SCRIBAL INTRUSION IN THE TEXTS OF 'GAMELYN'

ABSTRACT One of most important steps in the process of editing a manuscript is the identification and correction of the mistakes made by the scribe or scribes involved in its copying process in order to obtain the best text. In some cases, the changes introduced by the scribe, or by the editor who was supervising his work, can easily be noticed because we find out "physical" elements throughout the folio, such as dots under a word as a sign of expunction or carets indicating that a missing word is being added. However, there are many instances of scribal intrusion where only a detailed analysis of the text itself, or even the comparison of different manuscripts, can lead us to the identification of a modified reading. For instance, orthographical changes due to the dialectal provenance of the copyist, or altered lines with a regular aspect. The purpose of this article is to analyse the scribal amendments that appear in some of the earliest copies of The tale of Gamelyn: Corpus Christi College Oxford MS 198 (Cp), Christ Church Oxford MS 152 (Ch), Fitzwilliam Museum McClean 181 (Fi), British Library MS Harley 7334 (Ha4), Bodleian Library MS Hatton Donat. 1 (Ht), British Library MS Lansdowne 851 (La), Lichfield Cathedral MS 29 (Lc), Cambridge University Library Mm.2.5 (Mm), Petworth House MS 7 (Pw) and British Library MS Royal 18 CH (Ry2). 0. Introduction When editing any Middle English material, one of the main drawbacks for the editor is the identification and correction of the mistakes made by the scribes responsible for the manuscript/s involved in the process. Scribal intrusion is very often responsible for some odd readings in thorough editions. Besides, when analysing this type of material in linguistic change and grammaticalization studies, an unaware scholar can end up obtaining altered results if she/he does not take into account what part of her/his text is the result, for instance, of the absentmindedness of a certain monk in a certain monastery or of the negligence of a specific scribe in a professional copying office. In most cases, it is almost impossible to ascertain up to what extent the text we are facing has been "corrupted" by its scribe, especially when the author is anonymous and we cannot trace her/his original dialect or style. However, it is desirable and advisable to detect and correct as many mistakes as possible in order to obtain the best results. When we have several exemplars for the same work, it is easier to achieve a "good" text by comparing all the readings in the different exemplars and, subsequently, determining which of them show the least contaminated readings. The final decision for the editor will be, then, to choose among those readings the best for her/his own edition. In my edition of the Tale of Gamelyn, (2) I chose Corpus Christi College Oxford MS 198 as base text and then selected nine other manuscripts to be collated against the first one: Christ Church Oxford MS 152 (Ch), Fitzwilliam Museum McClean 181 (Fi), British Library MS Harley 7334 ([Ha.sup.4]), Bodleian Library MS Hatton Donat. 1 (Ht), British Library MS Lansdowne 851 (La), Lichfield Cathedral MS 29 (Lc), Cambridge University Library Mm.2.5 (Mm), Petworth House MS 7 (Pw), British Library MS Royal 18 C.II ([Ry.sup.2]). The output I obtained is a satisfactory text without missing parts and with the best readings available for this particular tale. Among the most common mistakes a scribe may make in his process of copying a manuscript, we can mention missing words or lines mainly due to eyeskip, changes in the word order of different elements in a sentence and the introduction of wrong letters and words. Hereafter, I will present some of the errors of these types which appear in the different texts of the Tale of Gamelyn I used in my edition, paying special attention to the devices used by the scribe or some later editor in order to amend those mistakes, such as deletions, additions and so on. …