initial letters at the opening of individual tales and prologues, but the manuscript contains no illustrations. Scribe and relationship to other manuscripts The Hengwrt manuscript was written by the same scribe as the lavishly illustrated Ellesmere manuscript, which, following the examples of the editors Frederick Furnivall and W. W. Skeat, was thought to be superior to Hengwrt and used as the base text for many modern editions of the Canterbury Tales. Since the work of John M. Manly and Edith Rickert in compiling their Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940), however, the Hengwrt manuscript has had a much higher degree of prominence in attempts to reconstruct Chaucer's text, displacing the previously prominent Ellesmere and Harley MS. 7334. Recent scholarship has shown that the variant spellings given in the Hengwrt manuscript likely reflect Chaucer's own spelling practices in his East Midlands / London dialect of Middle English, while the Ellesmere text shows evidence of a later attempt to regularise spelling; Hengwrt is therefore probably very close to the original authorial holograph. The scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts has been identified by Linne Mooney, a palaeographer at the University of York, as Adam Pinkhurst, a scrivener. The attribution has been widely accepted, and other manuscripts have since been added to Pinkhurst's scribal canon. However, other scholars, including Jane Roberts, who drew Mooney's attention to Pinkhurst in the first place, have expressed skepticism about the identification on various palaeographical, literary, and historical grounds. See also William Maurice (antiquary) Robert Vaughan (antiquary) References External links Full digitized manuscript at the National Library of Wales Literary illuminated manuscripts The Canterbury Tales Peniarth collection