive ‘three fingers hold the pen’ works as a subtle representation of the scribe as a mediator between divine and human realms by way of an allusion it makes to a well-known passage from a text on writing by Cassiodorus ( c . 487– c . 580): ‘A man multiplies the heavenly words and, if such an allegory is permitted, by three fingers is written what the excellence of the holy Trinity speaks.’ 9 In this way, each scribe effectively portrays his role in relation to his physical labour on the one hand and to readers on the other as a kind of mobile and site-specific priesthood, whose liturgy is the scribe’s written performance in any given book and whose parishioners include all of the book’s readers and viewers.

As far as we know, none of the scribes who laboured to produce Chaucer’s work was a priest (though their ranks did include monks and friars), yet there was another priest and scribe whose functions make a useful lens for apprehending the scope of those secular scribes’ work: the character of Genius in De planctu Naturae ( The Plaint of Nature ) by Alan of Lille (d. 1203), who functions as Nature’s priest and secretary. 10 Like that Genius, these are responsible for giving abstract forms—in this case Chaucer’s works, or ‘makyngs’—material and individualized substance. Like that Genius, Chaucer’s scribes also serve custodial and tutelary functions, assuring the continuity of his work with respect both to its written form in books and to its legibility to readers. Also like that Genius, these scribes function at times as a mirror or other self of the author whose work they produce. And finally, like the genii loci from which Alan’s Genius descends, the scribes of Chaucer’s work are associated with specific places, namely, with the books of his oeuvre they worked to bring forth. In this way, these scribes function as the spirit of the locale each book encloses. In this essay I use Alan’s Genius as a template for recognizing and understanding this variegated role of the scribe as it is represented in three contexts: in Chaucer’s own work, in the manuscripts that preserve his work, and in contemporary scholarship. But first, a brief excursus on the Genius of De planctu Naturae is in order.

Alan’s Genius: scribe and priest and scribe as priest

Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae ( c . 1160 to 1170) has been studied for a range of interests, including its documentation of the stigmatization of homosexuality in the West, its influence on subsequent generations of poets—in particular, Jean de Meun, John Gower, and Chaucer—and its innovative personification of the ancient spirit, genius . On this latter topic, Winthrop Wetherbee wrote the truth when he observed of Alan’s Genius, ‘[t]he associations of Genius are complex’. 11 Those associations extend back to two archaic species of genius : the genius loci , who inhered in a specific place, lending it an individual quality and ensuring its fertility; and the comes natale —‘companion of birth’—a genius born with each individual and accompanying him through life. 12 Alan’s Genius’s nearest kin, however, are the genii of Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia (1147), who aid and guide the soul’s descent from the heavens into embodiment in human form. As Jane Chance Nitzsche and Denise N. Baker have explained, the labours of Bernardus’s hierarchy of genii are symbolized in De planctu by the two functions Alan gives to his personified Genius: the roles of Nature’s priest and secretary. 13

In his first appearance in the poem, Genius is occupied with his role as Nature’s secretary, through which Alan renders Bernardus’s generative genii : as Genius busily writes on parchment with a reed pen, we witness the fleshly becoming of Nature’s exemplars, for, ‘with the help of his obedient pen, he endowed with the life of their species images of things that kept changing from the shadowy outline of a picture to the realism of their actual being’. 14 As the passage continues, Genius brings to life a procession of famous and infamous personages, from Helen and Ulysses to Cicero and Aristotle—and many more. In this way, Genius’s writing activity fittingly allegorizes the descent of the soul into flesh: as Nitzsche explains, his pen ‘represents the heavenly source of man’s soul’; as pen meets parchment the soul transmigrates ‘to the truth of being’. 15 But the generative function of Genius the secretary of Nature may open our eyes as well to the full implications of the work of real, non-allegorical scribes: that is, that in committing authorial works to parchment, they bring them forth as embodied texts with ‘lives’ of their own.

If in the guise of Genius as secretary we may glimpse reflections of real scribes giving being to each text they copy, turning to an examination of Genius in his role as Nature’s priest in De planctu , we may begin to entertain formulations of the author/text/scribe triangle that are less agonistic than terms like ‘scribal interference’ connote. Genius is first invoked in this role when Nature writes him a letter asking him to bar men who commit homosexual acts from partaking of the rites of ‘our church’. 16 While it has been noted that as a female deity, Nature cannot excommunicate these miscreants herself—as Nitzsche puts it, ‘Natura cannot very well be a priestess; she requires a priest’—Genius’s priesthood constitutes no mere ad hoc device for a needed excommunication in Alan’s plot. 17 Instead, his role as Nature’s priest is completely in keeping with the concept of genius as a spirit accompanying each indivual as a ‘most faithful tutelary and brother’, as Martianus Capella put it. 18 In fact, Nature articulates her relationship with Genius in just this way, addressing him at the beginning of her letter as her ‘alter-ego’ and declaring that she finds her likeness reflected in him ‘as in a mirror’. 19 Genius’s role as Nature’s priest is also in keeping with Bernardus Silvestris’s intermediating genii : like those genii , a priest also serves as intermediary between humans and the divine; just so, Genius acts as the goddess Nature’s intermediary in carrying out the rite of banishment she requests in her letter.

While both the tutelary and mediating functions of genius are thus represented in Genius’s role as priest, we see, as Nature’s letter continues, that these duties are inextricably intertwined with his generative functions—that is, with Genius’s role as Nature’s scribe. As she goes on to confess: ‘I am bound to you in a knot of heartfelt love, both succeeding in your success and in like manner failing in your failure.’ Nature flourishes as the goddess of procreation, in other words, as long as Genius keeps up with his writing. Moving towards the ‘business’ of her letter—the excommunication—Nature opines: ‘Love … should make our fortunes interchangeable.’ 20 Baker captures the interdependency of this pair well: ‘Because he participates in Natura’s procreative duties, he also shares her responsibilities as moral guide.’ 21 Genius’s scribal activity incurs a moral liability, in other words; might a real scribe’s work seem, by its very nature, to burden him with a similar responsibility? If so, his response to that obligation might take the form of his own composition, though it would draw on the formulas of his training. As such, it might resemble the response of Alan’s Genius to Nature’s letter: De planctu concludes with Genius ‘call[ing] forth from the deep recesses of his mind the prearranged formula of excommunication’, and delivering his anathema not in writing but in his own voice. 22 Interestingly, many of the scribes who copied De planctu —or, in terms of my discussion, brought it into material being—appear to have felt a genius -like responsibility towards its Genius, for many reinforced Genius’s anathema with one of their own: ‘ Pereat sodomita ’ (Let the sodomite perish). 23

As we know from his depiction of the goddess Nature in The Parliament of Fowls , Chaucer was inspired by Alan’s De planctu Naturae , which does not mean that scribes of Chaucer’s work were inspired by Alan’s depiction of Genius. Nevertheless, his linked secretarial and priestly roles make Genius an illuminating model for interpreting scribes’ activities and thus for reimagining their roles on a scale more generous than Bernard’s narrow ‘adding and changing nothing’ dictum. With Genius as exemplar, we may envision scribes’ duties as running a gamut from the agent and companion of a text’s materialization, to intermediary between author and text and text and reader, to an author’s ‘mirror’ or other self. In the following, I consider aspects of each of these roles as they pertain to the scribes of Chaucer’s work, to the figure of the scribe within his work, and to contemporary scholars’ understanding of the functions of both real and fictional scribes. While I take up these scribal functions one at a time, I also attempt to keep their overlaps and synergistic effects in view. Here too the singular yet multi-faceted character of Genius functions as a guide. In concluding, I evoke yet another personification in Alan’s De planctu —the fair maiden Truth, daughter of Genius and Nature—and ask where, betwixt the roles of author and scribe, the true object of literary study might be apprehended.

The scribe as agent and companion of a text’s birth

Whether mimetic or metaphorical, within the narrative frame or outside it, reflections on matters of textual transmission—its perils, its politics, its frisson—are ubiquitous in Chaucer’s oeuvre. We may think, for example, of the letter writing in The Man of Law’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde ; of the Wife of Bath and Jankyn’s ‘book of wikked wyves’ (III.685); of the Knight with the weak oxen in his plough (I.886-87); of the Clerk’s Tale’s Griselda ‘[w]han she translated was’ (IV.385) and the translating narrator of Troilus and Criseyde ; and of the monumental texts and whirling rumors of the House of Fame . 24 This expansive network of references aside, explicit references to scribes in Chaucer’s work number only two: his ‘Wordes Unto Adam’ and his prayer at the close of Troilus and Criseyde that no future scribes ‘myswrite’ (5.1795) that ‘litel bok’ (5.1786). 25 Interestingly, both of these references pertain to the transmission of Chaucer’s own work—referring to the ‘real’ world outside the fictional worlds of his poetry—and both also promulgate the familiar view of a scribe’s failing at his job of faithfully reproducing an author’s work, or, using the terms of Alan’s description of Genius as secretary, failing to bring their exemplars into ‘the realism of their actual being’. Turning from Chaucer’s pessimism about once and future scribes of his own work to portrayals of books and the materials of writing within his work, however, we find that the scribal technologies of writing and page layout—devices that give a work a visual and tactile form—are represented as operating very well. A look at a selection of allusions to page layout and alphabetical characters within Chaucer’s work will make way for a study of scribes’ labours to substantiate the form of Chaucer’s works through which they become the life-long agents and companions of his corpus.

