Describing Miscellanies in Late Medieval English Wills.
- Author/Editor
- Blatt, Heather.
- Title
- Describing Miscellanies in Late Medieval English Wills.
- Published
- Blatt, Heather. "Describing Miscellanies in Late Medieval English Wills." The Huntington Library Quarterly 85 (2022): 683-704.
- Review
- Blatt uses "data" to study "hundreds of English wills written between 1400 and 1499 to evaluate descriptive trends employed by book owners of the late Middle Ages that clarify how they conceptualized miscellanies" (683). One will, that of Elizabeth Childrey Kyngeston Findern (d. 1463), records the potential passing of her "boke called Gower" to her son Thomas, an ardent Lancastrian supporter who lost his head after the battle of Hexham in 1464 (685). Blatt considers, without entirely resolving, whether the "boke called Gower" might be the miscellany now known as the Findern manuscript, which contains "excerpts from John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis' alongside some of Chaucer's short poems and works by Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and others" (683). Blatt suggests as possibilities for the description in the will (which she prints in full, as Appendix A, 696-97) that the "boke called Gower" could indeed be a multitext manuscript and mark the first documentary appearance of the Findern manuscript. It is also possible that the "boke called Gower" represents only a fascicle that was, after its distribution following Kyngeston's death, added to and bound with others to fashion the multitext Findern manuscript" (694). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis