Each year, one to three awards (up to $1,500 in total) are presented for the best abstract of a paper submitted to the annual conference. This year’s theme is "Interiority and the Outer World: The Middle Ages as Meeting Ground."
Morgan and Davide have been awarded the prize for their paper on The Miller’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales. They will present their work at the Medieval Association of the Pacific’s annual conference, held at Calabasas University in Malibu, California. Their presentation will take place during Session 5B: Manuscripts and Scribes on June 7th, from 1:00 to 2:30 PM.
Abstract: "Rethinking the Miller’s Tale: Evidence in Support of a Non-Canonical Usage of the BL MS 5140"
This paper explores scribal evidence in British Library Additional MS 5140 [Mosser: Ad1], one of the 88 pre-1500 witnesses of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. This fifteenth-century manuscript presents a series of traits in the hand that appear to be erratic – mainly emphasis and capitalization of some letters. However, we argue that these seemingly random instances are triggered by a metrical rationale. The paper begins by briefly outlining background information about Ad1, ranging from the provenance of the manuscript to its language and scribes. The data set is then presented, and practical instances of the implementation of capitalisation are provided to prove not only the metrical competency of the scribes who wrote it but also the intended usage of this particular witness. The paper explores insights into the literary debate of whether or not the Miller’s Tale, which has been defined as a “game” in its Prologue, was meant to be performed in front of an audience. Given that the capitalization of the manuscript might be the result of well-established scribal practice that enforces metrical and performative aspects of the text, these features still represent a clue for a possible oral performative destination of the Ad1 (belonging to the less important D group of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales tradition). In these terms, our aim is also to analyze the implications for our understanding of how scribal practices record extra-textual elements within the document, and how these are significant considering the critical interpretation of the text. We argue that the presence of these elements might impact the way we have so far interpreted the Miller’s Tale in particular, and possibly other tales that show similar features. This might also be beneficial for our understanding of scribal practices and the relation between texts and scribes, and their interpretations.
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