No matter how many artisans eventually plied their craft on any given manuscript page—supplying its decorated initials, lush borders, and illustrations—the scribe was first in line, and thus it fell to him to plan the page’s overall design, leaving adequate and appropriate space for elements to be added later. 26 A reference Chaucer makes to one of these features of page design demonstrates just how effectively a text’s layout operated to define its constituent parts. Early in Troilus and Criseyde , when Pandarus arrives at Criseyde’s house to make his first pitch on behalf of the love-lorn Troilus, he finds Criseyde and her companions engaged in reading. In answer to Pandarus’s queries about the nature of their reading material—‘Is it of love?’ he asks—Criseyde tells him that it is a ‘romaunce … of Thebes’. Going on, she summarizes the story so far in general terms, as a matter of what they have ‘heard’—‘‘we han herd how that kyng Layus deyde / Thorugh Edippus his sone, and al that dede’—and then indicates the point to which they have just arrived by referring to where they are on the page, as a matter of what she sees, ‘here we stynten at thise lettres rede – ‘(2.97–103). These ‘lettres rede’ would be the letters of a rubric, those titles or chapter headings that have their name from the Latin ruber —red—since they were often written in red ink. As Criseyde continues, we read that rubric with her, a brief description of the ensuing chapter: ‘How the bisshop … / Amphiorax, fil thorugh the ground to helle’ (2.104–5). 27 In the story logic of this scene—Criseyde’s being interrupted in the midst of her leisure reading—it is rather unlikely that she would just happened to have finished a chapter in her book at the moment Pandarus strode in. According to the scene’s book—or page layout—logic, though, a rubric would be the only place to stop, for as Michelle Brown explains, a rubric ‘is not strictly part of the text but … helps to identify its components’; or, borrowing from the language of this scene,—‘we stynten at thise lettres reed’—rubrics give a running narrative an episodic form by rendering it on the page in the form of a series of ‘stints’ of writing. 28

Chaucer’s work includes no summarizing headings like the ‘How the bisshop … ‘rubric in Criseyde’s book, but a suggestive line in the Book of the Duchess and in its manuscript witnesses hints that both Chaucer and his scribes wrote with this kind of chapter-heading, episode-defining rubric in mind. 29 Chaucer’s narrator has just finished describing his abruptly falling to sleep after deciding to pray to Morpheus for relief from his chronic insomnia and has also extolled the wondrousness of his ensuing dream, which, he declares, was such that not even Joseph of Egypt, nor ‘skarsly Macrobeus’ (284) would be able to interpret it. This lead-up to the dream has tumbled forth in one breathless twenty-line sentence, and the story of the dream itself continues in an equally loquacious way. This stretch of the poem may thus have sounded all of a piece, in the manner of an anecdote—‘I had the most amazing dream last night! I dreamed that …’—if it were not for a one-line sentence that effectively divides it into two parts: preface and narrative proper. That line reads, ‘Loo, thus hyt was; thys was my sweven’ (290). The concision of this line in relation to the verse on either side of it already makes it stand out; considering that along with its initial interjection ‘Loo’—‘behold, look’—and its demonstrative ‘thys’—this here, this, the following—the line has the look and visual rhetorical force of a rubric: a line not properly a part of the text that works not only to identify its components, as Brown asserts, but also to produce them as such. Manuscript evidence suggests that the scribes of the Book of the Duchess recognized the rubric-like quality of this line and, in the manner of Alan’s Genius, whose job it was to bring souls out of the ether into ‘the truth of being’, they have brought this poem out with a cleft at just this line. All three surviving witnesses mark the following line—‘Me thoghte thus: that hyt was May’ (291)—as the beginning of a new section of the poem, two with large initials, and one with a marginal paraf mark. 30

Across the manuscripts of Chaucer’s work, large decorated initials and rubrics serve most often to signal major narrative divisions in a work: the five books of Troilus and Criseyde , for instance, or the four parts of the Knight’s Tale. However, scribes also used these devices together with a variety of less ostentatious flagging instruments to bring out the contours of structures and set pieces within those larger narrative frames. As Ardis Butterfield has shown, the scribes of Troilus and Criseyde routinely highlight its songs and letters, sometimes with decorated initials and rubrics, thereby visually equating them to book divisions, but more often with paraf marks or marginal annotations. 31 Many scribes of Troilus and Criseyde further subdivide the poem by setting each stanza clearly apart from its neighbors and marking each with a one-line decorated initial or paraf mark, in this way grounding the poem’s Boethian flights in the ‘consolation’ of a visually elegant modularity. The versatile paraf allows for the emergence of more idiosyncratic forms as well. As Joel Fredell has shown, a ‘dense’ pattern of paraf placement in three witnesses to the Miller’s Tale functions to draw a parallel between ‘Nicholas’s beguiling Oswald through scientia … and Alison’s beguiling Absolon through affecioun ’; in contrast, a ‘sparse’ pattern in two other witnesses follows, instead, the histories of Nicholas’s and Absolon’s efforts to win Alison and also highlights, thereby calling it out as the tale’s cynical moral message, the line ‘Lo, which a greet thyng is affeccioun!’ (I.3611). 32 Scribes employ the low-tech tool of underlining as a means of drawing out still other facets of a text: its embedded lists, in particular. Scribes of two related copies of the Parliament of Fowls underline in red ink the individual birds’ names in its list of birds—from ‘There myghte men the royal egle fynde’ to ‘The throstil old; the frosty feldefare’ (330; 364)—thus calling to mind a nominale in which these species names would be linked to their Latin equivalents. 33

In casting into relief these and other concatenations and centers of gravity through their expert use of the grammar of page design, scribes may be following their exemplars or expressing their own ‘genius’, reading and responding to the texts as they copy them. In either case, they follow the model of Alan’s Genius in giving tangible form and a life in the real world to Chaucer’s works, which would otherwise persist as abstractions, like Nature’s ‘shadowy outlines’ before Genius copied them down. These scribes’ success at this interpretive labour finds a telling reflection in the language the two scholars I mention above use to discuss page design and its effects. Both refer repeatedly to scribes’ decisions with respect to page design as a matter of attending to a work’s ‘structure’, whether that structure be overtly or only latently authorial: so Fredell comments on the ‘binary structure’ brought out by one pattern of parafs and the ‘double-linear plot’ brought out by another, and Butterfield concludes that in the hands of its scribes, Troilus and Criseyde begins to look like a genre of composition associated with its own kind of physical book, ‘a lyric compilation’. 34

Butterfield’s allusion to a codicological structure serves as a felicitous reminder that scribes’ formal, form-giving duties pertained not only to the two-dimensional place of the page but also to the three-dimensional place of the book. In building that codicological dimension, a scribe’s basic structural unit was the quire. A survey of descriptions of manuscripts containing the works of Chaucer shows a preference for quires of eight leaves: that is, four bifolia folded in half to produce eight leaves and sixteen writing surfaces. 35 Ideally, and often in practice as well, a scribe would copy a work straight through into successive quires of equal numbers of leaves, whose boundaries would be revealed only by the catchwords or quire signatures used to ensure their being bound together in the proper order. 36 But detailed study of their quire structures reveals that medieval manuscripts are to be compared less to orderly monumental edifices constructed from uniform bricks than to rustic garden walls fashioned out of stones of many sizes. As such, a medieval book is a site whose structural units—its quires—allow for all manner of internal adjustments, calling upon and revealing scribes’ adept spatial reasoning.

As recent studies have shown, there was a particular need for such adjustments in early manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , where scribal interventions at the ‘level’ of quire structure also provide fascinating glimpses of the ‘layers’ of a work’s composition. Evidence along these lines from Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library MS 198 is, as Estelle Stubbs rightly puts it, ‘perhaps the most startling’. 37 Considered in only two dimensions—looking only at its script and page design, that is—the manuscript gives, as Stubbs asserts, ‘the impression of seamless continuity and is a masterly example of the professionalism of its scribe’. 38 However, a look at its quire structure afforded by its 1987 rebinding shows that the manuscript’s seamlessness is all illusion though that very illusion shows off its scribe’s professionalism and ingenuity—or in- genius -ness—all the more. By adding whole bifolia in the middle of some quires, tipping in singletons in others, and removing leaves from still more, he has managed to give a smooth face to what would appear to have been an array of exemplars that represented various layers of Chaucer’s revising his work. 39 As Stubbs argues, the textual revisions effected by these quire structure adjustments suggest that this scribe was part of a close network of penmen working on the Tales , which may have included Chaucer himself. 40 By pursuing the implications of similar quire structure adjustments in Oxford, Christ Church MS 152, Jacob Thaisen has offered a view of another scribe papering over—for in this case the quires in question are made of paper—the discrepancies he finds among the exemplars that came his way. 41 As Thaisen shows, the boundaries of these quire structure revisions correspond to similar ‘faultlines’ in the texts of Hengwrt and Ellesmere; in this way, this scribe’s interventions, like those examined by Stubbs, also yield valuable evidence about the earliest stage of the Canterbury Tales ’ manuscript tradition despite this manuscript’s late date (1450–75). 42

Whether through their labours on the design of the page or on the architecture of the book, the form scribes give to Chaucer’s works is hardly a ‘form’ that could be opposed to ‘content’; instead, poetic form—its structure, above and beyond a poem’s constituent words—depends for the ‘realism of its actual being’, borrowing from Alan once more, upon the ‘genius’ of the scribes who give it bookish form. In the process, in the manner of Alain’s Genius and the genii of antiquity before him, these scribes also endow each individual manifestation of Chaucer’s work with its own unique character, a spirit that accompanies a work’s coming into material form and then becomes its life companion. That spirit inhabits the structures of page layout and quire, but it is most ubiquitously yet ineffably present in the part of a book that was the scribe’s primary responsibility: the text itself, written in the scribe’s ‘hand’.

As we have seen, in his role as copyist, a scribe was to add nothing, let alone a spirit, which would properly reside in a text’s propositional content and not in its inky letter. This conventional understanding of the separation of letter and spirit notwithstanding, Chaucer suggests at the beginning of his Troilus and Criseyde that even the inky physicality of writing is imbued—‘literally’ saturated—with character: in order to forecast the depth of the sorrowfulness of the story he is about to tell, Chaucer’s narrator conjures an emotional responsiveness in the very inscription of its words, which weep as they are written: ‘Thise woful vers, that wepen as I write’ (1.7). In describing his verses this way, Chaucer follows the opening lines of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy , which portray that work as tearful— elegi fletibus —but he does so with a twist: in specifying that the verses weep as they are written , he suggests that they are tearful not only thematically but physically as well. 43 In this way, Chaucer also elegantly depicts a written text being in-formed with a ‘spirit’—manifested here by its emotional sensitivity—at the moment of its physical ‘birth’, or in-scription. While scribes of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde do not infuse its written witnesses with quite as empathic a spirit as would enable them to weep, the various decisions scribes have made with respect to which script to use for this work in particular do invest its copies with an equally varying range of dispositions, moods, or ‘images’, the latter in the sense of a ‘public image’—the impression a person creates in the eye of a community, in this case, a reading community.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 61, f. 122.

Detailed view of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 61, f. 122. Troilus and Criseyde , V.148–82.

