The Case For Accepting Trinity 244 Into The Pynkhurst Canon

By Author: Solo Chen
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In conclusion I suggest that the case for accepting Trinity 244 into the Pynkhurst canon on the basis of its palaeographical and linguistic features is not persuasive. The identification of scribes in more than one manuscript depends upon a combination of certain distinctive palaeographical and linguistic factors. In the case of Trinity 244 too many of these distinctive features are lacking for the case of identity to be accepted. Of course ultimately all such identifications are subjective and are not capable of proof; an issue well summed up by Angus Mclntosh when he wrote that 'I cannot prove that the Ellesmere Chaucer was not written by twenty scribes of identical habits'. It is of course possible that scribes changed their writing and spelling Rolex Watches habits over time, as Fletcher notes at the beginning of his article, but the extreme consistency found across the large number of folios attributed to Pynkhurst means that the level of variation needed to accommodate Trinity 244 into the canon is too great to be acceptable.

Fletcher accepts the lack of certainty involved in ...
... such attributions, although he argues that if we are unwilling to accept Trinity 244 into the canon then the only alternative possibility is that it was written by a scribe of Pynkhurst's school: '[the] minimum concession must be that Trinity 244's candidate stints belong to Pynkhurst's "school"' (p. 629). In a footnote Fletcher admits that 'precious little is known about how the London scriptoria at this time were organised at this particular level'. It is not clear what kind of establishment Fletcher is appealing to here; there be no evidence for scribal schools operating in London during this period. Doyle and Parkes's study of the production of the copy of Gower's Confessio Amantis to which Pynkhurst contributed, a manuscript copied by five scribes, highlighted the lack of coordination and Fake Watches cooperation between its contributors. The ad hoc nature of this collaboration led Doyle and Parkes to emphasise the independence of scribal copyists in this period and the lack of evidence for scriptoria: 'We can find no evidence for centralized, highly organized scriptoria in the metropolis and its environs at this time'.

The only case that Doyle and Parkes are willing to admit as possible evidence of two scribes working in the same scriptorium, perhaps in a master-apprentice relationship, is that of Scribes D and Delta, whose hands they consider to be so similar as to suggest some kind of coordination. But the lack of evidence for collaboration between the two scribes prompts Doyle and Parkes to conclude that it was the market that stimulated independent scriveners to adopt similar styles of writing, rather than the imposition of a house style within a scriptorium.