Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms 9780812298451

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Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms  • • • • • •

M AT E R I A L T E X T S Series Editors Roger Chartier Joseph Farrell Anthony Grafton

Leah Price Peter Stallybrass Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms  • • • • • • Jessica Brantley

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN 9780812253849 Ebook ISBN 9780812298451 A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For Gabriel and David  •

CON TEN TS 

•

Preface xi

Introduction 1 Reading Medieval Books: Manuscript Studies in the Twenty-­First Century  3 Reading Medieval Texts: Chaucer’s “Adam Scriveyn”  8 The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript 17

1. The Writing Surface  18

1.1. Earlier Supports: Stone, Wax, Papyrus  19 1.2. Parchment  23 1.3. Paper  29

2. Writing  31 2.1. Pricking and Ruling  35 2.2. Writing Instruments  39 2.3. Scripts  40 2.4 Abbreviation  56 2.5. Punctuation  59 2.6. Musical Notation  61 2.7. Correction  66 2.8. Annotation  67 2.9. Editing  71

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3. Decoration and Illustration  72

3.1. Rubrication  73 3.2. Line Fillers  75 3.3. Borders and Marginalia  76 3.4. Initials  78 3.5. Illustrations  81 3.6. Diagrams and Maps  82

4. Bindings and the Shape of the Book  85 4.1. Roll  85 4.2. Codex  89



5. A Template for Manuscript Description  110

Case Studies: A Selection of English Literary Manuscripts 113 I. Literature: The Moore Bede (Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Other Items) Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.5.16  117

II. Afterlives: The Nowell Codex (Beowulf and Other Items) London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, ff. 94r–209v  133

III. Ownership: St. Albans Psalter Hildesheim, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St. God. 1  148

IV. Language: Orrm, The Orrmulum Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1  165

V. Miscellaneity: Trilingual Miscellany London, British Library MS Harley 2253  181

VI. Geography: Roman d’Alexandre and Other Items Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264  200

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Contents

VII. Authorship: The Gawain Manuscript (Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2  217

VIII. Writing: The Ellesmere Chaucer (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales) San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9  232

IX. Editing: William Langland, Piers Plowman; John Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels; Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; and Other Items San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS HM 114  245

X. Mediation: The Book of Margery Kempe London, British Library MS Additional 61823  260

XI. Illustration: Illustrated Carthusian Miscellany London, British Library MS Additional 37049  276

XII. Performance: N-­Town Plays London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii  297 Glossary 313 Primary works Cited 325 Suggestions for Further Reading 327 Acknowledgments 345 Color plates follow page 58



Contentsix

PR E FAC E  

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Across the field of medieval studies, interest in manuscripts has been rising steadily. Although paleographers and editors have long concerned themselves with the material witnesses to medieval texts, traditional manuscript studies have been newly energized by the histories of the book being written in many disciplines. Decades ago, scholars such as D. F. McKenzie, Robert Darnton, and Roger Chartier shifted the grounds of textual scholarship, demonstrating that bibliography can go beyond the simple collation of quires to ask questions about the social uses of books, and thus about the meaning of the texts they preserve. Within medieval studies, a similar shift moved manuscript studies away from the purely philological concerns that animate (for example) the introductions of early volumes produced by the Early English Text Society toward more general social and literary historical questions. Historians of both text and image have fruitfully examined the history of reading in the Middle Ages through the testimony of rich individual books. Whether it is called the “archaeology of the manuscript book,” “materialist philology,” or the “new codicology,” this kind of inquiry has formed the basis for some of the most exciting recent work on medieval history and culture. Because of this deep and growing scholarly interest, the field of manuscript studies needs general introductions to working with textual artifacts from the Middle Ages. A number of important books have begun the work of opening this subject. The Medieval Book, the catalog of a forward-­thinking exhibition at Yale University’s Beinecke Library organized by Barbara Shailor in 1988, has been indispensable in helping readers wrap their minds around these complex and sometimes daunting artifacts. More recently, Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham have written a practical Introduction to Manuscript Studies (2007) that offers excellent preparation for working with manuscripts in a serious way. Its companion volume, Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson’s Opening Up

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Middle English Manuscripts (2012), provides a more specialized look at some of the important cultural contexts surrounding English literary books. More recently still, Ralph Hanna has collected his Oxford lectures into Introducing En­ glish Medieval Book History (2013), a useful series of investigations into the importance of manuscripts to medieval literary culture. All of these studies have inspired me and my students, and I rely gratefully throughout this handbook on much of the information they offer. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms has slightly different aims. My own introduction to manuscript studies began when scholarly references to the marginal images of Bevis of Hampton in the Taymouth Hours (London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 13) led me to wonder what other texts and images might be found with them on the page. My need to know everything I could about the material context of a single item led to a galvanizing encounter with a whole book, and my interests shifted from a concern with the part to a concern with the ensemble of parts. For that reason, I offer here an introduction to manuscripts motivated by a series of case studies, using the artifacts themselves as an inductive means to open the most interesting theoretical issues in the study of the medieval book. Ralph Hanna has described the “piecemealism” endemic to manuscript studies, the necessity of making particular arguments because persuasive general ones are so hard to come by (Introducing English ­Medieval Book History, xiii). And, indeed, that is one of my motivations for using case studies to structure this handbook; what Hanna calls “lateral analogical thinking” is a familiar and necessary part of studying medieval manuscripts. But, without attempting a general field theory, I also hope to use very particular arguments about single objects to open larger theoretical areas of inquiry. The concrete examples given here will enable readers to make their own way through the tangle of questions that any manuscript poses to the scholar, without too much interference from this or any other guide. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist readers in thinking through the implications of those questions, not only for medieval manuscript culture but also for book cultures more generally. I hope that providing beginning researchers with selected objects for their detailed analysis will encourage them to take manuscript studies in directions that no one currently working in the field can predict. With illustrative examples from a range of significant collections, Medieval En­ glish Manuscripts and Literary Forms offers a broad survey of the material forms of literary manuscripts and their cultural histories. It includes a guide to interpreting the physical parts of a medieval book, as well as a number of case studies in particularly important and representative examples of medieval literature in manuscript form.

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Preface

The first section, “The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript,” introduces and describes the parts of medieval books and the processes by which they were made. It includes discussions of the writing surface (stone, wax, papyrus, parchment, paper); the writing process (pricking and ruling, scripts, abbreviation, punctuation, musical notation, correction, annotation, editing); decoration and illustration (rubrication, line  fillers, borders, marginalia, initials, illustrations, diagrams), and bindings (roll, codex). This section introduces technical terms in boldface, all of which can be found defined in the glossary. It concludes with a template for manuscript description that reflects the international standards currently being developed for digital bibliography and cataloging. The second section, “Case Studies: A Selection of English Literary Manuscripts,” provides a series of studies of significant literary books in order to highlight some of the most important questions surrounding the study of medieval literature. For example, how are we to understand authorship in the period? Or the interaction between image and text in an illustrated manuscript, the importance of miscellaneity in medieval literary production, the theoretical underpinnings of modern editorial practice, or the role of the book in medieval performative culture? The manuscripts chosen here demonstrate the interest of these abstract questions through tangible examples. The four poems of British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, for example, usually ascribed to a single “Gawain-­ poet,” raise urgent questions about the nature of medieval authorship. How much does codicological unity presuppose authorial unity for medieval and modern readers? To take another example, a copy of Piers Plowman in the Huntington Library assimilates what modern editors distinguish as the poem’s A-­, B-­, and C-­texts, inviting readers to consider problems surrounding editing and the integrity of the medieval poem. Each case study introduces a landmark literary manuscript through some of the most pressing issues raised in the scholarship surrounding it, and each one points the way toward possibilities for further research. Because no single volume can adequately address every aspect of the complex field of medieval manuscript studies, this handbook cites sources and resources that can help readers pursue specialized questions further. This is particularly important for the manuscript case studies, which are designed to be used as examples for the classroom or as the inspiration for individual research projects. Selected bibliographies for each manuscript will enable any reader to enter scholarly discussion around an unfamiliar object. Moreover, high-­quality digital surrogates—all fully and freely available online—will allow readers of Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms to gain access to each of these manuscripts in its entirety, enabling further individual exploration and also facilitat-



Prefacexiii

ing the setting of assignments in the classroom. Through resources such as these, this introduction seeks both to address the literary critical subjects that attention to manuscripts can open and to enable the exploration of those subjects in concrete and particular terms. Manuscript scholarship forms an essential part of twenty-first-century medieval studies, an intellectual enterprise increasingly important to both graduate and undergraduate education in the field. I hope that this book will make a wide-ranging introduction possible, especially at institutions with small collections of rare books, geographically distant from large repositories. Medieval En­ glish Manuscripts and Literary Forms can also satisfy the curiosity of those who know they need an independent introduction to working with literary manuscripts, whether they are just beginning their medieval studies or are veteran researchers whose prior interests and research methods have lain elsewhere. Finally, this handbook aims to inspire a broad group of readers, both scholarly and casual, with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-­ first century. Even those modern readers who do not plan to make a lifetime study of manuscripts can benefit from the intellectual charge carried by an encounter with a medieval text in one of its medieval forms.

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Preface

Introduction And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. —William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.14–17)

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Theseus’s well-­known words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream offer a theory of literary creation precisely balanced between the transcendent and the physical. They describe the ongoing materialization of “things unknown” into “bodies” and “forms,” and thence into “shapes.” The initial mechanism for this embodiment is imagination, the faculty of mind whereby, according to premodern explanations of the physiology of the brain, sensory impressions create images that can be combined and recombined through the aid of memory. But the immaterial forms of unknown things are embodied equally in another way. By virtue of the “poet’s pen”—that is to say, literary language realized through the instrument of its recording—new ideas become enmeshed in words, and they take up a position in space: they are given a tangible presence. Moreover, written language gives to “airy nothing” a particular kind of “local habitation” in books, which provide the material context for literary expression. The pens of poets not only provide a language for the communication of ideas; they also give these ideas a powerful physical existence in the world. Medieval texts, in particular, are not disembodied but take their meaning in part from the physical forms in which their original readers encountered them. These physical forms are manuscripts: literally, texts written by hand (Latin, manu scriptus) on any kind of surface. Unlike the productions of print culture, each manuscript is a unique creation of human hands, visibly distinct from any other in its material and textual embodiment. This uniqueness makes it easy to see that a medieval book is not merely a transparent container for the text it represents; instead, such a book is evidently an artifact, an individually created object whose physical characteristics contribute to or even structure the ideas it transmits. This insight—important for the history of the book in all periods— has particular purchase on manuscript study, for although any book is a material

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object, whose physicality participates in ways large and small in the creation of its meanings, the singularity of the handwritten manuscript makes the consideration of its forms a necessity. The material forms of the manuscript book carry meanings different from those of print culture. On the one hand, the physical features of a specific volume seem to mean less than they would in the twenty-­first century: Middle English scribes, for example, typically concern themselves so little with conventions of standardized spelling that they may write a word in two different ways on the same page. On the other hand, physical features that seem incidental might mean immensely more: in the absence of a universally agreed-­upon critical edition, the particular way in which a poem and its glosses were laid out on a page, or the interactions among different texts contained in one manuscript miscellany, could significantly shape a medieval reader’s experience. Such contextual information is often lost or suppressed in modern printed editions of medieval texts, but recovering it can augment or even change our critical perception of those texts. The study of manuscripts is essential both to understanding the reading culture of the Middle Ages and to interpreting that culture’s productions. Recovering the readings implied by medieval manuscripts is a necessarily interdisciplinary project, including a vast range of different subjects that might be relevant to any particular book: methods of making parchment, the iconography of St. Jerome, the locations of bookshops in Paris, the transformations of royal seals, and foreign influences on Chaucer’s vocabulary—just to name a few. Topics in codicology (or the study of the codex) include the making of parchment and paper, the sewing of quires, the construction of bindings, and the layout of the page. Paleography sometimes refers to the study of all aspects of old books, but even in its strictest and most literal sense of “old writing,” it encompasses a crowd of different scripts extending from Roman capitals in stone inscriptions to the Bastard Secretary common in fifteenth-­century manuscripts, not to mention widely divergent habits of abbreviation and correction. Painstaking editorial and textual criticism are required to present a medieval text in a modern form, for manuscript witnesses often provide conflicting testimony to the work itself. Historical documents and legal instruments such as charters, bulls, or letters can be authenticated through specialized knowledge from the field of diplomatics. The many types of manuscript decoration and illumination require art historical attention to the ways in which medieval books construct meaning through visual means, and the history of musical notation can help to reconstruct performance cues. In short, manuscript studies require the collaboration of many scholarly fields, including but not limited to linguistics

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(what might in a slightly antiquated mode be called philology), history, art history, musicology, literature—and even scientific fields such as biology, chemistry, and computer science, which have contributed to the compositional analysis of parchments and inks. Each of these disciplines brings its particular skills, its hard-­ earned knowledge, and most of all its own questions, assumptions, and methodologies to the objects at hand. This book aims to provide a general introduction to manuscript studies for readers whose particular interests lie in medieval literature. The field of medieval literary studies has long depended on manuscripts, of course. The nineteenth-­ century editions that facilitated the widespread study of medieval texts made explicit their dependence on manuscript evidence. But that scholarly tradition was primarily textual and philological, concerned with how to reconstruct readable texts from fragmentary remains in order to develop histories of literature and language. More modern editions have typically moved farther from considering the original forms of the texts they encounter. But it is clearer than ever that manuscripts are important to literary analysis. Medieval books provide indispensable contexts for understanding literary culture, and even for establishing (or questioning) the historical parameters of the “literary” itself. Bringing the traditional archival strengths of medieval manuscript studies together with the larger, more synthetic, and theoretical achievements of recent approaches to material texts, this handbook aims to ask such big questions.

Reading Medieval Books: Manuscript Studies in the Twenty-­First Century What does it mean to read medieval books? To answer this question, it will be helpful to unpack its polyvalent terms, beginning with the first one: What does it mean to read? On one level, this book is concerned with reading medieval books as their first users did, in a simple effort to learn what is written down on their pages. Given unfamiliar scripts, myriad scribal idiosyncrasies, and the potential for damage over time, it is not always straightforward in the twenty-­first century even to decode the letters on the medieval manuscript page. Even less straightforward is the effort to recapture the experiences of medieval readers. The present participle in my title—reading—emphasizes the importance of process to the activity of looking at and interpreting medieval books; a manuscript is not an inert object, but one that comes alive in an interaction with a human mind. The practice of reading may seem uncomplicated at first glance, but wide variations both synchronically and diachronically require careful attention. Any



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book reads (and thus means) differently at different moments depending on the circumstances under which it is read, differences registered in various modes of engagement we might describe as perusing, consulting, skimming, scanning, reciting, examining, inspecting, meditating, deciphering, studying. Moreover, medieval encounters with books, as scholars have worked to discover, were sometimes shaped by cultural expectations and habits different from those that shape modern reading. When a medieval “reader” is not a person sitting still in a quiet room alone, but rather a listener moving through a crowded and noisy hall, we have to reconsider how broadly the activity can be defined. Modern readers of medieval books must interest themselves in reconstructing the historical encounter with a text, even if they will never be able to replicate it in every way. With necessary respect for the historical distance that separates modern from medieval readers, this book is also concerned with “reading” medieval books in the sense of “interpreting” them: what do manuscripts communicate fundamentally about the meanings of texts? If it is true that medieval texts cannot be properly understood without recourse to their physical contexts, what do those contexts reveal? Historical processes of interpretation are even more difficult to imagine and reconstruct than modern ones, but the physical shapes of manuscripts can provide some clues to how their original readers used them. Manuscripts shape their readers’ understanding through paratexts that might include indexes, explanatory glosses, or visual elements such as layout and decoration. Manuscripts also reveal their readers’ understanding through marginalia, corrections, notes, and other physical traces of medieval readers at work. By making readers’ perceptions visible as an object of study, manuscripts also provide a “reading” of medieval literary and intellectual culture (and medieval culture all told). At their most instructive, medieval books offer a perspective on medieval structures and habits of thought, one that tells us not only what people read, but also how they imagined themselves reading it. Exploring these modes of medieval reading raises a further question of special interest to scholars of literature: what distinguishes the literary object from other kinds of written production? Is a “literary” manuscript one that contains a particular kind of text—poetry, for example, or acknowledged fictions—or is it a manuscript that is read in a particular way, with particular kinds of attention, for particular ends? From this second perspective, literariness is one potential product of the methods of reading employed to address any book. Thinking beyond such simple distinctions as separating verse from prose, or imaginative from factual reporting, attention to varieties of medieval reading might instead align books such as histories and philosophies with fictional stories because of their

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reliance on narrative modes, but separate them from charts, calendars, or legal documents. Conversely, cipher poems might begin to resemble diagrams more closely than verse narratives. Exploring the kinds of attention that have historically been paid to literary objects, but never taking the category of the literary for granted, this handbook aims to foster attention to the kinds of reading that medieval books can provoke. The second complicated term to consider is medieval. While it is clear in broad strokes what this word means—the term medieval usually designates the historical period between circa 400 and 1500 CE—it is less clear what it implies about the history of those centuries. Insofar as they constitute a discrete era, the Western Middle Ages might be defined by language (Latin), religion (Catholicism), or even the prevalence of the handwritten book before the advent of the printing press. In fact, one could argue that the changing technology of the book is the primary way in which literary scholars mark the end of the medieval era—a more important marker even than the linguistic change from Middle English to modern English, or the confessional change signaled by the Reformation (which was itself perhaps facilitated by the advent of the press). Yet although the shift from handwritten to printed books introduced some far-­reaching changes in the manner in which information technologies were produced, it also sustained many continuities. For one thing, manuscript culture persisted for centuries after the introduction of mechanized printing and continued to shape literary culture in significant ways. Moreover, the shape of the codex arguably makes as much of a difference in intellectual culture as the technology of handwriting on parchment, and the codex persisted through the shift from script to print—and, indeed, persists into the digital era. Accordingly, the shift from scroll to codex, one that happened largely before the beginning of the medieval period, may account for a greater rupture in book culture than the shift—gradual in many ways— from handwritten to printed book. From this perspective, the continuities between medieval and modern books might be as revealing as the differences. Tracing critically the historical shift from script to print requires careful thinking about what defines medieval manuscript culture as against our contemporary experience of the modern printed book. Ironically enough, in noting the ways in which electronic textuality has changed our relation to information, the field of media studies has revealed significant affinities between pre-­print and post-­print reading. “Scrolling” on a computer screen provides an alternative to the technology of the codex, and the discontinuous reading fostered by hyperlinks mirrors some medieval reading practices. And although the middleness of the “Middle” Ages differs from the middleness of the medium—defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the “physical material (as tape, disk, paper, etc.)



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used for recording or reproducing data, images, or sound”—the etymological root of media is visible in the Latin name by which we call the age: medium aevum. In shuttling from one thing to another, both perform a useful kind of intermediation, for in the study of media and the study of the Middle Ages scholars are trying to look squarely at phenomena that have sometimes seemed only ancillary to the real subject of inquiry. The study of manuscripts is a particular historical version of media studies, then, and the insights from both fields can be mutually informing. The example of electronic media raises a final question of definition from my title: what, after all, is a book? What characteristics define this most familiar form of information technology? And how might one understand its definitional characteristics—whether conceived as material or immaterial—to contribute to its meaning? Terms such as text, poem, or work imply particular structures of meaning, modes of interpretation, or methods of composition, suggesting literary forms that are less material than book. If materiality is the key, one might stipulate that a book must take the shape of a codex: the familiar spine-­with-­pages shape that has been a supremely useful technology and the dominant form of reading material for more than one thousand years. But etymology indicates that, in its earliest forms, the word book in the singular meant only one tablet, page, or leaf. The plural sense of pages, that is, of a book as a multipage codex, gradually attached to the singular form of the word as a back-­ formation. Surprisingly distinct from the codex, then, the history of the word opens the possibility that a book in the broadest sense might be any portable material expected to hold text—including printed pages made of paper, but also including handwritten quires of vellum, both wooden tablets and iPads, the Torah, a computer screen, a smartphone, and even objects such as coins. These are all familiar platforms for reading—“inscription technologies,” to borrow a phrase from media studies—that show nontrivial similarities to the objects we are more comfortable calling “books.” Although one might quibble, the more capacious definition is useful for its provocation and for bringing many kinds of reading under comparative consideration. From the perspective of reception, or use, perhaps a book is most helpfully defined by what its readers do with it. Perhaps the word itself signals something significant about readers’ experience of the written surface, something that has become an expressive part of the meaning of the text. But even setting aside the significant difficulties in defining the activity of reading across space and time, it is important to consider how it is changed by the material forms of the thing read. All of these objects include writing on a surface: a billboard, a computer screen, a trade paperback romance novel, a biology textbook, a child’s picture

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book, a phone book, a magazine. Most of these “books” even preserve the shape of the codex. But their marked differences reveal that the way an object looks affects our understanding of how to use it and even what it is—whether durable or ephemeral, mostly text or mostly image, to be read continuously or consulted now and then. A reader approaches the information densely packed in a reference work differently from the illustrations of a glossy brochure. These differences of use point to some commonalities, however: the importance of visual elements in shaping the experience of reading any book and the extent to which reading a material object is always an activity of looking. All books—whether illustrated or not—are three-­dimensional objects that can be manipulated in space, and all letterforms are visible two-­dimensional realizations of sound. Even though its focus is explicitly manuscript studies, this handbook keeps all these definitional questions in mind as it addresses the reading of medieval books. Most of the objects under discussion clearly are manuscripts—they were written by hand. But they are also manuscript books—codices mostly not so different from the objects we call books today. If thinking about reading as a process highlights historical change, calling both medieval and modern reading machines by the name of “books” highlights their continuity. The codex is a remarkably durable and long-­lasting form of reading machine. It is hard to say whether or not it will be superseded soon, but the medieval centuries can provide some of the history upon which we might base guesses about its future. The medieval period is a remarkable time in the history of human communication because of the technological transitions it saw: from roll to codex at the start, and from manuscript to print at the end. One of the ways to understand the importance of medieval books is to compare our experience of them to our own (often unexamined) cultural conceptions of the book in its modern guises. Current media shifts become newly legible through the complicated media ecology of the Middle Ages—a time of change that also set up many of the features of contemporary bibliographic culture, of what we know as books now. The consideration of medieval manuscripts as “books” also highlights an important connection with current methodologies of literary criticism outside of medieval studies. As is already clear, my approach to manuscript studies shares an important premise with the field known as the history of the book: the idea that books are not transparent containers of information but objects whose material shapes and visible forms contribute to their meaning. As Katherine Hayles has put it in Writing Machines, a study of contemporary print and digital texts, “the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean” (25). From one perspective, this refusal to separate content from form has a long heritage in literary study: the



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practice of close reading, or practical criticism, teaches us that the structure of a sonnet cannot be separated from its meaning—these necessarily inform each other, whether they reinforce a single interpretation or, alternatively, conflict. But these observations have generally concerned abstracted literary form: a sonnet, a sestina, a novel, a verse drama. Thinking about material form offers another powerful way to approach this question, for it is increasingly clear both that the content of a book is determined, in part, by its visible structure, and, conversely, that the material form of a book is also determined by the content of its texts. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan first taught us to observe. We cannot simply look through the material form of a book, and it is not so easy to separate (pace the common medieval metaphor) the wheat from the chaff.