Three early witnesses to Troilus and Criseyde amply demonstrate the variety of visual impressions the poem projects. The earliest, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 61 (ca. 1398) gives a first impression of reserved and stately elegance but reveals upon closer examination a playful touch. It is written in textura littera quadrata , a script used primarily for liturgical books. To the steady rhythm of the spur-footed minums that distinguish this script, however, the two scribes who produced this text have added a trill of curling hairline strokes that invite the eye at times to see pictures in the place of letter forms (see Figure 6.1a ). 44 For instance, letters T, D, and O at the beginnings of lines suggest harps while Es and Fs sometimes have the look either of gargoyles or hedgehogs (Figure 6.1b , detail). 45 After Corpus Christi MS 61, the next earliest extant copy of Troilus and Criseyde is New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 817 ( c. 1405), which is written in a textura -based secretary. 46 While textura offers the eye an orderly verticality and connotes the liturgy, secretary—a cursive script—presents itself in loops and slants and invokes the world of documents, and in fact, Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs have recently identified this scribe as John Carpenter, common clerk of the London Guildhall from 1417–37. 47 But as Jeanne Krochalis notes, this scribe exhibits a ‘textura approach’ to secretary, giving his writing an overall ‘angular impression’. 48 In addition, by exaggerating ascenders of select letters on top lines, this scribe lends that general angularity an atmosphere of high drama. A third early witness to Troilus and Criseyde , Durham, Durham University Library Cosin MS V.ii.13 (s. xv 2/4 ), was written by two scribes, one using a ‘set secretary’, the other ‘anglicana formata’ with many secretary features, including forward-slanting clubbed ascenders (see Figure 6.2 ). 49 With the addition of a calligraphic rendering of the first letter of each page together with frequent elaborated ascenders or descenders on top and bottom lines, the text exudes a fashionable flamboyance associated with French court culture. 50

Durham, Durham University Library Cosin MS V.ii.13, f. 83v. Troilus and Criseyde , V.141–89.

In the examples I have just cited, a scribe’s decision to use a particular script—whether textura , secretary, or a combination of the two—affects a text’s visual connotation, the way a person’s work-day attire may announce a category of employment, whether construction, office, airline, hospital, and so on. At the same time, as M. B. Parkes has argued, a scribe’s idiosyncratic habits in executing a script lend it a recognizable individuality apart from its general category, a quality T. A. M. Bishop calls ‘inimitable’ and ‘defying verbal analysis’. 51 Parkes rose to the challenge of analysing this inimitable quality through his development of the terms aspect and ductus : aspect, according to Parkes, is the ‘first impression’ made by a scribe’s ‘personal ductus ’; in turn, ductus consists of the ‘way in which [the scribe] executed the strokes required to produce the configurations which form the basic shapes of the letters’. 52 The use and possible mis-use of these traits for identifying the work of individual scribes has become a matter of intense interest following Mooney’s celebrated 2006 essay ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, which identified the scivener previously dubbed Scribe B as Adam Pinkhurst. 53 While identifying the distinctive features of scribes’ hands and linking them to known individuals serves the laudable function aim of filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the world outside the books in which those hands are preserved, the very same idiosyncrasies give us purchase on an ‘aspect’ of a written text that is original to the scribe, however he or she was known in the world outside the book: born with the written text, in and as a scribe’s movements direct the flow of ink onto parchment—or, as Bishop put it, ‘in the behaviour of the pen as it turns a curve or a corner’—these distinctive features persist in a book as the genius , the individual spirit, of the written text—and of the environment that is the book. 54 And even after the historical scribes responsible for them went on to their next commission and eventually out of this life, these ‘characters’ inscribed by and as their scribes’ hands remain active as a kind of ‘scribal function’—a complement to the ‘author function’—carrying out the traditional duties of the ancient genii and of their latter-day attestation Alan of Lille’s Genius, though with respect to a written text rather than to a human being or allegorical character. These include the roles of go-between, of guide or tutelary spirit and, at times, even of an author’s mirror or other self.

The scribe as go-between, guide, and author’s other self

In her study of the ‘trope of the scribe’, Lynn Staley Johnson observes that when an author refers within a work to the scribal production of that same work, the scribe thereby evoked often functions to vouch for the text’s authority or for the author’s propriety or both. In this way, the proem to Margery Kempe’s Book , which tells of her second scribe’s failing eyesight being cured by his labour over her text, frames her work with evidence of her sanctity; as Johnson puts it, ‘the scribe serves to shift attention from her role as a social critic to her status as a holy woman’. 55 Johnson goes on to point out that this scribe could as easily have been Margery’s invention as a real person; the work he does as a go-between between Margery and her readers, making her Book safe for the eyes of good Christian readers, derives from his presence as a ‘trope’ in her text. Across his oeuvre, Chaucer employs a range of such intermediary personae; these usually work, as Johnson notes, ‘as a means of distancing himself from his writing’ rather than of shoring up his authorial stature. 56 In a strict sense, none of Chaucer’s distancing personae is a scribe, but one of them does exhibit a scribal sensibility: the ‘reporter’ of the tale-telling contest documented in the Canterbury Tales . In the prologue to the Miller’s Tale, this persona professes fidelity to the texts of his ‘authors’—the pilgrims—in the manner of a scribe trained by Bonaventure: the possible offensiveness of any given tale notwithstanding, he maintains that he must report ‘Hir tales alle, be they bettre or werse, / Or elles falsen som of my mateere’ (I.31745). He must tell ‘alle’ the pilgrims’ tales and all of each tale—adding or changing nothing, in other words. In the same passage, however, this scribe-like persona also takes on the genius -like role of intermediary between the pilgrims’ tales and their readers.

Displaying a diplomatic sensitivity to the potential squeamishness of the genteel members of his audience—‘every gentil wight’ (3171)—along with an intimate knowledge of the range of alternatives to the Miller’s in the collection of tales, this persona is a savvy ambassador from the world of the book, specifically, the book he conjures in referring to its current page, or ‘leef’:

And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, Turne over the leef and chese another tale; For he shal fynde ynowe, grete and smale, Of storial thyng that toucheth gentillesse And eek moralitee and hoolynesse. (3176–80)

Framing a reader’s choice of reading material as itself a matter of ‘moralitee’, our reporter-cum-scribe-cum- genius concludes by noting that it is possible to choose wrongly even as he shifts the responsibility for such an error onto the reader: ‘Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys. / The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe well this’ (3181–2). In thus ensuring the blamelessness of the text he has already brought forth, this persona also provides for its viability and future transmission. Combining the duties of faithful copyist and protective intermediary, he fulfills the secretary and priest functions entailed in the expanded vision of the scribe exemplified in Alan’s Genius outlined above. Although they do not always escape blame for doing so, the scribes of Chaucer’s work also take after his mediating pseudo-scribe in the Canterbury Tales and in the process, in the manner of guardian or custodial spirits, assure its longevity and build the stature of Chaucer-the-author, even if Chaucer’s fictive authorial persona would disavow it. John Shirley leads the group by taking up the role of Chaucer’s middleman and champion under the sign of his own name; others fulfill this function in the form of explanatory glosses; still others notoriously intervene on Chaucer’s behalf as his editors, adjusting his work in large and small ways to assure its presentability to readers on every ‘leef’.

The smallest order of scribal mediation involves lexical and syntactic alterations, termed ‘variant readings’ in the apparatus of modern editions of medieval works. In their analyses of such interventions, scholars see scribes working towards a range of objectives, from simplifying to complicating an authorial text. In their edition of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women , for instance, Janet Cowen and George Kane list scribal interventions under five headings—‘more explicit readings’, ‘more emphatic readings’, ‘easier readings’, ‘modernization’, and ‘sophistications’—and attribute them to ‘copyists’ response to and participation in the meaning of the text’. 57 The text of the Legend in Oxford, Magdalene College Library Pepys MS 2006 provides a record of one such copyist: responding to the text as a sentimental reader, he copies into it a group of variants we might include under yet another heading, ‘sentimentalizations’. A small selection of these variants drawn from the Legends of Cleopatra and Dido follows (preceded by readings from Cowen and Kane’s edition; variants italicized): 58

tanner:  Al for the loue of Cleopataras pepys:  For the loue of his lady dame Cleopatrace (600) tanner:  Mi worship in this day thus haue I lorn pepys:  My wurshyp for euer this day haue I loren (659) tanner:  But herkeneth, ye that speken of kindenesse pepys:  But herken ye now that speken of kyndenes (665) tanner:  And wol for loue his deth so frelye take pepys:  That wull for love of his lady his deth so frely take (704) tanner:  But al this thing auayleth hir ryght nought pepys:  But al this pitows complaynt availleth ryght noght (1325) tanner:  And stal away [vnto] hys companye pepys:  And fro hir falsely stole a wey to his companye (1327)

Between multiple additions of ‘his lady’ and intensifiers such as ‘for euer’, ‘falsely’, and ‘pitows’, the Pepys scribe heightens of the overall piteousness of these ladies’ plights.

While this scribe’s lexical additions and alterations thus evince his ‘participation’ in the stories of Chaucer’s good women, one addition cited above goes further. In changing the line ‘But herkeneth, ye that speken of kindenesse’ to ‘But herken ye now that speken of kyndenes’, the Pepys scribe has gone beyond amplifying the tale’s theme: here he also raises the pitch of the narrator’s voice. In doing so, he exemplifies a phenomenon that Bernard Cerquiglini argues is peculiar to vernacular works of the Middle Ages: when a scribe is set to copy a text written in his own spoken tongue, Cerquiglini asserts, ‘something is at work to restore life to inert inscription; the language lures the copyist, whom it catches in its snare and sets up as subject’. 59 In the terms of Cerquiglini’s analysis, the Pepys scribe has been caught up in the text to the point of rendering its ‘speaker’ more urgent, more present, more, we might say, alive than it is at this point in Tanner. In the terms of my discussion of scribal activities in the light of the genius figure, the Pepys scribe’s addition of the single word ‘now’ is another example of a scribe as the companion of a written text’s ‘birth’, endowing it with a unique and enduring character in the ‘now’ of its inscription even as he also works, in the manner of a mediator, to usher the tale into the ‘now’ of any present reading or listening audience: ‘ye now that speken of kyndenes’.

