The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on February 27, 2009
The Review of English Studies 2009 60(245):382-405; doi:10.1093/res/hgn108
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved
C. L. Kingsford: The Stonor Letters, and Two Chronicles
Palmerston North, New Zealand
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Abstract |
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Norman Davis's edition of the Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, now completed by Richard Beadle and Colin Richmond, with a long-awaited glossary, enables linguists and historians to read for the first time what the Pastons and their correspondents actually wrote. No such authority attaches to the edition of the Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290-1483, which C. L. Kingsford offered in 1919. All too often, Kingsford's texts seriously misrepresent their originals. In one or two cases, a transcript owed everything to the copyist's imagination. In others, Kingsford printed readings that made no sense, without investigating their accuracy. His errors were perpetuated in the re-issue of the work that was published in 1996 as Kingsford's Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483. At his time, Kingsford was the leading authority on fifteenth-century English history and historical writings, and some of his assumptions in English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (1913) remain unchallenged. Two are here re-assessed in the light of a closer examination of the texts.