Reading Medieval Texts: Chaucer’s “Adam Scriveyn” Despite the many ontological and conceptual continuities between them, medieval manuscript books nonetheless offer information technologies that are different in many ways from modern printed books. As any reader approaching a rare book library knows, manuscripts are precious, expensive, and guarded accordingly. They are unique, like art objects; indeed, many are art objects in their own right. Each manuscript represents a relatively large investment of time and labor, and yet they are imprecise copies, full of errors. The relations among all the parties involved in production are differently configured, too: the making of a medieval book is collaborative, yet often the interactions between author and scribe, author and patron, author and illustrator, and scribe and illustrator are less clear than one might expect. Reader and writer can be specially affiliated by the process of making a book by hand, since the creative activities of the reader as commentator or glossator are functionally and even formally indistinguishable from the activities of the writer. On the other hand, the figure of the scribe intervening between reader and writer looms larger than the figure of the compositor, and what the manuscript reader eventually sees is at least several shaky steps away from what the author intended. Chaucer addresses many of the particularities of medieval book culture directly in a short lyric to his scribe, Adam, a poem that takes as its theme its own manner of production. The poet complains about the scribal culture through which his works were realized: Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe, Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,

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But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe; So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe, It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape. With a startling hostility, the author critiques practices of production that threaten to undo his literary “makyng”: he accuses his scribe of “negligence” and “rape,” a word that most obviously means “haste,” but which might also intimate its more familiar meaning of sexual violence. Although it is possible that the tone of the poem is more joking than it would at first appear—such egregious insults perhaps betray a certain intimacy—the stakes of the jest are nonetheless high. According to Chaucer’s “wordes,” scribal error leads to a false (less “trewe”) representation of the text, to be restored only by the difficult work of authorial correction. Read historically, the poem reveals several specific features of Chaucer’s connection with medieval bookmaking industries: his personal relationship with one scribe, who was commissioned to “wryten” his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Troilus and Criseyde, both works of the 1380s. The poem may even gesture toward the identity of that scribe, since one Adam Pynk­ hurst, a scrivener affiliated with the Mercers’ Company of London, has recently been identified as the scribe of several Chaucerian manuscripts (see Case Study VIII). If the poem is read allegorically, on the other hand, it addresses more universal problems of postlapsarian language: Adam’s desecration of his copy-­ text might be seen to comment on topics ranging from the fall of man to the feminization and victimization of the written word by male writers and readers to the sin of falsifying. Chaucer’s vituperations of his scrivener thus reflect the particular relationship between fourteenth-­century writers who worked closely together and also register more generally the serious impediments to the production of truthful texts in a manuscript culture. Whether historically or allegorically inclined, modern readers of “Adam Scriveyn” recognize the culture of book production that Chaucer describes as a fundamental part of the alterity of medieval literature. The unfamiliar conditions of manuscript culture have been at the heart of medieval studies from the beginning, for the first—difficult—task of early medievalists was to establish and print texts from the manuscripts that bear the only witness to them. As a practical matter, students and scholars today read Chaucer’s poetry reproduced in printed books, shaped by the tools of textual scholarship and analytical bibliography that establish what we should understand to constitute the author’s texts. But encountering medieval literature only in critical editions limits mod-



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ern readers’ access to the full complication of historical understanding. Manuscript study, on the other hand, takes seriously the unfamiliar conditions in which medieval literature was first produced and received as a component of its meaning, linking those conditions to the broadest interpretative questions— even postmodern questions—surrounding the nature of authorship, the interpretative possibilities available to readers, and the status of texts themselves. Without a printer’s imprimatur, the author of a medieval poem is often unknown, its provenance and circulation mysterious, and its textual variations confounding. Many medieval works exist in only one, sometimes fragmentary, copy. The singular manuscript of Beowulf, for example, was damaged (but not destroyed) in an eighteenth-­century library fire, an event that underscores the vulnerability of early literary history to chances good and bad (see Case Study II). Although we are fortunate to have Beowulf (and the other texts in that manuscript), the charred book remains mysterious: it provides no firm sense of the poem’s date, its author, or any early community of readers that might have known it. And uncertainties can be almost as great when medieval works exist in numerous copies. The Canterbury Tales is attested by some eighty-­two fifteenth-­ century manuscripts and an independent early printed edition, but these witnesses do not agree with each other on readings of individual lines of verse, nor on the sequence or even the number of tales that Chaucer wrote (see Case Study VIII). That any contemporary reader most likely had access to only one of these variant versions confirms the distance between modern book cultures and medieval ones. As luck would have it, “Adam Scriveyn,” like Beowulf, also exists in only one manuscript, though we know a bit more about the circumstances of its production. The poem was copied into an anthology of “Chaucerian” verse (Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20) by the enthusiastic fifteenth-­century scribe John Shirley. Shirley attests to Chaucer’s authorship in the title that he almost certainly invented for the poem— “Chauciers wordes . a Geffrey vn to Adame his owen scryveyne” (Figure 1). But although Shirley calls them “Chaucier’s wordes,” and even repeats that they are “a Geffrey,” his attribution of the text is complicated by his general interest in building the Chaucerian canon, which renders his judgments sometimes more than objective. Even the specificity of the names in Shirley’s headnote might serve purposes other than simple historical record: in identifying Adam so precisely, Shirley might have hoped to reinforce the distance between that scrivener and his own scribal activity. And in naming the author as “Geffrey,” as well as “Chaucier,” Shirley perhaps alludes to the well-­known persona of the House of Fame, as well as to the poet. Moreover, given the neat way in which “Chauciers wordes” wrap up a manuscript sequence

10

Figure 1. “Chauciers wordes . a Geffrey vn to Adame his owen scryveyne.” Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20, p. 367. England, fifteenth century.

concerned with writing and knowledge—almost a literary excursus on the “arts of the scriptorium”—one has to wonder, along with Alexandra Gillespie and many other critics: are these words really Chaucer’s or were they perhaps written for the occasion by Shirley himself ? Even if Chaucer is the author of this poem in the strictest sense, the activities of the compiler—Shirley’s choice to copy the text into his collection and his particular placement of it—are part of what creates its meaning. “Adam Scriveyn” itself explicitly raises the questions about authority that its manuscript context so richly implies; for, alongside hostility, the poem records a surprising dependence of author upon scribe. The poet as he is pictured here is not a solitary figure, separate from the physical mechanisms through which his genius is secondarily transmitted, but rather is an active participant in a common struggle through which poems are made. Nor is the medieval author necessarily a primary figure—if anything, scribal activity as it is represented in



11

Chaucer’s lyric precedes authorial work, the copyist first establishing a text that the author will afterward seek to emend. Illustrations of medieval scribes often show them with a pen for writing in one hand and a knife for scraping away errors in the other (see, e.g., Figures 14, 15, 16), but this poem splits those two activities between two people and reverses their priority, making the hasty scribe the initial writer, and the aggrieved author the secondary corrector. Despite the antagonism this small poem registers in the exchange between Geoffrey and Adam, it also illuminates an authorial culture indistinct from a scribal one, a culture of book production in which an author would collaborate in the process not only through such intellectual activities as “renewe”ing and “correcte”ing, but also through such physically laborious ones as “rubbe”ing and “scrape”ing mistakes off of the parchment page. The antagonism is important, though. For this poem also records a complex and self-­conscious moment of transition in medieval literary culture; it demonstrates the author’s direct involvement in supervising the final form in which his texts would take shape. Chaucer’s impatience with Adam shows the ways in which authors necessarily relied on scribes, but it also shows that textual variation—what Paul Zumthor has called mouvance (i.e., mobility of texts) and Bernard Cerquiglini has called variance (i.e., variation of written texts)—was not an unquestioned fact of late medieval literary life. In fact, the status of the medieval author was often and stridently questioned in the period; the debate over the significance of authorship—the instability of the question, rather than an acceptance of the instability of authorship itself—characterizes Middle English textual production. It is most likely that no manuscript of Chaucer’s verse remains in his own hand, and it is probable that none of the surviving manuscripts were made during his lifetime. But the evidence of “Adam Scriveyn” reveals an authorial desire for control over the production of his text; it suggests that the poet might have physically corrected manuscripts even several versions removed from his holograph. Chaucer’s impatience with scribal error perhaps implies a more modern conception of the author, who can expect to depend more surely upon the mechanisms that will reproduce his imaginative work. In fact, Chaucer was one of the first English writers whose works were collected on principles of authorship; many fifteenth-­century manuscripts (including John Shirley’s) brought together poems considered to be “Chaucerian,” and in 1532 William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s Collected Works enshrined the concept of the single-­author book. Although Chaucer clearly worried about the limited control he could exert over his work, perhaps he need not have worried so much. Chaucer’s anxious words to Adam are often read alongside another rhyme-­ royal stanza he likely composed around the same time, the aspirational envoy

12

that concludes Troilus and Criseyde. Just after he instructs his poem (his “litel bok” [5.1789]) to follow humbly behind the great epic writers of classical antiquity (“Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace” [5.1792]), the poet places his work firmly, if uncomfortably, in the literary culture of late medieval England: And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (5.1793–98) Chaucer’s impatience with his scribe Adam is here turned to resignation and fear—an acknowledgment that Middle English language and letters are “diverse,” combined with a dread that his poem will be so mishandled that it will become incomprehensible. The dialectal variation in both speaking and writing late medieval English, the metrical incompetence of scribes, and the possibilities for both literate and oral reception of the poem all limit the reception of Chaucer’s poetic “making,” for the immortality of his verse is potentially compromised by the unpredictable interventions not only of the person who writes it down but also of the people who hear or read it. In the world of printed books, reproduced identically and infinitely, it might be possible to imagine that two readers encountering exactly the same artifact could have indistinguishable experiences of reading and draw identical meaning from the text. But each unique instantiation of a disembodied text in the material form of a manuscript enforces a unique reading experience, and therefore the conditions of reception are as important as the conditions of production in determining a medieval poem’s range of meanings. The production of the poem conditions its reception, but the author loses control over that aspect of interpretation as soon as the text leaves his hands. Chaucer hopes that Troilus will be “understonde,” as he hopes that Adam, once chastised, will write “more trewe,” but his anxiety betrays the impossibility of certainty on either score. One of the factors leading to Chaucer’s doubts about the fate of his Troilus is the question of whether the poem will be “red” “or elles songe.” Although the late fourteenth century was a time of increasing private reading, still relations between orality and literacy remained complex, and the interaction between the two modes persisted as an important feature of Chaucer’s poetry. For example, in the prologue to the Miller’s Tale, the pilgrim-­narrator makes the following apologetic offer to his listeners:



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And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, Turne over the leef and chese another tale. (I.3176–77) These lines move awkwardly between the fiction of the Canterbury pilgrimage, within which a listener might wish not to hear, and the reality of the manuscript a medieval reader holds, whose pages it might actually be possible to turn. In either case, Chaucer’s aside acknowledges the control that a medieval audience might exercise over a text: both over its interpretation—is it amusing or scabrous?—and over whether it is heard or read at all. Although the scribes who wrote the text were in a sense its first readers, subsequent readers controlled the meanings of Chaucer’s poetry in ways that also call into question the sole authority of medieval writers to establish interpretations of their work. For just as it is not easy to discern the line dividing author from scribe in the late Middle Ages, neither is the line dividing author from reader, seemingly more obvious, always plain to see. In a manuscript culture, a reader’s marginal annotations have the same physical status as a scribe’s text; the author’s words and the readers’ responses are both handwritten and (therefore) unique. Moreover, manuscripts often offer more secure information about who was reading than they do about who was composing or writing. Annotations and other personal marks can provide clues about readers’ identities and even their motivations. Marginalia in manuscripts of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, for example, reveal how contemporary readers responded to a figure—that is, Alisoun herself— whom modern readers might find surprisingly anachronistic. Manuscript illuminations can also supply information about how texts were interpreted. The marginal portraits of the pilgrims in the famous Ellesmere copy of the Canter­ bury Tales (so-­called after a previous owner), placed not with their verbal portraits in the General Prologue, but alongside the opening of their tales, suggest that the images of those differing pilgrim voices shaped the reading of this book. Because medieval reading in manuscript differed in practice from modern reading in print—fewer texts were consumed more slowly and more repeatedly— readers often lived with and in their books, as much as authors did. The sometimes-­hostile collaboration between medieval authors and the scribes who preserved their works and the anxiety surrounding transmission and reception of texts in manuscript form are both reflected in the relationship between medieval literary manuscripts and modern editors. Textual editors are effectively both readers and scribes, untangling the work from its material instantiations in often contradictory manuscripts, and reproducing it for other readers in the future. Fully critical editions take on this task most actively, aiming to pro-

14

duce the best imaginable version of what an author originally wrote by collating and rationalizing all the available evidence of any text. Editors may take either a recensionist approach, creating rationalized stemmata in a scientific attempt to reconstruct patterns of manuscript transmission, or an eclectic approach, choosing according to the editor’s subjective judgment which of various readings makes most sense in any given case. Either approach effectively places the editor in an authorial role as much as medieval emendations placed the scribe there. An alternative to critical editions might be so-­called best-­text editions, which rely more or less exclusively on the one manuscript witness judged to be the most full and accurate representation of the medieval text. Best-­text editions elevate scribal practice over authorial intention, relying on the tangibility of the manuscript and honoring its historical connection to the Middle Ages, rather than seeking after an originary (and transhistorical) moment of genius. Given the drawbacks that attend any one of these methods, modern editors have embraced authorial intention or scribal artifacts with more or less enthusiasm, taking a range of different approaches to Middle English texts. The products of their efforts range from photographic facsimiles or diplomatic transcriptions of individual manuscripts to the infamously interventionist editing of Piers Plowman by George Kane and E. T. Donaldson (see Case Study IX). Whatever choices editors make, the editions that convey medieval literature to modern audiences necessarily misrepresent it. They elide the questions about readership, authorship, and textuality that are crucial to our historical understanding of these distant texts, and also the questions that were asked by medieval readers and writers themselves. Can a disembodied text be distilled from the material evidence for it—that is, from the manuscripts in which numerous versions are found? Is one author responsible for the words that we take to represent the text, and if so how diligent should we be in attempting to reconstruct his intention for his creation? How much control does a reader have over interpretation? This last question raises, also, the fundamental conundrum of reading any historical literature: did a contemporary reader necessarily understand texts better than modern readers can? The answer to this last question is not inevitably “yes”—modern perspectives can yield new insights into old texts that suggest that some aspects of them, at least, have the potential to come unstuck in time. But considering a historical work without considering the ways in which its particular circumstances make it distinct from a modern one leaves the process of interpretation incomplete. Thinking about the differences between manuscript and print culture—particularly in the late medieval period when a shift occurred from one to the other—can reorient these texts in significant new ways.



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over the bright border, swallowed tree-­dye, a portion of the stream, stepped again on me, journeyed, leaving behind a dark track. Afterward a hero encircled me with protective boards, covered me with hide, garnished me with gold; therefore the wonderful work of smiths glitters on me, surrounded by wire. (lines 1–14) Once the solution is found—book, Bible, or gospel book—the opening of this enigmatic poem offers interesting evidence for the technical stages of early medieval bookmaking: making parchment, writing with a quill, decorating, and binding. It also places each of those processes into a revealing metaphorical register, so that the poem conveys not only how medieval people made books, but also how they thought about them. From the murderous violence that produces the animal skin, to the repetitive process of soaking and scraping by which it becomes parchment, to the folding and ruling of quires at the edge of a knife, this riddle initially presents the production of a medieval manuscript as a dark and brutal enterprise. Writing the manuscript, however, is imagined as a feathery “bird’s joy” (fugles wyn) that covers the page in ink, or “tree-­dye” (beam­ telge). Finally, the binding of the book is described as a heroic victory, in which a generous lord protects the vulnerable pages with boards and embellishes them with treasures of gold. Like the riddling Old English poem, this “Anatomy” considers the technical stages in the making of a manuscript as they are embedded in cultural understandings. The physical processes of making books can be described through metaphors that illuminate other kinds of social and cultural formations—violence toward animals, for example, or heroic gift-­giving. But the structures of bookmaking themselves also provide striking images that became available to medieval poets, artists, and thinkers of all kinds, revealing the deep imaginative interconnections between medieval books and other parts of medieval culture. Medieval manuscripts are engines of thought, which is itself conditioned and shaped by their material structures.

1. The Writing Surface A manuscript book consists of something written (the text) and something written upon (the support). The support can comprise a number of different materials, ranging from stone to wood to parchment to paper. More than just a detail of technical description, the material identity of the writing support has

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

consequences for the kinds of information that can be stored and for the ways in which that information can be used.

1.1. Earlier Supports: Stone, Wax, Papyrus The earliest writing appears on many kinds of nonliterary objects, such as stones, pots, pottery shards or ostracons, jewelry, walls, triumphal arches, and cathedral portals. Usually such objects function as more than a support for writing, and their other functions take precedence over their transmission of texts. Because inscriptions on marble monuments, for example, have a permanence that other supports cannot offer, even very few words in such an environment can have a powerful commemorative function. A pitcher or a platter with a proverb painted around its rim has such a clear utilitarian purpose that the message of the text does not affect the way in which the object as a whole is used. The function of an object like a pitcher or a platter can affect the message of any text it carries, however, by placing it squarely in a particular kind of domestic environment. Because the motto of Chaucer’s Prioress—Amor vincit omnia (Love conquers all)—is inscribed on a courtly brooch, readers readily recognize it as a quotation from the secular poet Virgil, rather than a nun’s celebration of divine love. An engraved ring might be an example in which influence goes both ways, as the symbolic meaning of the ornamental object is determined by but also reinforces the meaning of the writing upon it (Figure 2). Less utilitarian supports exist primarily to convey textual information. Ivory tablets can be as permanent as stone, if not as monumental, but they do not do double duty as the entrance to a building; their function lies entirely in the texts

Figure 2. Pence de moy (“think of me”) ring. Made in France or England, 1400–1450. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.



The Writing Surface19

Figure 3. Vindolanda tablet. First to second century. British Museum 1980,0303.21. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

they convey. Some objects become amulets by virtue of their texts: for example, Roman curses written on lead sheets (tabulae defixiones), rolled up and nailed to walls or floors, pronounce their maledictions perpetually. More ephemeral supports were often not intended to outlive their immediate textual function at all. In a remarkable survival, the late first-­and early second-­century wooden tablets preserved in Vindolanda record practical matters ranging from military records to birthday invitations (Figure 3), and birch bark was used to similar purpose in Sweden and Russia. A wax tablet offered the combined advantage of a relatively permanent object that could nonetheless be used to convey impermanent texts. Hot wax was poured into a hollow in a panel made of wood, ivory, or even silver and gold (Figure 4). When the wax cooled, a writer could inscribe the surface, which later might be restored to receive a new text. Because they could be easily thus “erased” and reused, wax tablets were valued throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages for bookkeeping and official accounts of all kinds: legal, military, commercial, and governmental. Students also found them an inexpensive mechanism for taking notes, and writers for making early drafts of work that would eventually be copied onto something more lasting. Wax tablets were small, light, portable, and impervious to water, which meant they were often useful to travelers. Despite their practical uses, the tablets themselves provided an opportu-

20

The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

nity for aesthetic gestures, and late medieval examples in ivory were often covered with elaborate decoration. Eight tiny fourteenth-­century wax tablets in a leather pouch discovered in York contain accounts, and perhaps a letter, in Latin, but also what seems to be a Middle English love poem. As this example suggests, tablets were sometimes kept in cases as sets, or even bound together to form diptychs or polyptychs (Figure 5), in a multipart structure that antici-

Figure 4. A Greek wax tablet. Egypt, ­second century. London, British Library MS Additional 34186. © The British Library Board (Add 34186).

Figure 5. Consular diptych. Monza, Italy, ninth century. Arthur Westfell, private collection.



The Writing Surface21

pates the pages of a codex. Hamlet refers to such tablets both literally—he mentions “my tables” (Hamlet 1.5.107)—and metaphorically, when he imagines his mind to be this kind of writing surface: Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there. (1.5.98–101) In imagining his memory as a tablet, Hamlet imagines it as erasable and reusable, a material structure for temporarily recording the petty textual traces of a life. In spite of the multitude of supports one could find for texts of all kinds, papyrus was the main bookmaking material of antiquity. In the early cultures of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, most everyday writing was done on this material, which was constructed from the stalk of the pithy papyrus plant. Pliny’s Natural History gives instructions for making papyrus sheets: Paper of all kinds is “woven” on a board moistened with water from the Nile, muddy liquid supplying the effect of glue. First an upright layer is smeared on the board, using the full length of the papyrus available after the trimmings have been cut off at both ends, and afterwards cross strips complete the lattice-­work. The next step is to press it in presses, and the sheets are dried in the sun and then joined together, the next strip used always diminishing in quality down to the worst of all. There are never more than twenty sheets to a roll. (13.23.77) As Pliny explains, papyrus stalks are cut into strips and flattened. One layer of strips is arranged vertically and another arranged horizontally, and the two layers are glued together with adhesive from the plant itself, released when it is soaked in water. Once the sheets are made, they are dried, then hammered to a smooth surface. Different grades of papyrus came from different parts of the plant: the finest from the interior (charta hieratica, or charta Augusta), and the more commercial grades from the exterior (charta emporetica). Pliny specifies that the sheets are to be joined together in groups of no more than twenty per roll and ordered in a sequence of decreasing quality from the beginning to the end. Even the highest grades of papyrus, however, presented some technical difficulties to writers. The plant’s rough fibers mean that the writing surface can never be entirely smooth; as a result of the inevitable ridges, one can write easily

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 6. Papyrus fragment, record of the basilikos grammateus (royal secretary) of the Heraclid meris. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, P.CtYBR inv. 901(A) (Second text). Roman Egypt, CE 161–80.

on a sheet of papyrus only on the side where the latticed fibers run in the direction of the text. And although papyrus was cheap to produce in antiquity from plentiful and renewable raw materials, it also was relatively brittle, prone to mold (a particular problem outside of desert climates), and liable to other sorts of deterioration over time. Many ancient papyrus scrolls are preserved today only in fragments and require the science of papyrology to piece together and decipher often impossibly tiny sections of text (Figure 6).

