The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College, MS 244, Some Early Copies of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Canon of Adam Pynkhurst Manuscripts

Abstract

Recent palæographical research has convincingly argued that the scribe Adam, at whom Geoffrey Chaucer directed a squib berating him for shoddy copying, was Adam Pynkhurst, a professional scrivener whose hand has been detected in a number of early Chaucer manuscripts, in a copy of John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and in an important copy of William Langland's Piers Plowman. Hence Pynkhurst has emerged as a prominent literary scribe of the late fourteenth (and early fifteenth) century. His hand has also been detected in documents sponsored by the Mercers of London, and thus his copying career has been seen also to include an administrative and legal capacity. This paper argues that Dublin, Trinity College, MS 244 merits consideration as either another manuscript in which Pynkhurst's hand appears, or as one in which a scribe of Pynkhurst's ‘school’ has been active. Acceptance of Pynkhurst's involvement in the manuscript would add a radical new dimension to his copying career as currently conceived: various of the prose tracts that Trinity 244 contains resound with the hereticated theology of John Wyclif. The alternative possibility, that the manuscript is in part a product of a member of Pynkhurst ‘school’, is also not without its implications for the understanding of Chaucer's relation to the textual culture of late-fourteenth century religious radicalism.

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