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ESTS 2023: Authorship, Identity, and Textual Scholarship
Essays

Textual Circumstances and Textual-Critical Method: Nicholas Love’s Mirror and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection

Michael G. Sargent
p. 139-159

Abstract

The present study is a discussion of the textual critical consequences of the affordances of various editorial projects, illustrated by the author’s experience in editing the Latin cartae of the annual General Chapter of the Carthusian Order through the fifteenth century, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (one of the largest-corpus surviving medieval English prose texts), and the two books of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection – two books that had remarkably different textual histories.

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  • 1 The best representatives of recension are Lachmann (1850), Maas ([1927] 1958), and Timpanaro ([1963 (...)

1In over fifty years of editing medieval English and Latin texts, it has been my experience that circumstances of composition, transmission, and preservation of texts, and even modern editorial intervention on them, has often determined textual-critical methodology. Originally trained to think of recension as the standard method of establishing authoritative text, I have found myself producing, in the end, postmodern “disjunctive” texts that aim rather to present the reader with the textual “pleroma” — the creative overflow — that came into being once the author let the work go.1

  • 2 “Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday” in Bodleian MS Additional E 6. In the Digital Index of Middle Engli (...)
  • 3 Digital Index of Middle English Verse (http://www.dimev.net), the relevant record is indexed as DIM (...)
  • 4 On the influence of Kane’s textual-critical approach, see Patterson (1985) and Hanna (1992, 2010, 1 (...)

2As my first introduction to the study of medieval texts in manuscript form, I was set to transcribing a Middle English poem on the “Fifteen Signs before Doomsday” from a so-far unedited Bodleian manuscript.2 When I completed this exercise, I compared my transcript with six other versions of the poem, all of which had been published separately elsewhere;3 I was puzzled at the time by the discovery that no version could be considered the source of any other. This was my introduction to textual complexity. I was later to study paleography and textual criticism with Leonard Boyle of the Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies in Toronto. It should be noted that George Kane’s anti-recensionist polemical introduction to the edition of the B-Text of Piers Plowman was published during the time that I was a graduate student in Toronto (Langland 1975, 128–220),4 but I do not recall its being discussed there.

  • 5 The Heneage manuscript is now Yale University, Beinecke Library MS Osborn fa46. Collation for me th (...)

3Under the direction of Edmund Colledge in Toronto, I undertook to enter the readings of the newly-discovered Heneage manuscript of The Chastising of God’s Children into the pencil-and-paper collation that he and Joyce Bazire had produced for their critical edition twenty years earlier (Bazire and Colledge 1957).5I discovered that the text of the Heneage manuscript, which I saw had been corrected against a manuscript of a different lineage in a hand and ink other than that of its scribe, was the very manuscript against which another of the Chastising manuscripts, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.14.19, had been corrected — a manuscript that, as Bazire and Colledge observed, had itself been corrected against some other manuscript of which they were unaware at the time. The manuscript against which the Trinity manuscript was corrected was, in fact, the Heneage manuscript: the hands and the corrections matched (Sargent 1977)!

  • 6 See also Hussey (1964) and Sargent (2013a, 513–23).

4My doctoral dissertation was to produce a collation, but not an edition. Rather, it compared the many textual annotations made by James Grenehalgh, a Carthusian monk at Sheen (approximately ten miles upstream on the Thames from London) in three copies of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection: Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.15.18, British Library MS Harley 6576 of Thomas Fishlake’s Latin translation of the Scale, and the Rosenbach Library copy of the 1494 Wynkyn de Worde print (S.T.C. 14042). Grenehalgh left nearly a thousand textual-critical annotations in these three books: 135 in the Trinity manuscript, 158 in the Harley, and 655 in the Wynkyn de Worde print, which seems to have been his primary working copy (Sargent 1984, esp. 330–54). What I discovered was that beyond the comparison of these three copies with each other (including textual corrections in the Harley manuscript that had been translated into Latin from the printed English text and corrections in the print that had been translated into English from the Latin text), 130 other textual annotations appear to have derived from a different surviving manuscript of the English text, Cambridge University Library MS Ee.iv.30 (from London Charterhouse). Seventeen of Grenehalgh’s corrections derive from some other source that I was not able to identify among the surviving manuscripts of the Scale, although my collation with the other surviving manuscripts of the Scale suggests that it may have been a manuscript from the affiliational group “O” as described by Rosemary Birts (later Dorward) in her Oxford B.Litt. thesis editing fifteen chapters from the middle of Scale I, which is group “y” as described by S. S. Hussey in his doctoral dissertation editing Scale II (Birts 1951; Hussey 1962).6 It must be noted that Grenehalgh was not a sophisticated textual critic: he seems simply to have made use of copies of the text that were easily available to him.

  • 7 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale latin 10887–10890 and Parkminster Charterhousse, West Sussex, UK MS B (...)
  • 8 Grande-Chartreuse MS 1 Cart.15.

