After I had finished writing about medieval writers and their intimacy with the words they wrote, I remembered I tiny poem by Chaucer that might seem to contradict me a bit. In a spirit of honesty, I reproduce it here (from Dr. Skeat’s edition):
Chauceres Wordes Unto Adam, His Own Scriveyn.
Adam Scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle
Boece or Troilus to wryten newe,
Under thy lokkes thou most have the scale,
But after my making thou wryte trewe.
So ofte a daye I mot thy werk renewe,
Hit to correcte and eek to rubbe and scrape,
And al is through thy negligence and rape.
The poet whom Spenser called “Dan Chaucer” (I always thought his name was Jeff), “well of English undefiled,” is complaining that his careless scribe defiles quite a bit of his English. The poor old poet has to go through every page of Troilus and Criseyde and laboriously scrape and rub away all the errors—a labor that is all the more laborious, as any scribe will tell you, after the ink is dry and settled deep into the vellum.
So the poems of Chaucer were not written by his own hand in their final form; Adam the scribe must have taken them from his master’s rough copy. Other writers dictated their works; Thomas Aquinas kept four secretaries at once taking his dictation, so that he could work on four books at once.
So it’s not always true that medieval authors wrote their own books with their own hands It’s equally true that, even when they did, their autograph manuscripts have seldom survived to our own day.
Still, what I said about the care it took to prepare a manuscript is true. Most writers didn’t have the luxury of a secretary, and even when they did, the rough copy went more slowly than it would with today’s handwriting. Scriveyn or no scriveyn, it took a lot more care to write in Walter Map’s time, and I still think that care comes through in the construction of the romances.
