Layamon\u27s Brut : Relationships between the two versions

The Early Middle English legendary history Layamon\u27s Brut survives in two manuscripts, British Library Mss. Cotton Caligula A.ix and Cotton Otho C.xiii. This dissertation reassesses their theoretical, paleographic, and literary relationships. Modern scholarship privileges the Caligula text over Otho. Chapter 1 examines post-Romantic assumptions about textual authority that influence this reading habit, and reconstructs different assumptions for pre-print scribal textuality. The chapter examines (1) Cassiodorus\u27s writings about scribal error; (2) rhetorical variation between manuscripts of the Historia Regum Britanniae; (3) philological analysis of Latin, Old English, and Middle English terms for writers and writing; (4) self-reflexive passages about scribes and authors in Early Middle English manuscripts; (5) medieval metaphors for writing. Conclusions: medieval text-making was perceived as an act of compiling and transmitting. Scribes and authors were equally privileged in the sight of God. Error was conceptually significant only for sacred writing, and history-of-Britain texts had no system of authorizing one version over another. Chapter 2 described the manuscripts and distinguishes them in terms of readership. The textual apparatuses are assessed for potential scholastic influence; Caligula more than Otho shows concern with ease of reference but older chronicle traditions could account for that. Glosses and readers\u27 marks characterize distinctive readerly interests: Caligula\u27s readers showed more interest in Christian historiography; Otho\u27s readers focused on rulership; both evidence intense interest in the figure of Arthur. Chapter 3 examines Caligula and Otho for their differences of detail, diction, and rhetoric. There are few differences of detail. Otho retains Anglo-Saxon diction more than it usually receives credit for, although Caligula more clearly preserves subtle Old English poetic patterns in one case involving gendered contexts for the collocation zeddian-zeomere. Otho\u27s variations in diction are not necessarily less metaphorical. Rhetorical variations, especially Otho\u27s elimination of repeated parallelisms, constitute the bulk of the difference between the Caligula and Otho versions. The resulting different texts are partial matches with the readers whose interest were reconstructed in Chapter 2