I can think of another example: There are three sixteenth-century
manuscripts (one may be early seventeenth) of Pierce the Plowman's Crede.
Two include Piers Plowman; in one the Crede serves as an introduction to a
C-text. If one or more of these manuscripts were produced after the Crede was
printed in 1553 (again in 1561, with Piers Plowman printed in 1550 and 1561),
the controversial nature of Piers might make sense of the labor undertaken.
On Wed, 1 Jan 2003 18:51:03 -0000 Colin Burrow <
[log in to unmask]> writes:
> Well
I'm a cautious old bore, so I wasn't going to say as much
> because
I
> haven't seen the MS and have no wish to blow my posterior trumpet
> about
> something I haven't looked at, but I think there could be
a
> connection
> between the fact that several people seem to have
gone through the
> (labour
> intensive) creation of scribal copies
of a print artefact and the
> controversies surrounding the print edition
of Complaints. Of
> course
> sometimes people just did transcribe
printed books without a very
> obvious
> reason (someone copied out
the duodecimo of Jonson's poems, for
> instance;
> presumably the
scribe's friend had a copy and the scribe had more
> time than
>
money); but to find two transcriptions of a printed text among a
> pretty
thin
> MS tradition would I think be pretty unusual. (Which means I can't
> think of
> another example, but am a cautious old bore).
>
> Colin Burrow, Fellow and Tutor, Gonville and Caius College,
>
Cambridge CB2
> 1TA
> tel: 01223 332483
> web:
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk
