A Repeated Passage in a Manuscript Copy of the Crónica de Enrique IV of Diego Enríquez del Castillo (MS C-3)

CN.02112011.001

David Hook

MIMSS, Oxford

Hitherto unstudied and unpublished, MS C-3 in my library is a s.XVII folio paper copy of Diego Enríquez del Castillo’s chronicle of Enrique IV of Castile (wrongly identified as ‘Coronic[a] de Enrique III’ on the spine label). The manuscript is written in a single-column text block on unruled leaves in quires without early foliation or pagination (modern pencil foliation has been supplied); excluding later endpapers, there are 200 leaves including a final blank. The provenance of the manuscript before its acquisition by me from Sr Joan Gili of the Dolphin Book Company, Oxford, in 1991 is uncertain; by then, it had been in his possession for some decades. (It may, however, be stated with confidence that it is not a former Phillipps manuscript, since it bears none of the library marks diagnostically associated with the Bibliotheca Phillippica.) The twenty-one quires do not bear signatures, but were once numbered in ink in Arabic numerals at the upper left-hand corner of the first recto; the unusual collation of the volume is 1-18₁₀ 19₈ 20₁₀ 21₂. The quire numbers (which use forms of numerals identical to those in the numbering of chapter headings in the manuscript) survive in full on the first rectos of quires 2, 4-9, 11-12, 14-15, and 17-21; traces of the feet of figures cropped by binding remain in the appropriate position on quire 16. Additionally, verso foliation (in the lower margin of the first verso only) survives on fols 51v (quire 6), 71v (quire 8), and 81v (quire 9); it may be assumed that elsewhere it has been cropped. The occurrence of verso catchwords is, in the case of this manuscript, an unreliable guide to collation (though it may provide useful evidence in other considerations) because of its irregular distribution, since in some quires all leaves have a catchword, while in others only the first five leaves and the last have one, and yet other quires have a more idiosyncratic occurrence of this device.

Eschewing here the study of other aspects of the text of the manuscript, an interesting feature is the copyist’s treatment of a passage duplicated in error during copying, which is found on fols 7v-8r. Here, instead of being struck out as is the case with other more minor duplications encountered elsewhere in the manuscript (e.g., fol. 151v), the first occurrence of the passage in question, which occupies the last sixteen lines of fol. 7v, has been outlined in ink with a single-framed freehand box and marked by a diagonal croix pattée in the left-hand margin; the redundant text is not, however, crossed through. An identical cross marks the start of the second occurrence of this passage, which follows as the first textual content of fol. 8r and occupies fifteen lines below a blank space three lines deep left empty, as if for a chapter heading that was never inserted, at the head of that page. From the end of this second copy of the passage the text of the rest of the chronicle continues uninterrupted.

As is usual in such situations, the duplicated passage naturally offers the opportunity to examine the fidelity of the copyist to certain aspects of the text of the unidentified exemplar being copied; since key features of the writing on these folios are identical, and since the duplication does not stand at the junction of two quires but is internal to quire 1, there is no reason to believe that the error results from separate work by two different copyists. It seems more likely to have arisen from some discontinuity in executing the work of a single hand. The two renderings of the passage are as follows.

A. fol. 7v.
Quanta mas alta cosa es aquella que se deue tratar tanto su grandeça pone temor en el deçir quanto de mayor ecelençia tanto de fruto de las palabras mas grande porque antes el estilo describir que materia de ablar fallesçe siempre	1
nuestras lenguas son mas aparejadas a disparar sus dhos que las plumas a conponellas y avn aquesto la espirienzia natural Nos lo nuestra como sea cierta cosa quel vso comun de ablar es a todos General y a muy Pocos la perfiçion del decir y no sin caussa que los humanos yngenios mayores	5
cosas entienden que sauen Proponer y mejor las conçiben que açiertan a pronunçiarlas en deçir lo que dentro sienten y Porque tratando de tan alto Rey altas E Grandes cossas se deuen notar Primero que al processo que de su Ystoria Vengamos Para que de todo Prestemos Raçones y la re	10
Prension dela ynograncia se escuse algo de su jesto y façiones de sus condiçiones y bida conVerna	15
B. fol. 8r:
Quanta mas alta cossa es aquella que se deue tratar tanto su grandeça Pone temor en el deçir quanto de mayor eçelenzia tanto de fruto de las palabras mas Grande Porque antes el estilo descrebir que materia de ablar falleçe siempre nuestras	1
lenguas son mas aparejadas a disparar sus dhos q las plumas a conponellas yavnquesto la espiriençia natural nos lo muestra como sea çierta cosa quel Vso comun de ablar es a todos General y a muy Pocos la perfiçion del deçir Y no sin caussa que los huma nos yngenios mayores cosas entienden que sauen proponer Y	5
mejor la conçiben que açiertan a pronunçiar las En dezir lo que dentro sienten e porque tratando de Tan alto Rey Altas e Grandes cosas se deuen notar Primero que al Proçesso que de sy ystoria vengamos Para que de todo Prestemos raçones y la reprehension de la ygnorançia se escuse algo de su jesto Y	10
façiones de sus condiçiones y bida conberna que digamos [...]	15

The absence of substantive differences of textual readings in the two versions of this repeated passage (apart from the single case involving ‘las conçiben’ [A10] versus ‘la conçiben’ [B10], in which the reading in A is the correct one) should not be allowed to obscure the extent of difference between them in other matters. To begin with questions of mise-en-page, as may be seen from the transcription above the line breaks occur, without exception, at different points in the text in the two renderings, and it is immediately clear, therefore, that this aspect of the exemplar was of no concern to the copyist here; no attempt was being made to produce a line-for-line copy. Nor does there appear to have been any concern with accurate reproduction of details of presentation such as the distribution of capitalisation. It may be noted, however, in passing that where the two texts occasionally coincide on an unusual succession of capitals such as ‘a todos General y a muy Pocos’ (A8/B7-8) this may perhaps be thought more likely to reflect the exemplar, although it may perhaps be felt that such considerations would be likely to carry more weight in cases in which the capitalised words are not the semantically most significant ones in a clause. Matters of linguistic detail such as orthography and word-separation exhibit similar variation between the two versions. While both are agreed on caussa (A9/B8), in one case on cossa (A1/B1), and in two instances on cosa (A7/B7, A10/B9), on one occasion they differ on this point (cossas, A12; cosas, B12), as they do on reprension (A14-15) versus reprehension (B14) and also on ynograncia (sic, A15) versus ygnorançia (B14). They agree on the absence of a written initial consonant for ablar (A8/B7). It is, of course, debatable whether such orthographic solutions as are common to both versions of the passage reflect the usage of the exemplar or the habits of the copyist. The incidence of contractions is small in this section of text in both cases; while the versions differ once on employing the contracted (B5) versus the full (A6) form of que (which is usually written out in full in both), they agree on the contraction dhos (A5/B5), and on the writing of ‘de escribir’ as one word, descrebir/describir (A4/B4), which we may probably accept as the likely form in the exemplar.

The duplicated passage in MS C-3 thus abundantly documents the inconsistency and the variability of the work of this late copyist in treatment of matters such as the orthography, word separation, capitalisation, and mise-en-page of the exemplar; production of the text was evidently the limit of the copyist’s concern. Such significance as the resulting manuscript possesses lies in other aspects of its textual content; and, of course, not least in its very existence, in so far as it constitutes an additional late witness to the extent and duration of the impressively fertile textual tradition of the work of Diego Enríquez del Castillo.

Received 02.11.2011.