Adam Pinkhurst

Who is Adam Pinkhurst?

In 2004, Professor Linne Mooney identified the scrivener who worked on the Ellesmere Chaucer and Hengwrt Chaucer, two manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales by the 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney, then a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, proposed to match Pinkhurst's flamboyantly-written signature on an oath he signed to his lettering to the handwriting in these early manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, thought to be closely derived from Chaucer's holograph.

Not only was this discovery — if correct — significant in shedding light on the relationship between a writer, his scrivener and their manuscripts at that time, it would also contribute to our understanding of one of Chaucer's shortest works. Chaucer words unto Adam his scrivener takes a scribe called Adam to task for the many errors he introduces and the amount of work Chaucer has to do correcting them.

Pinkhurst had in fact been suggested as a possible candidate for "Adam scrivener" as early as the late 1920s.

Based on their shared work on another manuscript, Pinkhurst has been suggested as a colleague of "Scribe D", another copyist of the Tales, and both scribes may have worked for the same bookseller or moved in the same literary circles.