Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making.
- Author/Editor
- Dwyer, Seamus.
- Title
- Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making.
- Published
- Dwyer, Seamus. "Bastard Hands: Fifteenth-Century Scripts and the Processes of Medieval Making." Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 118.3 (2024): 315–47.
- Review
- Dwyer investigates scribal use of "bastard" as a descriptor for, among other things, script types (e.g., "bastard anglicana"), examining for comparison other "made/crafted" objects--"swords, saddles, wine, food recipes" (315) to which "bastard" was applied, objects made from "intermingled parts that achieve specific utilitarian ends" (325). He concludes that like these, script was considered a commodity, and that "bastard" as applied to script meant an adjudication of high and low styles, mixing "calligraphic features" with less formal script, suited to individual customers--"a process of making that purposefully intermingles elements of efficiency and restraint with elements of care and refinement that yield an elevated yet accessible commodity" (328). Dwyer uses manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis" ("a manifestly bastard thing," 329), focusing first on the “anglicana formata” of "Scribe D" (Doyle and Parkes' identification and terminology) in Oxford, Christ College 148 [sic] (337, typo for Christ Church) to illustrate and support his argument that "combining lofty matters with 'lusty' ones, and Latin with vernacular, produces a bastard textual object: one that is plainly accessible yet elevated" (333.) He thus connects Gower's "middel weie" with scribal practice: "poetry more solidly with bookmaking" (334). He next examines the hand of Cambridge, St. John's College B.12, "a rare example of an early fifteenth-century 'Confessio' potentially produced outside of London" (341), finding there a "bastard" script that "participates dynamically in the bastard project of Gower's poetry" (344)--i.e., because Gower's subject is Love, at once divine and corporeal. Ultimately, Dwyer draws the conclusion that "literary readings are enhanced by analyzing script. Likewise, commonly used scripts can be shown to have surprising literary qualities that are illuminated in certain poetic milieux" (346). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2024
- Gower Subjects
- Manuscripts and Textual Studies
Confessio Amantis