Chaucerian 'detective' joins the University of York
Posted on 22 March 2005
Professor Linne Mooney's detective work enabled her to unmask Adam Pinkhurst as the scrivener responsible for copying early versions of the poems Chaucer wrote nearly a century before William Caxton established the first printing press in England.
Her appointment in the Department of English and Related Literature will allow her to combine further research into medieval texts with teaching students how best to use original sources.
She is no stranger to York, having previously spent 10 months at the University's Centre for Medieval Studies in 2002 as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor. She was appointed Visiting Professor of Medieval Literature at York in September 2004, but she has now been given the permanent appointment of Professor in Medieval English Palaeography based at King's Manor.
I try to identify the idiosyncrasies of each scribe's writing and I get such a buzz when I find a new manuscript by one of the scribes I know
Professor Linne Mooney
An unashamed Anglophile - the former Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maine in the USA has spent seven of the last 12 years in the UK, principally at Cambridge.
"Coming back here, feels like I'm a fish back in water. I feel totally at home in York and I love the University," Professor Mooney said.
She has spent thousands of hours studying contemporary manuscripts and has built up a database of more than 200 scribes working in England between 1375 and 1525. She is now working with the University's Department of Computer Science to develop software to identify medieval scribal handwriting.
Her discovery that Pinkhurst, the son of a Surrey landowner, was the scribe of the two most authoritative copies of the Canterbury Tales came when she spotted the similarity between his signature, in the earliest records of the Scriveners' company in the City of London, and the handwriting in Chaucerian manuscripts.
Until now, her research principally involved studying literary manuscripts from the 14th and 15th Centuries, but now she is turning her attention to administrative documents written for the government, the Archbishops or the London Guilds to find further matches for the handwriting in the literary manuscripts.
"The scribes who copied literary manuscripts were often the same people who produced official documents of all kinds. I try to identify the idiosyncrasies of each scribe's writing and I get such a buzz when I find a new manuscript by one of the scribes I know," Professor Mooney added.
Notes to editors:
- Linne Mooney was educated at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies. She was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maine in 1987 and Professor in 1999.
- In 1992-93, she was Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge from 1995-96. The following year she was Visiting Scholar at King's College, Cambridge and, in 1999, was a Visiting Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. In 2000, she returned to King's College as Visiting Scholar in the Research Centre and, in 2003-04, she was again Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College. .In 2002, she was Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. In 2004, she was Helen Waddell Visiting Professor at Queen's University, Belfast.
- Further information at www.york.ac.uk/depts/engl/staff/academic/biograph.htm#mooney
- The two copies of the Canterbury Tales, acknowledged as the most authoritative are the Hengwrt manuscript in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and the Ellesmere manuscript in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Pinkhurst produced a third copy of the Canterbury Tales, only a fragment of which survives in the Cambridge University Library. He also copied at least one manuscript of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and at least one copy of Chaucer's translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, besides manuscripts of works by Chaucer's contemporaries John Gower and William Langland.
- Palaeography is the study of ancient scripts and writings.