Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 26

It appears that the use of the stylus as writing implement in English MSS was also known in the post-Conquest ME period. Oxford, Corpus Christi College 198Oxford, Corpus Christi CollegeMS 198 (GEOFFREY CHAUCER, Canterbury Tales, AD 1410×1420)Geoffrey ChaucerCanterbury Tales1 contains scribbles that “have mostly been pumiced away in the cleaning process. A few survive in dry point, nearly all illegible” (Manly & Rickert 1940: 98). Unfortunately, Manly & Rickert do not provide examples of scribbles that were still legible, which would allow some tentative conclusions as to what the nature of the connection of these scribbles with the base text might be. In addition to these scribbles, the MS bears a dry-point signature Burledry-pointnameson f. 146^r, which is associated by Manly & Rickert with a prominent London family who had personal ties with Chaucer. Manly & Rickert think the signature represents an owner’s mark, “which looks as old as the text” (1940: 98).

To what extent dry-point writing was still practiced in post-Conquest England has not been investigated systematically so far. Clanchy (1993: 118–120) does not mention dry-point writing in his portrait of ME stylus usage. Hunt (1991), who is aware of the Anglo-Saxon dry-point practices (cf. 1991: 9), does not report any dry-point finds in the numerous post-Conquest MSS that he investigated. We cannot make any statements about the falling out of use of Anglo-Saxon dry-point annotation practices, however. Whether the late use of the stylus in a Chaucerian MS context represents a continuation of the OE practice or whether we have to assume a polygenetic origin, is difficult to assess, as the lack of reports in the literature does not necessarily imply the lack of existence of similar notes in other ME MSS. Since the stylus is still used in connection with wax tablets at the time, the transfer from the context of the wax tablet to the context of MSS seems in any case always a possibility without any need for an Anglo-Saxon model.