1.2. Parchment By the fourth century, most books were written on parchment, which was the primary material for bookmaking in the Middle Ages. Parchment, or vellum, is the skin of a calf, sheep, or goat, prepared for writing. It is sometimes said that vellum describes calfskin or lambskin, whereas parchment is made of a sheep or a goat, but in modern discussions (including this one) the two terms can be interchangeable. As its etymology suggests (pergamenos [Gr.] and charta pergamena [L.]), widespread use of the material originated in Pergamum, in Asia Minor (modern-­



The Writing Surface23

day Turkey). It was developed as a replacement for papyrus when Egyptian rulers banned the export of that material in the second century BCE in order to benefit the library at Alexandria. But parchment offered advantages apart from simple availability: because it is more flexible than papyrus, it can be more easily folded, and so proved better for the construction of the bifold pages demanded by the c­ odex form (bound pages attached to a spine). Parchment is also remarkably durable in many kinds of climate. Medieval manuscripts in parchment are far sturdier than, for example, nineteenth-­century books printed on acid paper, which after only one hundred years have started to fall apart. Its strength meant that parchment was often used in binding stays, or reinforcements for bindings (Figure 7), and it was even used on its own to make some simple, soft coverings for books (Figure 8). Like wax tablets, parchment can be reused if necessary; writing on parchment can be scraped off and the surface reclaimed for a new text. This recycled parchment is called a palimpsest, and such reuse often offers interesting perspective on changing needs and fashions in reading matter. Palimpsests are more common in the early Middle Ages, when fresh parchment was perhaps harder to come by, but they were always fairly common in liturgical manuscripts, which quickly became outdated by changes in church ritual. In this example, a first text in Gothic script was overlaid, perhaps in the eighteenth century, with liturgical music (Figure 9). Figure 7. Binding stay in gutter. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marston MS 62, fol. 22r. Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris. Northern Italy, 1425–50.

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 8. Parchment wrapper (thirteenth-­century French canon law) used on a sixteenth-­century alchemical miscellany. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Mellon MS 43. England, about 1575.

Figure 9. Manuscript palimpsest. Collegeville, MN, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University, uncataloged. © Matthew Heinzelman 2012/Hill Museum and Manuscript Library.



The Writing Surface25

An anonymous twelfth-century text added to a manuscript of Theophilus’s De Diversis Artibus describes an elaborate process of parchment-making: Take goat skins and stand them in water for a day and a night. Take them and wash them until the water runs clear. Take an entirely new bath and place therein old lime and water mixing well to form a thick cloudy liquor. Place the skins in this, folding them on the flesh side. Move them with a pole two or three times each day, leaving them for eight days (and twice as long in winter). Next you must withdraw the skins and unhair them. Pour off the contents of the bath and repeat the process using the same quantities, placing the skins in the lime liquor and moving them once each day over eight days as before. Then take them out and wash well until the water runs quite clean. Place them in another bath with clean water and leave them there for two days. Then take them out, attach cords and tie them to the circular frame. Dry, then shave them with a sharp knife after which leave them for two days out of the sun. Moisten with water and rub the flesh side with powdered pumice. After two days wet it again by sprinkling with a little water and fully clean the flesh side with pumice so as to make it quite wet again. Then tighten up the cords, equalize the tension so that the sheet will become permanent. Once the sheets are dry, nothing further remains to be done. (London, British Library MS Harley 3519, fol. 148r) First the skin is thoroughly washed, then soaked in lime to remove fatty tissue. The hair is removed, and the skin is stretched on a rack to dry. The skin is repeatedly scraped and stretched to remove any inconsistencies of tone or color. And finally it is polished, with pumice or chalk. The lengthy process described here can be reconstructed from visual as well as textual evidence; for example, an illumination of daily activities in a German alchemical manuscript shows one man standing on skins in a vat, while another “unhairs” what is recognizably an animal skin (Figure 10). Parchment is still made today to facilitate calligraphy and bookmaking, but it is also used for other decorative purposes such as interior design (Plate 1). In spite of the intensive process involved in preparing parchment, some traces of its animal origin remain in the final product: one can see patterns of discoloration where the skin was stretched over the spine, for example, and holes in the skin sometimes witness to insect bites and injuries. It is usually possible to distinguish the hair side of the skin (Figure 11a) from the flesh side (Figure 11b) by the follicles that remain visible even after thorough scraping.

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 10. Medieval parchment-­making process. London, British Library MS Harley 3469, fol. 23r. Splendor solis. Germany, 1582. © The British Library Board (MS Harley 3469).

Figure 11a. Hair side of parchment. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 125, fol. 65r. Wycliffite New Testament. England, late fourteenth/early fifteenth century.



Figure 11b. Flesh side of parchment. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 125, fol. 65v. Wycliffite New Testament. England, late fourteenth/early fifteenth century.

The Writing Surface27

This particular anatomical difference became a part of the aesthetics of the manuscript, for most binders thought it preferable to bind hair side facing hair side, and flesh side facing flesh side, to maintain visual continuity within the manuscript opening. The finest grade manuscripts seek continuity even across many openings, for after much scraping the parchment may be so white that it can be tricky to tell hair side from flesh side. The finest grade is uterine vellum—so thin that it was once thought to have been made from the skin of an unborn calf, though now that quality is more often attributed to extensive preparation. All of these considerations serve as somewhat gruesome reminders of the source of these writing materials in the bodies of living animals. Occasionally parchment was stained or colored; for example, some early medieval manuscripts contrast dark, rich, purple parchment with luminous gold or silver ink to create a very specialized kind of luxury object. In the “Royal Bible,” for example, a now fragmentary gospel book made in Canterbury in the second quarter of the ninth century, the opening of St. Luke’s gospel shows the aesthetic possibilities of bright inks contrasting with the darkly colored parchment page (Plate 2). Even apart from such obvious rarities, varieties of parchment can demonstrate regional differences in technique or aesthetic preference. In southern Europe, for example, the parchment is often whiter and “harder” than its northern counterparts—showing evidence of more scraping and polishing to finish the surface (Figure 12a). One problem with this lovely and labor-­intensive preparation, however, is that ink flakes off from the harder surface more readily than from a fuzzier one (Figure 12b), so although the book on smooth parchment is beautiful, over time the writing may deteriorate and grow harder to read. The brutal details of parchment-­making, as well as the ultimate beauty of the final product, inspired widespread metaphoric thinking among medieval writers. We have seen that Exeter Book Riddle 26 acknowledges the violent deaths upon which parchment-­making depends. The comparison of Christ’s crucified flesh to parchment stretched upon the cross became widespread in later medieval sermons, poems, and plays. In the Digby Burial of Christ, for example, Mary Magdalene calls to Joseph of Arimathea by the cross:    Beholde and looke How many bludy letters been writen in this buke? Small margente her is. (271–73) Christ’s wounds are here described as letters so plentiful that they are squeezed into every available space, leaving no margin. Joseph responds: “Ye, this parche-

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 12a. Smooth, white Italian parch­ ment. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 76. Papal document. Rome, 1520.

Figure 12b. Fuzzy, dark, northern European parchment. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marston MS 22, fol. 1r. Book of Hours (Sarum Use). England, thirteenth century.

ment is stritchit owt of syse” (274). In an elaborated version of this image in the “Long Charter of Christ,” Christ can find no parchment for a “charter of fefment” except his “owne skynne,” which would be tugged and beaten on a pillar, washed in blood, inscribed with the “pennes” of scourges, and finally sealed with red wax from his “herte rote.” And Christ’s body is not the only one subject to the disciplines of bookmaking: in the fourteenth-­century alliterative poem Cleanness, the Christian after confession is “polysed als playn as parchmen schauen” (line 1134; polished as plain as scraped parchment).

1.3. Paper Paper is an old material. It was probably first made by the Chinese in the first century, although the earliest surviving paper documents date from the second



The Writing Surface29

and third centuries. Arabs made paper in the ninth century, and the Egyptians in the tenth. In Europe, however, paper was first made in quantity in Spain in the twelfth century. Early paper mills are known in Italy (Fabriano, 1246), coming along later in France (Troyes, 1348), and still later in England (Hertford, before 1494). Paper did not catch on immediately, since its inferior durability was thought to outweigh its relatively lower cost. The rise of the technologies of papermaking is often related to the development of printing, although the connection is in no way absolute. The Gutenberg Bible was sometimes printed on parchment, for example, and manuscripts were often written on paper, both before and after the introduction of the printing press. Moreover, paper leaves are mixed with parchment ones in some books, particularly where parchment is needed for structural support on the outsides of quires, or for making important pages—often those with illuminations—especially sturdy. Medieval paper, like parchment, is the result of a complex process of production: first, rags are boiled until soft; then they are beaten to a pulp, water is added, and the mixture is poured into a frame or mold composed of crisscrossed wires and chains. Another frame—the deckle—is placed over the first one; the height of this second frame determines the thickness of the paper. (Deckle edge is the term used to describe the rough, “handmade” edge of some finished paper.) The pulp is first couched, or stretched to dry with felt in between the layers. One hundred layers, or sheets, of paper, is called a post. After the excess water is pressed out, the sheets are hung over poles to dry. The paper is then sized in animal gelatin to make it waterproof; this is necessary so that it will provide an appropriate surface for writing in ink. Figure 13. Watermark of a shell and a Maltese cross from an incunabulum printed in The Hague, Netherlands, 1479. National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague. Source: http://watermark .kb.nl/search/view/id/00822.

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Like idiosyncratic methods of making parchment, specialized techniques employed in papermaking can provide clues to the origins of any particular sample of medieval paper. Paper handmade in the way just described—laid paper— has individual patterns of wire lines and chain lines, which can sometimes be traced to particular molds. The watermark, or the manufacturer’s imprint woven into the wires of the mold, provides another pattern in paper that can identify it (Figure 13). The design of a watermark—whether a crown, jug, hand, or perhaps a letter—can be used to pinpoint the time and place in which the paper was made. Moreover, the position of the laid lines or the watermark on the finished page can indicate how many times the original sheet of paper was folded to make the volume, providing clues to the method of its manufacture.

2. Writing Once the material for a book has been selected, it must be prepared for writing. Carthusian monastic statutes of the twelfth century describe in great practical detail the items a monk is to have in his individual cell for the making of books: “And for writing, a desk, pens, chalk, two pumice-­stones, two inkwells, a small knife, two razors for leveling the surface of the parchment, a punctorium, an awl, a lead pencil, a ruler, writing tablets, and a stylus” (Guigo I, Consuetudines 28.2). This exemplary description remains the most complete contemporary record of scribal supplies available to modern codicologists. Apart from written testimonials like this one, more complex evidence for the practice of medieval writers—that is, not authors, but scribes—comes from artistic representations of them. Contemporary author portraits provide a trove of images of medieval scribes, beginning with the portraits of the evangelists very commonly found at the start of each gospel in biblical manuscripts. Although one can never assume that the medieval author and scribe were the same—and indeed other sources of information about medieval scribes reveal that most of the time they were not—evangelist portraits nonetheless provide a first look at medieval practices of writing. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are commonly depicted in the process of writing their gospels, an iconography that suggests that medieval bookmakers imagined the biblical authors as looking something like themselves. Sometimes the evangelists implausibly write in already-­bound codices, but in the fourteenth-­century Savoy Hours St. John uses pen and knife to write on a long scroll draped over his elaborate writing desk (Figure 14). A solitary figure of a hermit in a fourteenth-­century manuscript of the Estoire del Saint Graal provides more detailed information about contemporary writing practices: this scribe copies into what seems to be a ruled bifolium from an exemplar care-

Writing31

Like idiosyncratic methods of making parchment, specialized techniques employed in papermaking can provide clues to the origins of any particular sample of medieval paper. Paper handmade in the way just described—laid paper— has individual patterns of wire lines and chain lines, which can sometimes be traced to particular molds. The watermark, or the manufacturer’s imprint woven into the wires of the mold, provides another pattern in paper that can identify it (Figure 13). The design of a watermark—whether a crown, jug, hand, or perhaps a letter—can be used to pinpoint the time and place in which the paper was made. Moreover, the position of the laid lines or the watermark on the finished page can indicate how many times the original sheet of paper was folded to make the volume, providing clues to the method of its manufacture.

2. Writing Once the material for a book has been selected, it must be prepared for writing. Carthusian monastic statutes of the twelfth century describe in great practical detail the items a monk is to have in his individual cell for the making of books: “And for writing, a desk, pens, chalk, two pumice-­stones, two inkwells, a small knife, two razors for leveling the surface of the parchment, a punctorium, an awl, a lead pencil, a ruler, writing tablets, and a stylus” (Guigo I, Consuetudines 28.2). This exemplary description remains the most complete contemporary record of scribal supplies available to modern codicologists. Apart from written testimonials like this one, more complex evidence for the practice of medieval writers—that is, not authors, but scribes—comes from artistic representations of them. Contemporary author portraits provide a trove of images of medieval scribes, beginning with the portraits of the evangelists very commonly found at the start of each gospel in biblical manuscripts. Although one can never assume that the medieval author and scribe were the same—and indeed other sources of information about medieval scribes reveal that most of the time they were not—evangelist portraits nonetheless provide a first look at medieval practices of writing. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are commonly depicted in the process of writing their gospels, an iconography that suggests that medieval bookmakers imagined the biblical authors as looking something like themselves. Sometimes the evangelists implausibly write in already-­bound codices, but in the fourteenth-­century Savoy Hours St. John uses pen and knife to write on a long scroll draped over his elaborate writing desk (Figure 14). A solitary figure of a hermit in a fourteenth-­century manuscript of the Estoire del Saint Graal provides more detailed information about contemporary writing practices: this scribe copies into what seems to be a ruled bifolium from an exemplar care-

Writing31

Figure 14. John the Evangelist as scribe. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University, MS 390, fol. 1r. Book of Hours (Savoy Hours). France, 1334–40.

fully propped up above his desk, both original and copy held open by red weights (Figure 15). A less grand relation of these authorial images, arguably even more self-­reflexive, is the figure (perhaps St. Augustine?) writing on his lap in the margins of a Bodleian Library copy of Piers Plowman (Figure 16). Despite these solitary figures of authors as scribes, most medieval scribal activity was collaborative. The stages of medieval book production might have been performed by one person, but they were more likely to be divided among a number of different people working together in a monastic scriptorium or a commercial workshop (Plate 3). Even the writing itself was often parceled out to many different scribes, whose individual hands can frequently be traced, even though within one volume they might try to copy each other in a uniform style. Occasionally a colophon might identify a scribe precisely by name, date, and even location, but usually scribes worked anonymously and collaboratively. Almost certainly the main scribe was not the same person as the rubricator, who added titles and initial letters and other organizational aids in red ink. Frequently a separate corrector read the work of both scribe and rubricator and made emendations in a different hand. This division of labor was usual for monastic scriptoria, but was adopted also by secular bookshops for efficiency’s sake. In a rare and fascinating image from the margins of a luxury copy of the Ro­ mance of the Rose, the married bookmakers Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 15. A hermit-­scribe at work on a manuscript. London, British Library MS Royal 14 E III, fol. 6v (detail). Estoire del Saint Graal. France or Belgium (Saint-­Omer or Tournai?), ca. 1315–25. © The British Library Board (Royal MS 14 E III).

Figure 16. St. Augustine (?) writing. Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS Douce 104, fol. 52v. Piers Plowman. Ireland (?), 1427.

Writing33

Figure 17. Prickings in right margin; double pricking to show middle of page. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 322, fol. 3r. Liber Hebraicarum questionum in Genesim, etc. England, thirteenth century.

Figure 18. Double vertical prickings. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 401a, fols. 1v–2r. Aldhelm, De laude virginitatis. England, beginning of ninth century.

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

work side by side: he writes capitals and she works at coloring and decorating the letters while finished quires are hung up to dry in the background (Plate 4).

2.1. Pricking and Ruling After a sheet of parchment has been physically prepared to receive writing, the design of the page can begin. First, a scribe creates prickings, small regular holes in the parchment that will help to establish ruling lines (Figure 17). These prickings might be made with a straight edge and an awl, a tool that produces round holes, or with a knife, a tool that produces small slits. Prickings can also be created by a small toothed wheel, or punctorium, which produces evenly spaced holes, but often slightly curved lines. Usually the prickings occupy the far edge of the parchment sheet, intended to be trimmed off or cropped in the process of binding. As a result, they are not always visible in every medieval manuscript. But, when they are present, they can be valuable sources of information about the production of the book. Patterns of prickings can sometimes help to date and localize a manuscript’s origin; for example, two vertical columns of prickings, along the inner and outer vertical margins, suggest an early date, and an Insular (British or Irish) provenance (Figure 18). The patterns of pricking in a manuscript can also help to clarify methods of book production, for prickings in the inner margin suggest that the ruling was done after the leaves were folded to make a quire. The earliest method of ruling involved a drypoint stylus. The stylus applies no pigment to the parchment using this technique, but creates a furrow on the recto (or front side) of the folio (or leaf) and a raised line on the verso (or the back). Although this method of ruling leaves an impression in the parchment, it is relatively invisible, and many sheets can be prepared at once. Ruling by drypoint stylus prevailed in Italy into the Renaissance. Elsewhere in Europe, by the twelfth century, ruling was more often done with a pencil or crayon. This technique increased scribal labor, for scribes now had to rule on both sides of the folio, but the new visibility of the lines does not seem to have necessarily presented an aesthetic compromise. In the fifteenth century, rulings sometimes became specially decorative, executed in colored inks such as red or purple. Ruling is not always dependent on pricking, for a page can be laid out in other ways. Arabic manuscripts, for example, are ruled with a ruling board, or mastara (Figure 19). Pages were pressed into a frame of parallel strings and rubbed to make an impression. Using this technique, the format of the page could be changed between projects, but once the ruling board was set up, each page of the same book would be exactly the same. In allowing the layout of a page, if not the words themselves, to be mechanically reproduced, the use of a

Writing35

Figure 19. Ruling board for paper. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 1973.1. Iran or Turkey, seventeenth–­eighteenth century.

ruling board anticipates print technology. Parchment manuscripts in Renaissance Italy were also sometimes ruled in this way; the break where one string crosses another in the frame reveals that it was a ruling board and not a drypoint stylus that made the indentation. Another more casual method of ruling is simply to fold paper pages to create regular outer and inner margins (Figure 20). If a folio is folded twice vertically, the area of the page is divided into equal margins on the left and right, with a double-­wide space in the center. This method of laying out the page delineates the text block only loosely, creating indistinct boundaries rather than clear individual lines and also leaving residual folds in the page. Another variety of casual ruling, more common for parchment, is to draw in the outer limits of the text block only, separating text from margin on all four sides, but similarly leaving the interior lines of text unregulated (Figure 21). These informal methods of ruling indicate that their main purpose is to delineate a separate text block. Reg-

36

The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 20. Ruling by folding. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marston MS 77, fol. 136v. Epistole Magistri Petri de Vineis. Tyrol (?), fifteenth– sixteenth century.

Figure 21. Bounding lines only, no ruling for text lines. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 632, fol. 8r. Figurae instrumentales testamenti. Italy, c. 1400.

Writing37

Figure 22. Complex ruling for interlinear and marginal glossing. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 403, fol. 7r. Bible with Glossa ordinaria. France, twelfth century.

ularity in the lines of script themselves is less important to the visual character of such a page than the boundaries between text and margin. More complex patterns of pricking and ruling go beyond a simple rectangular block of lines surrounded by even margins (Figure 22). The layout of such a complex page might include not just lines for the main text but also sometimes half lines (marking space for the bodies of letters, and also ascenders and descenders), or designated spaces for the addition of display scripts. If the page is to be laid out for both text and commentary, the ruling patterns can be especially complicated and will most likely be different on each page. Finally, if the page is to integrate image with text, the ruling patterns must accommodate pictures and borders, as well as text, marking their boundaries clearly. There is occasional evidence that the scribes laying out medieval pages made mistakes, so that

38

The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

illustrators, for example, had to paint over ruled spaces. But more often the intricate design of the mise-­en-­page is executed flawlessly. The pricking and ruling of the page lays a significant foundation for the structure of the manuscript, and for the organization of its contents into meaningful and communicative visual structures. The ordinatio of the page, especially in its most complex forms, provides visible and analytic structures for reading and thinking.

2.2. Writing Instruments Early writing instruments vary from the chisels used to carve inscriptions on stone, to styluses used to write on wax or clay tablets, to reed pens and quills used on papyrus and parchment. The reed pen used in antiquity (calamus) gave way in the Middle Ages to the quill. Although a new quill pen made from goose feathers might be called penna (L., feather), feder (OE), or penne (ME), it was still sometimes called a calamus, since the feather had the same reedlike hollowness. Goose feathers could be cut in a variety of ways—that is, given a variety of nibs—and still write easily and legibly on parchment or paper. This natural, renewable technology proved immensely successful, lasting some 1,500 years until mechanized modern pens finally superannuated quills in the nineteenth century. Occasionally, writing instruments were used without any pigment at all. Some glosses in Old High German (or, here, Figure 23, in a manuscript of Aldhelm) were scratched in parchment with a drypoint stylus, presumably in order not to distract from the look of the written text. Varieties of lead and chalk were also used for writing. But the most common way to write with a pen was to use some kind of ink. Early inks for parchment were lampblack or soot mixed with gum and water, but these carbon-­based inks were not waterproof. More permanent inks for writing on parchment were made from iron gall mixed with gum

Figure 23. Drypoint gloss. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 401, fol. 7r. Aldhelm, De laude virginitatis. England, beginning of ninth century.

Writing39

and water. Many medieval recipes exist for iron-­gall ink, ranging from those in Theophilus’s twelfth-century treatise to this one from a fifteenth-­century manuscript: How to prepare the ink: take some gum arabic, gall nuts and copperas and grind each one separately in a mortar. Use the following proportions for each: nine parts of gum; seven parts of gall nuts; five parts of copperas, then dilute separately (the first two substances) in different jars: the gum with 9 parts of water and the gall nuts with 7 parts of water. Leave both to soak for 2 days and 2 nights. Then, mix them and add the 5 part of copperas and let stand for a day and a night and it is then that the ink is made. If afterwards it becomes too thick, dilute as needed with water. (British Library MS Arundel 507, fol. 100v) Although these inks minimized water damage to texts, they also had some drawbacks: their color tended toward brown, rather than black, and they could fade over time. More troubling, the chemistry of iron-­gall ink could eat into parchment, creating small holes where letters had been (Plate 5). Among his other technological innovations, Johannes Gutenberg created a new ink for printing that was less fluid and faster drying—lampblack with linseed oil and resin. The spectrum of ink color varies widely, according to the chemistry of the components and the nature of the recipe. The blackest early ink was called atramentum. By the fourteenth century, coppers mixed in made inks greenish-­blue, rather than reddish-­black. Recipes also exist for red inks, intended for rubrication. The creation of pigments for manuscript painting was also important, and many treatises and recipes explain how that was done. Some of the components—animal, vegetable, and mineral—were very rare and precious: lapis lazuli for the deepest blues, for example; scarlet kermes made from the dried bodies of pregnant female insects found in particular oak trees; or gold leaf. In a fourteenth-­century encyclopedia, James le Palmer illustrated the concept of “color” with an artist’s varied paint pots (Plate 6).

2.3. Scripts The Platonic ideal of a script (a style of writing from a particular place or period) is rarely matched exactly by a scribal hand (the style of an individual person). A manuscript written in a formal Gothic textura, or textualis, by a number of scribes will demonstrate many hands but one script. Conversely, one scribe would be able to write in many different scripts, including a formal textura, as well as a variety of display scripts, and some informal cursive scripts, as well.

40

The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 24. Majuscule letters in the text (“Obsculetur”) and minuscule letters in the gloss. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Marston MS 2, fol. 1r. Canticum canticorum, with glossa ordinaria. Tuscany, fourth quarter twelfth century.

Because medieval scribes did not always respect taxonomies—and because modern paleographers do not always agree in their systems for describing scripts—it is often hard to classify any example of a hand as belonging purely to one single script. Most are amalgamations of letterforms and styles of writing that can be described and classified only in the abstract. In spite of these limitations, analyzing the form and style of handwriting in a medieval manuscript can provide significant information about the book’s origins, purposes, and uses. Paleographical study often provides invaluable clues about provenance and date, for example, as particular scriptoria can be identified by the distinctive scripts they developed and fostered in scribes trained there, and degrees of influence from one area to another can be traced. Because the shapes of the letters in a handwritten book are unique, they can be treated as visual, not just alphabetic, forms. On a formal level, scripts are made up of majuscule letters, those written between two lines; or minuscule letters, those marked by ascenders and descenders, and written between four lines (Figure 24). (Uppercase and lowercase, terms that derive from the two “cases” from which the compositor chooses his type for letterpress printing, do not strictly apply to manuscript letters.) A script may be ceremonial and digni-

Writing41

fied in style, in which case it is known as a book hand, or a calligraphic script. Its letterforms require many individual strokes, or ducts, to form each letter, and few ligatures link one letter to another. Alternatively, practical and unassuming letterforms may require that the pen be only rarely lifted from the surface, in which case the script is known as a cursive, or running, script. Scripts may also be either nostalgic or forward-­looking. The revival of Carolingian letterforms by Italian humanists, for example, signifies not only an interest in legibility and a repudiation of the Gothic aesthetic but also a desire to link their literary productions, through Charlemagne, with the Roman past. The earliest forms of permanent writing in the West were monumental. Bold lapidary styles developed from the demands of the material, from what could be practically carved in stone with a chisel. Classical inscriptions were composed of Roman square capitals (first to fifth century), clear majuscule letters starkly separated (Figure 25). The straight edges and simple lines of these letters lend themselves to carving, but the process of writing is slow: each letter requires many distinct strokes, including the finishing strokes known as serifs, with no ligatures between one letter and the next. This separation of letters enhances legibility, and because Roman capitals are easily read from a distance, they are ideal for the short, declarative texts usually found on civic monuments, tombstones, and walls. The specialized study of such inscriptions—whether on stone, bronze, lead, or clay—is called epigraphy.

Figure 25. Inscription in Roman square capitals; note “Senatus Populusque Romanus” at the top. Trajan’s column, Rome, 113 CE.

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 26. Roman square capitals, rustic capitals, and uncial scripts. London, British Library MS Royal 6 B VII, fol. 4r. Adhelm, De virginitate. England, eleventh–twelfth century. © The British Library Board (MS Royal 6 B VII).

In medieval books, Roman capitals were most often used to mimic these ancient and monumental forms. They dignify medieval copies of important classical works such as Virgil’s Aeneid, and Christian works such as the Bible. Some copies of Virgil are written entirely in Roman capitals, but more often the monumental letterforms lend their gravity to the opening of a text or mark its particularly important divisions. For example, a copy of Aldhelm’s De virginitate uses Roman capitals in a hierarchy of scripts that insists upon an affiliation with older forms and also gives shape and emphasis to the different parts of its page (Figure 26). The text opens with a display script—four lines of large Roman capitals in alternating red and green inks—while similar capitals also punctuate other pauses and divisions in the text. The aesthetic features of this script—the straight, clear lines of the letterforms and the decorative serifs—require an investment of scribal time and energy in many separate and deliberate strokes of the pen. In a transition from the large square capitals of the opening words to the more informal script of the main text, this scribe has used one line of Roman

Writing43

rustic capitals (first to seventh century). Derived from square capitals, rustic capitals are also separated majuscule letterforms, but are less formal, slightly freer, and more rounded—much better suited to a pen on parchment than to a chisel on marble. Examples of distinctive rustic capitals include the rounded U (with a small descender), and the splayed-­out lines of the M. These curved shapes could be written more quickly than straight ones, and the script shows a degree of lateral compression through short horizontal strokes (see E), using less space than square capitals. Some long foot serifs, combined with a short crossbar, make it possible to confuse T and I, and rustic capital A does not have a crossbar at all. Occasional ascenders (see L) and descenders (see U, P) suggest that this majuscule script has adopted some minuscule elements. Nonetheless, rustic capitals were generally reserved for formal display purposes, rather than for whole texts or practical account keeping. A formal majuscule script that tends still more toward the minuscule is an uncial (or “inch-­high”) script (third to eighth century), which was used for the main text on the page. Uncial letters are not joined with ligatures, but because they lack serifs, each letter can be made with one or sometimes two strokes of the pen. The Roman capital M, for example, requires at least six separate pen strokes (four large strokes and two serifs), but the distinctive uncial M can be accomplished in just two (see the contrast between the uncial M in “meae” and the rustic capital M in “mediocritati,” Figure 26, line 5). Uncial letters can therefore be made quickly, but they often take up more lateral space than rustic capitals, producing a wider, less compressed script. And although uncials are also usually majuscule letters, more frequent ascenders and descenders suggest a closer affiliation with minuscule forms (see d, u, p, l). Variations on this script include mixed uncial (with many minuscule forms) and half-­uncial (mostly minuscule forms, with both ligatures and separate strokes). Uncials were often used for Christian texts and grew to be associated with the sacred writings of Christianity. Other varieties of script suggest less weighty purposes. Roman cursive, for example, was not used for monuments to posterity or imposing literary works— instead, it was suited to immediate practical matters such as business transactions, record-keeping, and graffiti. For this reason, very little of it survives, and it can be difficult to establish when it began to be commonly used, but it is possible to recognize two distinct types: popular (or early) cursive (first to sixth century) and official (or late) cursive (fifth to thirteenth century). With little or no separation between letters, cursive scripts can be written very quickly. Sometimes, the fondness for ligature is so strong that two strokes of a Roman cursive letter are more visibly linked to the letters that precede and follow them than they are to each other; even more often, the shapes of particular letters are

44

The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 27. Deed of sale. London, British Library Papyrus 138. Origin unknown, seventh century.

changed in some way by the ones that surround them. As a result, this script, like many varieties of cursive, can be extremely difficult to read. Even official government documents, let alone Pompeiian graffiti, can be impossible for all but the most highly trained specialists to decipher—see, for example, this sixth-­century deed recording a woman’s sale of a piece of land (Figure 27). Some have supposed that the illegibility of lawyers’ scripts in this period may even have been intended to protect the contents of their documents from casual eyes. As Roman scripts responded to their users’ practical needs, national, regional, and even very idiosyncratic local scripts developed. The Beneventan script in southern Italy, prevalent from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and closely associated with the monastery at Monte Cassino, is one example. Its many ligatures show its inheritance from cursive forms (Figure 28). The Visigothic script developed at the same time, mainly in the Iberian Peninsula, with both cursive and book-­hand forms that were influenced by both uncial and Roman cursive.

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Figure 28. Beneventan script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 482.55. Lectionary or missal. Italy, early thirteenth century.

Figure 29. Visigothic script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 481.3. Regula ad monachos. Spain, late ninth to early tenth century.

Visigothic letterforms included an open-­topped a; multiple forms of letters with ligatures; tall, upright ascenders; and the distinctive z that developed into the c-­ cedilla (Figure 29). Most local of all, a type of Merovingian writing developed at the abbey at Luxeuil (France) is so distinctive that it constitutes its own script. Luxeuil minuscule also is characterized by an open-­topped a, a distinctive f, and many ligatures changing the shapes of individual letters (Figure 30). In the British Isles, an Insular script developed from uncial and half-­uncial that was distinctive in its diminuendo effect—large initial letters growing increasingly smaller as they continue across the page (Figure 31).

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 30. Luxeuil script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 481.2. Pseudo-­ Augustine, Sermon 190 (from a homilary). France, 700–710.

Figure 31. Diminuendo effect. Dublin, Trinity College MS 57, fol. 19v. Gospel book (Book of Durrow). Insular, seventh century. Board of Trinity College, Dublin.

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Figure 32. Caroline minuscule. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 73 (fragment). Vitae sanctorum. Italy, 1100–1125.

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

The varieties of regional script detailed above made communication difficult among different areas of Europe. Charlemagne saw the importance of using a more standard and more legible form of script across his empire, and scholars at his court developed what is now known as Carolingian or Caroline minuscule (Figure 32). This open, clear, and highly readable script was very successful throughout Europe circa 800–1200, and its influence was long-­lasting: it later formed the basis for humanist scripts, as well as for twenty-­first-­century minuscule forms. Carolingian minuscule is distinguished by standardization of each letter form, aided by a greater separation between letters and an absence of ligatures. Since ligatures deform or change the shape of the letter from one context to another, avoiding them makes each letter clearer—just as when twenty-­first-­century bureaucratic forms provide boxes to separate each letter of a response, rather than plain lines. Increased use of punctuation, too, helped to make the script open and easily legible. Later Carolingian minuscule grew slightly more complicated, developing more serifs, more compression of letters within words, and more space between one word and another. The system of Gothic scripts that was the dominant form of writing in Europe circa 1200–1500 is in many ways the theoretical and practical opposite of Carolingian minuscule. Whereas the Carolingian script is open, rounded, and horizontally spaced, Gothic scripts are dense, angular, and vertical. Whereas Carolingian minuscule is designed to be easy to read, the highly compressed and heavily abbreviated Gothic styles of writing produce a dense, dark, and often nearly illegible text block. A page of Gothic script often presents as a mass of undifferentiated minims—the single vertical pen strokes that comprise the letters i, n, u, m. The most formal Gothic script is known as textura or littera textualis, words that come from textus (L., woven) and highlight the dense weave of the Gothic letters (Figure 33). Textura developed in many directions, from textura quadrata (“squared”) with distinctively careful, diamond-­shaped strokes at the foot of each minim (Figure 34), to the more rounded forms known as littera rotunda, popular in southern Europe (Figure 35). Because Gothic scripts vary widely, scholars use many systems of terminology for describing them. But all are connected by the visual attributes of the Gothic itself, a broad late medieval aesthetic of visual density, angularity, and compression that also shaped contemporary architecture, painting, and sculpture. The Gothic system of scripts included some varieties that were less formal and calligraphic, tending instead toward a more running, or cursive, appearance. The scripts most often used for late medieval English literary books are of this type: called Anglicana after the areas in England and northern France in which they were most prevalent. Anglicana scripts, which start to appear in the

Writing49

Figure 33. Early Gothic script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marston MS 267, fol. 4v. Vitae sanctorum. Flanders or northern France, ca. 1200.

Figure 34. Gothic quadrata script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 417, fol. 20v. Psalter. England, ca. 1325.

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The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript

Figure 35. Gothic rotunda script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 806, fol. 29v. Book of Hours. Italy, ca. 1450.

mid-­thirteenth century, are characterized by a more rounded and organic look than a pure textura, sometimes including large ascenders and descenders that break up the integrity of the text block (Figure 36). The letters r and s have long forms that dip below the line, for example, and the high ascenders are often looped in letters such as d, b, and h. The Anglicana g often looks like a figure eight, the lowercase a has two compartments, and the w can be especially elaborate. Anglicana hands can tend toward a formal book hand (known as Anglicana formata) or toward more administrative scripts used for court or chancery records. Especially in the fifteenth century, scripts in England were influenced by a new script imported from France and Italy: Secretary. Secretary hands are distinguished by a spiky, angular appearance, with broken rather than curved strokes and tapering ascenders and descenders (Figure 37). English manuscripts of the later Middle Ages often exhibit a thorough mixture of Anglicana and Secretary features, offering telling examples of the distance between idealized templates and actual scribal practice; individual hands instantiate scripts without conforming entirely to them. The density of Gothic scripts had their detractors. Francis Petrarch, for example, complains in old age of the difficulty of reading a style of writing he describes as “small, cramped lettering that baffles the eye; by heaping and cramming everything together, it confuses the spacing and piles up the letters, as though they were riding on top of one another, so that the scribe himself could scarcely read them, were he to return a little later, while the purchaser would really purchase not so much a book as blindness because of the book” (Sen. 6.5).

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Figure 36. Anglicana script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Osborn MS a13, fol. 3r. Pricke of Conscience. England, ca. 1450.

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Figure 37. Secretary script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 116. Prayer roll. England, ca. 1475–1525.

As a reaction to the density of the Gothic text block and its near illegibility, a new humanistic book hand, developed in late fourteenth-­century Italy, returned to Carolingian and even antique types (Figure 38). Few ligatures and greater separation of words and letters make it much easier to read. These new scripts followed a Carolingian model even to the decorative ornament, which included, for example, white-­vine initials modeled on the earlier styles (Figure 39). A humanistic cursive—more “running,” though still legible—also appeared in less formal contexts (Figure 40). The intersection of practical and aesthetic considerations is evident in these developments: concerns about whether a page can be read are never far from concerns about what it should look like. Dating medieval scripts is very difficult to do, beyond identifying the general style of script and the centuries in which it was used. Many years of study, using

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Figure 38. Humanistic book hand. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 111 (fragment). Book of Hours. Italy, 1480–89.

Figure 39. Humanistic white-­vine initial. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marston MS 38, fol. 23r. Vitae et sententiae philosophorum. Florence, ca. 1450–60.

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Figure 40. Humanistic cursive. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 161. Marescalcia equorum. Italy, 1454.

dated and datable manuscripts as points of reference, can train a connoisseur’s eye. But even an expert can be misled by an undated manuscript. Some scribes’ styles are surprisingly conservative: monastic scriptoria usually produced scripts that seem older than those written in commercial contexts, for example, and the age of the scribe can also make a difference. Determining where a manuscript was written is similarly difficult, for scribes may be trained in one place, but then move to another; they may continue to write in the styles in which they were trained, or shift to the aesthetics of their new environment. Scribal hands will always be messier and more variable than the templates scholars use to classify them. Linguistic evidence may provide additional clues to where and when a manuscript was written, but such evidence must also be used with caution. Regional dialects change across time, conventions of language can be affected by exemplars, and scribes adapt to the linguistic as well as the scribal conventions of the areas where they live. Even combining linguistic with paleographical evidence, then, complete certainty about the date or location of a manuscript’s production is rarely possible.

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2.4. Abbreviation In any script, and in any language, scribes could save space and time by abbreviating common words. In relatively open and spacious scripts, such as Carolingian minuscule, scribes typically used fewer abbreviations, but in relatively compressed scripts, such as Gothic, they used more. Although Gothic abbreviations must have been more familiar to medieval readers than they are to modern ones, still the effort of deciphering them must have added greatly to the time involved in reading. Heavy abbreviation surely constitutes one of the most important features that separates medieval reading from the modern experience of books. Medieval habits of abbreviating vary according to context and can sometimes be used to date and localize manuscripts. Especially dense abbreviation is common in legal and scholastic Latin manuscripts of the later Middle Ages, for example, but some scribes of vernacular texts shortened familiar words and syllables, as well. Abbreviations were not used systematically; words might be differently abbreviated by different scribes, or indeed by the same scribe in different contexts. It can also be difficult to determine whether a particular flourish in context is an abbreviation or an otiose stroke. Reasons for abbreviating were, of course, partly economic: shortening words saves space, and therefore conserves expensive parchment. Abbreviations also surely had the effect of excluding uninitiated readers who could not make sense of them. But they were also used for aesthetic reasons: controlling the lengths of single words helps a scribe control the length of lines, so that each one can be aligned (or justified) on the right, as well as the left. In Figure 34, for example, both “mea” (line 3) and “timencium” (line 4) are abbreviated at the right edge of the text block, even though elsewhere the word mea (line 2) is unabbreviated. This regular alignment creates a neat and dense text block, which was a particularly important feature of the aesthetic of the Gothic manuscript book. And whether or not any particular abbreviation was inspired by visual concerns, abbreviation as a practice is a part of a literate culture (one cannot pronounce abbreviations) that always takes a visual, rather than an oral, form. A scribe can create an abbreviation by omitting either the end of a word (suspension) or some of its interior letters (contraction). Names can be suspended, as in the use of initials for W. E. B. Du Bois, or C. S. Lewis; or contracted, as in the rather antiquated styles Thos (Thomas), or Wm (William). Other words, too, are shortened in both ways, such as Ave. for Avenue (a suspension) and Blvd for Boulevard (a contraction). Usually, in a medieval manuscript, a period marks a suspension and a macron marks a contraction. The difference

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Figure 41. XPI abbreviating Christi. Dublin, Trinity College, MS 57, fol. 23r. Gospel book (Book of Durrow). Board of Trinity College, Dublin.

is still preserved in British English, where the titles Mr and Dr are not followed by periods, since they are, strictly speaking, contractions. Suspensions derive from the notation of Roman lawyers—the most famous of these notae juris being SPQR (Senatus populusque Romanus)—since they presumably needed to write quickly and concisely. Contractions probably derive from the reluctance of Greek and Hebrew scribes to name the deity in full, producing such nomina sacra as ds for deus, dne for domine and xps for Christus and its human derivatives “Xpstine” and “Xpstopher” (Figure 41). Abbreviation can also include signs that stand for whole words, signs traditionally known as Tironian notes after their use by Tiro, Cicero’s secretary. Examples include the ampersand (&) for et, which in medieval practice often looked something like a z (see the ampersand in “soule & body,” in Figure 36, line 20). Specialized abbreviation marks can vary widely, and only practice deciphering them makes them familiar. An all-­purpose macron-­like supralinear contraction mark, for example, indicates the omission of a letter—often a nasal letter (m or n)—or even the omission of a whole syllable. See, for example, Figure 16, where expanding a macron means that line 7 reads: “Fides non habet.” Some syllables, particularly common Latin endings, have their own substituted symbols. A mark like a modern semicolon at the end of a word stands for the Latin endings bus and ue. A mark like a numeral three (3) can play this role, as well, or can indicate that syllables ending in et are missing. The abbreviation viz. for vi­

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delicet is a modern descendant of this practice. For a specialized mark meaning um, see Figure 17, where line 5 reads: “in regione chaldeorum.” The same word appears in line 6, including the e this time, but still abbreviating the ending: “chaldeorum.” Superscript letters can also indicate omissions while saving space, such as qo = quo, pi = pri, or w t = with. In Middle English, a common abbreviation is pt = pat; see Figure 36, line 22, where the abbreviation appears in a long line of verse, although the word is written out in full in shorter lines. A letter p with a crossed descender can indicate the omission of a vowel and an r—per, par, por. And a letter p with a looped cross on its descender stands for pro. In Figure 33, line 2 reads: “De qua perfectione.” For a vernacular example, see Figure 37, which shows both “person” (line 12) and “person” (line 13). As this example shows, the systems developed for Latin abbreviation were applied also to texts in vernacular languages, though less consistently and much less heavily. Vernacular systems of abbreviation were generally less strict, as well, so that one mark could mean a number of different things in practice. A word about numbers: medieval scribes usually used Roman numerals, though starting in the tenth century they did occasionally use Arabic ones, and they often mixed the two systems. However, medieval versions of the Arabic numbers 4, 5, 6, and 7 look quite different from modern ones (Figure 42); and Roman numerals use j in place of the final i, for example, iiij = 4, viiij = 9 (see, e.g., Figure 48, “kyng herry the iiij” and “The viij 3er of king herry”). Numbers are often marked off by points. Multiplication can be indicated by a supralinear number, and subtraction of half a unit by a transverse stroke on the descender. Zero often has a vertical or horizontal stroke through the middle. Figure 42. Arabic numerals 1–9. Paris, BnF Fr. 1798, fol. 1r. Jacques Legrand, Livre de bonnes meurs. France, fifteenth century. Source: gallica. bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Plate 1. Modern ­­ parch­ment. Pergamena Parchment and Leathers, Montgomery, NY.

Plate 2. Purple parch­ ment. London, British Library MS Royal 1 E VI, fol. 44r. Gospels (imperfect). Canterbury, England, first half of the ninth century. © The British Library Board (MS 1 E VI).

Plate 3. Scribes at work. Paris, BNF MS Latin 815, fol. 2v (detail). Missal. France, eleventh century. Source: gallica.bnf. fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 4. Richard and Jeanne Montbaston writing and illuminating a manuscript. Paris, BNF MS fr. 25526, f. 77v (detail). Romance of the Rose. France (Paris), 1325-1350. Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 5. Damage from iron-­gall ink. Kassel, Germany, Universitätsbibliothek Kassel 4° Ms. theol. 35, fol. 1r. Psalter. France, c. 1400.

Plate 6. “Color” from James le Palmer’s encyclopedia. London, British Library MS Royal 6 E VI, fol. 329r. James le Palmer, Omne bonum. Southeast England (London), ca. 1360–75. © The British Library Board (Royal MS 6 E VI).

Plate 7. Square notation with tails added in “Sumer is icumen in/ Perspice christicola.” London, British Library MS Harley 978, fol. 11v. Reading Abbey, thirteenth century. © The British Library Board (Harley MS 978).