5For the next several years, I collaborated with James Hogg at the Universität Salzburg on an edition of the cartae, the official records of the annual general chapter of the Carthusian Order in the fifteenth century (Sargent and Hogg 1982–87). Notionally, this edition would have been a perfect candidate for a best-text edition based on the “originales”, the official record made by the scribe of the chapter, one gathering per year, and kept at the Grande Chartreuse. Derivative copies made for the use of the various provinces and houses of the order were, according to statute, to be made directly from these “originales” and corrected against them before the priors who attended the chapter returned home; further copies for houses whose priors did not attend were to be made from these for the use of each house. There are four surviving manuscripts of the “originales”, comprising the official cartae for the years 1438–74, 1504–13, and 1516–35,7 and a late seventeenth or early eighteenth century copy made from the “originales” for the years 1411–14, 1416–17, 1420–29, 1431–2, and 1434–36.8 Reference to the derivative copies made for various provinces and houses would provide a useful corrective in the case of foreign names and details not accurately presented in the “originales”, and to further, derivative sets of extracts (usually of disciplinary materials) would have made this into a fully critical edition. Unfortunately, the choice of the principal investigator of the project was instead to produce a set of single-manuscript transcripts, beginning with the most derivative materials of all.

  • 9 This was revised, based on the complete collation of fifty manuscripts described immediately below, (...)

6Upon returning to the United States, I took up the task of producing an edition of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the English version of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi by Nicholas Love, the early fifteenth-century prior of Mount Grace, the newly-founded Carthusian house on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Love’s Mirror is one of the most important pieces of late medieval English literature, surviving in fifty-six originally complete manuscripts, five extracts, and nine incunable prints (Sargent 2008). I did not produce a critical edition: it had already been pointed out that one surviving manuscript, Cambridge University Library Additional MS 6578, belonging to Mount Grace (Doyle 1983, esp. 83), written while Love was prior there, and bearing a note of approval from Thomas Arundel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was a uniquely fitting candidate for a best-text edition, and the New York publisher’s series of Middle English texts in which the edition was to come out only produced best-text editions. This edition did have one major critical feature: I collated six passages from different points in the text, totalling 2,323 words, against forty-four manuscripts and the first of the incunable prints, and was able to construct a stemma of the affiliational groups (Love 1992, lxxxix).9

  • 10 Waseda University Library MS NE3691, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 648, and Edinburgh, Natio (...)

7Spurred by an invitation to produce a study of a hitherto-undescribed manuscript of Love’s Mirror recently purchased by Waseda University in Tokyo, I collated their manuscript fully with the two to which it was obviously most closely related — coincidentally, the only two manuscripts to be illustrated.10 I went on from this to produce a full collation of the manuscripts of Love’s text, beginning with the earliest half-dozen of each of the six affiliational groups, which were collated fully, with pencil and paper. I did not collate all of the later manuscripts of all of the groups fully; I recorded only those readings in each manuscript where they agreed with the earliest manuscripts of the affiliational subgroups to which they belonged. Further agreements among the later manuscripts, unless they seemed intrinsically interesting, were usually not recorded. As it was, the critical apparatus of this second edition of Love’s Mirror, a text of approximately 65,000 words, comprises some 6,500 entries. I also made some 300 editorial corrections to the text, at points where the Latin text that Love was translating supported the reading of the other English manuscripts against the Cambridge manuscript.

8In November of 1985, before I had taken up work on the edition of Nicholas Love’s Mirror, A. J. Bliss died, leaving unfinished another major medieval English editorial project: a critical edition of Book I of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. Because of my previous work on the Scale, I was invited by the Early English Text Society to assume responsibility for his materials (including the collations of the manuscripts, which I discovered hidden in his office at home) to attempt to complete them and bring out his edition. My first attempt at this was unsatisfactory to EETS council, and I set it aside while I completed work on Love’s Mirror. In December, 2004, shortly before the full critical edition of the Mirror was published, S. S. Hussey, who was to produce the critical edition of Book II of Hilton’s Scale for EETS, died, having handed in the typescript of his edition only months before, which was returned to him for revisions. I was granted permission to undertake the task of completing this edition too, so that the critical edition of the two books of the Scale could be brought out with a greater degree of uniformity.

  • 11 Hilton died at the house of Augustinian friars at Thurgarton in eastern Nottinghamshire on March 24 (...)

9The textual and editorial history of The Scale of Perfection is complex. As mentioned already, it survives in two books, probably written several years apart, in the late 1370s and the early-to-mid 1390s.11 Book I of the Scale survives without Scale II in twenty-two manuscripts (including five fragments and extracts), including two in which the second book has been added in another hand. Excluding these, the two books survive together in nineteen manuscripts (including two fragments and extracts) and six incunable prints; the later prints of the Scale are textually derived from the first. Scale II survives alone in four manuscripts (including three fragments and extracts), and in a hybrid copy with a Latin Scale I in a single manuscript. The Scale was translated into Latin by Thomas Fishlake, a Carmelite friar who would have known Hilton in Cambridge and Ely; both books of the Latin version survive in thirteen manuscripts, including seven of continental European provenance (Sargent 2011); there are also two manuscripts of Latin Scale I alone.

  • 12 Underhill produced modernized editions of both the Scale (Hilton 1923) and The Cloud of Unknowing ( (...)

