Stephan Batman’s Peculiar Ways and the Parkerian Scribe of Pierce the Plowman’s Crede

TY - JOUR

T1 - Stephan Batman’s Peculiar Ways and the Parkerian Scribe of Pierce the Plowman’s Crede

AU - Warner, Lawrence

PY - 2024/5/14

Y1 - 2024/5/14

N2 - This essay sets out as opposites the careers of two important players in the promulgation and reception of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, and Pierce the Plowman’s Crede in the years leading up to the death of Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1575. First, a catalogue of thirty-three items by the hand of the Crede in Trinity College MS R.3.15, most of them quite staid products of the archbishop’s household. Then, a corrected and extended catalogue of books and manuscripts owned or inscribed by Stephan Batman, who claimed to have collected 6700 books for the archbishop and whose imagination ran rampant. The final section investigates the ways in which these two have been combined into one, especially in the work of Simon Horobin. An appendix tracks the history of the cancelled classmarks found in Trinity College Library’s manuscripts, the misreading of one of which, in the Piers Plowman manuscript R.3.14, as Batman’s erased initials is symptomatic of the mode of argumentation that made the historical Batman into his opposite: the Crede scribe, a George Kane avant la lettre, textual critic of Middle English poetry.

AB - This essay sets out as opposites the careers of two important players in the promulgation and reception of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, and Pierce the Plowman’s Crede in the years leading up to the death of Archbishop Matthew Parker in 1575. First, a catalogue of thirty-three items by the hand of the Crede in Trinity College MS R.3.15, most of them quite staid products of the archbishop’s household. Then, a corrected and extended catalogue of books and manuscripts owned or inscribed by Stephan Batman, who claimed to have collected 6700 books for the archbishop and whose imagination ran rampant. The final section investigates the ways in which these two have been combined into one, especially in the work of Simon Horobin. An appendix tracks the history of the cancelled classmarks found in Trinity College Library’s manuscripts, the misreading of one of which, in the Piers Plowman manuscript R.3.14, as Batman’s erased initials is symptomatic of the mode of argumentation that made the historical Batman into his opposite: the Crede scribe, a George Kane avant la lettre, textual critic of Middle English poetry.

KW - Stephan Batman

KW - Geoffrey Chaucer

KW - Piers Plowman

KW - Piers Plowman's Crede

KW - Trinity College Cambridge Library

KW - Parker Library

KW - Archbishop Matthew Parker

KW - scribal attribution

KW - Early Modern reception of medieval literature

M3 - Article

VL - 38

JO - The Yearbook of Langland Studies

JF - The Yearbook of Langland Studies

ER -