Plate 8. Insertion in red ink. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 219, fol. 71r. Das Leiden Iesu Christi, Germany, 1450–1500.

Plate 9. Lassoed correction. London, British Library MS Arundel 38, fol. 65r. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, England, 1411–32. © The British Library Board (Arundel 38).

Plate 10. Canceled prayer to Thomas Becket. London, British Library MS Harley 2900, fol. 56v. Book of Hours. England, 1430–40. © The British Library Board (Harley 2900).

Plate 11. Self-­portrait of illuminator Rufillus at work. Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer MS 127, fol. 244r. Passionary of Weissenau. Perhaps Abbey of Weissenau, Germany, late twelfth century. Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cologny (Geneva). 

Plate 12. Rhyme brackets. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS Takamiya 32, fol. 15v. Speculum Misericordie. England, 1425–50.

Plate 13. Monkey antics in the border. London, British Library MS Stowe 17, fol. 176r. Book of Hours. The Netherlands, 1300–1325. © The British Library Board (Stowe 17).

Plate 14. Knight jousting with snail. London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 19, fol. 65. Brunetto Latini, Le Livre dou Trésor. France, 1315–25. © The British Library Board (Yates Thompson 19).

Plate 15. Iconic Christ on the cross with narrative border showing the remorse of Judas. London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 13, fol. 121v. Book of Hours (“Taymouth Hours”). England, ca. 1330. © The British Library Board (Yates Thompson 13).

Plate 16. Initials in alternating red and blue penwork. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 589, fol. 256v. Bible. France, fourteenth century.

Plate 17. Large initial I. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 402, fol. 71r. Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Germany, ca. 1050.

Plate 18. Two-­column page structure with four-compartment miniature in left-­hand column; inhabited initial B in right-­hand column. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 407, fol. 272r. Bible (Albergati Bible). Italy, 1428.

Plate 19. Presentation of text by Lydgate to Henry VI. London, British Library MS Harley 2278, fol. 6r. Lives of SS. Edmund and Fremund. England, 1434–39. © The British Library Board (Harley 2278).

Plate 20. Vernon Pater Noster diagram. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Eng. poet. a. 1, fol. 231v. Religious and didactic miscellany (Vernon manuscript). England, ca. 1390.

Plate 21. Map of routes from London to Jerusalem, with foldout flaps. London, British Library MS Royal 14 C VII, fol. 4r. Matthew Paris, Itinerarium. England, ca. 1250. © The British Library Board (Royal 14 C VII).

Plate 22. Islamic-­style binding with tooling and flap. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Arabic MS 430 Quran. Perhaps thirteenth century (binding is much later).

Plate 23. Biccherna (or tavoletta di Biccherna). Siena, 1343. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Plate 24. Codex rotundus. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek MS 728. Flanders, 1450–75.

Plate 25. Cordiform, or heart-­shaped, book. Paris, BNF Rothschild MS 2973, fols. 8v–9r. Recueil de chansons italiennes et françaises. France, 1470–80. Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

2.5. Punctuation Apart from the words themselves, other systems of signs on the manuscript page help to organize its meaning. These systems include punctuation, or marks with no linguistic value that nonetheless help to makes sense of linguistic signs. They also include visible hierarchies of coordination and subordination such as those indicated by writing in different scripts, different sizes, or ink of contrasting colors. One could, in fact, consider such hierarchies of script another kind of punctuation, as they use purely visual, nonlinguistic cues to show a reader how to categorize words and letters for easier comprehension. Word separation itself can be considered a most basic type of scribal punctuation, for the continuous script of the earliest manuscripts did not even leave space between words (Figure 43). Some Roman documents, in a practice derived from inscriptions, insert a point or a slash between words, but this is by no means universal. Ancient punctuation was idiosyncratic and inconsistent, reflecting individual readerly interpretation as much as any organized system of signification emanating from authors or scribes. By the time of Gregory the Great (d. 604), a decline in literacy in post-­Roman Europe meant that some non-­verbal guides were needed to aid in decoding text. Systematizing began with punctuation of the Bible, since it became clear early on that such inconsistencies as grouping words differently could affect the meaning of biblical verses, and that standardizing punctuation could help to standardize interpretation. Beyond word separation, medieval punctuation included three levels of pause: a slight pause, indicated by a virgule, or forward slash (/); a median pause, indicated by a punctus, or point (.); and a period, or full stop, indicated by the punctus elevatus, a point and comma arranged vertically like an inverted version of a modern semicolon (;). All of these marks can be seen in Figure 44. The punctus interrogativus, or question mark, indicated by a point surmounted by a mark like a tilde, was rarely used. Medieval scribes varied in their practices, and many manuscripts have such light punctuation as to seem (to modern eyes) unpunctuated; the relative absence of any punctuation is one of the most likely surprises to come from a first encounter with a medieval text in its original form. In both vernacular and Latin texts, punctuation corresponds with performance habits as much as grammatical units—that is, pauses do not necessarily designate units of meaning but places where a breath would be necessary in oral delivery of a text, or places where the intonation of the reader should change. Modern punctuation is fundamentally a matter of making the text on the page easily comprehensible to the eyes, but medieval punctuation was much more

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Figure 43. Continuous script. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 440 (fragment). Bible. Northern Italy, ca. 700.

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Figure 44. Punctus, punctus elevatus, and virgule. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 823, fol. 3r (detail). Macer floridus. Germany, twelfth century.

like stage directions for the voicing of texts and relied upon a culture of oral delivery and even imagined oral delivery for its context. From this point of view, vernacular spelling can be seen to operate almost as a kind of punctuation, in the sense that its visual representation of a text can point towards a series of spoken words. Like virgules and full stops, spelling can provide guides to performance, in the form of pronunciation. Medieval English scribes were famously unconcerned with spelling, and their idiosyncratic practices often reflect the spoken language, providing clues as to when and where a text was written. A few attempts at standardization were made: a writer who names himself as Orrm introduced a rigorous system of spelling in his thirteenth-­ century Orrmulum—which, however, appears to have been read by almost none of his contemporaries (see Case Study IV). Thomas Hoccleve, a fifteenth-­century clerk in the office of the privy seal, also seems to have elaborated a system of relatively standard spelling, perhaps out of bureaucratic need. But most Middle English scribes worked in a textual environment that tolerated both variation and idiosyncrasy in these “accidental” features. Modern editors of medieval manuscripts almost always regularize both spelling and punctuation for the convenience of readers whose expectations have been shaped by print culture.

2.6. Musical Notation Closely connected to marks of punctuation—signs that show how words are to be construed or how they should be read aloud—are signs that indicate how they might be sung. The subject of medieval musical notation is too large for detailed consideration here, but, because music in manuscripts is often closely connected with text, it is worth considering how marks that indicate musical performance might engage some aspects of literary form. Texts of song and chant are themselves the earliest system of musical notation in medieval manuscripts, for the presence of familiar words alone might summon up an equally familiar melody. “Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early

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light”: if you know this tune, these words will unfailingly evoke its music. Similarly, the words of the antiphons and hymns chanted repeatedly by medieval monks could summon their melodies to memory. When the earliest musical marks emerged separate from words, they still worked to reinforce remembered musical lines. Early medieval notation was always added to texts to be sung (instrumental music was notated much later), and both word division and syllabification played a role in how the musical signs were configured. Even when multiple notes were joined together in combinations called ligatures, the musical scribe always lifted his pen at the end of a word—that is to say, the music was never segmented differently from the text, but was always imagined to align with it. Melisma, or the singing of multiple notes on one syllable, allowed for musical shapes to separate from textual ones by extending and elaborating the melody that fit to a single verbal unit. But the melodic sequences that were sung, for example, on the last syllable of the word alleluia were sometimes remembered through additional poetry that was set to them. The experiential connections between words and melodies remained close. The earliest system of musical notation separate from words themselves took the form of neumes (the term deriving either from Gr. pneuma [breath] or neuma [sign]), small marks that indicate the relative pitch of each note, whether it is lower or higher than the one before it. These neumes appear with some local variation in manuscripts of the ninth and tenth centuries from musical centers such as St. Gall, Metz, and Aquitaine. A dot, or punctus (.), signals a relatively lower note, and a slash, or virga (/), signals a relatively higher one. Neumes also indicated the relative pitches of notes in clusters of twos and threes. Initially, neumes appeared in campo aperto (“in the open field”)—that is, in the empty spaces above lines of text, without any kind of staff lines or other kind of guide (Figure 45). Even without staff lines, heightened, or diastematic, neumes used the vertical axis to show differences of pitch more precisely. This seems a natural extension of a notational system concerned with relative pitch—notes are, after all, conceived as “high” or “low”— but it can be difficult to determine whether early neumes are deliberately or haphazardly heightened. An upward slope in a row of neumes might represent rising pitches, but also might reflect an unconscious drift of the scribe’s pen. In order to show pitches more precisely, some musical scribes added a line that could show the tonal center of a melody. Guido d’Arezzo (991/992 to after 1033) is credited with the introduction of multiple horizontal lines—a four-­ line musical staff—against which a pitch could be exactly measured, thus enabling the sight-­reading of new music. Guido also named the notes with the syllables that begin each line of the hymn Ut queant laxis, creating the syllables of solfège still used today: ut (later do), re, mi, fa, sol, la. Staff lines made use of clefs to signal

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Figure 45. Neumes, possibly heightened. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 482.26, fol. 1v. Antiphonary. Germany, twelfth century.

which lines represented which notes, and a special sign known as a custos (or “guardian”) appeared at the end of one musical line to help the singer quickly anticipate which is the first note on the next. These innovations provided a technology to support performances that were not derived from memory.

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With the coming of the Gothic pen and its thicker nib, the neumes that appeared on staff lines became thicker and more rectangular: such composers as Leoninus and Perotinus, connected with the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, wrote polyphony around the turn of the thirteenth century using this square notation. Groups of square notes, connected in ligatures of twos and threes, created patterns that could convey rhythmic information through the relation of one group to another. But square notation soon began to include some intrinsic information about rhythm, as well as pitch—through the shapes of the notes themselves. In “Sumer is icumen in,” the earliest poetry in English to be preserved alongside musical notation, one can see the beginnings of this distinction: the long notes (longa) have added tails, and the short ones (brevis) do not (Plate 7). The explicit notation of rhythm is just one of many ways in which this manuscript communicates information about performance; the page also includes verbal instructions about how to perform the round, and also how to perform the bass line (or pes). Two poems are offered as lyrics set to this melody: a springtime celebration in English written in black, “Sumer is icumen in,” and a Latin Christological hymn written in red, “Perspice Christicola.” A red cross marks the moment in the music when the second voice of the round should enter. The musical notation, the performance directions, the English poem, and the Latin one are all offered on this complex page as simultaneous and interconnected systems for expressing the sounds of the song and guiding its performance. Once beats or pulses (known to medieval music theorists as tempora) were subdivided into smaller units of twos and threes, they could be infinitely subdivided. Differing shapes of semibreves, minims, and so on allowed for ever more complex and nuanced rhythms to be notated. Contrasting ink colors (e.g., red and blue) and additional dots expressed the increasingly complex rhythms that characterized the compositions of this ars nova—the “new” musical art of the fourteenth century that retrospectively recast the polyphony of the thirteenth century as an ars antiqua, or ars vetus. Ever increasing rhythmic complexity in the fifteenth century, known as the ars subtilior, went along with new graphic possibilities for notating rhythmic nuance: open and solid noteheads, notes with ascending and descending tails, notes with ascending and descending flags. The complex and varied visual systems for notating medieval music raise interpretative questions that touch on more literary performances. How can ephemeral performance of either words or notes be represented, notated, or expressed in two visual dimensions? Does notation describe performances that took place in the past, or prescribe those that are yet to come? Does it record what performers are already doing, or enable them to do something new? Me-

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dieval musical scribes aimed to communicate performative choices beyond pitch and rhythm, choices such as voice quality, articulation, “liquescence,” gesture, and variations of emphasis. These qualities surround the inscription of any kind of performance, including dramatic performances that depend upon declaimed words more than sung ones. Like musical scores, dramatic manuscripts exist in relation to performance, whether they script a performance to come or recall one that has already happened (see Case Study XII). A revealing example is found in the section of the Passion narrative in the gospel of Mark in Figure 46. Above the words, one can make out initials that indicate the manner in which words should be voiced: C (celeriter, or “quickly”) and T (tenere, “to hold”). These indications of tempo or emphasis instruct readers in how to create a dramatic presentation of the Passion story. But they also function like early neumes to prompt the manner in which these words should be declaimed. They might even indicate that the words were to be sung. Figure 46. C and T marked in text as indi­cators of performance style. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 482.20, fol. 1v. Gospel of Mark. Possibly Germany, ca. 990–1010.

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2.7. Correction Scribes often made mistakes, some of which can be categorized into familiar types: dittography (repetition of words or letters), eyeskip or homoeoteleuton (jumping back to a similar word and omitting a passage), and homoeoarchon (confusion of words with the same beginning). Correction can be applied at any point after a mistake is made. The main scribe of a manuscript can be his own simultaneous corrector, but in a more professionalized scriptorium or bookshop a second reader, something like a modern proofreader, might come along later to judge accuracy and correct the new copy against an authorized original. That official corrector makes corrections in another hand besides the main one, and sometimes in another ink. Although the makers of some fine manuscripts appear to leave mistakes rather than blot the beauty of the page, others would rather show that the work of correcting has been done than preserve the visual effect of the main scribe’s work unspoiled. And correction could also be seen as a work of Christian mercy; Oswald de Corda, a Carthusian monk in the fifteenth century wrote a Latin treatise on spelling, Opus pacis, that interpreted the work of reconciling text and copy as tantamount to reconciling enemies in Christ. Some correction occurred long after a manuscript’s original production, when a later reader sought to bring the work in line with new or different standards. Correction takes many forms. Scribes used knives to scrape mistakes off of parchment, and for this reason standard scribal iconography includes both a pen and a knife (see, e.g., Figures 14, 15, 16). A point below a letter or a series of points below a word can be a mark of expunction, or, specifically, subpunction, indicating the erroneous material more unobtrusively than a line crossed through. Sometimes omitted material is inserted in the margin, with a caret as in modern usage and a signe de renvoi (literally, “sign of return”) similar to a modern asterisk (Figure 47). Sometimes the correcting calls attention to itself for visual effect, as when the correcting ink is red (Plate 8). Other times the need to correct the text is taken as an opportunity to decorate, as in the case of a stanza lassoed into place in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (Plate 9). Of course, readers can make corrections to a Figure 47. Caret and signe de renvoi. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 781, fol. 3v. Cicero, De amicitial. Italy, [1432?].

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manuscript at any point, and often the correcting hand will long postdate the original construction of the book. This is especially obvious in medieval English books that are corrected for theological “errors” by post-­Reformation readers. In a fifteenth-­century Book of Hours, for example, the prayer to Thomas Becket is canceled, even as the image of the saint remains untouched (Plate 10).

2.8. Annotation Apart from the main scribe’s work, other kinds of writing can be just as important in determining a manuscript’s meaning. Annotation is writing in response to a main text, either by the main scribe or by someone else, sometimes long after the manuscript was originally constructed. Often annotations take the form of marginalia, notes and references marked around the outer edges of a text to record one reader’s thoughts or to direct future readers (Figure 48). Annotations of this kind might highlight textual sections of particular interest or offer references to comparative material; they might also be pen trials of little or no relevance to the central text. They can be quite formal, pointing in directions for further study, or they can be more casual, revealing a particular historical reader at work. Annotation can be pictorial, as well as textual: the familiar pointing hands known as manicules serve this function (Figure 49), and sometimes marginal pictures highlight, as well as comment on, important passages of text (Figure 50). Formal glosses fall into the category of annotation, even though they often originated in a codified, standard form along with the main text and traveled with it. They are so integral that they are included in the textual design from the beginning, and space is carefully planned for them alongside or within the main text block. The smaller or less formal script that often distinguishes the gloss does not reduce its importance on the page; the difficulty of preparing the complex layout of such a dual-­purposed page and the complications of matching the parallel texts in such a way that the gloss is commenting on the proximate text mean that the gloss often becomes prominent in both physical and imaginative space (Figure 51). Although an anonymous annotator might be subsidiary to the author, some annotators had their own kind of literary fame: these range from Macrobius, whose late antique commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio was so influential that no copy of the Ciceronian text exists without it, to Nicholas of Lyra, whose postilla (or biblical commentaries) traveled with authoritative editions of scripture into the Renaissance. Some medieval authors provided glosses for their own work, such as Giovanni Boccaccio for his Teseida, or John Gower for his Confessio Amantis. Ultimately, as clear as the hierarchy at first seems to be, it can be hard to make a universal distinction between text and gloss.

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Figure 48. Three separate annotating hands. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 323, fol. 149r. Brut. England, ca. 1450.

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Figure 49. Manicules. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 43, fol. 17v. Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon. England, 1325–50.

Figure 50. A marginal drawing of an ox. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS Osborn a55, fol. 36v. Mandeville’s Travels. England, 1440.

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Figure 51. Bible with formal gloss. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 1, fol. 149v. France, ca. 1250.

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2.9. Editing Routine processes of correction and annotation involve medieval scribes and readers in the fundamental work of editing. And the activities of these medieval editors can be paralleled in the concerns of their modern descendants: medieval scribes often make detailed and well-­informed choices about wording, for example, whether they are seeking to increase clarity, update older vocabulary, or demonstrate fidelity to an exemplar. Medieval compilers bring texts together along an appropriate axis, adjusting them in ways that will allow them to work together well, as do modern anthologists. Medieval annotators, like modern scholars, add useful guiding paratexts in the form of glosses and other explanatory matter. All of this work, for medieval and modern editors, serves the goal of making preexisting texts accessible to future readers. Recognizing the commonalities among these kinds of editing highlights the influential role played by all editors in producing medieval texts. Textual criticism, the work of editing medieval texts from their manuscripts in order to produce printed versions, is where the modern study of manuscripts began. Scholars needed to establish texts so that readers could both determine common objects for discussion and also share them widely. The practice of editing will always be important to the study of manuscripts, since editors in every generation return to the manuscripts to create fresh versions of medieval texts. There is no easy bridge over the historical gap, but different varieties of edition address the problems of the medieval text from different angles. The most synthetic editorial practice, creating a critical edition from a careful consideration of all of the manuscript witnesses, bears little relation to usual medieval textual practices—since scribes rarely had access to more than one exemplar from which to copy. Moreover, the text created by such a procedure is not a medieval text: it exists nowhere in the historical record. The critical edition imagines a Platonic ideal of the text that can be reached by scientific and logical methods of deduction from the chaos of the remaining evidence. But this procedure relies on assumptions that are not always warranted: that scribal error is distinguishable from authorial revision, that errors descend by copying but cannot arise independently, that stemmata always break into two branches. Conversely, a facsimile edition or a diplomatic transcription of a single manuscript respects the singularity of the medieval artifact, but will limit, if the text is multiply attested, the information available for modern understanding of it. Even if the text exists in only one copy, some degree of editing can correct obvious error. Parallel-­text editions provide a glimpse of the range of possibilities in multiple manuscripts, but only by compromising the experience of reading as anything

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other than a scholarly exercise. Electronic editions can painlessly provide the ultimate in parallel texts, enabling kinds of analysis that remain impossible without digital methods. But they remain difficult to read, as opposed to consult, and are not ideal for the classroom. A useful compromise might be the best-­text edition, for which an editor selects a single manuscript with a strong textual tradition to form the basis of the text, while also considering variants from other manuscripts and emending where it seems wise. An apparatus criticus, relegated to the bottom of the page or the back of the book, reflects the variance of medieval texts. This kind of edition recognizes the benefits of hewing close to the medieval evidence while also valuing the kind of editorial discernment that can produce an improved text. Given that we cannot circulate individual manuscript copies, how should editors best bring medieval texts to modern readers? There are benefits and limitations to every choice. Increasingly, though, as digital facsimiles become commonly available, twentieth-­century editions have the opportunity to preserve the multiple paratexts of the manuscript record: from page layout (ordinatio), to script, to punctuation, initials, and illumination. These paratexts have become an ever more visible part of the meaning of the medieval text.

3. Decoration and Illustration Just as it can be challenging to separate text from gloss on the pages of a medieval manuscript, so it can also be difficult to draw a clear line between writing and decoration; some kinds of lettering are decorative, and some decoration fulfills textual purposes. The connections between writing and more obviously visual arts were recognized in metaphor, such as this image of graduated mystical experience from the 1320 Trattato della Perfezione of the Siennese Franciscan Ugo Panziera da Prato: “In the first stage when the mind begins to contemplate Christ in these circumstances, he seems to be written into the mind and imagination; in the second he appears to be outlined; in the third outlined and shaded; in the fourth colored and lifelike; and in the fifth he seems to be incarnate and in relief.” The visionary begins with writing in this example, progressing to outlining, shading, painting, and sculpting in ever-­ increasing knowledge of Christ. This is a meaningful sequence, as we have already seen that visual decoration is a natural outgrowth of scribal work: script, punctuation, and even spelling can function in concert with ornament or iconography to create the look of a page. Moreover, as the passage suggests, images are an especially forceful, emotional, memorable kind of sign, one that even has the potential to bring a viewer ever closer to mystical experience of the divine. Sometimes the scribe and the artist of a manuscript were the same person, and in these cases it can be difficult to tell whether writing preceded decoration,

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other than a scholarly exercise. Electronic editions can painlessly provide the ultimate in parallel texts, enabling kinds of analysis that remain impossible without digital methods. But they remain difficult to read, as opposed to consult, and are not ideal for the classroom. A useful compromise might be the best-­text edition, for which an editor selects a single manuscript with a strong textual tradition to form the basis of the text, while also considering variants from other manuscripts and emending where it seems wise. An apparatus criticus, relegated to the bottom of the page or the back of the book, reflects the variance of medieval texts. This kind of edition recognizes the benefits of hewing close to the medieval evidence while also valuing the kind of editorial discernment that can produce an improved text. Given that we cannot circulate individual manuscript copies, how should editors best bring medieval texts to modern readers? There are benefits and limitations to every choice. Increasingly, though, as digital facsimiles become commonly available, twentieth-­century editions have the opportunity to preserve the multiple paratexts of the manuscript record: from page layout (ordinatio), to script, to punctuation, initials, and illumination. These paratexts have become an ever more visible part of the meaning of the medieval text.

