Ordinatio and genre in ms ccc 201: A mediaeval reading of the b-text of piers plowman

Scripture’s remark to Will in Piers Plowman.B, “I nel noght scorne . . . but if scryveynes lye” (B.X.331), acknowledges the possibility o f scribal inaccuracy, capturing both the reality o f mediaeval manuscript traditions and the frustration o f editors who wrestle to distinguish authorial from scribal readings of a text. From the point o f view o f author or editor, scribal “corruptions” interfere with the important processes of creation and dissemination of a literary work— in the case of Piers Plowman.B, surviving manuscripts not only have scribal corruptions, but are themselves copies o f an unusually corrupt copy (Kane-Donaldson 96-97, 128-29). As readers, we instinctively side with the editors and poets, but over the gulfs of time in the wake of centuries o f the writer’s absence, we perhaps should pause, as B.A. Windeatt suggests, to reconsider the “scryveynes lye” and to understand it also as a mediaeval response to a mediaeval text (1979, 122). Although at opposite poles in their own responses to scribal contributions, both Kane and Windeatt narrow “scribal response” to signify textual variation— the glossing and rewriting of the text, but manuscript layout (ordinatio and compilatio, for example) also fashions and interprets the text. In Oxford MS Corpus Christi College 201, manuscript arrangement and “corruption” together manipulate the text aggressively in ways that frequently demonstrate intelligent scribal reception of a complicated text; the “scryveynes lye” becomes here a contemporary response, a mediaeval guide to our own potential reading of Piers Plowman.