10The first modern editorial work on the Scale was Evelyn Underhill’s examination for her modernized version of 1923 of ten of the forty-one originally complete manuscripts now known to survive, and the first of the incunable prints (Hilton 1923).12 Underhill made several observations that have dominated textual discussion ever since: first, that the two books were written and transmitted separately (the second book was added to copies of the first already in circulation); second, that at least some manuscripts of the first book contain a number of interpolations focusing the reader’s attention on Christ and his passion (interpolations added by a later annotator in British Library, MS Harley 6579, hereafter MS H, an important manuscript belonging to the London Carthusians); third, that some of these manuscripts and others contained an excursus on devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus (added on an extra sheet by yet another later scribe, tipped-in to MS H); and fourth, that the second book had no such additions. Underhill’s choice of MS H, which belonged to London Charterhouse — brutally suppressed by King Henry VIII for its refusal to accede to the supremacy of the crown over the Christian church in England — appears to have been based on that house’s reputation for sanctity and the manuscript’s inclusion of all later forms of addition and revision to the text, rather than upon a textual-critical examination of the textual tradition as such. Underhill was a spiritual guide and a historian of mysticism and not primarily a textual critic (Underhill 1911), but her analysis of the textual situation of The Scale of Perfection set the terms of twentieth century discussion of the text of the Scale.

11Helen Gardner refined Underhill’s observations in a study of the text that proposed a fourfold division of the thirty surviving copies that she examined, according to the presence or absence of the interpolations in Scale I and the Holy Name passage (Gardner 1936): five manuscripts with both, two with the interpolations (which she termed “additions”) but not the Holy Name passage, eight with the Holy Name passage but not the additions, and eight with neither. Discussing the internal and external evidence for the authority of the Holy Name passage and the additions, Gardner came to the conclusion that the former was certainly Hilton’s work, but that the latter were later productions, probably emanating from Sheen Charterhouse and Syon Abbey, situated across the Thames from each other at Richmond.

  • 13 This information is from a letter by Helen Gardner to A. J. Bliss, dated 12 July, 1974. The Bliss f (...)
  • 14 Birts produced diplomatic texts based on MSS C and H, and a “composite text” based on MS C and thre (...)
  • 15 In large part because Dorward accompanied her husband on a business posting to Eswatini (then calle (...)

12Gardner gave up work on Hilton in 1939, and the project of editing the Scale passed to Rosemary Birts (later Dorward), who produced a text of Scale I, chapters 38–52 for a B.Litt. thesis under the supervision of Dorothy Everett (Birts 1951).13 Dorward’s discussion, based on Undernill’s textual criteria (surveying the underlying text, the Christocentric interpolations, the Holy Name passage, and the varying systems of chapter division in Scale I), established a scheme of classification of three textual groups, with a degree of overlap among them, and allowed the production of a preliminary text of approximately one-fifth of Scale I (Sargent 2013a, 513–15).14 At this point, the project was passed along.15

  • 16 In a letter to Helen Gardner dated 20 May, 1964, Dunning notes that they had discussed his “taking (...)
  • 17 In a letter to Bliss dated 25 April, 1963, Hussey welcomes Bliss to the Scale project; Dunning also (...)

13The project of editing The Scale of Perfection, being considered too large and complicated for a single scholar, was divided in two in the 1960s: Tom Dunning of University College, Dublin was to produce the critical edition of Scale I,16 and S. S. Hussey that of Scale II. Dunning was primarily a theological literary critic (Dunning 1937); feeling the need of a collaborator with more experience in textual criticism, he brought his colleague, A. J. Bliss into the project.17 Dunning died in 1973; both Bliss and Hussey eventually approached completion of their separate editorial projects, and I inherited both projects on the death of Bliss in 1985 and Hussey in 2004. I did some preliminary work on Bliss’s edition of Scale I, but because Hussey’s edition of Scale II had been provisionally accepted for publication before he died, it was determined that I would do whatever was necessary to bring it out first.

  • 18 As noted above, I used a version of this method in editing Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Li (...)

14Hussey claimed to have produced his edition by recension (Hussey 1992), but what he employed was in fact a problematic simplification of that method. Hussey’s editorial method was derived from that which his doctoral supervisor, Phyllis Hodgson, had used in her edition of the The Cloud of Unknowing (Hodgson 1944). Hodgson collated her texts twice: a first, preliminary collation was to determine a number of crucial readings that could be used to sort the manuscripts into probable affiliational groups and to determine the best manuscript in each group. A second, complete collation of these selected manuscripts provided the apparatus of the edition and the material for her choice of a base-text. According to Anne Hudson, Hodgson’s purpose in producing this selective apparatus was to avoid a “cloud of variants” at the foot of every page.18

15Hussey used the same method as Hodgson, with the exception that he treated the best manuscript of each affiliational group or subgroup as prospectively its hypearchetype, and when the affiliational groups fell into two lineages, x and y, he treated the best manuscript of one group (MS H) as the prospective hypearchetype of the best manuscript of the other group as well (Lambeth Palace Library MS 472: MS L), and thus as prospectively the archetype of all surviving manuscripts (Sargent 2013a, 521–27). Parts of Hussey’s presentation of the textual relations were self-contradictory (in particular, his treatment of H as the archetype of the entire textual tradition was inconsistent with other parts of his description of the textual relations); the EETS readers were not convinced by his argument, and only recourse to the collation of the manuscripts could resolve the difficulty.

  • 19 It is logical that a variational pattern of x vs. everything that is not x can be characterized as (...)
  • 20 See the chart in Hilton (2017, xci).