3. Decoration and Illustration Just as it can be challenging to separate text from gloss on the pages of a medieval manuscript, so it can also be difficult to draw a clear line between writing and decoration; some kinds of lettering are decorative, and some decoration fulfills textual purposes. The connections between writing and more obviously visual arts were recognized in metaphor, such as this image of graduated mystical experience from the 1320 Trattato della Perfezione of the Siennese Franciscan Ugo Panziera da Prato: “In the first stage when the mind begins to contemplate Christ in these circumstances, he seems to be written into the mind and imagination; in the second he appears to be outlined; in the third outlined and shaded; in the fourth colored and lifelike; and in the fifth he seems to be incarnate and in relief.” The visionary begins with writing in this example, progressing to outlining, shading, painting, and sculpting in ever-­ increasing knowledge of Christ. This is a meaningful sequence, as we have already seen that visual decoration is a natural outgrowth of scribal work: script, punctuation, and even spelling can function in concert with ornament or iconography to create the look of a page. Moreover, as the passage suggests, images are an especially forceful, emotional, memorable kind of sign, one that even has the potential to bring a viewer ever closer to mystical experience of the divine. Sometimes the scribe and the artist of a manuscript were the same person, and in these cases it can be difficult to tell whether writing preceded decoration,

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or vice versa. More often, the artist or artists who decorated a manuscript were different from its scribe or scribes and might not even have worked in the same space. Furthermore, the artists responsible for borders and initials were usually not the ones responsible for the painting of figural miniatures, and often one can detect many hands at work in the decoration of a single manuscript. As Ugo’s metaphor suggests, the decoration of a manuscript most often followed the writing of it, beginning with underdrawing in lead point, also known as plummet, perhaps darkened with ink. Then, if gold foil or gold leaf was to be used, artists applied an adhesive in those spots, affixed one or more layers of thin, beaten gold, and burnished them with a stone or an animal’s tooth. Next, artists painted in the solid colors, afterward adding highlights and modeling. Occasionally, instructions to decorators and illuminators appear in the margins of manuscripts, even in cases where the instructions were not fulfilled (Figure 52). Where decorative programs were not completed, blank spaces or partially completed drawings can reveal the multiplicity of hands at work and the staggered process of decorating a manuscript. And a few artists’ self-­portraits provide self-­ conscious glimpses into that process: a twelfth-­century portrait of one “Brother Rufillus,” for example, shows the artist working with paint pots and a knife for erasures as he paints the very initial letter in which he sits (Plate 11).

3.1. Rubrication Scribes writing the bulk of a text in the primary color, usually black, will leave space for important phrases, words, or letters to be filled in with an eye-­catching contrasting ink. Usually this ink is red, hence the term rubrication (L. ruber, red). A rubricator usually works after the main scribe or scribes have finished, creating an apparatus by highlighting certain parts of the text. In addition to calling attention to whole words, rubrication can also include other marks of emphasis, such as accenting initial letters with red touches, underlining important words or phrases, adding paraph marks at textual divisions, and sketching brackets that indicate patterns of rhyme (Plate 12). Rubricated words usually mark important divisions in the text: first letters of chapters, headings of sections, or even captions of pictures. Sometimes correction is done by the rubricator, as well, and in that case, paradoxically, it is scribal errors, as well as important divisions of the text, that leap off the page. Like punctuation, rubrication occupies a middle ground between writing and decoration—it is writing decorated for purposes of emphasis and textual organization. Interestingly, the red pigment most often used for rubrication is made of red lead, or minium (L. min­ ium, the ultimate origin of the word miniature). Rubricated words, like all forms of display scripts, have an equally communicative and decorative purpose.



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Figure 52. Unfulfilled instructions to an illuminator in English: “Make the armye of the [passion?] of our lord.” Oxford, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Lat. liturg. e. 17, fol. 19r. Prayers and offices. Northern England, 1400–1410.

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3.2. Line Fillers Within the text block, line fillers composed of abstract designs often extend a line of text to its right margin (Figure 53). Commonly found in psalters and in other books that include verse, line fillers testify to a desire for a solid text block, to a horror vacui in the aesthetic of the Gothic page. In some ways the opposite of textual abbreviation, which can also be used to regularize the space a text

Figure 53. Geometric line fillers. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 80, fol. 1r. England, thirteenth century.



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Figure 54. Grotesques in line fillers. Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MS 102, fol. 10v. Book of Hours. England, end of the thirteenth century.

occupies, line fillers respond to the imperative of the regular text block by adding visual material. When a line of poetry ends before the physical space is completely used, the remaining space provides an opportunity as well as a necessity for an artist to fill in. Sometimes simple and nonrepresentational, line fillers (much like borders) at other times provide spaces for aesthetic play: grotesque creatures, human heads, and animals all can inhabit the narrow space of the textual line (Figure 54). While line fillers are especially common in books like psalters, their ubiquity in all kinds of manuscripts highlights again the extent to which the medieval text block is a visual form that balances verbal with nonverbal material to fulfill the aesthetic purposes of the page.

3.3. Borders and Marginalia Line fillers can be thought to occupy marginal spaces within a text block. But the large, empty margins surrounding the text provide further spaces for artistic decoration, just as they provide spaces for formal textual commentary or casual jottings by readers. Decorated borders offer evidence for the level of care and expense taken in the production of a manuscript, and their styles can be traced for the purpose of localizing and dating the manuscript. A common type of late medieval border is the simple bar frame, often with spraywork at the corners, or vegetal decoration winding around the margins (e.g., Figures 52, 66; Plates 4, 18, 20). But while some border decorations consist of seemingly routine abstract designs, others offer opportunities for artistic license and extended creativity—

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geometric designs, acanthus leaves, spraywork, and even fantastic creatures inhabit the most ornate, mixed borders (e.g., Plate 10). In fifteenth-­century northern European manuscripts, the borders sometimes offer a collection of highly illusionistic images: jewels, butterflies, or flowers (Figure 55).

Figure 55. Trompe l’oeil borders. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­ script Library, Yale University, MS 663, fol. 33r. Book of Hours. Bruges, 1500–1525.



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In marginal spaces apart from the borders, too, a remarkable artistic energy is on display, following an aesthetic imperative to fill open space. Whether within and around the borders, or in a truly peripheral and unbounded position in the margins or the bas-de-page, the edges of medieval manuscripts are often and famously filled with drolleries or grotesques: fantastical, often hybrid, creatures of the imagination that seem to offer a riposte to or an inversion of the orderly images at the center. Common motifs include the antics of monkeys (Plate 13), or—mysteriously—a knight jousting with a snail (Plate 14). Just as often, manuscript margins are filled with images of humans involved in various activities, or, as in the famous pilgrim portraits of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales (see Case Study VIII), single figures marking their appearance in the text. The sequencing of these images sometimes even provides the continuity of narrative, as in the Taymouth Hours, where an iconic large crucifixion image in the center is paired with a scene in the lower marginal space of the page showing one of the events of the Passion story: a repentant Judas returning his thirty pieces of silver to the temple (Plate 15).

3.4. Initials Closely related to borders, and indeed often structurally connected to them, initials offer another significant site for the decoration of the medieval page and also for the exploration of relations between text and image. The embellishment of the large letters that mark major divisions in a text reinforces the visual properties of any letter; written language is always a visualization and perhaps even a “decoration” of words that are otherwise sounds. While a decorated initial continues to function alphabetically, its ornamentation shifts the balance toward more visual qualities, sometimes even obscuring its shape and impeding its legibility. A littera notabilior, or “more notable letter,” can be enlarged, colored, and ornamented in a variety of ways for different effects. Just increasing the size of a letter, so that it fills more than one line of text, serves as a visual sign that something important is occurring at that moment. A two-­line initial identifies a textual division; a red twenty-­six line initial proclaims it (Figure 56). Furthermore, initials are sometimes flourished with delicate penwork, often alternating in red and blue in Gothic manuscripts (Plate 16). Dense geometric designs and strapwork adorn so-­called puzzle initials. Initials can also be inhabited, that is, decorated with representational human or animal figures within. The figures inhabiting initials might be very closely related to the text, such as King David playing his harp at the start of a psalm verse, but they might equally be anonymous faces peering out of the letterforms (Figure 57). When initials are historiated, or embellished with narrative pictures, they are usually more textually in-

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Figure 56. Twenty-­six-­line initial. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 154, fol. 72r. Catena Commentariorum SS. Patrum, in Epistolis ad Romanos et Corinthios. England, twelfth century.



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Figure 57. Inhabited initial. New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.919, fol. 81r. Gift of Fellows, 1965. Book of Hours. Paris, ca. 1418.

Figure 58. Historiated initial. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 229, fol. 225r. Arthurian romances. France, 1275–1300.

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spired, depicting not only characters but actions in an unfolding scene (Figure 58). Initials can also be illuminated—a word that, although it is sometimes used loosely to mean simply “decorated,” strictly denotes the use of a particular luxury material, gold leaf or gold foil (Plate 17).

3.5. Illustrations Parchment was a vital support for painting in the Middle Ages, perhaps as important as wood or canvas. And, because books in libraries were not subject to the same kinds of damage and defacement as more public art, much well-­ preserved medieval painting is to be found in manuscript illustrations. As a result, a strict hierarchy or even too complete a separation between book painting and panel painting is misleading. Some artists, such as Jean Fouquet and Simon Marmion, worked easily in both media. This is not to say that the images in medieval books should be considered apart from their physical context. An illustrated book is an amalgam of text and image, in which both media must be read together. Because medieval manuscripts are most often the product of many hands, it is sometimes tempting to assume a fundamental separation between the art forms they produced. If an artist did not read the text carefully or receive detailed instructions from someone who had, text and image might not speak to each other directly. Artists followed pictorial models, just as scribes copied exemplars, and the relationship between text and image in any particular manuscript might not have been carefully planned. But, while it is important not to leap to facile conclusions about the relationship of text and image, it is equally important to take their physical proximity into consideration when seeking to read and understand a medieval book. The illustrations are a significant part of the material makeup of the text, and even if their makers did not take care that they should operate in concert with the text, their conjunction made a difference for any medieval reader who encountered the two together. Manuscript illustrations occupy a range of specialized pictorial spaces. Some are integrated with the text block, falling, for example, within the bounds of a single column, as in the Albergati Bible (Plate 18). Such images were relatively easy to include in the design of the book, and they often track plot developments in a long, narrative text. More important pictures might occupy a half page, or even, in a complete separation from textual layout, a full page. Half-­ page images are a common form of illustration in the pictorial programs of both Books of Hours and luxury vernacular books, such as a copy of John Lydgate’s Lives of SS. Edmund and Fremund presented to Henry VI (Plate 19). Full-­page images might mark textual divisions, such as the canonical hours in a prayer



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book, or they might communicate visual material in an almanac, such as a zodiac man. The start of a text, or the opening of the manuscript itself, also offers a significant location for a full-­page frontispiece, a visual preface to the verbal content that follows. Although physically distanced, independent illustrations can closely reflect the verbal material of the manuscript, through illustration of narrative or meta-­pictures in the form of author portraits or presentation scenes. Full-­page illustration can also, however, result from a truly separate process of creation, in which images are tipped in or inserted at the request of a patron or owner after a book is otherwise complete. Pope Gregory the Great famously counseled Bishop Serenus of Marseilles that pictures should be considered the “books of the illiterate.” Gregory was defending the use of images against the forces of iconoclasm, and he was acknowledging their effectiveness in communicating religious truths. But the relation between pictures and books that he proposes—one that makes pictures a substitute for books—has often shaped scholarly attention to medieval art. The pictures we find in books, however, cannot be so straightforwardly compensatory (see Case Studies III, XI). Instead, medieval manuscripts demonstrate that books and pictures were, for their makers and especially for their readers, intertwined and interdependent. Ornament can work to shape the meaning of a text, guiding a reader’s attention from section to section or highlighting items of particular interest. Illuminated initial letters frequently adapt a textual form to a visual function, and medieval iconography—from Christian symbols to coats of arms—demonstrates how readily pictures can function as semantic signs.

3.6. Diagrams and Maps Diagrams and maps deserve a special mention, for many medieval manuscripts include them in the absence of any other decoration. Like so many aspects of the medieval book, diagrams and maps fall somewhere on a spectrum between image and text, for although they represent information spatially, they almost always include verbal labels as well, and they communicate in a symbolic mode not unlike language. Some medieval diagrams are enfolded into texts, such as the wheels and grids associated with the systematized virtues and vices of the Speculum theologie (Figure 59). Others are founded upon and represent texts, such as the Vernon Pater Noster diagram that transforms the words of that common prayer into a multilingual structure of knots and roundels (Plate 20). Medieval maps are an enormous subject unto themselves, running the gamut from universal or world maps such as the familiar T-­O variety (Figure 60), to maps of very local interest, such as the plan of the waterworks at Canterbury Cathedral to be found in the Eadwine Psalter (Figure 61). They use a variety of

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Figure 59. Wheel of Sevens diagram. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 416, fol. 2v. Speculum theologie. Germany, thirteenth or fourteenth century.



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Figure 60. T-­O map. London, British Library MS Additional 22797, fol. 99v. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies. Belgium?, early thirteenth century.

systems to represent the world as humans saw it. The itinerary maps of Matthew Paris, for example, show the landscape unfurling in a straight line, from the perspective of a traveler on a pilgrimage route (Plate 21). Interestingly, this linear perspective might accommodate well to the form of the codex, unfolding from page to page in one direction only. A spatially apprehended map, on the other hand, would perhaps be better represented on a single sheet. But Matthew Paris’s maps also expand the codex through flaps that fold out beyond the boundaries of the page. Maps such as these benefit from, but also challenge, the physical forms of the book.

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Figure 61. Canterbury water plan. Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.17.1, fols. 284v–285r. Psalter (Eadwine Psalter). Canterbury, twelfth century.

4. Bindings and the Shape of the Book A medieval manuscript can take a number of different shapes, of which the primary ones are the roll and the codex. Although particular materials are often linked with certain forms—papyrus with rolls, parchment with manuscript codices, and paper with printed books—these associations are neither inevitable nor universal. Sometimes rolls were made of parchment and manuscript codices made of paper.

4.1. Roll When written texts in the ancient world needed to be lengthier and more portable than single tablets could be, they were inscribed on rolls. Basic bibliographical vocabulary in English owes something to this history of the earliest rolls. The



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Figure 61. Canterbury water plan. Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.17.1, fols. 284v–285r. Psalter (Eadwine Psalter). Canterbury, twelfth century.

4. Bindings and the Shape of the Book A medieval manuscript can take a number of different shapes, of which the primary ones are the roll and the codex. Although particular materials are often linked with certain forms—papyrus with rolls, parchment with manuscript codices, and paper with printed books—these associations are neither inevitable nor universal. Sometimes rolls were made of parchment and manuscript codices made of paper.

4.1. Roll When written texts in the ancient world needed to be lengthier and more portable than single tablets could be, they were inscribed on rolls. Basic bibliographical vocabulary in English owes something to this history of the earliest rolls. The



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Greek biblion (book) comes from the Greek biblos (parchment), derived, that is, from the material of the writing surface rather than the shape of the object or the method of making it. But the modern English volume comes from the Latin vol­ umen (roll), which in turn derives from the Latin evolvere (to roll up). We speak of the beginning of a text as the incipit (it begins), but the end of a text, through a false symmetry, is the explicit, which more precisely means “it is unrolled.” The columns of text on a roll are known in Latin as pagina, a word that would come to refer to the leaves of a bound volume. It is possible that the proportions of the columns on the parchment page—often two or three—reflect the column width originally common for texts written on rolls. Moreover, some have speculated that this ancient technology has had literary as well as lexical consequences—arguing, for example, that the length of a Homeric “book” is determined by the amount of writing that can easily fit on one roll. Early rolls were most often made of papyrus, but were also sometimes made of parchment (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls). The earliest surviving papyrus rolls date from the fourth century BCE. Some come from Greece, but mostly they come from Egypt, where the desert climate helped to preserve them. Typically a roll was made of twenty to fifty sheets of papyrus glued together, to produce a continuous sheet from thirty to forty feet long. Text was written in columns perpendicular to the long edges of the roll. The first sheet, or protocol, sometimes named the place in which the roll was made and even the name of its maker. The last sheet was called the eschatacol. In general, only one side of a roll was written on, but in the relatively rare case that both sides were used, the object is called an opistograph. The front of a roll, like the front of a page, is the recto, but the back is the dorse. The computer screen has offered in some ways a return to the technology of the roll: digital text is presented in a continuous form that readers “scroll” through in order to move from beginning to end. There are advantages to continuous text in both ancient and digital environments: the content is not circumscribed or determined in any way by page separation, and so the visual aspects of the reading experience are less constrained by the borders of the material support. On the other hand, the disadvantages are significant: in part because they are inscribed on only one side, rolls cannot easily contain long texts. Also, readers experience greater difficulty in searching a text, referring others to particular parts of it, and navigating quickly. Despite these disadvantages, rolls were nonetheless used through the late Middle Ages for legal and historical documents, such as papal bulls, chancery records, charters, and leases. Genealogies, maps, and certain kinds of devotional texts also often took advantage of the form of the roll for the display of visual material unconstrained by the size and shape of the page (Figure 62).

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Figure 62. Genealogy of the kings of England. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu­script Library, Yale University, Marston MS 242. Genea­ logical roll. England, 1466–67.



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A roll has no binding, properly speaking, though cords might be attached to one end so that it can be tightly and securely closed. Some rolls were stored in purpose-­made leather wrappers or boxes that could serve the same identifying and protective functions as the binding on a codex (Figure 63).

Figure 63. Roll case. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 1187. Possibly sixteenth or seventeenth century.

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4.2. Codex When ease of navigation became a priority, texts were written in the form of a codex (L. codex). The word simply describes the familiar form of a modern book: some number of pages folded and hinged along one side. Martial refers to such a book in 85 CE, though probably still as a novelty, in describing the works of Homer written on “multiplici . . . pelle”—many layers of skin (Epigrammata 14.184). The codex has proved a very powerful technology and a durable one: this hinged, paginated structure has been the basic shape of reading matter for more than fifteen hundred years. Newspapers and magazines, as well as books between hard covers, all take the shape of a codex. One might even say, since the form of the codex is so dominant, that it is the binding that makes a book. Sometimes early wax tablets were bound together along one edge to form a notebook in the shape of a codex: two tablets thus joined together formed a diptych. In Rome, the binding of wax tablets in this way may even have led to the development of folded leaves bound together in the codex form. The consular diptych, for example, is composed of two hinged panels, highly decorated on the exterior and inscribed on the interior, intended to commemorate a consul’s accession to office (see, e.g., Figure 5). These objects imply an association between artworks in the form of diptychs and written texts bound together along one edge; often, in fact, late antique consular diptychs were reused (and thus preserved) as the bindings of medieval books. A late medieval prayer book pays tribute to that same material inheritance, attaching a painted diptych to the top of a devotional book with multiple pages (Figure 64). The signal achievement of the codex was its navigability. Manipulation of the information in the codex is easier than in a roll because a reader can easily search for a particular passage by a system of reference and does not have to reroll the book when finished. The codex also makes citation and reference easier: those for whom precise and accurate citation of texts was valuable—such as lawyers, but also, notably, early Christians—soon adopted it completely. The difference in technology marked Christian books as different from pagan ones, which was perhaps a part of their appeal to the new religion; it also enabled Christian readers to draw typological connections between Old and New Testament passages, and to cross-­reference passages easily within the voluminous body of canonized texts. Other advantages of the new form included compact and efficient storage of information: since scribes could easily write on both sides of the leaf, the codex made more economical use of writing material than a roll. Moreover, the codex allowed for more spatially compressed storage of information, for the bound volumes could be easily stacked on their sides. In early libraries, the title and shelfmark



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Figure 64. Codex surmounted by a diptych. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex 1800, fols. 13v–14r. Prayer book (Prayer book of Philip the Good). France, mid-­fifteenth century.

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Figure 65. Title on fore edge. Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library INC M26. Questiones morales. England, fifteenth century.

were often inscribed on the edges of the pages, rather than on the spine, as today, and they were most often laid flat on shelves (Figure 65). The codex could thus accommodate longer texts than a roll, and with greater variation in size. By the beginning of the fourth century, the codex was predominant. In order for papyrus, parchment, or paper to be made into a codex, it has to be folded and cut. Individual sheets sewn in—an accommodation sometimes made to incorporate late additions to a manuscript—do not give the binding the strength of those that are both folded and sewn. If a large sheet is folded once, it is a folio volume (fo.), if it is folded twice, a quarto (qto. or 4to), and three times, an octavo (oct. or 8vo). These designations refer to the method of making, but they also indicate the relative size of the finished book. Because the size of sheets can vary—by the size of the animal involved, for example, in the case of parchment sheets—not every folio volume will be the same size as every other, but any folio volume will be larger than any quarto or octavo made from a sheet of the same size. If the sheets are made of paper, the placement of the watermark varies according to the method of folding, and can be used to reconstruct the manufacture of the book. If the sheets are made of parchment, traces of animal anatomy—spine, hair, and any cuts or wounds—can provide similar information. The folded sheets are gathered together before sewing to make gatherings, or quires. Although a quire can be any size, including a simple bifolium, the most common quires are gatherings of four sheets, folded and nested within each other to create eight leaves (a quaternion) or five sheets, with ten leaves



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(quinion). Conventionally, the collation, or structure, of a manuscript is notated by assigning a Roman or Arabic numeral to each quire, and a superscript or parenthetical number to show how many folios it includes. For example, a manuscript composed of eight quaternions, a quinion, and a quaternion from which the fifth leaf is missing might be described by the following formula: I–VIII8, IX10, X8 wants 5. The distinction between a folio and a page is crucial in navigating a manuscript: the leaf or folio is a single sheet, front and back. The page is only one side of a single sheet, however—so one leaf contains two pages, and quires most commonly contain either sixteen or twenty pages. Although in the twenty-­first century we take pagination for granted, it was not common until the fifteenth century. Foliation is the rule in describing medieval manuscripts, with the designations recto (front) and verso (back) indicating which side of the folio is being described. Modern scholars usually abbreviate folio 1, recto, and folio 1, verso, as “fol. [or f.] 1r” and “fol. [or f.] 1v,” though they may also be noted as “fol. [or f.] 1a and fol. [or f.] 1b.” Medieval scribes often foliated only the recto, or only the first half of the folios in a quire, and of course the majority of medieval manuscripts have no original pagination or foliation at all. Our information about medieval binding techniques comes from very few samples, since only 1–5 percent of surviving medieval books retain their original bindings. Bindings have often been considered merely decorative, not an integral part of the book, and so post-­medieval owners—both private and institutional ones—have not scrupled to dispose of worn or unfashionable bindings and replace them with the newest styles. In addition to decorating a book, the binding on a codex served to protect it, not only when it was stored but also while it was being read. Medieval codices were typically bound by gathering and stitching quires together, and then stitching them to a protective cover. In order to ensure that quires were assembled in the right sequence, scribes often added catchwords, or the first words of the next gathering written at the end of the previous one (Figure 66). Sometimes they also added signatures, by giving each gathering its own symbol (A, B, C, and so on) and numbering the pages within each gathering (Ai, Aii, Aiii, and so on). Signatures became the more common way to mark the gatherings in printed books (Figure 67). Quires were attached to each other, and to the book’s cover, by various methods. The earliest bound codices we have, the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Gospels, are single-­quire codices sewn to their covers in much the same way a simple modern pamphlet might be stapled: a leather thong was passed through holes in the fold of each quire and then through the spine itself, so that when the thongs were tied the pages were attached securely to the cover (Figure 68). Multiple-­quire bindings made in the Coptic manner were typically sewn without cords, so that the

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Figure 66. Decorated catchword. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Takamiya MS 47, fols. 63v–64r. Psalter. England, late fifteenth century.

quires were sewn together when closed and attached to their covers either by those threads themselves, or by pastedowns. Ethiopian codices were Coptic sewn until the nineteenth century. Unsupported link-­stitch sewing served binders over a wide geographical area for many centuries, but it has several disadvantages: first, the spine tends to become concave, and the fore edge tends to sag. Second, and more important, the stresses of opening and closing the book are borne entirely by the sewing threads, which, even if reinforced, give way sooner rather than later. These problems can be solved by sewing both the quires and the covers to intermediary cords, which became the more usual method in medieval western Europe. The cords are attached directly to the boards and the quires are then sewn, not directly to each other, but to the cords, which can better sustain the stresses of repeated opening and closing. Makers of Romanesque bindings (Figure 69) often used a frame to sew quires to a number of these cords or straps, which then entered the wooden boards from



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Figure 67. Signature (A ii) and catchword (The) in Stow’s Chaucer. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Idz +561. The werkes of Geffrey Chaucer. England, 1561.