Beyond making a wide range of such local modifications ‘inside’ a text—that is, on the level of single lines—scribes also concerned themselves with the structural framework and outer boundaries of Chaucer’s works. The textual history of the Canterbury Tales provides a wealth of examples of scribes’ efforts in this regard, a preponderance of which suggest that their top priority was to present the work as complete, no easy task since Chaucer died leaving his planned magnum opus a miscellany of tales in no apparent authorial order—a ‘scribe’s nightmare’, as Helen Cooper has put it. 60 Faced with this state of affairs, scribes’ first recourse would naturally have been the narrative links joining tales to each other, which would, in theory, unite all the tales into a well-wrought whole. Here too, however, Chaucer’s literary remains offered no certain guide, for it would seem that he wrote more than one version of several of the links, a matter that only intensified the ‘nightmare’ the Canterbury Tales presented to scribes since the adoption of any given version of a link could require re-ordering a whole chain of tales. Despite the proliferating uncertainties these links could create for scribes regarding the order of tale tellers, a sense of their instrumentality to the integrity of Chaucer’s Tales —to its being a whole work—is evident, paradoxically, in the Hengwrt scribe’s willingness to leave several whole-page blank spaces for links that he did not have—leaving the Tales visibly un -whole—in hopes of acquiring the exemplars that would allow him to make the work truly and properly whole. 61

It was likely the same concern for the Tales ’ integrity that guided the Hengwrt scribe to leave a generous space for a hoped-for remainder of the Cook’s Tale ; when it was not forthcoming, he left the famous marginal note ‘of this Cook’s tale maked Chaucer no more’—as if to place blame for the textual lacuna at the tip of Chaucer’s pen rather than his own. Indeed, we might hear in the note a hint of pique, for as J. S. P. Tatlock once observed, ‘[w]hat a scribe most desired, perhaps, was not quite so much to find everything as to avoid glaring gaps’. 62 While it is well known that many scribes avoided the Hengwrt scribe’s dire straits by having the Cook tell the Tale of Gamelyn, scholars have begun to suspect the Parson’s Tale of constituting a similar scribal interest in providing material for any and all pilgrims who were evidently meant to tell a tale. Having unambiguous evidence in the form of the Parson’s Prologue that Chaucer had included this pilgrim among the tale-telling contestants, the scribes may have fabricated one for him from a piece Chaucer never intended to be part of the Tales , a piece encompassing both the tale given to the Parson and the ‘Retraction’, which Charles A. Owen has dubbed a Treatise on Penitence . 63 Thus the closure the Parson’s Tale and ‘Retraction’ provide to the Canterbury Tales as we know them may also mark, as Míċeál F. Vaughan puts it, ‘the end point’ of ‘a process teleologically determined by the scribe’s desire to minimize the [ Tales ’] incompleteness’. 64 Going along with this agenda under mild protest, the scribe of Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Ii.3.26 includes the Parson’s Tale but gives it a concluding rubric that at once points out its generic awkwardness as a tale and suggests an ad hoc decision behind its use as such: ‘ Explicit Tractatus Galfridi Chaucer de septem peccatis mortalibus ut dicitur pro fabula Rectori s’ [Here ends the treatise on the seven deadly sins, as it is called, by Geoffrey Chaucer for the tale of the Parson]. 65 Following the Hengwrt scribe, we might paraphrase this scribe’s note as follows: ‘Of the tale of the Parson Chaucer maked nothing; therefore this treatise will do for his tale.’

Comments like the ones on the truncated Cook’s Tale and the possibly ad hoc Parson’s Tale have their origins in specific instances of scribes’ efforts to endow given copies of the Canterbury Tales with the appearance of wholeness—that is, to fulfill their genius -like function as custodian spirits of a work’s physical form—but to the extent that they explicate a part of the text that would not be obvious to an ordinary reader, these comments are also specimens of another facet of scribes’ work: that of providing texts with explanatory glosses—or, put another way, that of acting as guides and tutelary spirits for readers, thereby assuring the viability of a text and the good reputation of its author. Over their long history in western manuscript culture, glosses have taken a variety of forms—from interlinear synonyms for or translations of difficult words to extensive marginal commentaries running the gamut from explanatory or source notes, to complementary extracts from auctores , to allegorical and tropological interpretations. 66 Even before a marginal apparatus was read, its very appearance on the page lent the commented-upon text an aura of authority, and Chaucer or an early ‘glossator’ shows his canny understanding of this salutary function of a gloss in the extensive marginal commentaries accompanying the Wife of Bath’s Prologue even as that text itself is an irreverent send-up of the by-then well-known use of glossing to manipulate or obscure a text’s meaning rather than to guide a reader to a fuller understanding of it. 67 ‘Standardized’ glossae ordinariae like those associated with the study of civil law, canon law, the Bible, and even Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue would have been copied by scribes but not composed by them. 68

Such authoritative, institutionalized glosses aside, scribes of Chaucer’s work were not shy about composing their own, original glosses. Of all Chaucer’s works, his Troilus and Criseyde garnered the most glosses; among its sixteen surviving manuscript witnesses, London, British Library MS Harley 2392 has been endowed in this way more abundantly than any other—all in the hand of its scribe ‘Style’. 69 In the manner of a tutelary guide or spirit, this manuscript’s interlinear glosses assist a reader’s comprehension of the text by supplying synonyms for difficult words and referents for pronouns when they may be unclear, as in the following stanza:

id est destine But O Fortune, executrice of wyerdes, O influences of thise heuenes hye, id est gou er no u rs Soth is, that vnder God ye ben oure hierdes, id est cou er ed Though to vs bestes ben the causes wrie Cres This mene I now, for she gan homward hye, But execut was al bisyde hire leue The goddes wil, for which she moste bleue. (3.617-23)

Beyond these interlinear glosses, Style has provided numerous marginal annotations, some of which function partly as explanatory notes and partly as finding aids, primarily for mythological characters; for instance, next to the lines ‘Or elles were hym levere, soule and bones, / With Pluto kyng as depe been in helle / As Tantalus’ (3.591–3)—spoken by Pandarus while trying to convince Criseyde of Troilus’s earnestness—Style has written ‘ Pluto / deus inferni ’ and ‘ tantalus ’.

But the largest portion of Style’s marginal notes has a moral valence and thus fulfills the specifically moral aspect of the genius figure’s tutelary role. In this category of annotation, which takes the form of a simple ‘nota’ written in the margin, Style focuses on the poem’s proverbial wisdom, especially that which pertains to the perils of romantic love. Book One, for instance, features nine ‘nota’ marks, including one that highlights an apostrophe to Fortune, ‘O blynde world, O blynde entencioun!’ (1.211); another pointing out an explanation of Troilus’s rationale for keeping his love a secret, ‘Remembryng hym that love to wide yblowe / Yelt bittre fruyt, though swete seed be sowe’ (384–5); another next to the last line of Pandarus’s famous comparison of himself to a whetstone, ‘By his contrarie is every thyng declared’ (637); and one next to the line ‘Unknowe, unkist, and lost that is unsought’ (809), which is from Pandarus’s speech urging Troilus to pluck up his courage but whose wisdom easily stands alone. Given Style’s appropriation by way of his ‘nota’ marks of the role of moral mediator between text and reader, it is interesting to observe that six of his ‘nota’ marks in Book One call attention to the words of Pandarus, the advice-giver and go-between extraordinaire in the poem.

For a scribe that might look a lot like Pandarus in one light but who resembles Alan’s Genius and his forerunner genii in another, one could do no better than London scribe and bibliophile John Shirley (1360s–1456). Like Pandarus, who ‘packages’ Troilus for Criseyde in hyperbolic praise and a modicum of invented gossip, Shirley prefaces his texts with head-notes that sing their authors’ fame along with concrete details about their lives. Shirley saves his highest praise for Chaucer and his work, to the extent that, as Seth Lerer has put it, ‘[m]aintaining Chaucer’s reputation as the laureate and aureate poet seems almost an obsession with him’. 70 Beyond these shared traits as salespeople, it would appear that Shirley himself saw Pandarus-the-facilitator as a model for his role as scribe, for beneath a bookplate poem in his second major anthology, Cambridge Trinity College MS R.3.20, he penned Pandarus’s ‘whetstone stanza’:

A whetston is no kervyng instrument, And yet it maketh sharppe kervyng tolis; And there thow woost that I have aught mys-went, Eschuw thow that, for swich thing to the scole is; Thus ofte wise men ben war by foolys. If thow do so, thi wit is wel bewared; By his contrarie is every thyng declared. (1.631–7)

Shirley gives this stanza the heading ‘Pandarus to Troilus’, but given the self-referential quality of the bookplate poem that appears above it, which concludes with the plea ‘Whane yee þis boke haue over redde and seyne / To Johan Shirley restore yee it agayne’, a reader is invited to view the ‘I’ of the whetstone stanza as a reference to Shirley as well as to Pandarus and in doing so to catch that he is declaring himself a ‘fool’ who may nevertheless teach ‘wise men’. 71 Of course Pandarus was no fool and neither was Shirley; on the contrary, Shirley epitomizes the role of scribe as kindred spirit as it was exemplified by both Alan’s Genius and the traditional genius figure, for he functions as genius of the place that is the book, as genius the moral guide, and as Alan’s Genius as a generative ‘other self’, in this case, Chaucer’s.

If the Canterbury Tales narrator briefly steps out of his role as a pilgrim telling the story of a journey in order to speak as a denizen of the very book in a reader’s hand—suggesting that he or she might want to ‘Turne over the leef and chese another tale’—then Shirley performs the trick in reverse and takes it further, figuring the process of reading a book as a journey and identifying himself both as the author of its itinerary and as the constant and trustworthy guide for the reading ‘traveler’. Shirley writes himself into these roles in two versified tables of contents, both composed for volumes he produced containing works by Chaucer. 72 In both poems, Shirley begins by detailing his efforts in acquiring exemplars, copying them, and having them bound into books. While such inventories of scribal labour are unusual in themselves, Shirley goes on to note that he has also ordered the texts. Given that the order of a book’s texts is the essence of a table of contents and given that a table of contents is a specifically bookish form, the ensuing versified lists of contents effectively establish their author Shirley as the guiding intelligence of each book—the genius of these two places. In the earlier of the two poems, the subsequent list of contents reads like an advertisement for a day’s sight-seeing written by a local expert, pulling the customer/reader in by addressing him in the second person and framing each text in future-tense phrases: either as an attraction you—the reader—‘shall’ find or see or know, or as a sight (or site) that will follow ‘next’—as long as you keep turning the pages, as long as ‘ye wol þe writing suwe’. 73 Having once entered upon the territory defined by the bindings of any one of Shirley’s productions, a reader would find herself addressed at every turn by that same local expert, now in the form of the garrulous head-notes Shirley supplies for his texts.

It is in these head-notes that Shirley most closely fulfills the intertwined roles of priest and secretary exemplified by Alan’s Genius, for here he not only enacts but also gives verbal expression to a sense of the moral obligation to a text that goes along with bringing it into material form; like Alan’s Genius, he fulfills his duty using a formula of his training, for a head-note is essentially an expanded rubric. Also like Alan’s Genius, whom Nature dubbed her ‘alter-ego’, Shirley serves as a mirror or other self to Chaucer, thereby making their ‘fortunes interchangeable’. 74 A look at Shirley’s head-note to Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite in Trinity College MS R.3.20 will illustrate these extraordinary dimensions of his scribal practice:

Takeþe heed sirs I prey yowe of þis compleynt of Anelyda Qweene of Cartage. Roote of trouthe and stedfastnesse þat pytously compleyneþe vpon þe varyance of Daun Arcyte lord borne of þe blood Royal of Thebes englisshed by Geffrey Chaucier in þe best wyse and moost Rettoricyous þe moost vnkouþe metre coloures and Rymes þat euer was sayde tofore þis day – redeþe and preveþe þe sooþe. 75

Beginning with a direct address to readers indicating the points of moral interest they should take heed of in the text that follows—the steadfastness of Anelida and the ‘varyance’ of Arcite—Shirley goes on to praise Chaucer in all superlatives (to which I return shortly) and to conclude by admonishing readers to read the work and see for themselves if what he announces is true. In his directions to readers in this head-note, Shirley at once protects the text—by working to assure readers’ appreciation of it—and performs the role of priestly intermediary between Chaucer and his readers, reminding the latter of their own responsibility to recognize ‘þe sooþe’ in anything they read.

