CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Pintér, Ágota Kamilla |
|---|---|
| Title | Readers of Chaucer: A case study of marginalia in Cambridge University Library MS Dd. 4. 24 |
| Summary | The aim of this thesis is to provide more details about the early reader interpretation of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales through the case study of Cambridge University Library MS Dd.4.24 (Dd). Dd is one of the earliest and richest in reader comments among The Canterbury Tales. To map the reception of a literary work, there are three sources that a researcher can turn to: forms of imitation, re-invention, and commentaries. This thesis focuses on the marginal commentaries found in Dd which is the most densely commented one from among the early manuscripts thus being outstandingly informative about the historical reception. The commentaries in Dd have not been completely cataloged and extensively discussed so far. In order to interpret the notes from the margin, I collected, categorized and analyzed the marginalia. On the basis of this, I defined the provenance of Dd more precisely than it was known before and with the help of paleography, I distinguished and dated the annotators of the main body. The provenance defined the social layer of the owners and readers (aristocrats, college masters and members of the church), provided details of the owners’ erudition and about the terminus ante quem of marginalia in Dd. The thematic analysis of these annotations revealed the individual use of the manuscript. Based on these two sources, I determined the connection between the annotators and the main body of the text, The Canterbury Tales. Comparing these results to the seventeenth-century reception history of Chaucer, the seventeenth-century commenters show anomalia. Although Chaucer was generally not appreciated in the seventeenth century, this thesis revealed that among the annotators of Dd there were four hands from the seventeenth century who were deeply engaged with the content of The Canterbury Tales continuing the sixteenth-century interpretation. |
| Supervisor | Reed, Zsuzsanna: Karath, Tamas |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/unger_agota.pdf |
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