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Figure 68. Ethiopic manuscript sewn in Coptic style. Oxford, Balliol College MS 378. Date unknown.

Figure 69. Romanesque-­style binding. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 4. Confessionale. Italy, fifteenth century.



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Figure 70. Sewing of a Gothic binding. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 27. Speculum humanae salvationis. England, fourteenth or fifteenth century.

the side. In Gothic bindings, the cords enter the board over the beveled edge and are attached on the inner cover (Figure 70). Sometimes soft leather or parchment alone creates a limp binding for a codex (Figure 71). Students’ books and utilitarian notebooks of various kinds were covered in this way, for thrift and ease of carrying. Textile bindings, more popular with individuals than with institutions because of their fragility, could be decorated with imagery that would enhance the contents of a book. Even paper was used as a temporary wrapper in the late fifteenth century. Soft covers such as these are less substantial, more temporary, and of course less likely than solid ones to have survived intact. The covers of a medieval codex were generally made of wooden boards. The book block was often attached to the boards by endleaves, both attached pastedowns and flyleaves that can be turned. Flyleaves are generally designated with

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Figure 71. Limp leather binding. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 649. Sermons. Germany, 1377.

roman numerals, and the folios of the book block with Arabic numerals. Some medieval books have endbands, decorative strips of cloth (sometimes plaited) that protect the spine edge of the parchment (see, e.g., Figure 69). The boards were cut square, or (later in the period) beveled, chamfered, or otherwise shaped. The boards were generally, though not always, at least partially covered with tanned leather. In the fifteenth century national preferences can be identified: pigskin in Germany, calfskin in England, and goatskin in Italy. The boards are completely covered in a full binding, only spine and corners in a half binding (Figure 72), and only the spine in a quarter binding. Sometimes, especially in northern and eastern Europe, a second cover (Hülleneinband) was added over the first, decorated, cover. Some books were carried in leather bags, and sometimes, in a chemise binding, the leather of the covering extended beyond the boards to form a kind of soft leather wrapping for the book block (Figure 73).



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Figure 72. Half binding. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Disticha Catonis. Germany, fourteenth century.

The leather wrapping of a book can be decorated or finished in a variety of ways: with color dyes, for example, or with various kinds of patterned impressions. The earliest known European decorated leather binding comes from seventh-­century Northumbria, where it was buried in the coffin of St. Cuthbert at Lindisfarne, and was preserved from rebinding or destruction by its status as a relic (Figure 74). Most decorated Western bindings in the fifth through the ninth centuries are ornamented with simple abstract patterns, such as interlace. Blind tooling, done with stamps or panels, created decorative designs pressed into the leather. Gold tooling, or the bonding of gold leaf to leather with heated stamps (familiar even on modern leather-­bound books), appeared in very few early European examples (Figure 75) and became widespread only when imported through Italy from the Islamic world in the fifteenth century. Islamic books were characterized by an envelope flap, as well as gold tooling: an exten-

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Figure 73. Chemise binding. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 27. Speculum humanae salvationis. England, fourteenth or fifteenth century.

sion of the lower cover wraps around the fore edge, making a wrapper somewhat akin to a chemise (Plate 22). Other techniques of decoration include rolled tooling, done with an engraved metal cylinder with a handle for applying pressure, and cut-­leather, cuir-­ciselé, or Lederschnitt work, done by incising designs into wet leather. Bindings also give some idea of how books were stored when they were not being read. For carrying, leather boards could be closed securely around the book block by leather thongs or by metal clasps (Figure 76). Some manuscripts boast a headcap, a semicircular tab of leather at the top of the spine, for added strength, and often bookmarks and indexing tabs were also made of leather (Figure 77). Bindings on large books were decorated (and protected from wear) with metal bosses near the top and tail of the spine, often adding metal corners or decorative panels in metal or ivory (Figure 78). Chained books in institu-



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Figure 74. Early tooled binding. London, British Library, MS Additional 89000. Gospel book (Stonyhurst Gospel; St. Cuthbert Gospel). Insular, ca. 700–730. © The British Library Board (Stonyhurst).

Figure 75. Gold tooling. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS Osborn a8. Raphe Rabbards, Inventions of Military Machines and Other Devices. England, 1598.

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Figure 76. Binding with clasps. Princeton University Library 6179.75.361. Gregor Reisch, Margarita philosophica. Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Johann Schott, 1503.



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Figure 77. Tabs on the fore edge. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 710, fol. 76v. Ordinarium Missae. Spain, fifteenth to sixteenth century.

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Figure 78. Binding hardware: bosses, shoes, clasps, and nameplate. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marston MS 287. Collection of texts on St. Barbara. Germany, 1470–80.



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Figure 79. Chain binding. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 1009. Sermons. Germany, fourteenth century.

tional libraries required metal furnishings—a ring that could swivel and a chain up to five feet long attached securely to the boards (Figure 79). Bindings can sometimes provide clues to the working methods of a particular bindery or region, although evidence is sparse and conclusions must usually rely on speculations. Binders can be identified by their distinctive stamps, for example, the “Fishtail” binder working in fifteenth-­century Oxford (Figure 80). Occasionally an artist signed his work: Ludovicus Bloc of Bruges stamped his bindings with the following motto: “Ludovicus Bloc ob laudem Xpristi librum hunc recte ligavi” (I, Ludovicus Bloc, bound this book properly to the praise of Christ) (Figure 81). In the later Middle Ages, bindings sometimes give evidence

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Figure 80. Fishtail binding. San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS 52435. Ambrosiaster, Commentary on the Pauline Epistles. Oxford, fifteenth century.

Figure 81. Stamped binding by Ludovicus Bloc. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton, NJ, Princeton Univer­ sity Library MS Garrett 63. Prayer book. Southern Netherlands (Bruges?), early sixteenth century.



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of ownership, as an individual bibliophile could have all his books bound in one uniform way. More rarely, there is evidence that a particular printer, such as the early English printers William Caxton or Wynkyn de Worde, had an association with one identifiable binding shop. Some bindings were constructed specially for opulent display. Purple parchment books and other specialized luxury volumes sometimes boasted treasure bindings worked in ivory, enamel, or precious metals, set with valuable jewels. Popular in the early Middle Ages, treasure bindings signal that the object’s high status takes precedence over ease of reading (Figure 82). Jerome, for example, complains about the priorities of Christian women whose books are written in gold on purple and are “clothed with gems” (Ep. 22, to Eustochium, Patrologia Latina 22, col. 418). But although some treasure bindings were owned by individuals—emperors and princes, more often than not—usually these bindings and their books formed part of the liturgical furnishings of a church. Classed with crucifixes, vestments, precious vessels, and reliquaries, they would not even be housed in the institutional library, but in the treasury. A related kind of cover is the Irish or Scottish cumdach, a decorated metal slipcase for a book that would allow it to be taken into battle, sometimes hanging around a soldier’s neck (Figure 83). Another example both decorative and protective can be found in the thirteenth-­century Sienese biccherne (or tavolette di Biccherna), or painted wooden covers used to protect treasury records (Plate 23). Other unusual bindings provide evidence of a book’s specialized function: a girdle book or vade mecum, for example, was wrapped in a leather covering finished with a knot that could be attached to the belt (Figure 84). Such a personal volume was shaped and bound so that it could be carried along by its owner for easy and quick reference. The so-­called Codex rotundus was also probably meant to be easily carried (Plate 24). In a more symbolic example, several unusual medieval books take the form of a heart (cordiform), not only to indicate that the matter inside, often songs, is related to romantic love, but also to reflect the familiar trope of the heart itself as a book (Plate 25). Usually, however, the book and its binding were not so perfectly symbiotic. Medieval books were frequently unbound and rebound by their original owners and those who came after. It is rare to find a medieval binding undisturbed, and marks of rebinding can be found in many medieval books, such as cropping that has sliced off not only the wide margins of the parchment, but also bits of what was written and painted on it (Figure 85). The author of the fourteenth-­ century Middle English alliterative poem Cleanness describes the destruction of Sodom in terms of the destruction of a book:

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Figure 82. Treasure binding. London, British Library MS Egerton 1139. Psalter. Jerusalem, 1131–43.

Figure 83. Cumdach of the Book of Dimma. Dublin, Trinity College TCD MS 49. Ireland, twelfth century with fourteenth-­ to fifteenth-­century alterations.



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Figure 84. Vade mecum (folding calendar and case). New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 923. France, 1290–1300.

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Figure 85. Excessive cropping. New Haven, CT, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marston MS 22, fols. 54v–55r. Book of Hours. England, ca. 1250.

& clouen alle in lyttel cloutes þe clyffez aywhere, As lauce leuez of þe boke þat lepes in twynne. The cliffs, cleft by chasms, clattered asunder As leaves, when the binding breaks, leap from a book (lines 965–66) But in an image founded paradoxically on the vulnerability of the postlapsarian book, Dante imagines the ultimate fulfillment of love in God through the figure of a perfectly bound volume. In this celebrated image from the end of Paradiso, he offers a vision of unqualified unity: In its depth I saw contained     by love into a single volume bound,     The pages scattered through the universe:



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Substances, accidents, and the interplay between them,     As though they were conflated in such ways     That what I tell is but a simple light. (Paradiso 33: 85–90) This vision of perfect celestial unity, of course, is unattainable for most of Dante’s readers. But this fantasy of the bound volume, pulling the scattered universe into something perfect and whole, speaks powerfully of the place of the book in the medieval imagination.

5. A Template for Manuscript Description A full analytical description of a manuscript, such as you might find in a library catalog, typically includes the following information. Identifying Information

1. City, repository, shelfmark 2. Short description of textual contents 3. Place of origin 4. Date 5. Languages 6. Number of folios 7. Dimensions 8. Material

Material 1. Quality of parchment, including its color, any holes or repairs, and any palimpsest 2. Quality of paper, including descriptions of watermarks and their placement, if applicable Structure 1. Collation of quire structures, including both number and type; any excisions or additions of leaves (in a tightly bound book, the collation may be difficult to determine with certainty); quire marks, if applicable 2. Catchwords and signatures 3. Foliation and pagination Layout 1. Method of pricking (location, shape) 2. Method of ruling (hard point, lead point, crayon, ink)

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Substances, accidents, and the interplay between them,     As though they were conflated in such ways     That what I tell is but a simple light. (Paradiso 33: 85–90) This vision of perfect celestial unity, of course, is unattainable for most of Dante’s readers. But this fantasy of the bound volume, pulling the scattered universe into something perfect and whole, speaks powerfully of the place of the book in the medieval imagination.

5. A Template for Manuscript Description A full analytical description of a manuscript, such as you might find in a library catalog, typically includes the following information. Identifying Information

1. City, repository, shelfmark 2. Short description of textual contents 3. Place of origin 4. Date 5. Languages 6. Number of folios 7. Dimensions 8. Material

Material 1. Quality of parchment, including its color, any holes or repairs, and any palimpsest 2. Quality of paper, including descriptions of watermarks and their placement, if applicable Structure 1. Collation of quire structures, including both number and type; any excisions or additions of leaves (in a tightly bound book, the collation may be difficult to determine with certainty); quire marks, if applicable 2. Catchwords and signatures 3. Foliation and pagination Layout 1. Method of pricking (location, shape) 2. Method of ruling (hard point, lead point, crayon, ink)

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3. Size of writing block (page or column), in millimeters (mm); number of lines, including stanzas where appropriate 4. Other notable ruling patterns Script 1. Number and distribution of scribes, noting changes of hand 2. Description of script(s), including style and probable date and place of origin 3. Ink color, display scripts, punctuation 4. Notable corrections Text

1. Title, author, folio numbers 2. Any internal heading or title 3. Incipit and explicit 4. Details about omissions or interpolations 5. Glosses, commentaries, marginalia 6. Editions, noting any that use this manuscript’s text

Decoration

1. Rubrication, paraph marks, including any guidewords or instructions 2. Initials (types, colors, sizes, relation to text) 3. Line fillers 4. Borders (location, size, relation to text, motifs, colors) 5. Illustrations (size, subject, relation to text, technique) 6. Tables and diagrams

Binding

1. Date, origin, and type 2. Material, including shape of boards, number of cords, endbands 3. Decoration (blind tooling, gold tooling, panels) 4. Clasps and other metal furnishings (bosses, corners, chains) 5. Bookmarks 6. Title labels, binder’s labels, or other identification 7. Endleaves, flyleaves, and pastedowns

Provenance 1. Scribal colophons 2. Signs of ownership, including signatures, mottoes, ex libris marks, shelfmarks, coats of arms. 3. Signs of later history, including library catalogs, sales catalogs, and so on



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Bibliography 1. Printed notices, including descriptions and references to the manuscript in bibliographical works The description of manuscript materials is not uniform across libraries and catalogs, however. For useful discussion of descriptive practices and their interpretative implications across subjects ranging from illumination to miscellaneity to dating, see further: Delaissé, L. M. J., James Marrow, and John de Wit. Illuminated Manuscripts: The James A. de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor. Fribourg: National Trust, 1977. See pp. 13–20. Dutschke, C. W. Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Li­ brary. 2 vols. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1989. See 1:xv–xvii. Ker, N. R. Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–92. See 1:vii–xiii; and 3:vii. Pass, Gregory A. Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts. Bibliographic Standards Committee, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2003. Robinson, P. R. Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 737–1600 in Cambridge Libraries. 2 vols. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988. See 1:1–12, 17–18. Shailor, Barbara A. “A Cataloger’s View.” In The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, 153–67. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

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Case Studies A Selection of English Literary Manuscripts

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Having anatomized medieval books into their component parts, we now turn to the study of medieval manuscripts in a different mode—not just examining individual features such as layout or script but bringing those particularities together in a more holistic spirit to explore the material and intellectual structures that make up an individual volume. The following twelve case studies present some of the most compelling manuscripts of medieval England and use them to introduce a range of theoretical questions central to literary studies. Each case study examines a landmark manuscript through a general analytical category such as authorship, geography, mediation, or performance. Short catalog-­style descriptions provide guidance for readers encountering these manuscripts for the first time, along with basic information about the structure of the whole. Brief and open-­ended essays explore some of what is most interesting, complicated, or puzzling in each example and seek to inspire readers’ further investigations. In addition to the images illustrating each essay, fully and freely available digitized facsimiles of the manuscripts allow for “hands-­on” examination of the objects themselves. Since these particular manuscripts have been digitized in their entirety, readers wondering what text follows the one they are studying, or precisely how a picture interacts visually with adjacent text, will be able to make those discoveries by turning the pages of the online surrogate. Selected bibliographies help to direct further research. All told, the case studies endeavor to make the contents and forms of these manuscripts available to readers of this book without too much constraining argument, while at the same time orienting them to some of the most interesting questions the manuscripts raise. Each one presents an invitation to further reading and study. Because the purpose of this handbook is to explore how manuscript research can deepen the study of literature, these case studies include some of the most

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exceptional witnesses to medieval English literary history. Indeed, some, like British Library MSS Cotton Vitellius A.xv and Cotton Nero A.x, are important precisely because they are unique, provoking us by their chance survival to imagine medieval English literature without Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Other manuscripts are important because of their rich and surprising collocations of texts (British Library MS Harley 2253), or their witness to especially complex textual histories (Huntington Library MS HM 114), or their challenging combinations of media forms (British Library MS Additional 37049). All of them offer particular insight into the big questions that concern literary studies, questions about writing and reading and—most of all—interpretation. Even while it makes literary experience central, this selection of manuscripts deliberately casts a wide net, including alongside Piers Plowman and The Can­ terbury Tales a psalter, the Orrmulum, and an idiosyncratic Carthusian miscellany. Each example attends to the interactions between more traditional literary elements and other contents: a recipe on the flyleaf of the Book of Margery Kempe, for example; or the Anglo-­French saint’s life embedded in liturgical Latin in the St. Albans Psalter; or the annals that, along with “Caedmon’s Hymn,” extend Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. In fact, the example of the “Moore Bede” (Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.5.16) centrally interrogates the qualities of the literary, exploring the origins of written English poetry in the margins of a Latin history, and questioning precisely the relation between the literary and the literate. More representative examples of medieval English writing would no doubt reveal a more modest landscape of literacy, filled with smaller, cheaper, less ambitious, scrappier volumes. But although these manuscripts are exceptional outliers, they ultimately undermine any strict divisions among modes of literate practice, and instead work to broaden and complicate the category of the medieval literary. These twelve are not the only extraordinary manuscripts that could have been chosen for this purpose. Another version of this handbook might have included the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501), famous for its Old English elegies and riddles; the Reading Abbey miscellany that preserves the earliest English words set to notated music (British Library MS Harley 978); or a romance compilation such as the Auchinleck Manuscript (National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS 19.2.1). It might have included the illustrated histories of Matthew Paris (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MSS 26 and 16; British Library MS Royal 14 C VII), Thomas Hoccleve’s remarkable autographs (Huntington Library MSS HM 111 and HM 744; Durham University

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Case Studies

Library MS Cosin V.III.9), or the monumental Rylands copy of John Lydgate’s Troy Book (Manchester, John Rylands Library English MS 1). The literary manuscripts of medieval England are so materially rich and interesting that the possibilities are, if not endless, at least thrillingly abundant. Just as any selection of medieval English literary manuscripts must always be provisional, so the categories of analysis that organize the short essays here also must remain flexible. They overlap with each other: the tricky concept of au­ thorship, for example, is shaped by some of the same cultural complexities as practices of writing or editing. And the categories of theoretical interest also multiply in the context of a single object: any manuscript can raise interesting questions at once about scribal practice, miscellaneity, image and text interactions, and ownership, for example. Asking questions in any of these categories of any manuscript will produce interesting answers, with different areas of focus depending on what is most central in an individual case. But the same threads of investigation connect them all: the heuristic categories offered here are meant to be portable, not determinative. In order to suggest the ways in which the analytical categories can be relevant to a wide range of manuscripts, the list of cross-­comparisons that follows suggests, for example, multiple examples of complicated authorship, just as it also suggests other kinds of questions that can be fruitfully brought to Cotton Nero A.x. These twelve literary manuscripts stage a productive range of theoretical and conceptual questions about writing and reading in a manuscript culture. They are not only beautiful examples of medieval English writing, but also intellectually challenging ones. They provide especially rich opportunities for detailed, concrete exploration of the kinds of issues raised by all medieval manuscripts and their histories. More broadly, the case studies aim to demonstrate a variety of ways in which the questions of manuscript studies can matter for literary studies, ways in which scholars of literature can benefit from thinking about medieval texts in all of their material forms.