16Unfortunately, Hussey’s collation of the manuscripts of Scale II no longer exists, which meant that I had first to produce a new collation of the twenty surviving originally-complete manuscripts and nine extracts, and tabulate the results of the pattern of textual affiliations on that basis. What I discovered was not the bifid stemma of x-text and y-text that Hussey had described (Hussey 1964),19 but a complex set of relations that I have characterized using a different biological metaphor: that of a rhizome — the often circular pattern of propagation that we see in mushroom rings and some kinds of trees (Hilton 2017, xci; Sargent 2013a). There are eight primary branchings in the affiliation of the copies of the text of Scale II.20 The most extensive branch comprises nine originally complete manuscripts, several of which are connected by scribe or ownership to houses of the Carthusian order and Syon Abbey; there are also two manuscripts with conflated texts that are at least partially indebted to this group, a series of five incunable prints, an early seventeenth-century manuscript copied from one of the prints, and four manuscripts comprising extracts.

17The manuscripts with Carthusian connections are MS H, the affiliational pair comprising MSS Ch and Hu2 (Coventry charterhouse), Cambridge, Trinity College MS 354 (Sheen charterhouse: MS T); and the seventeenth-century manuscript Brussels, Bibliothèque royale 2544-45 (Sheen Anglorum: MS Br). One manuscript with a Carthusian connection, but textually conflated with the group centering on the Lambeth Palace manuscript to be discussed below, is Cambridge University Library MS Ee.iv.30 (London charterhouse: MS E). The manuscripts with connections to Syon Abbey are British Library MS Harley 2387 (bequest of Margery Pensax, anchoress of Bishopsgate: MS H5), and Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 602 (MS Ld). Another manuscript connected to Syon, Oxford, All Souls College MS 25 (Rose Pachet: MS As) presents a text parts of which derive from a Carthusian/Brigittine exemplar, and parts from the text represented by MS R, to be discussed below. Texts containing extracts from Scale II with Carthusian connections are British Library MSS Add. 37049 (Northern Carthusian: MS Ad) and 37790 (London and Mount Grace: MS Ad2), Trinity College, Dublin, MS C.5.20 (probably London: MS Td2), and Westminster Cathedral Archives MS 4 (London: MS Ws).

18A second group of originally complete manuscripts comprises four manuscripts centering on MS L, made from the bequest of John Killum, grocer, of London, “for the common profit,” and including one manuscript conflated with the Carthusian group (MS E). Besides L, this group includes Bodleian Library MS Bodley 592 (B3), London, Inner Temple MS Petyt 524 (belonging to Harry Langford, “warden of the science” of organmakers, dwelling in the Minories: MS P), and British Library, Harley MS 2397 (purchased for the London Franciscan nuns [the minorites — that is, the minories] by the abbess Elizabeth Horwood: MS H6). This manuscript contains only Scale II.

19A third group, centered on Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.285 (hereafter MS R), are of diverse provenance; the text of Scale I in MS R is dialectically localizable to northern Yorkshire, but Scale II has been added by another hand, localizable to the Cambridge/Ely area. Besides MS R, this group comprises two other manuscripts dialectically localizable to northwest Yorkshire: Cambridge University Library MSS Dd.v.55 and Ff.v.40 (MSS D and F). The textual group also comprises British Library MS Additional 11748 (Shaftesbury, but in a Dorset dialect overlaying a more northern form of English: MS A) and Columbia University Library Plimpton MS 257 (Surry: MS Pl). MS Pl comprises a text of Scale I textually affiliated with the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts (MSS V and S), which do not have Scale II; it also comprises a text of Hilton’s Mixed Life (Plimpton MS 271) closely affiliated to the copy in MS V. The two Plimpton manuscripts, originally a single small, thick book, were separated at some point and acquired separately by Columbia (Bliss 1969). In Scale II, this group of manuscripts has a number of “theocentric” substitutions of the word “God” where all other manuscripts have “Jesus”.

  • 21 In this, I disagree with Hussey (1973).

20Four manuscripts are not allied with any of these affiliational groups; three of these have the greatest frequency of isolative variants among surviving manuscripts of Scale II. These are University of Pennsylvania Library Codex 218 (MS Sr), Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 268 (MS Cc), and Magdalen College, Old Library MS fo.4.17 (MS M), which lacks Scale I and has an introductory paragraph that adapts the beginning of Scale II so that it can stand as an independent work. Finally, the Carmelite Thomas Fishlake’s contemporary Latin translation does not appear to derive from an exemplar represented by any of the surviving English manuscripts.21

  • 22 E.g., phonetic or morphological variations such as, e.g.: Middle English “ā” vs. “ō” as a reflex of (...)

