Putting it Right: The Corrections of Huntington Library MS. HM 128 and BL Additional MS. 35287.
The variability of the text of PPl is a commonplace and often obscures the pains scribes took to “get their text right,” or even over-right; although, this resulted sometimes in piling “confusion onto confusion.” The scribes of Huntington Library MS. HM 128 (Hm and Hm2) and BL Add. MS. 35287 (M) both corrected their texts laboriously in a manner that cannot fully be accounted for. Describing this activity, however, is useful as it shows what scribes considered “textually important” in copying L’s text. Hm and M belong to a group that includes Cambridge, Trinity College MS. B.15.17 (W) and two others dating from the sixteenth century. All three medieval hands are a similar practiced Anglicana and the scribes probably worked “within a network” where they could obtain texts for correction. The essay also argues that the “house-style” of professional London scribes is best represented by W. In Hm some correction takes the form of passages being rewritten to include missing lines, but the “vast majority” of the corrections are to do with orthography, particularly the final