Adam Pinkhurst and the Baffled Jury

Among the most celebrated and debated findings in medieval paleography is Linne Mooney’s 2004 discovery that Adam Pinkhurst was the mystery “scribe B” of the earliest Chaucer manuscripts. This cluster traces the subsequent story of the identification’s positive reception, alongside a growing cottage industry of reasons for rejection, showing that the methodological implications of Mooney’s detective work reach far beyond Middle English studies. We examine her identification as an important contribution to interpretive paleography in the best tradition of Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes, which, however, raises challenging new methodological problems that must be resolved before any definitive judgment can be made. But more optimistically, we also offer new evidence for unscrambling some key complications, plus new archival material on Pinkhurst. As we show, the main, unrecognized stumbling block till now has been that these identifications deal with generic hands, that is, with scribes who are trying to look alike, which is why we have called this cluster “Communities of Practice.” It brings together a group of colleagues with long-established specialties in medieval paleography and linguistics to explain why respected paleographers may reasonably disagree about identifying individual hands, and to exemplify further constructive research on issues of scribal training, dialect, and notarial practices in distinguishing Pinkhurst and other fourteenth-century scribes

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• Chaucer's Scribe

  Linne R Mooney•Speculum•2006

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