21For the two manuscripts of Scale II presented in the facing-page critical edition (Hilton 2017), I kept Hussey’s choice of MS H, but replaced MS L (the text of which had already been published in a single-manuscript TEAMS edition: Hilton 2000), and chose as the privileged left-hand-page base-text British Library MS Harley 6573 (hereafter MS H7). The reason for the choice of H7 as the base text of the edition is that in tabulating the variant readings of all manuscripts, I found that it differed less often from the consensus of manuscripts than any other. All readings of all manuscripts were recorded in the critical apparatus, with the exception of variations that have minimal textual-critical significance (primarily dialectal variation, which is discussed elsewhere in the edition).22 The purpose of the apparatus of this edition is not to provide support for the editorial construction of an ideal text, whether by recension or by a best-text process of elimination, but to present what I have referred to as the “pleroma,” the overflowing multiplicity of the text as it survives to us. Variant readings that I, as editor, consider more cogent than the reading of the base text are noted as such in the textual notes; the base text is only “improved” editorially in cases of transparent error. The apparatus comprises variant readings for some 16,000 lemmata, occupying 532 pages in typescript (double-spaced); the two facing-page texts occupy 139 pages each in typescript; the complete text with apparatus occupies 355 pages in print.

  • 23 In a letter to Rosemary Dorward dated 19 August 1974, Bliss describes his collation books and says (...)
  • 24 For example, Bliss cited the reading from the affiliational subgroup RDFH3U from MS D, which was in (...)

22At this point I returned to the edition of Book I of the Scale. Bliss had produced a corrected text based on MS C and a semi-diplomatic text of MS H, intending these to be published in facing-page format. He also left four complete sets of collations of the manuscripts, all based on an already-corrected text of MS C.23 Each set of collations comprised the complete text: a file of 348 pages totalling 42,500 words. The recording of variants is quite comprehensive: some sixty lemmata, representing more than eighty variant readings, for every 100 words of text, including dialectal variations in spelling and morphology. This amount of information required two separate sets of collations, one for each of two major affiliational groups of the manuscripts, each subgroup in each set recorded in a different colour of ink. The division of the manuscripts into affiliational groups and subgroups agrees, by and large, with Dorward’s. The logic of the order of citation of the manuscripts within the collations is not apparent; later, derivative manuscripts often take precedence over earlier and more authoritative manuscripts from the same affiliational subgroup. In reducing the collations to a critical apparatus, I changed the citation order, which required checking the variant readings against different manuscripts than those that Bliss cited — which provided an additional benefit — a measure of control over the accuracy of the citations.24

  • 25 Bliss seems to have been uncertain about the placement of two manuscripts, Huntington Library MS 11 (...)
  • 26 Bliss does not say whether his conclusions were influenced by Dorward’s, although their corresponde (...)

23Bliss had obviously already decided upon the base-text of his collations, MS C, and the corrections that needed to be made to it, as well as a scheme of manuscript groupings, before this collation was made.25 The collation books all seem to be clean copy: there is none of the sloppiness, messy revision and erasure that one associates with an ongoing process of collation. The choice of MSS C and H as base texts of the edition, and the identification of the membership of the affiliational groups, seem already to have been made. One wonders whether there were sloppy copies of the collation that were replaced by the copies that survive. The surviving collations already disagree in some particulars with Dorward’s, so his primary textual decisions probably did not come directly from her thesis (Sargent 2013a, 513–18).26

  • 27 For a chart of these relations, see Sargent (2013a, 518).

24A third collation book reduced the amount of variation to those readings that Bliss could reasonably consider as representative of five affiliational groups, each of which was given a sigil: G , K, Q, X, or Z.27 A variant reading present in most, but not all members of a given group (as demonstrated in the two primary collation books) was designated by the addition of a minus sign after the group sigil (e.g., X-); a reading present in an affiliational group plus some others by a plus sign (e.g., Q+). It is not apparent whether Bliss intended these to form the backbone of a critical apparatus, but it would have been confusing had he done so. He probably intended this collation to serve a schematic purpose, aiding in the conceptualization of the pattern of affiliation as a whole. Bliss also produced detailed codicological/textual-critical discussions of the interpolations and chapter divisions of Scale I that appear to have been based on this third collation. There is no surviving evidence of a critical apparatus as such. Bliss’s fourth set of collations records variation between the English text and the contemporary Latin translation by the Carmelite Thomas Fishlake.

25Since my own method is not to identify affiliational groups first, then look for evidence to support them, but to tabulate the thousands of coincidental agreements and look for what the numbers lead to, I set Bliss’s third set of collations aside. My task was to work through Bliss’s first two sets of collations to produce a critical apparatus recording all variants preserved in the forty-two surviving originally-complete manuscripts and seven fragments and extracts, and to tabulate this (listing all isolative readings, all groupings of two manuscripts, groupings of three manuscripts, and so on, up to groups of twenty-five manuscripts, beyond which the numbers of affiliated manuscripts represent the same information in opposite order) in order to produce as complete a picture as possible of the transmission of the text. Since, as with the edition of Scale II, my task here is to present the “pleroma” of the text, all variant readings of all manuscripts were entered in the first draft of the Critical Apparatus, without reduction to affiliational groups. Further, since I have not treated MS C as having textual authority greater than that it is the version of the text that I put before the readers for their primary consideration, I have recorded in the apparatus the sigla of the manuscripts that agree with MS C in their variations: they, too, are variant readings. Since it has been objected that my original draft of the Apparatus would have been impossible to print (it amounted to some 800 pages in typescript), I have been working since to reduce its volume by eliminating such things as dialectal variants (e.g. ‘hem’ for ‘them’, ‘til’ for ‘to’), but it will still take up a very large amount of space on the page.