In its praise of Chaucer, this head-note is one of many that functions, as Lerer has argued, to create the Chaucer we know today, for they invent ‘the controlling idea of a lyric, public Chaucer’, as he puts it. 76 In this particular head-note, as Lerer explains, Shirley’s ‘moost vnkouþe metre’ refers to Chaucer’s use in Anelida and Arcite of the unusual decasyllabic line while his ‘moost Rettoricyous … coloures and Rymes’ refers to his figurative language and elaborate stanzaic structure: the superlatives all tout, in other words, Chaucer’s ‘[v]irtuosity in metrical and stanzaic form’. 77 Beyond setting terms for the aesthetic value of Chaucer’s poetry, however, this head-note is also one of many that performs the more basic task of naming Chaucer as a poem’s author, and thus it is that it is Shirley we have to thank for much of the canon of Chaucer’s short poems, including the unique witness to Chaucer’s ‘Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn’, also preserved in Trinity College R.3.20, right below Pandarus’s ‘whetstone stanza’. In this way, both by attributing poems to Chaucer and by defining and then championing their aesthetic value, Shirley’s Chaucer is our Chaucer; put another way, Shirley functions as Chaucer’s mirror and as an alter ego to the Chaucerian persona who, as we have seen, would prefer to distance himself from his work. Moreover, Shirley’s head-notes promulgated his own fame as well as Chaucer’s; indeed, both author and scribe could boast a network of ‘heirs’ in the fifteenth century. 78 Lerer has observed that by inscribing ‘Chaucer’s Wordes Unto Adam’ where he does, Shirley ‘presents himself as this labouring Adam to Chaucer’s near-divine authority’. 79 As I have shown, Shirley’s actual performance of his scribal labours was more in the manner of partner to a near-divine authority than servant, in the manner of the partnership between Alan’s Genius and the goddess Nature.

Author, scribe, and the true object of literary study

Given the various and sundry roles of the scribe I have touched upon in this essay, the question arises, what do we study—and what might we study—when we study the work of scribes? With respect to John Shirley, one answer to this question is that we study the processes of canonization, appreciating the ways Chaucer was packaged and represented by the hand of Shirley and his descendants. With respect to scribes’ work as glossators, scholars may find information, as B. A. Windeatt has put it, about ‘the points of difficulty for the contemporary reader of Chaucer’s diction’. 80 In relation to their work as editors, Lee Patterson would have it that in the form of scribal productions, we find a text that has been ‘preread’ by scribes and altered according to their interpretations, which we study in order to ‘reverse this process, to return the text to a readable, but as yet unread, condition’—the condition of the text as Chaucer, before interacting with the scribe, intended it. 81 Yet another answer to this question I have already noted above in concluding my discussion of scribal hands: a study of scribal labour yields valuable insight into the circumstances of production and routes of transmission of the works of Chaucer. Returning now to Linne Mooney’s essay on Adam Pinkhurst, a ground-breaking example of that use of scribal evidence, we may find that her vision of Chaucer’s and Pinkhurst’s relationship bears some resemblance to the relationship I have been describing between Chaucer and his work on the one hand and his scribes as Geniuses and genii on the other—and to the ties between Nature and Genius and individual humans and their genii before that. Mooney’s assertions that Pinkhurst ‘offers a model of a scribe who specialized in copying the work of a single author’ and, further, that the connection between Chaucer and Pinkhurst might have begun as early as the 1380s and have been ‘sufficiently close for the poet to write a jesting poem to him’ all suggest the kind of loyal, durable, and mutually beneficial companionship that marks the bond between an individual and his genius . 82

All of these answers to the question of what we study when we study the work of scribes focus on matters outside the literary work that scribes actually bring into being, however. In concluding my exploration of the role of the scribe, I return to Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae , to its description of Truth, or Veritas— the daughter of Nature and Genius—in order to discover a conception of the object of literary study that partakes of the work of scribes. In a passage that is strikingly evocative of the traditional notion of the literary ‘work’ (as an entity independent of its material forms), Alan notes, ‘On her face could be read [ legebatur ] the divinity of heavenly beauty which disdains our mortal nature’, after which he goes on to explain that her garments, ‘proclaiming the work of the right hand of a heavenly craftsman’, were impervious to age and were joined to her body in such a way as to be inseparable. 83 Truth, it would seem, is the offspring of a loving communion between matter and form and exists in and as a combination of the two. Revisiting the question of what we might study when we study the work of scribes with this allegory in mind, we could answer that it would be possible to study the product of a relationship, looking neither solely at the material labour of scribes nor solely beyond that for the intellectual work of authors. The product of such a relationship could be figured, in fact, in an allegorical reading of Chaucer’s ‘Wordes Unto Adam’. Following Mooney’s sense of the work as a ‘jesting poem’, we may recognize that it is in the context of an affectionate relationship that the speaker asks his scribe to ‘write more trew’. Envisioning a kindly union between an author’s ‘makyng’ and a scribe’s writing might lead us to an object of literary study that is ‘more trew’ for Chaucer’s work than the traditional object that recognizes value in the author’s ‘makyng’ alone.

St Bonaventure, ‘ Aliquis enim scribit aliena, nihil addendo vel mutando; et iste mere dicitur scriptor ’. Latin text and English translation quoted from Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11.

For complaints about scribes beginning with Cicero, see John Scattergood, ‘The Jongleur, the Copyist, and the Printer: The Tradition of Chaucer’s Wordes unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context: Selected Papers from the 5th Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society , ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1990), 499–508, at 503–4. For Ælfric’s criticisms, see Orietta Da Rold, ‘Textual Copying and Transmission’, in The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English , ed. Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker with the assistance of William Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33–56 at 36–42.

Glending Olson, ‘Author, Scribe, and Curse: The Genre of Adam Scriveyn’, Chaucer Review 42 (2008) , 284–97. Chaucer distinguishes authorial ‘makyng’ from scribal writing in the fourth line of his poem to Adam: ‘But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe’. For the varied senses of ‘makyng’ in reference to medieval textual production as well as the distinction between it and writing, See Glending Olson, ‘Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer’, Comparative Literature 31 (1979), 272–90. For an excellent survey of book curses from antiquity into the early modern period, see Marc Drogin, Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld and Schram, 1983) . See also Lynn Thorndike, ‘Copyists’ Final Jingles in Mediaeval Manuscripts’, Speculum 12 (1937), 268; and ‘More Copyists’ Final Jingles’, Speculum 31 (1956), 321–8. In addition to the book curses collected here, word searches on ‘anathema’ or ‘maledictus’ in online library catalogues (e.g. the British Library) yield many more.

‘ Quicunque alienaverit anathema sit. / Qui culpat carmen sit maledictus. Amen ’ (Drogin, Anathema! , 69); translation based on Drogin’s.

Libri contractor calamis celi potiatur; Si quis subtractor, in Avernis sic moriatur (Drogin, Anathema! , 83).

Olson, ‘Author, Scribe, and Curse’, 288.

For examples of colophons alluding to material rewards, see Thorndike, ‘Final Jingles’ and ‘More Final Jingles’. Taking the pretty girl reference a step further, one scribe claims that it was one of these who taught him to use his pen: ‘ Scribere cum penna docuit me pulcra puella ’ (‘More Final Jingles’, 323).

‘ Amice qui legis, retro digitis teneas, ne subito litteras deleas, quia ille homo qui nescit scribere nullum se putat habere laborem; quia sicut navigantibus dulcis est portus, ita scriptori novissimus versus. Calamus tribus digitis continetur. Totum corpus laborat. Deo gratias. Ego, in Dei nomine, Vuarembertus scripsi. Deo gratias ’ (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS Lat. 12,296). Latin text from Leslie Webber Jones, ‘The Scriptorium at Corbie: I. The Library’, Speculum 22 (1947), 191–204, at 200. English translation by David F. Harvey in Drogin, Anathema! , 24.

‘ verba caelestia multiplicat homo, et quadam significatione contropabili, si fas est dicere, tribus digitis scribitur quod virtus sanctae Trinitatis effatur ’. Cassiodorus, Institutiones divinarum et humanarum lectionum , in ed. R. A. B. Mynors, Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones Edited from the MSS (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), bk. I, ch. 30.1, lines 21–3 (75); trans. J. W. Halporn, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 163.

On manuscripts of Chaucer’s works associated with houses of monks, friars, and nuns, see Linda Olson’s ‘ “Swete Cordyall” of “Lytterature”: Some Middle English Manuscripts from the Cloister’, in Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches , eds. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 291–371, at 303–14.

Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘The Theme of Imagination in Medieval Poetry and the Allegorical Figure of “Genius” ’, Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 7 (1976), 45–64, at 57.

On these early genii , see Jane Chance Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975) , 7–20.

Denise Baker, ‘The Priesthood of Genius: A Study of the Medieval Tradition’, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology , ed. Peter Nicholson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 143–57; Nitzsche, Figure of Genius , 88–107. On Bernardus’s system of genii see the same, 65–87.

Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae , ‘ A Genii templo tales anathema merentur / Qui Genio decimas et sua iura negant ’, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring, in Alan of Lille, De planctu naturae (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo), 876, lines 71–672; trans. James. J. Sheridan, The Plaint of Nature (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980) , 216. All quotations from and translations of the De planctu are from these editions.

Nitzsche, Figure of Genius , 92–3.

Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae, ‘ abhominationis filios a sacramentali ecclesie nostre communione seiungens, cum debita officii sollempnitate, seuera excommunicationis uirga percutias ’, ed. Häring, 872, ll. 211–14; trans. Sheridan, 207–8.

Nitzsche, Figure of Genius , 89.

Martianus Capella, quoted from Nitzsche, 15–16.

Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae , ‘… uelut in speculo Nature resultante similitudine inueniendo me alteram’ ed. Häring, 871, ll. 190–1; trans. Sheridan, 207.

Ibid.,‘ nodo dilectionis precordialis astringor aut tecum in tuo profectu proficiens aut in tuo defectu equa lance deficiens. Quare circularis debet esse dilectio, ut tu, talione dilectionis respondens ’, ed. Häring, 871, ll. 190–3; trans. Sheridan, 207.

