Identification of the Scribes Responsible for Copying Major Works of Middle English Literature

Project start date: 2007-04

Project end date: 2011-03

This project has investigated the manuscripts of all literary works by five major Middle English writers (the manuscripts dating 1375-1600), Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, William Langland, John Gower and John Trevisa, to find relationships among the writers and their patrons and audiences through the identification of the scribes who wrote the manuscripts. We will have examined over 300 manuscripts in libraries worldwide, and analyzed the number of hands in each manuscript and the other manuscripts written by these hands. The website will offer a list of the manuscripts of each authors' works with the scribal hands that wrote each one, together with lists of other manuscripts written by many of the scribes. Each entry will include descriptions of the manuscripts, descriptions of the handwriting of each scribe in the manuscripts, and visual profiles of these scribes in the form of images of special letters by which the scribe's handwriting could be identified and full-page images of characteristic pages of the scribe's handwriting. Specialists and interested members of the public will then be able to trace the connections between manuscripts of this period, and use the site to make further identifications of manuscripts written by these scribes.