* * *

26Hilton probably wrote the first book of the Scale in the late 1370s or early 1380s, after he is first recorded in the consistory court of Ely (1371, 1375) as a bachelor of civil law, a clerk of Lincoln diocese, where the Huntingdonshire village of Hilton lay. Textual echoes connect Scale I with his Latin letter De Imagine peccati and the English letter On Mixed Life, written to a wealthy layman who wanted to introduce a contemplative aspect into his active life (Hilton 1986, 1987). These were presumably written before he wrote the Latin letter De Utilitate et prerogativis religionis to Adam Horsley, former clerk of the King’s Exchequer, who joined the Carthusian Order at Beauvale charterhouse in Nottinghamshire in 1386. In the De Utilitate Hilton reports that he had tried but given up a solitary life, but did not feel a calling to join a religious order. He was, apparently, a secular cleric, in demand as a spiritual guide for those drawn to the contemplative life. The first book of the Scale was written for a woman enclosed as an anchoress, as a series of conferences, it seems to me. There are several schemes of division of the text of Scale I into chapters: most comprise approximately ninety chapters; the “Carthusian” textual group divides it into thirty. The patterns of division of the text make it seem that Scale I was written out as relatively continuous text, divided at some point into what might have served as material for thirty days’ or ninety days’ meditation (Sargent 2025). The first book of the Scale was probably written by the mid-1380s, when Adam Horsley joined the Carthusians at Beauvale; the second book probably between 1386 and Hilton’s death at the house of Augustinian canons at Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire (approximately fifteen miles from Beauvale) on the vigil of the feast of the Annunciation (25 March), 1395/96.

  • 28 I believe that the Holy Name passage may have been a later addition by Hilton; some of what it has (...)

27Probably the earliest surviving form of the text of Scale I survives in fifteen manuscripts, distinguishable by their agreement in forty readings throughout the text (most groupings of more than two to four manuscripts in agreement occur only once or twice). Most of these fifteen manuscripts agree not only in minor readings throughout the text of Scale I; they also lack Scale Book II and other (possibly authorial) textual accretions,28 and they share one of the three ninety-chapter systems of division. Manuscripts of this form of the text are distributed in subgroups of two, three or four spread across the English midlands.

28The earliest of these subgroups are one containing MSS V and S, probably written in Worcestershire in the last decade or two of the fourteenth century, plus their later congener Pl. Another subgroup contains MS R and its descendents Cambridge University Library MSS Dd.v.55, Ff.v.40, and British Library MS Harley 1022 (MSS D, F, and H3), written before the turn of the century in northwestern Yorkshire. Yet another subgroup comprises two manuscripts, Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.7.47 and Longleat MS 298 (MSS T2 and Lt), written early in the fifteenth century in hands dialectally localizable to within a little less than fifteen miles east of Thurgarton priory, with their congener, Liverpool University Library MS Rylands F.4.10. Four other manuscripts demonstrate probable later transmission of this form of the text from the West Midlands to the South of England.

29Three branches demonstrate three apparently separate lines of transmission of the Scale to London. The first of these, the Carthusian group discussed above, is represented most clearly by two manuscripts connected to Coventry Charterhouse and written in hands localizable to the Coventry area, MSS Ch and Hu2. The scribal dialectal profiles of MS H, the first book of which is virtually identical to MSS Ch and Hu2 textually, but with various additions (including the addition of Scale II) by several other hands, place it in Ely or extreme southern Lincolnshire, but by the mid-fifteenth century, it was at London Charterhouse. MS H may well have been the exemplar from which two other London manuscripts, MS T and Yale University, Beinecke Library, Takamiya Deposit MS 3 (MS Lw), and W, the first of the series of incunable prints of the Scale, were made.

30A second group of London manuscripts of Scale I, all of which also have Scale II, comprises MSS L, B3, and P. It is often noted that the contents of MS M.26 in Thomas Betson’s index to his catalogue of the brothers’ library at Syon Abbey list the same works as are in the Lambeth Palace manuscript (in reverse order), but the book listed in the index is not in the catalogue itself; nor, apparently, does the book survive (Gillespie and Doyle 2001; Gillespie 2002, esp. 36–44).

31A third group of manuscripts with London connections, distinguishable in some 160 variants, including a unique series of chapter divisions of Scale I, includes three surviving manuscripts: Huntington MS 112 (MS Hu), commissioned by John Pery, a canon of Holy Trinity by Aldgate, and Worcester Cathedral Chapter Library MS F.172, written in the mid-fifteenth century by the “Hammond Scribe” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (MS H5),29 as well as MS As, which contains both books of the Scale.

32Another major branch of the circulation of the first book of the Scale, usually without the second book, is represented by eight manuscripts from various places, primarily in East Anglia. These do not form an affiliational group in themselves, although there are a few relatively persistent groupings of two or three manuscripts among them: these include National Library of Scotland MS 6126 and British Library MS Harley 330 (MSS N and H2); MS N and Cambridge, St John’s College MS G.35 (MS J); and MSS H7 and J, as well as the idiosyncratic MSS Sr, Cc, and M.

33By the end of the fifteenth century, Walter Hilton’s ScaleofPerfection had come to the attention of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII, who had it printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1494, probably the first book he produced after taking over the press of William Caxton. The Scale was printed again, using de Worde’s editio princeps as exemplar, once by Julian Notary and three more times by de Worde. An early seventeenth-century manuscript was copied from one of the later prints by Abraham Ellis, a Carthusian converse in Bruges (Brussels, Bibliothèque royale MS 2544-5).

