Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the texts
- Introduction
- Part I The early phase
- Part II The late nineteenth century
- Part III The Skeat aftermath
- Part IV Chambers and Grattan, Knott and Fowler
- 12 Chambers 1909–1910
- 13 Chambers versus Knott
- 14 Chambers' graduate students
- 15 Chambers 1931
- 16 Chambers 1935–1942
- 17 The Chambers and Grattan collations
- 18 Grattan and Kane
- 19 Knott and Fowler, Donaldson, Mitchell, and Russell
- Part V The Athlone Press edition
- Part VI Epilogue: the Athlone aftermath: Schmidt, Pearsall, Rigg-Brewer, et al.
- Works cited
- General index
- Index of manuscripts
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
13 - Chambers versus Knott
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Note on the texts
- Introduction
- Part I The early phase
- Part II The late nineteenth century
- Part III The Skeat aftermath
- Part IV Chambers and Grattan, Knott and Fowler
- 12 Chambers 1909–1910
- 13 Chambers versus Knott
- 14 Chambers' graduate students
- 15 Chambers 1931
- 16 Chambers 1935–1942
- 17 The Chambers and Grattan collations
- 18 Grattan and Kane
- 19 Knott and Fowler, Donaldson, Mitchell, and Russell
- Part V The Athlone Press edition
- Part VI Epilogue: the Athlone aftermath: Schmidt, Pearsall, Rigg-Brewer, et al.
- Works cited
- General index
- Index of manuscripts
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Summary
It is tantalisingly difficult to trace the course of Chambers' and Grattan's work, but it seems clear that they felt some considerable pressure on them to complete their text of A as soon as possible. A copy of a hastily written letter from Chambers to Grattan seems to belong to this early period, and was presumably written in February 1910:
I chucked the whole of Trinity [the A-MS of Trinity College Cambridge, thought by most scholars to be the best MS of A, and the one that Chambers and Grattan were planning to use as their base-text. Presumably Chambers refers to the rotograph of the MS, not the MS itself] into my things which were going off to Clacton [where Chambers spent his summer holidays during this period] I would therefore suggest your getting on with Univ. [i.e. with transcribing the A-MS of University College, Oxford]. I think, if you are in London with more or less free time it might be well if you could collate say Lincoln's Inn upon it, this being more useful even than Univ, wh. if necessary can be done, so to speak, in bed. We have now all the evidence we really want Rawlinson, Univ, Ingilby, Lincoln's Inn, Vernon in Skeat's Reprint, Trinity. The other MSS so far as I can make out are purely ornamental Westminster and Digby almost worthless, Douce and Ashmole, Harl 129 [there is no such A-MS; perhaps Chambers means Harley 3954] little better. I should be very sorry to do it, but should things become desperate we might go to press without West, Dig Ash. I doubt much whether in a single instance these will help
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- Information
- Editing Piers PlowmanThe Evolution of the Text, pp. 237 - 255Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996