Baker, ‘The Priesthood of Genius’, 149.

Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae, ‘ Genius … pretaxatam excommunicationis seriem a penetralibus mentis forinsecus euocauit’, ed. Häring, 878, l. 138; trans. Sheridan, 220.

For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Elizabeth Pittenger, ‘Explicit Ink’, in Premodern Sexualities , eds. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), 223–41.

On Chaucer’s use of the plough as pen metaphor in the Knight’s and the Miller’s tales, see Lynn Staley Johnson, ‘The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’, Speculum 66 (1991) , 820–38, at 825.

An argument has been made that this number of references to scribes should be halved; for provocative discussions of the authorship of ‘Chaucer’s Wordes Unto Adam’, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 121; Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Chaucer’s “Chronicle,” John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998), 201–18, at 207–8; Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam’, Chaucer Review 42 (2008), 269–83, at 275; and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Chaucer and ‘Adam Scriveyne’’, Medium Ævum 81 (2012), 135–8.

For descriptions of each of the steps in the production of a manuscript page, see Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 18–34. For overviews of the use of page design elements in books produced in late-medieval England, see Kathleen L. Scott, ‘Design, decoration and illustration’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475 , eds. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 31–64; and Stephen Partridge, ‘Designing the Page,’ in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 , ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 79–103.

In his note on this line, Stephen A. Barney explains that summarizing chapter headings often began with ‘How … ’. (‘Explanatory Notes’, Riverside Chaucer , 1032).

Michelle P. Brown, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms . (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1994), 111. Brown’s Guide is now also available at the British Library Website: bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/glossary.asp. On rubrics, see also Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies , 24–5.

For further reflections on the possibility of Chaucer thinking like a scribe, see Partridge, ‘Designing the Page’, 102.

In Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, the line is marked with a three-line blue initial with red flourishing (f. 133v); Bodleian Library MS Bodley 638 marks it with a two-line red initial with decorative in-filling also in red ink (f. 115v); Bodleian Library MS Tanner marks it with a small paraf mark (f. 105r).

Ardis Butterfield, ‘ Mise-en-page in the Troilus Manuscripts: Chaucer and French Manuscript Culture’, Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1995) , 49–80.

Joel Fredell, ‘The Lowly Paraf: Transmitting Manuscript Design in The Canterbury Tales ’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000) , 213–80, at 238–40.

The witnesses are Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Bodley 638 (ff. 101v-102v) and Fairfax 16 (ff. 124v-125r). On nominales , see Werner Hüllen, English Dictionaries 800–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67–9. For their relation to the underlining in these two manuscripts, see my essay ‘‘Qui bien ayme a tarde oblie: Lemmata and Lists in the Parliament of Fowls ’, in Visual Approaches to Chaucer , ed Susanna Fein and David Raybin (College Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 195–217.

Fredell, ‘The Lowly Paraf’, 238 and 239; Butterfield, ‘ Mise-en-page in the Troilus Manuscripts’, 63.

My survey is based is based on M. C. Seymour’s A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts , 2 vols. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).

On quires and systems for ordering them, see Brown, Guide , s.v. ‘quire’, ‘bifolium’, and ‘catchword’. See also Clemens and Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies , 49–50.

Estelle Stubbs, ‘ “Here’s one I prepared earlier”: The Work of Scribe D on Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198’, Review of English Studies 58 (2007), 133–53, at 143.

Ibid., 144.

For a full narration of these activities and their relations to the Hengwrt Manuscript and London, British Library Harley MS 7334, see Stubbs, ‘The Work of Scribe D’, 144–8.

Stubbs, ‘The Work of Scribe D’, 151–3.

Jacob Thaisen, ‘The Merchant, the Squire, and Gamelyn in the Christ Church Chaucer Manuscript’, Notes and Queries 253 (2008), 265–9.

Ibid., 268. Date as given by Seymour in Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts , vol. 2, 201. A possible layer of authorial revision is evinced by quire revisions in some Troilus and Criseyde manuscripts as well—affecting Troilus’s Boethian soliloquy (4.983–1085)— on which see Barry Windeatt, ‘The Text of the Troilus’, Essays on Troilus and Criseyde , ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), 1–22, at 3–11. For yet another exemplary analysis of a scribe’s interventions in quire structure, see Orietta Da Rold, ‘The Quiring System in Cambridge University Library MS Dd.4.24 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ’, The Library 4 (2003) , 107–28.

Boethius writes that the words dictated to him by the muses cause him to weep: ‘they now dampen my face with lachrymose elegy’s [ elegi fletibus ] truth’. Boethius, Consolatio Philosophiae , ed. James J. O’Donnell (Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr College, 1990), line 4; trans. Joel C. Relihan, The Consolation of Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001).

Script identification from M. C. Seymour, A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts: Volume I. Works Before the Canterbury Tales (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 56. As M. B. Parkes explains in Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), in textura quadrata (of which littera quadrata is a specimen), scribes applied a short diagonal stroke to the base of minims using the full width of the pen’s nib ‘often forming a spur where the pen changed direction’; this ‘prototype movement’ lent the script a ‘rhythmic and unified effect’ (104). On the script in Corpus Christi MS 61, see M. B. Parkes, ‘Palaeographical Description and Commentary’, in Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 61 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978), 1–13, at 5–6. See also Linne R. Mooney et al, Late Medieval English Scribes (York: University of York, 2011), which includes an example of a letter E from this manuscript that the editors liken to a hedgehog ( www.medievalscribes.com ). See this site for further examples of the hands of all the scribes mentioned in this essay.

Parkes sees gargoyles (‘Palaeographical Description’, 6); the editors of Late Medieval English Scribes see hedgehogs (s.v. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 61).

Seymour, Chaucer Manuscripts , 2:60.

Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature 1375–1425 (York: York Medieval Press, 2013) , 86–106.

Jeanne Krochalis, ‘Introduction’, in The Pierpont Morgan Library Manuscript M.817: A Facsimile (Norman: Pilgrim Books, 1986), xvii-xxix, at p. xix. Find additional analysis of Carpenter’s hand along with a sample page from M.817 at Linne Mooney, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs, Late Medieval English Scribes ( https://www.medievalscribes.com , accessed 15 July 2019).

Script identifications from ‘Medieval Manuscripts in the University Library’ (Durham University, 2015), s.v. DUL MS Cosin V.II.13 ( https://www.dur.ac.uk/library/asc/theme/medmss/apvii13/ accessed 1 September 2015).

Parkes discusses the influence of ‘the aesthetics of an international culture’ on ‘all art forms, including handwriting’ in Their Hands Before Our Eyes , 108–9.

T. A. M. Bishop, Scriptores Regis: Facsimiles to Identify and Illustrate the Hands of Royal Scribes in Original Charters of Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 9.

M. B. Parkes, ‘Richard Frampton: A Commercial Scribe’, in The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya , eds. Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 113–24, at 115. Parke’s definitions of aspect and ductus first appeared in English Cursive Book Hands , 1250–1500 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), xxvi. See also Parks, Their Hands before Our Eyes , 59–63.

Mooney’s identification of Pinkhurst was published in her ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum 81 (2006), 96–138. For a recent history of ‘The Pynkhurst Phenomenon,’ see the so-titled introduction to Lawrence Warner’s Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production 1384–1432 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–12. This scribe was given the moniker Scribe B in A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries : Essays Presented to N. R. Ker , eds. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar, 1978) , 163–210, at 170.

Bishop, Scriptores Regis , 9.

Johnson, ‘The Trope of the Scribe’, 837.

Ibid., 822.

Janet Cowen and George Kane, eds., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Legend of Good Women (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1995), 84–100.

Cowen’s and Kane’s copy text is Oxford, Bodleian Library Tanner MS 346. Readings from Pepys are my transcriptions from the manuscript facsimile, Manuscript Pepys 2006: A Facsimile , Intro by A. S. G. Edwards (Norman, OH: Pilgrim Books, 1985). For a discussion of scribal ‘editing’ that touches on a tendency to sentimentalize along with several of the types of intervention Cowen and Kane list, see B. A. Windeatt, ‘The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979), 119–41.

‘… quelque chose est en jeu qui redonne vie à l’inscription inerte; la langue miroite et prend dans son piège le copiste, qu’elle institue en suget ’. Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge de la Variante: Histoire Critique de la Philologie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989), 19; trans. Betsy Wang, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 2–3.

Helen Cooper, ‘Averting Chaucer’s Prophecies: Miswriting, Mismetering, and Misunderstanding’, in A Guide to Editing Middle English , eds. Vincent P. McCarren and Douglas Moffat (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 79–93, at 80.

For a full explanation of this and other problematic links, see Norman Blake, ‘The Links in the Canterbury Tales ’, in New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron , eds. Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 107–18. For a more recent analysis, see Simon Horobin, ‘Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales’ , Chaucer Review 44 (2000): 351–67.

J. S. P. Tatlock, ‘The Canterbury Tales in 1400’, PMLA 50 (1935), 100–39, at 119.

Charles A. Owen, ‘What the Manuscripts Tell us About the Parson’s Tale’, Medium Ævum 63 (1994), 239–49, at 239. For a detailed analysis of scribal responses to the unfinished Cook’s Tale, see A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Canterbury Tales and Gamelyn ’, in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honor of Jill Mann, ed. Maura Nolan (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 76–90.

Míċeál F. Vaughan, ‘Creating Comfortable Boundaries: Scribes, Editors, and the Invention of the Parson’s Tale’, in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602 , eds. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999) , 45–90, at 55.

Quoted in Owen, ‘What the Manuscripts Tell Us’, 240.

For a historical overview of the practice of glossing together with a look at Chaucer’s exploration of its use and abuse, see Robert W. Hanning, ‘ “I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose”: Versions of Textual Harassment in Medieval Literature’, in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, eds. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 27–50.

On this aspect of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, see Hanning, ‘I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose’, 44–50. On the authorship of the commentary, see Graham D. Caie, ‘The Significance of the Early Chaucer Manuscript Glosses (With Special Reference to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue )’, Chaucer Review 10 (1976), 350–60, at 357–8.

Beryl Smalley provides a succinct history of the development of glossae ordinariae in The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), 46–66.

In the following discussion I draw from Tamara Pérez Fdez and Ana Sáez Hidalgo, ‘ “A Man Textueel”: Scribal Readings and Interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde through the Glosses in Manuscript British Library Harley 2392’, Journal of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature 14 (2007) , 197–220; and C. David Benson and Barry A. Windeatt, ‘The Manuscript Glosses to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ’, Chaucer Review 25 (1990), 33–53.

Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers , 46.

The bookplate poem and whetstone stanza appear on page 361 of one of Shirley’s anthologies, Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.3.20. For the text of the former together with a discussion of the juxtaposition of the two, see Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers , 133.

The poems are IMEV 1426 and 2598, which appear in London, British Library Additional MSS 16165 and 29,729, respectively. Both poems have been edited by Margaret Connolly, in John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate: 1998), 206–11.

IMEV 1426, line 72, ed. Connolly, in John Shirley , 208.

Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae , trans. Sheridan, 206, 207.

Quoted in Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers , 102.

Ibid., 119.

Ibid., 102.

I quote from the title of Linne Mooney’s recent article ‘John Shirley’s Heirs’, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003), 182–98.

Lerer, Chaucer’s Readers , 121.

Windeatt, ‘The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics’, 127.

Lee Patterson, ‘The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective’, in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation , ed. Jerome J. McGann (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1985), 55–91, at 72.

Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, 121 and 119. Simon Horobin presents documentary evidence of a connection between Chaucer and Pinkhurst in 1385 in his ‘Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales ’. See also Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City , 67–85.

Alan of Lille, De planctu Naturae , ‘ Huius in facie diuinae pulcritudinis deitas legebatur, nostre mortalitatis aspernata naturam. Vestes uero celestis artificis dexteram eloquentes, indefesse rutilationis splenditatibus inflammate, nullis poterant uetustatis tineis cancellari. Que uirgineo corpori tanta fuerant conexione iugate, ut nulla exuitionis dieresis eas aliquando a virginali corpore faceret phariseas ’. Ed. Häring, 877, ll. 98–102; trans. Sheridan, 218.

Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature . Trans. James. J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980 ).

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Butterfield, Ardis , ‘ Mise-en-page in the Troilus Manuscripts: Chaucer and French Manuscript Culture,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 58 ( 1995 ), 49–80.

Da Rold, Orietta , ‘The Quiring System in Cambridge University Library MS Dd.4.24 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ,’ The Library 4 ( 2003 ), 107–28.

Doyle, A. I. and M. B. Parkes , ‘The production of copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the early fifteenth century,’ in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries : Essays presented to N. R. Ker , eds. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar, 1978 ), 163–210.

Drogin, Marc , Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld and Schram, 1983 ).

Fdez, Tamara Pérez and Ana Sáez Hidalgo , ‘ “A Man Textueel”: Scribal Readings and Interpretations of Troilus and Criseyde through the Glosses in Manuscript British Library Harley 2392’, Journal of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature 14 ( 2007 ), 197–220.

Fredell, Joel , ‘The Lowly Paraf: Transmitting Manuscript Design in The Canterbury Tales ,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 ( 2000 ), 213–80.

Johnson, Lynn Staley , ‘ The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, ’ Speculum 66 ( 1991 ), 820–38.

Mooney, Linne , ‘ Chaucer’s Scribe, ’ Speculum 81 ( 2006 ), 96–138.

Mooney, Linne R. and Estelle Stubbs . Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature 1375–1425 . York: York Medieval Press, 2013 .

Olson, Glending , ‘ Author, Scribe, and Curse: The Genre of Adam Scriveyn, ’ Chaucer Review 42 ( 2008 ), 284–97.

Nitzsche, Jane Chance , The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975 ).

Vaughan, Míċeál F. , ‘Creating Comfortable Boundaries: Scribes, Editors, and the Invention of the Parson’s Tale’, in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602 , eds. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999 ), 45–90.

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Case Studies

Delivering cost effective and value driven patient encounters.

The physicians at the NANI study location sought a solution or service that enabled their physicians to quickly and accurately document a “value-driven” patient encounter into their EMR with greater efficiency and less cost than their previous workflow.

NANI and Scribe conducted a pilot program with the Mount Prospect, Illinois location that ran between January 11 and March 1, 2016. All findings in this Case Study were verified by both NANI and Scribe.

Nephrology Associates of Northern Illinois and Indiana (NANI) was established in 1976 and is setting their sights on becoming the largest nephrology group in the United States. The physicians at the NANI study location sought a solution or service that enabled their physicians to quickly and accurately document a “value-driven” patient encounter into their EMR with greater efficiency and less cost than their previous workflow.

Read about the challenges NANI faced and how Scribe improved their practice.

Recognizing and fixing lost or delayed billing opportunities

Optimizing the way providers and staff use their time

Adding the ability to mine data within EHRs

Managing ICD-10 and regulatory requirements

Reducing provider and staff burnout

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Case Study: Boosting Productivity with Medical Scribes

This case study was prepared by Kristene Cristobal of Cristobal Consulting, contracted evaluator for the Spreading Solutions That Work program.

When patients visit providers, the experience can be hampered by the use of the electronic health record, whether it’s difficult to use, time consuming, or hinders the clinical documentation process .

At the same time, primary care provider burnout is being driven by the demands of documentation, as clinicians spend extra hours each night writing notes instead of spending time with their families. The result in low satisfaction and high turnover .

Medical scribes are a promising way to help providers focus on their interactions with patients and increase joy in work . An estimated one in five practices with an electronic health record (EHR) currently use scribes .

La Clínica , a Federally Qualified Health Center located in the San Francisco Bay Area, has nineteen clinic sites and 140 providers. Like many community health centers, it struggles with a shrinking primary care workforce and an EHR that place a heavy clerical burden on providers, impacting productivity, patient access, and satisfaction.

To address challenges in delayed provider adoption of the EHR and other factors hampering computer use, La Clínica piloted two scribes working with ten providers. They targeted high-performing providers who were at risk for turnover.

Spreading Solutions That Work

In 2017, we selected 16 teams to participate in Spreading Solutions That Work , a year-long program in its fourth cycle. Teams implemented one of five solutions:

• Group Visits
• Medical Scribes
• Patient Portal Optimization
• Telephone Visits
• Texting Solutions

Medical scribes can be nurses, medical assistants, or other non-clinical staff who accompany providers in the patient visit to scribe notes in the electronic health record, enter orders, prepare the after-visit summary, and reinforce the plan with the patient.

Our support included a grant of $15,000, coaching, measurement support, peer group webinars, tools, and other resources. The team also trained at Shasta Community Health Center , which runs Scribe University, one of the few safety net programs of its kind. The three-day training allowed La Clinica to shadow Shasta’s scribe team and covered:

• How to take SOAP (subjective, objective, assessment, and plan) notes
• What to include when writing a history of present illness
• Elements of a physical exam
• Practice writing notes
• Preparing clinicians for scribes
• Process for reviewing notes

Designing the Pilot

La Clínica found it important to focus on productivity from the beginning instead of waiting until the end of the pilot phase to evaluate its impact on it. The team approached providers who were already greatly exceeding productivity expectations or who could likely serve a greater number of patients if they worked with a scribe. This approach set out to reward productive providers, monitor productivity throughout implementation, and increase productivity.

The team told the providers, “We know you work hard and we’d like to make your day better and your experience better. We’ll need to see a bump up in productivity and with a well-trained scribe you will be able to see see two patients more per day and get out of the clinic on time.”

The calculation was that increasing provider productivity by two patients per day would offset the cost of hiring the scribe.

Incorporating Medical Scribes into a Successful Team

Tips from Shasta Community Health Center

• Understand there is a steep learning curve, as new scribes may have little medical background or medical experience. They are learning medical terminology, EHR navigation, and clinical workflow.
• The initial training period is approximately one month, but it can take two to three months to establishing a good flow between the provider and the scribe, if the provider can put in the time and give feedback and consistent communication.
• Reviewing notes with scribes is important for learning. Providers should spend 10-15 minutes at the end of a shift letting them know what went well, what they can work on, and how they prefer things to look in the notes.
• Providers should dictate physical exam findings while in the exam room. For example, let scribes know if the cardiovascular exam or respiratory exam is normal.
• Create customized quick saved templates or “my phrases” or “dot phrases” to improve efficiency and accuracy.
• Before entering exam room, talk to your scribe about preventative measures you might order and a brief history of the patient.
• Providers and scribes can set quality goals. For example, make sure every eligible female has their mammogram appointment scheduled that day

Milestones During Implementation

Start-up and planning.

• La Clínica was torn between hiring candidates who were on a pre-professional track, such as medical school applicants, or candidates who were on a MA track. The team thought aspiring health care providers may have quicker uptake, but would not stay in the job very long. On the other hand, there could be challenges in convincing MAs to be scribes, as the skills sets have limited overlap, and MA scribes can be asked to perform MA duties only if there is a MA staffing shortage .
• La Clínica’s medical scribes accompanied providers during each visit, documented information in the EHR during the visit, and completed any further notes after the visit to close the encounter. The provider then reviewed and signed the note.
• It was important for the physician champion to meet monthly with the scribes as well as presenting to executive leadership to bolster their ongoing support for the program.
• The team observed what they dubbed “scribe envy.” When other providers saw how scribes worked, they also wanted to have scribes.
• The team also observed “scribe guilt,” where providers in the pilot felt guilty about getting to work with a scribe. They then sometimes expressed this guilt by encouraging the scribe to work with other providers as well.

Pilot Successes

La Clínica’s medical scribe program improved in all measures but one.

• The average cycle time for patient visits was 65 minutes in June and 70 minutes in July. After the first scribe was hired in July, the average cycle time decreased to 54 minutes in August and 50 minutes in September. The lowest was 40 minutes over the program period.
• The average number of patients seen by all providers in an hour varied, however in the best case, it increased from 1.9 to 2.5 — a 31.6 percent increase in productivity.
• Satisfaction amongst providers was high with 100 percent rating top two scores for overall satisfaction, or top box scoring, a common method for reporting and analyzing scale questions. Between 91 percent and 100 percent of patients rated top two scores for overall satisfaction.
• Despite these positive indicators, the number of charts not closed within a week increased from 10 to 23. La Clínica hypothesized that some providers may be spending a generous amount of time reviewing and appending scribe notes. There is also a chance it was spurious (e.g., due to provider leaves and vacations).

Characteristics of a Successful Scribe

• Skilled at receiving verbal information and rapidly synthesizing it into a clinically relevant format.
• Bilingual scribes are a plus when working in an environment with several different languages.
• Excellent spelling and grammar.
• Excellent listening and typing skills. A suggested minimum of more than 50 words per minute.
• Flexible, adaptable.