34This sketch of the original composition and pre-Reformation circulation of the text of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection is a product of the manual tabulation of the evidence of textual variation enabled by a full collation of all surviving manuscripts, combined with information on dialect and provenance derived from the study of the manuscripts from other codicological points of view (Johnston 2020; Wakelin 2014).

35The examination of the variation of medieval texts serves other textual purposes as well: for example, in the identification of the sources used by later writers. Nicholas Love’s translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi in his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, for instance, is generally quite close, when he is not specifically departing from his original. The critical edition of the Meditationes in the CorpusChristianorum series (Bonaventua 1997), however, is of no use in analyzing Love’s work of translation: Love translated a completely different version of the work — the late, “corrupt” version published in Peltier’s nineteenth-century opera omnia of Bonaventure (Bonaventua 1868, vol. 12, 509-630).

36What I have been attempting to produce in paper form in the edition of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection is an exercise in what Apollon and Bélisle describe as “transgressive philology”: “The text is viewed more as an instance of the world, a snapshot or confluence that becomes interesting by situating it within the flux that surrounds it” (Apollon and Bélisle 2014, 100–101). Apollon and Bélisle trace such textual transgression to post-modernism, but this attitude has existed at other times and places as well, brought forth by different sets of textual circumstances.

  • 30 A photograph of the figurine (alongside an English description of the object) can be found on the m (...)

37The influence of such external circumstances on textual-critical method was brought home to me particularly strongly by the discussion of the image on the cover of a recent volume on world-wide approaches to textuality (Grafton and Most 2016).30 A Western Jin Dynasty (265-316CE) Chinese funary figure shows two men seated or kneeling, facing each other across a work table on which lie a brush, an ink stone and a stack of texts (Most 2016; Boltz 1995). The two are wearing court dress, and are leaning toward each other so that the mouth of each is near the ear of the other. One holds a tablet in his left hand and a brush in his right, hovering over, or even touching the surface of the text; the other man holds a set of texts in his hands. They are correcting text — not the silent, solitary task of a single scribe, but a cooperative effort, one scribe reading the text aloud to the other, who follows and corrects his copy.

38Sinologists have observed that textual criticism more sinico had different forms and aims from textual criticism more occidentale. The aim of textual criticism in the Western tradition, as Susan Cherniack most trenchantly observes (Cherniack 1994), is to expunge the wounds, the defacement, the corruption visited on the text by generations of ignorant scribes to restore the pristine original. The Chinese tradition, on the other hand, according to Wiliam G. Boltz, values variation in the text, even when recognizing it as non-authorial:

with a comparatively dispassionate sense of choosing between variants that are seen as in some sense equally viable alternatives. The choice in other words respects the potential validity of the rejected variant even as it recognizes the preferability of the of the accepted one.

(Boltz 1995, 395)

39Boltz suggests that the difference in attitude lies in the difference between Chinese and Western writing systems:

The perception of textual variation as a form of corruption arises in the West, where texts are written with alphabetic scripts, from the fact that this way of writing words registers spelling and grammatical errors for all to see. Chinese texts, by contrast, because they are written logographically, camouflage such errors with an orthography that always implies the possibility of a genuine lexical variant, and hence Chinese texts even when standing side-by-side in variant forms do not imply the inevitability of error, nor exhibit an ineradicable taint of corruption or contamination.

(399–400)

40I do not agree with Boltz that the circumstances of editorial work limit the affordances of that work, but would rather suggest that they allow for new possibilities, or old possibilities that have new applications.

41While I cannot help but wonder how liberally ancient Chinese textual critics cited from variant versions in correcting their texts, I have no aspirations of creating another shelf of books for the Library of Babel, or producing an edition that occupies the same space as that which it edits. Still, as I hope my own experiences as a textual critic detailed in this paper will serve to demonstrate, it may be useful to adopt some of their attitude toward textual variance into our Western tradition, and to entertain at least the possibility of that “potential validity of the rejected variant even as it recognizes the preferability of the accepted one”.

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Bibliography

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Notes

1 The best representatives of recension are Lachmann (1850), Maas ([1927] 1958), and Timpanaro ([1963] 2005). The characterization “disjunctive” as applied to editions subject to “opposing impulses” derives from Robbins (2004). In my own work (Sargent 2013a, 2013b), I have referred to the editions I have produced as “rhyzomorphic” (in distinction to the biological characterization “stemmatic”). The word “pleroma” was used in Neoplatonism, early Christian theology and Gnosticism to refer to the fullness of the godhead whose overflow was creation. It may be noted that the metaphor of the rhizome had been used (unbeknownst to me) by David Greetham; see Greetham (1996).

2 “Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday” in Bodleian MS Additional E 6. In the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (http://www.dimev.net), the relevant record is indexed as DIMEV 1309 (Mooney, Mosser, Solopova, et al. 2011a–).

3 Digital Index of Middle English Verse (http://www.dimev.net), the relevant record is indexed as DIMEV 3000 (Mooney, Mosser, Solopova, et al. 2011b–).

