Thomas Hoccleve: Chaucer's First Editior?

Despite knowing the name of the scribe responsible for two of the earliest manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, we still know relatively little about the processes by which his works were copied and circulated. Since Linne Mooney’s identification of the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere Manuscripts as Adam Pinkhurst, scholars have returned to these two manuscripts in an effort to find evidence of the poet himself at work, carrying out the rubbing and scraping that he described in his poem to Adam Scriveyn, argued by Mooney to be Adam Pinkhurst himself. Since the Hengwrt manuscript contains various erasures, gaps, later additions and reworkings of the text and the order of tales, scholars have wondered whether it could represent Chaucer’s work in progress, supervised by the poet himself. In stark contrast, the Ellesmere manuscript presents the work as a unified and consistent whole, with many of the uncertainties apparent from the structure and layout of the Hengwrt manuscript resolved. Do these differences reflect authorial changes of mind, or the intervention of a later editor? If the latter, who was responsible for these revisions, and for the planning, supervising and commissioning of this landmark manuscript? In this article I want to look closely at the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts to try to answer these questions, and to reflect on their implications for our understanding of Chaucer’s role in the dissemination of his own verse, and the organisation of the London booktrade in this perio