Advice for Organizations Considering Implementing Medical Scribes

• Hire scribes who are pre-med or pre-allied health professionals, such as aspiring pharmacy or lab technicians, nutritionists, medical record technicians, or physicians.
• Focus on productivity earlier to help make the case for sustaining the program. Consider focusing on providers who already see a high number of patients, are at risk for burnout, or could likely see more patients if a scribe were handling the documentation.
• Conversely the providers who “likes to spend a lot of time with patients” is unlikely to serve more patients while using a scribe, although they will spend less time documenting.
• Think about who else needs to be involved in rolling out your medical scribes program so that you can strengthen sustainability. This can include a “lead scribe” or your own training and quality control.
• Begin with the end in mind. What drivers and measures will support sustainability or the best business case going forward? For La Clínica, this was productivity, so that they could make a strong case to leadership to sustain the program.
• A clinical champion (CMO) and a senior administrator (COO/CIO) as co-leads .
• A lead MA , who had high levels of buy-in and motivation to implement the program, plus the three scribes, attended the host site training. She is also the rooming MA .
• A teamlet made up of the provider and a scribe. Research shows that clinicians working in stable teamlets with the same MA every day have less burnout than clinicians working with different MAs on different days.
• The first group of five MAs who went to the Shasta Community Health Center training became “superusers.” They worked with the nurses on floor to train the rest of the staff.
• When the second group of MAs went to Shasta Community Health Center for training, they were required to watch a series of videos beforehand. This help set up expectations for the training, as well as being a scribe. The videos eased some anxiety about being able to be a scribe by showing the full scope of the role.
• Building off Shasta’s training documents, the Hill Country team developed its own materials for scribes. This included some shortcuts, such as sharing providers’ templated documentation, or “quick texts,” that could be reproduced by a scribe. For instance, EPIC’s “dot notes” makes typing easy and everything provider would say is already there. An example of a simple “quick text” is “.scribe” which translates to “Portions of this note were scribed by [NAME].” Each of Hill Country’s providers has a set of “quick texts” that they’ve customized and the scribe can upload into their own profile.
• The lead MA/rooming MA and the scribes met monthly to conduct internal peer reviews, looking at notes and charts together, and share learnings.
• At times, a male scribe would need to leave the exam room at a female patient’s request. It wasn’t always possible to find a female scribe.
• Expectations were unclear about the number of visits that would be scribed. Clinicians were surprised to learn that not all of their visits would be scribed. The team also needed to clarify which portions of the visit were to be scribed.
• The team developed a medication order workflow, with provider doing the final approval, since the scribe and provider were not allowed in the medical record at the same time.
• A couple of months after launch, charts were coded faster so the cycle time for billing decreased, providers were leaving work faster and needed less charting catch up time over the weekend, and fewer calls from patients asking about faster referrals and refills.
• The pilot team scribes helped to train the new scribes in the next site for implementation. The pilot clinicians were also available as a resource to the clinicians new to scribes.
• To hire scribes in a more remote area, Hill Country advertised for MA positions, got senior MA applicants, and then asked if they would be willing to also scribe.
• Having a separate rooming MA for every two providers that had scribing MAs made the workload more balanced. The scribing MA can’t also room the patients, take care of their immunizations, wound care, EKGs or other ancillary tasks. They can’t be in two places at once. You must separate these two roles in order for either job to be done successfully.

Building a Business Case for Spread

Hill Country’s medical scribe program produced gains in multiple areas.

• The average cycle time for patient visits decreased from 48 minutes to 32 minutes — a 33 percent decrease in average cycle time .
• The average number of hours providers spent charting outside of their normal salaried hours decreased from 8.5 hours to 3.1 hours — a 63.5 percent decrease in hours spent charting outside of salaried hours .
• These efficiencies happened while productivity increased from an average of 10 patients seen by a provider in a day to 13 patients seen by a provider in a day — a 30 percent increase in productivity .

Other benefits include:

• Team members going home on time.
• No overtime.
• More timely submission of claims
• Provider satisfaction at 100 percent for the entire program period.

The co-leads are confident this contributes to greater provider retention. They calculated that by adding one additional patient in the morning and one in the afternoon, the additional revenue would be able to pay for the extra rooming MA cost.

Additional goals included increasing the distribution of educational materials, depression screening, and follow-up plans for patients who screened positive for depression.

• Someone who can type quickly and also multitask. This is especially true for the scribes who are also MAs, as they must still answer questions from the front office, nurses, LVNs, and behavioral health staff.
• Someone who understands the medical process and how the chart works because providers will often simply talk with patients about their condition. The provider may not tell the scribe to type medical advice into the assessment and plan section of the chart.
• Someone who is flexible, but also has time management skills and the assertiveness to be able to tell the provider diplomatically that they need to wrap up the visit or save a particular conversation for another day.

• Take the time to offer one-on-one training to scribes. And set aside time to practice the skills.
• Your scribes will benefit from training guides and materials, both online and offline.
• Develop a train-the-trainer program so you don’t have to pull scribes off the floor each time you implement additional scribes.
• Share providers’ templated documentation, or “quick texts”, that could be reproduced by a scribe.
• The MA can’t be both a MA and a scribe due to time limitations and workloads of each role. You must separate these two roles in order for either job to be done successfully.
• Be clear up front and communicate expectations with providers about the number of their visits that will be scribed and what portion of those visits will be scribed.

Related Resources

Innovation Spotlight: Medical Scribes in the Safety Net

Southeast Health Center in San Francisco looks at the best way to train and manage medical scribes as part of their team.

Medical Scribes: Start-Up Basics 2017

Michaela Boucher and Charles Kitzman of Shasta Community Health Center give an overview of what it takes to implement medical scribes in an organization, the barriers and benefits, and lessons learned…

Medical Scribes: Duties and Workflow 2017

Michaela Boucher from Shasta Community Health Center talks about medical scribe duties and workflow in this webinar.

Medical Scribes: HR and Scribes 2017

Michaela Boucher and Charles Kitzman from Shasta Community Health Center share their experiences and knowledge around hiring scribes, the interviewing process, payment, and career advancement.

Case Study: Medical Scribes Improve Provider Satisfaction in Rural California

To improve retention, recruitment, and provider satisfaction, Hill Country Health and Wellness Center piloted medical scribes.

Case Study: Scribe

• First Online: 21 March 2019

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Scribe is an app that solved one very small but very serious problem for some people—copying and pasting between their Macs and iOS devices.

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Holstein, M. (2019). Case Study: Scribe. In: iPhone App Design for Entrepreneurs. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4285-8_8

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Those looking for a good example of the impact medical scribes can have on providers, a hospital, and the patients they serve, need to look no further than Hackensack University Medical Cente r (HackensackUMC) in Hackensack, New Jersey.

HackensackUMC is the number one ranked hospital in New Jersey, according to U.S. News and World Report . The publication also ranked HackensackUMC third out of the 179 hospitals in the New York metro area. Not to mention, the hospital is also nationally ranked in 10 specialties: Cancer, Cardiology & Heart Surgery, Ear, Nose & Throat, Gastroenterology & GI Services, Geriatrics, Neurology & Neurosurgery, Orthopedics, Pulmonary, and Urology. The Joseph M. Sanzari Children’s Hospital also ranked nationally as one of the Top 50 Best Children’s Hospitals for Neurology and Neurosurgery in the 2013-14 Best Children’s Hospitals list.

One of the secret ingredients that made HackensackUMC so successful was a decision that hundreds of other successful facilities all over the country have made: the decision to institute a medical scribe program.

HackensackUMC with Medical Scribes

Since the 2011 introduction of the program, its results have been overwhelmingly positive. Dr. Joseph Feldman is the chairman of Emergency Services and an advocate of the medical scribe program at HackensackUMC.  Dr. Feldman notes that improvements since the start of the scribe program have been vast, especially when it comes to metrics like physician satisfaction.

As a practicing physician himself, Dr. Feldman sees the everyday advantages to having medical scribes. “They really have allowed me to be razor-sharp when it comes to patients and their families, instead of having to focus on entering data, I am able to spend more time communicating and educating,” said Feldman.

“Scribes also help to comprehensively document an accurate story of what happened to the patient during their stay in the Emergency and Trauma Center, which is necessary in an evolving healthcare market,” said Feldman.

Life of a Medical Scribe in New Jersey

Angelica Poon, the lead scribe at HackensackUMC, knows that the work she’s doing matters, and tangibly improves the lives of both physicians and their patients. As a scribe, her duties go beyond just managing the EHR. She recognizes that things like notifying patients and their families of any potential delays in care or offering comfort items, like a glass of water, go a long way.

Life as a medical scribe is rewarding for Poon. She tells the story of an overnight shift from earlier this year:

“A few weeks ago, I worked an incredibly busy overnight shift from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., but wound up working a bit later due to the number of patients. To illustrate how busy we were, we received three patients per hour on average along with 12 sign outs from the two providers who had left earlier. In total, we had 14 patients around 5:30 a.m., had seen 32 patients already, and had three more waiting to be seen. In addition, a young cardiac arrest patient kept losing his pulse, and we spent an hour and 45 minutes at the patient’s bedside consulting, following ACLS protocol, and monitoring his vitals. We never left the patient’s side until he was stable. After the ICU patient, we still continued to receive patients, but I had to leave for my commute home. I returned to work eight hours later. An hour and a half into my shift, I got a phone call from the doctor I worked the overnight shift with. She said she didn’t stop seeing patients until 9 a.m. She called to thank me endlessly for staying so late to help complete as many charts as possible. She kept saying, “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t stayed. There were so many patients if it was not for you it would have been much more difficult for me to document as efficiently and comprehensively as you did.” Thank goodness you stayed or I wouldn’t have left so early.” That was the most sincere phone call I had ever received and I was speechless.

Medical Scribes and Nurses

It’s not just the doctors that are appreciative of medical scribes at HackensackUMC; it’s also the nurses.

Elizabeth Paskas, MSN, RN, NE-BC, is the administrative director of nursing, Emergency and Trauma Center at HackensackUMC. She believes medical scribes have been a wonderful addition to the hospital, making both her and her colleagues’ lives much easier, especially when it comes to EHRs and sometimes distracted doctors.

“Personally, I think they’re a very positive addition to the medical staff,” said Paskas. “They allow the medical team to spend more time with the patient and less time at the computer.”

Aside from these typical benefits of scribes, Paskas also sees a benefit for the Emergency Medicine Residents at HackensackUMC. “Now the attending physician doctors have time to educate during the time they would have spent entering data into the EMR,” said Paskas.

Paskas remembers when the hospital first made the switch to electronic health records six years ago.

“We changed over to EHRs in 2008, and that transition ended up placing a higher demand for managing records on doctors than expected,” she said. “It naturally impacted patient flow.”

“It was a major relief when the scribe program was introduced in 2011,” said Paskas.

Paskas says she only sees an upside to having scribes. She is hopeful for the day when nurses can also partner with medical scribes.

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