4 On the influence of Kane’s textual-critical approach, see Patterson (1985) and Hanna (1992, 2010, 1996).

5 The Heneage manuscript is now Yale University, Beinecke Library MS Osborn fa46. Collation for me then, and throughout my career as an editor working on the far side of the electronic revolution — was something done on paper with multi-coloured pencils.

6 See also Hussey (1964) and Sargent (2013a, 513–23).

7 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale latin 10887–10890 and Parkminster Charterhousse, West Sussex, UK MS B.62. See Sargent (1985; 1995, 132–35).

8 Grande-Chartreuse MS 1 Cart.15.

9 This was revised, based on the complete collation of fifty manuscripts described immediately below, in Love (2005, lxvi).

10 Waseda University Library MS NE3691, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS 648, and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ Library MS 18.1.7.

11 Hilton died at the house of Augustinian friars at Thurgarton in eastern Nottinghamshire on March 24, the Vigil of the Annunciation, 1395/96.

12 Underhill produced modernized editions of both the Scale (Hilton 1923) and The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill 1922).

13 This information is from a letter by Helen Gardner to A. J. Bliss, dated 12 July, 1974. The Bliss family has given me his files of correspondence concerning the Scale with Gardner, Dorward, Hussey, John P. H. Clark, A. I. Doyle, Anne Hudson, Neil Ker, and Angus McIntosh, as well as the copy of Dorward’s thesis that she had given to Dunning, and a number of files of textual discussion that Bliss was developing toward his edition.

14 Birts produced diplomatic texts based on MSS C and H, and a “composite text” based on MS C and three other manuscripts.

15 In large part because Dorward accompanied her husband on a business posting to Eswatini (then called Swaziland).

16 In a letter to Helen Gardner dated 20 May, 1964, Dunning notes that they had discussed his “taking over Miss Rosemary Birts’ work on Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, Book I” in June, 1956, and said that “she confirmed that she had no intention of continuing her work”.

17 In a letter to Bliss dated 25 April, 1963, Hussey welcomes Bliss to the Scale project; Dunning also mentioned Bliss as a collaborator in the aforementioned letter to Helen Gardner.

18 As noted above, I used a version of this method in editing Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.

19 It is logical that a variational pattern of x vs. everything that is not x can be characterized as x vs. y: the solution to this problem depends on asking whether y has a coherence of its own.

20 See the chart in Hilton (2017, xci).

21 In this, I disagree with Hussey (1973).

22 E.g., phonetic or morphological variations such as, e.g.: Middle English “ā” vs. “ō” as a reflex of Old English “ā”, as in the initial word of the text, “Gastly” vs. “Gostly”, variation in third person plural pronouns between initial “h-” and “th-”, or third person singular present verb forms ending in “-es” vs. “-eth”.

23 In a letter to Rosemary Dorward dated 19 August 1974, Bliss describes his collation books and says that the remainder of the work of collation would probably take two years: “For purposes of collation I prepared a stencilled copy of the English text with very wide spacing, so that variant readings could be entered between the lines”. The source of the corrections of the text of C in this collation is unknown.

24 For example, Bliss cited the reading from the affiliational subgroup RDFH3U from MS D, which was in fact copied from MS R. I cited instead from MS R.

25 Bliss seems to have been uncertain about the placement of two manuscripts, Huntington Library MS 112 and University College Oxford MS 28, which only became available to him late in the process, and which he entered into both sets of collations.

26 Bliss does not say whether his conclusions were influenced by Dorward’s, although their correspondence (from 1974 until 1984) is full of discussion of the origin and transmission of various patterns of variation in the text of Scale I. The first of Dorward’s surviving letters to him, dated 8 August, 1974, mentions a copy of her thesis formerly in the possession of Dunning; this is among the papers that the Bliss family have given to me. Outside of Bliss and Dorward’s correspondence, I have found no mention of her name, but it was not rare for the work of women to go unrecognized in the mid-twentieth century when it was superseded by the work of men of higher academic position.

27 For a chart of these relations, see Sargent (2013a, 518).

28 I believe that the Holy Name passage may have been a later addition by Hilton; some of what it has to say occurs in the next chapter following. The Christocentric interpolations were most probably added by someone else (Sargent 2023).

29 See Wakelin (2014, 166–67) and https://www.medievalscribes.com (Centre for Medieval Studies 2011–).

30 A photograph of the figurine (alongside an English description of the object) can be found on the museum’s website (Hunan Museum 2015–).

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References

Bibliographical reference

Michael G. Sargent, Textual Circumstances and Textual-Critical Method: Nicholas Love’s Mirror and Walter Hilton’s Scale of PerfectionVariants, 19 | 2025, 139-159.

Electronic reference

Michael G. Sargent, Textual Circumstances and Textual-Critical Method: Nicholas Love’s Mirror and Walter Hilton’s Scale of PerfectionVariants [Online], 19 | 2025, Online since 01 December 2025, connection on 10 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/variants/2068; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15do8

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About the author

Michael G. Sargent

Michael Sargent is a professor in the English Department of Queens College of the City University of New York. His work has primarily been in the edition and textual criticism of late medieval English mystical and contemplative literature, and the history of the Carthusian Order. He produced a disjunctive critical edition of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Nicholas Love’s English version of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi; produced a critical edition (EETS 2015) of Book II of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection; and is currently completing the critical edition of Book I of the Scale.

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Copyright

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