Adam Scriveyn identified

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I just heard: Linne Mooney has identified Chaucer's scribe Adam and some details of Adam's life. Very cool! The most interesting part is that Adam Pinkhurst worked for Chaucer for years and copied the Hengwrt (yes, I spelled that right; I think it's Welsh!) and Ellesmere Manuscripts. The article notes that this implied he worked on them over the course of the years; they're not so likely to have been later copies made without Chaucer's supervision. They've long been taken as having more authority than other manuscripts, but this finding adds further weight to that judgment. So why do we have no single authoritative ordering if he worked directly for Chaucer when he made these manuscripts? Ellesmere and Hengrt have different orderings, and Hengrt lacks the Canon's Yeoman's Tale entirely! (Dolores Frese suggested a number of years ago in her book An Ars Legendi for The Canterbury Tales that CYT was written after a "workshop disaster" that resulted in the disordering of the manuscript and reimagines that disaster through alchemical allegory. I'm still trying to decide how far to accept that argument.)

Yes, I'm very geeked about this! It isn't every day we learn something new about Chaucer and the people with whom he worked!