Cross-­Comparisons I. Literature: The Moore Bede (Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People Also: Afterlives, Language, Geography, Authorship, Mediation, Performance

II. Afterlives: The Nowell Codex (Beowulf and other items) Also: Miscellaneity, Geography, Authorship, Mediation, Illustration



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III. Ownership: St. Albans Psalter Also: Literature, Language, Mediation, Illustration, Performance IV. Language: Orrm, The Orrmulum Also: Authorship, Writing, Editing, Mediation V. Miscellaneity: Trilingual Miscellany Also: Literature, Language, Geography, Writing VI. Geography: Roman d’Alexandre and other items Also: Afterlives, Language, Miscellaneity, Writing, Illustration VII. Authorship: The Gawain Manuscript (Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) Also: Afterlives, Geography, Mediation, Illustration VIII. Writing: The Ellesmere Chaucer (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales) Also: Authorship, Editing, Illustration IX. Editing: William Langland, Piers Plowman; John Mandeville, Mande­ ville’s Travels; Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; and Other Items Also: Miscellaneity, Authorship, Writing, Mediation X. Mediation: The Book of Margery Kempe Also: Ownership, Authorship, Writing, Performance XI. Illustration: Illustrated Carthusian Miscellany Also: Ownership, Miscellaneity, Performance XII. Performance: N-­Town Plays Also: Afterlives, Geography, Writing, Editing, Mediation

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C A S E S T U DY I  

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Literature

The Moore Bede (Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Other Items) Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.5.16 Dimensions: 293 × 215 mm Date: ca. 734–737? Place of Origin: Wearmouth-­Jarrow (?) Languages: Latin; Old English Foliation: ii + 128 + i Material: Parchment Quiring [iii, modern paper flyleaves] + I–V10, VI9 (fol. 52 is a single leaf ), VII–XII10, XIII10 (fol. 129 survives as a stub)+ [i, modern paper flyleaf ] The first twelve quires are numbered on the verso of the last leaf. Layout One column, thirty to thirty-­three lines in the main text. Single rulings around the written space and prickings in both inner and outer margins. Script The manuscript is written by one main hand in a continuous script—mostly a rather hasty insular minuscule, though the scribe occasionally uses uncial or other majuscules for display purposes. The hand that added the supplementary notes and the English poetry on folio 128r–v is similar to the hand of the main

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scribe and may be the same. The excerpt from Isidore on folio 128v is added in a fine Carolingian minuscule, perhaps originating from the court of Charlemagne itself. Textual Contents

1. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, fols. 1r–128r 2. Moore Annals, fol. 128r 3. “Caedmon’s Hymn,” fol. 128v 4. Moore Memoranda, fol. 128v 5. Isidore, De consanguinitate, fol. 128v

Decoration Chapters are marked with large initials. Rubrication includes book and chapter headings, red dots around chapter initials, and red bars in the margins marking long quotations. Binding Eighteenth-­century wood and leather binding, repaired in 1959 by S. Cockerell. Some marginalia have suffered cropping in the rebinding process (see, e.g., fol. 19v), and the margins of some pages have been crudely trimmed (e.g., fols. 3, 84). Provenance The manuscript was made, possibly at Bede’s monastery of Wearmouth-­Jarrow, certainly after 734 and probably in or just after 737. It was in Francia before 800 and has connections to manuscripts from the court school of Charlemagne. A fifteenth-­century French hand has written “beda de historia anglorum” on folio 2r. On folio 128v, a sixteenth-­or seventeenth-­century hand has written “S. Juliani,” referring to the cathedral library at St. Julien at Le Mans. The title of the work and “auctore Beda” in the front flyleaf have been identified by Cambridge University Librarian Henry Bradshaw as the hand of bibliophile Jean-­Baptiste Hautin (approximately 1580–1640). John Moore, bishop of Ely (1707–14), acquired the manuscript between 1697 and 1702, perhaps from the sale of books belonging to classicist Alexander Cunningham (1655?–1730) on August 12, 1701. What has become known as the “Moore Bede” was donated with the collections of George I to Cambridge University in 1715. Connections “Caedmon’s Hymn” is known to have been copied into twenty-­one medieval manuscripts of Bede’s Historia, of which eighteen still present the text legibly. In addition to the Moore Bede, these include: Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS  8245–57; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41 [OE trans.]; Cam-

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bridge, Trinity College, MS R.5.22; Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.3.18 OE trans.]; Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 574; Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS P.V.1 London, British Library, MS Additional 43703 [Nowell’s transcription of Cotton Otho B.xi]; London, British Library, MSS Cotton Otho B.xi + Otho B.x, fols. 55, 58, 62 + Additional 34652, fol. 2 [fragments originally part of one manuscript of the OE trans., damaged in the Cotton fire of 1731]; London, College of Arms, s.n.; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 163 [largely illegible due to erasures]; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 43; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 243; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 10 [OE trans.]; Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 279, B; Oxford, Lincoln College, MS lat. 31; Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 105; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), MS lat. 5237; St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS lat.Q.v.I.18; San Marino, CA, Huntington Library, MS HM 35300 [formerly Bury St. Edmunds, Cathedral Library, 1]; Tournai, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS 134 [destroyed in World War II]; Winchester, Cathedral, MS 1.

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According to one version of its origin story, literature in English begins in an unusual place. The Venerable Bede (ca. 672–735), a Benedictine monk living and writing in the Northumbrian monastery of Wearmouth-­ Jarrow, describes the miraculous composition of what is arguably the earliest poem to survive in English, a nine-­line praise of creation now known as “Caedmon’s Hymn.” Caedmon, a shy, illiterate cowherd, always avoided singing when the harp came to him at feasts. One night he is so anxious to avoid the expected performance that he flees to the stables as his turn approaches. But, in his sleep, an angel appears, commanding him baldly: “Sing me something.” Caedmon objects, but when directed to sing of first creation, he is able to celebrate God in a short hymn that immediately secures his reputation as a gifted poet. In telling this story, Bede offers a version of the cowherd’s inspired words: Now we must praise the Maker of the heavenly kingdom, the power of the Creator and his counsel, the deeds of the Father of glory and how He, since He is the eternal God, was the Author of all marvels and first created the heavens as a [gable of the] roof for the children of men and then, the almighty Guardian of the human race, created the earth. ­(Ecclesiastical History 4.24, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 417) After Caedmon wakes up, he adds a few more verses to his memory of this poem, and then he relates his miraculous experience to authorities including



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Abbess Hild of Whitby (614–80). She encourages him to join the monastery, where he goes on to a career as a celebrated poet of vernacular devotional verse. Bede’s familiar story of the cowherd who was divinely inspired to sing offers a vision of early English poetry as a product of miraculous orality, emerging from the lowliest and most unlearned of contexts. But it forms part of his most widely known scholarly work, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum). This Latin prose text, which is dedicated to King Ceolwulf, narrates high points in the early history of the English church from Caesar’s arrival in Britain (55 BCE), to St. Augustine’s mission to Canterbury from Rome (597 CE), to the Synod of Whitby’s reconciliation between the Roman and the Celtic churches (664 CE), up to Bede’s present in 731 CE. The Historia remains in some 160 Latin manuscript copies, as well as four copies of an Old English translation—an impressively literate textual context for Caedmon’s astonishing song. The earliest witness to “Caedmon’s Hymn” in Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.5.16—a manuscript known as the “Moore Bede,” after its early owner Bishop John Moore of Ely—raises numerous questions about the relation of oral to literate modes of composition and reception, as well as about the relations of Old English to Latin, and poetry to prose. Insofar as literature can be defined most basically as what is fashioned of written letters (littera), the Moore Bede offers insight even into how we might most usefully understand or define the ideas of literacy and the literary in early medieval England. Bede paraphrases the hymn in Latin prose, but—interestingly—he recognizes that his modified version of Caedmon’s miraculous English poem cannot replicate it exactly. He apologizes for the inadequacy of translation, even as that is all he offers of the cowherd’s verses. Acknowledging that he can give “the sense but not the order of the words which [Caedmon] sang as he slept,” Bede also makes the more striking general claim that “it is not possible to translate verse, however well composed, literally from one language to another without some loss of beauty and dignity” (Ecclesiastical History 4.24, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 417). Perhaps it is this explicit caution about the viability of translation that prompted scribes and later readers of Bede’s Historia to include what is ostensibly the original English poem alongside the Latin prose of the main text. Twenty-­one manuscripts of the Historia are known to include (or to have included) an English version of “Caedmon’s Hymn,” including the two earliest, which both offer the Northumbrian version of the text characterized by the use of the word aelda in line 5b. In the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia, the poetic verses of “Caedmon’s Hymn” are integrated into the main text, replacing Bede’s paraphrase in his account of the episode. In the Latin manu-

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scripts, however, the poem appears only as a gloss to the main text. It did not seem to travel with Bede’s history, as there is no strong evidence that both were ever copied from the same exemplar. Nearly identical copies of the English poem exist alongside different versions of the Latin, and different versions of the English poem accompany similar versions of the Latin. That is to say, many scribes seem to have made the decision independently to copy Caedmon’s oral poetry in English into manuscripts of Bede’s Latin prose. The Moore Bede, a manuscript likely made in a northern English monastery shortly after the author’s death in 735, offers perspective on this scribal choice. Most likely the earliest copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the Moore Bede is not a luxurious manuscript: its text is written in a rapid continuous script that suggests it was produced by a competent scribe, but quickly. This haste could be a sign of disregard, but—conversely—it could also indicate that Bede’s history was in so much demand that copies had to be produced with no delay. Decoration of the manuscript is not extensive, and its continuous text shows that word separation was not yet a crucial part of literacy, but what rubrication there is provides a practical guide to navigating the text: highlighting of text-­division initials and marginal marking to indicate quotations (see Figure I.1). This is a text created to be read. Its interest lies in its early date, of course—few English manuscripts from this period still exist—and also its early witness to Bede’s landmark history of the English church. But it also offers the opportunity to ask questions about the idea of vernacular literature in England, and it can shed light on how that idea might have changed over time. The final folio in the Moore Bede, for example, offers some revealing additions to the historical record (see Figure I.2). After the conclusion of the main text, the scribe added six lines known as the “Moore Annals,” describing events from the years 731, 732, 733, and 734. These additions provide a continuation of Bede’s history, which concludes with events that occurred in 731. These extra lines also revise Bede’s emphasis, recording events closely related to the specific history of the Historia itself: the restoration of its dedicatee King Ceolwulf to the throne of Northumbria, and the removal of Bishop Acca, one of Bede’s most important patrons. The supplementary annals also offer some evidence for dating the manuscript, though the evidence is not straightforward. The additional notes must have been written after 734, when an eclipse of the moon is described, and five out of the nine dates calculated in relation to the “present” indicate that the date of writing was 737. There are discrepancies in these calculations, though, that must be reconciled in some way: Perhaps they are simple errors? Or perhaps the additions were copied from a variety of exemplars originally written in different years, without recalculating and reconciling the dates?



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Turning over the leaf, the verso of this final folio of the Moore Bede contains further historical memoranda, including a list of Northumbrian kings, from Ida (547) to Ceolwulf (729–37). But it begins at the very top with the Northumbrian aelda version of “Caedmon’s Hymn,” added after Bede’s Latin was written, though not long after (see Figure I.3). Nu scylun hergan    hefaenricaes uard metudæs maecti    end his modgidanc, uerc uuldurfadur   sue he uundra gihuaes eci dryctin    or astelidæ he aerist scop    aelda barnū heben til hrofe    haleg scepen. tha middungeard    moncynnæs uard eci dryctin    æfter tiadæ firum foldu    frea allmectig primo cantauit caedmon istud carmen. (Manuscripts of Caedmon’s Hymn, ed. Dobbie, p. 13) Now we must praise     the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the measurer,    and his mind’s purpose, the work of the wondrous father—    as he for each of the wonders, the eternal lord,    established a beginning. He first shaped    for the sons of men heaven as a roof,    the holy creator. Then middle-earth,    mankind’s guardian, the eternal lord,    made afterwards earth for human beings,    almighty ruler. Caedmon first sang this song. The text of the hymn appears at the top of folio 128v, written as Old English poetry typically was, without line breaks between verses, in a script much smaller than that of the historical notes that follow. This has suggested to some scholars that the hymn was added after the other notes were written, but it is hard to imagine that any scribe would have left such a large empty top margin without a plan to fill it. The smaller script has implied to other readers that the hymn was less significant in the planning of the book than the more prestigious historical additions. Intriguingly, it is annotated in a scholarly mode: “Primo cantavit Caedmon ista carmen” (Caedmon first sang that song). And there are further English glosses of difficult Latin words—arula hearth (hearth), destina

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fuer-­stud (fire-­proof stud), and iugulum sticung (pig killing)—only the first two found in Bede’s Historia. There are also Latin instructions to the scribe: “nota rubrica” (mark in red). These additional glosses suggest that the hymn, too, is offered in the spirit of a gloss, and that it could be understood as an aid to understanding the central text. Bede’s Latin prose paraphrase of “Caedmon’s Hymn” comes as an integral part of the narration of its genesis (fol. 91r; see Figure I.4). Kevin Kiernan has, by contrast, described the vernacular poem at the back of the Moore Bede as an “endnote.” It is certainly an unusual placement for a text that is now often thought to be the most important in the manuscript, and it raises the question of what is primary and what subsidiary in the experience of reading this book—a fundamental question about where a reader’s attention goes. The instruction nota rubrica lays bare a process of production whereby author and scribe collaborate to direct a reader’s attention to one thing or another by highlighting this or that. The layout of the physical manuscript, including the location and relative position of its various texts, shapes their meaning by setting the parameters of their reception. If Caedmon’s English verses are an “endnote” in the Moore Bede, they are more like a “footnote” in another early manuscript of the Historia: St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, lat.Q.v.I.18, likely written at Wearmouth-­ Jarrow in the mid-­eighth century, perhaps just a few years after the earlier manuscript. The St. Petersburg manuscript is beautifully produced in careful double columns, but on folio 107r a scribe has added in a smaller script the text of “Caedmon’s Hymn,” as a marginal gloss to Bede’s Latin (see Figure I.5). Scholars disagree about whether this scribe is the same one who wrote the main text; there are some differences between the scripts, but they might reflect only the difference between a formal book hand and a smaller glossing hand. Whether it represents the initiative of the main scribe or another scribe, however, the poetic supplement demonstrates an interest in bringing the miraculous English original into close physical contact with Bede’s Latin paraphrase. The addition of these words, especially here on this page, confirms from a material perspective the validity of Bede’s concerns about translation: because the Latin prose cannot be the original, the original is offered as a necessary addition. “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the first English poem, is always marginal and additional, a kind of paratext to Bede’s paraphrase in the Historia—and yet it is also, on the evidence of multiple scribes, necessarily connected to that text. Moreover, one might ask: is Bede’s reported version a paraphrase of a remembered original, or is it a close translation? Scholars have debated whether it is possible to imagine Bede’s Latin as translated directly from “Caedmon’s Hymn,” or whether, conversely, the English poem might have been translated directly



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from the Latin. For all of Bede’s posturing about the impossibility of translation, his Latin does read—especially in the first half—as a strikingly close restatement of the English texts we have. Can this close a paraphrase come from a memory of an oral performance? Or do the textual correspondences between the prose and the verse indicate that Bede was doing his best to reproduce an English poem he actually saw in a manuscript in front of him? Still more radically, might the correspondences between the prose and verse texts suggest that the English scribes— if Caedmon’s miraculous text was lost to them and also to us—confected the poem as a back-­formation from the Historia? The poetic English text of “Caedmon’s Hymn” is tellingly unstable, remaining in multiple versions that are nearly as close to the Latin as they are to one another. Scholars such as Andy Orchard, Kevin Kiernan, and Daniel McDonnell have explored the implications of this instability, which challenges in various ways the simple mythic story of Caedmon’s miraculous composition. But the modes of transmission and reworking that have produced the verse texts of the hymn we know remain obscure. However it came to be translated and transcribed, this variable poem tucked into edges and corners and margins of manuscripts records a significant moment in the developing literacy of early medieval England. The Old English hymn was undoubtedly an oral text to start with. In the manuscripts it retains marks of its liminal existence somewhere between song, memory, and written text—showing less pointing, for example, than written Latin, which was perhaps more difficult to parse on the fly. As Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has shown, although an oral poem committed to writing necessarily becomes a literate poem, it does not immediately take on all of the fixed qualities of literate production. But O’Keeffe also believes that the scribes who wrote “Caedmon’s Hymn” in both the Moore and the St. Petersburg manuscripts took more care with its presentation than with the Latin that they wrote, verse or prose. She writes: “Given its scribal origin, the quality of the copy of Caedmon’s Hymn in CUL KK.5.16, otherwise a hastily written production, argues a self-­consciousness about writing the Old English verses not apparent in the Latin” (11). “Caedmon’s Hymn,” as described in Bede’s account of the miracle, matters as an oral text, but it also matters as a literate one, added with a heightened degree of care to the pages of this manuscript of the Historia. At the bottom of the final verso of the Moore Bede lies a further testament to the way in which “Caedmon’s Hymn” is embedded within literate culture. Another scribe has written there an excerpt from Isidore, De consanguinitate from Etymologiae (see Figure I.3), alongside a passage from a 721 decree of Gregory II that similarly discusses allowable degrees of marriage. These last additions are written in a Carolingian minuscule script strikingly different from the main

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script, an insular minuscule. The new script suggests that the passages were added on the Continent, and even likely by a scribe trained in Charlemagne’s court schools. Bernhard Bischoff believed it similar to hands working in the court of Charlemagne circa 800 (cf. British Library MS Harley 2788), which implies that the manuscript was in Europe before the end of the eighth century, perhaps brought by Alcuin of York. Other traces of Carolingian readers include interlinear glosses in the early pages by a Frankish scribe seeking to clarify what must have been opaque insular conventions, and two examples of Tironian notes. And since stemmata show that most continental copies of the Historia derive from this manuscript, including the material on consanguinity, it must have been a prominent model in a scriptorium where it was often copied, such as the one at Charlemagne’s court. The questions here about which marriages were allowable connect to Bede’s Historia, which quotes Gregory the Great’s discussion of these issues in his Libellus responsionum (Ecclesiastical History 1.27). Bede’s text is thus embedded within a literate, allusive, scholarly intellectual culture that depended on the kinds of cross-­referencing enabled by writing things down. What role does “Caedmon’s Hymn” play in that allusive cross-­ referencing? A residue of oral vernacular poetic culture, it nonetheless takes its place comfortably here within a highly literate mode. From the narrative surrounding “Caedmon’s Hymn,” as well as the evidence of the text itself, one might deduce that vernacular literary production in early England was necessarily poetic, and the product of divine inspiration. More surprisingly, one might also notice that vernacular poetry emerges from the margins of the feast to take its place in the center of institutional religious life. But, finally, Bede’s account of “Caedmon’s Hymn” reveals that the most defining feature of this originary moment is simply that the song is written down. When it is transcribed in the Moore Bede—the condition of possibility for its survival and the accident that makes it the “first” poem in English—”Caedmon’s Hymn” becomes English literature. If Bede’s story itself offers the cowshed as the place from which vernacular literature emerged, the Moore Bede embeds it in the margins of monastic history. Here, in its earliest manuscript context, vernacular poetry joins other written language as a part of England’s complex and multifarious literary cultures.



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Figure I.1. Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.5.16, fol. 24r. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum. Note the rubri­cated dots around the initial and the lines marking quotations in the inner margin; also two lines of rough uncial script within the insular minuscule (lines 24–25), recording the dating clauses of papal letters in the script of the papal chancery.

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Figure I.2. Cambridge, Univer­sity Library MS Kk.5.16, fol. 128r. End of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum. Historical “Moore Annals” added.



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Figure I.3. Cambridge, Univer­sity Library MS Kk.5.16, fol. 128v. “Caedmon’s Hymn”; “Moore Memoranda”; Isidore, De consan­guinitate. Note the shift in scripts from insular minuscule to Carolingian minuscule, and the ex libris mark in the lower margin from the cathedral library of St. Julien at Le Mans.

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Figure I.4. Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.5.16, fol. 91r. Bede’s Latin paraphrase of Caedmon’s Hymn.



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Figure I.5. St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, lat.Q.v.I.18, fol. 107r. Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, with “Caedmon’s Hymn” in English added in the bottom margin.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile University of Cambridge Digital Library. “Moore Bede (MS Kk.5.16).” https://cudl.lib .cam.ac.uk/view/MS-­KK-­00005-­00016/1.

Catalogs and Editions Colgrave, Bertram, and R.A.B. Mynors, ed. and trans. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database of Manuscripts, Palaeography and Diplomatic. “Manuscript: CUL Kk.5.16 (2058).” http://www.digipal.eu/digipal/manuscripts /482/. Dobbie, Elliott Van Kirk. The Manuscripts of Cædmon’s Hymn and Bede’s Death Song: With a Critical Text of the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedæ. Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature 128. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937. Hunter Blair, Peter, ed. The Moore Bede: Cambridge University Library MS Kk.5.16. With contribution by R. A. B. Mynors. Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 9. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1959. Ker, N. R. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-­Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. O’Donnell, Daniel Paul. Cædmon’s Hymn: A Multimedia Study, Edition and Archive. Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer in association with SEENET and the Medieval Academy, 2005; 1.1 Internet Reprint. Vol. A.8 SEENET.SEENET, 2018. http://caedmon .seenet.org/index.html.

Secondary Studies Bischoff, Bernhard. Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne. Trans. and ed. Michael Gorman. Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Cavill, Paul. “The Manuscripts of Cædmon’s Hymn.” Anglia 118, no. 4 (2000): 499–530. Donoghue, Daniel. How the Anglo-­Saxons Read Their Poems. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Frantzen, Allen J., and John Hines, eds. Caedmon’s Hymn and Material Culture in the World of Bede. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007. Holsinger, Bruce. “The Parable of Caedmon’s Hymn: Liturgical Invention and Literary Tradition.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106, no. 2 (2007): 146–75. Hunter Blair, Peter. “The Moore Memoranda on Northumbrian History.” In Early Cul­ tures of North-­West Europe, ed. C. Fox and B. Dickins, 245–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Kiernan, Kevin S. “Old English Manuscripts: The Scribal Deconstruction of ‘Early’ Northumbrian” ANQ 3, no. 2 (1990): 48–55.



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———. “Reading Cædmon’s ‘Hymn’ with Someone Else’s Glosses.” Representations 32 (1990): 157–74. Lapidge, Michael. “Author’s Variants in the Textual Transmission of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica?” Filologia Mediolatina: Rivista della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini 16 (2009): 1–15. ———, ed. Storia degli inglesi (Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum). 2nd ed. Scrittori greci e latini. Rome: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla; Milan: A. Mondadori, 2008. O’Donnell, Daniel. “Bede’s Strategy in Paraphrasing Caedmon’s Hymn.” Journal of En­ glish and Germanic Philology 103, no. 4 (2004): 417–32. O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien. “Orality and the Developing Text of Caedmon’s Hymn.” Speculum 62, no. 1 (1987): 1–20. Orchard, Andy. “Poetic Inspiration and Prosaic Translation: The Making of Caedmon’s Hymn.” In Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt Wisely”: Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley, ed. M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler, 402–22. London: Routledge, 1996. Parkes, M. B. The Scriptorium of Wearmouth-­Jarrow. Jarrow Lecture 1982. Jarrow: St. Paul’s Church, 1982. Ringrose, Jayne. “The Royal Library: Moore and His Books.” In Cambridge University Library: The Great Collections, ed. Peter Fox, 78–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rowley, Sharon M. The Old English Version of Bede’s “Historia Ecclesiastica.” Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011. Story, Joanna. “After Bede: Continuing the Ecclesiastical History.” In Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter et al., 165–84. Studies in Early Medieval Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Wright, D. H. Review of The Moore Bede, ed. Peter Hunter Blair. Anglia 82 (1964): 110–17.

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C A S E S T U DY I I  

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The Nowell Codex (Beowulf and Other Items) London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, ff. 94r–209v Dimensions: Roughly 202 × 120 mm Date: Fourth quarter tenth century to second half sixteenth century Place of Origin: England Languages: Latin, French, Old English Foliation: ii + 208 + ii Material: Parchment Quiring I–XI8, XII–XIII10, XIV8 (Nowell Codex only) The fourth quire is misbound before the third. In order to arrest the flaking resulting from fire damage, the folios were placed in paper frames by the British Museum in 1845, obscuring any record of the original collation. Layout Verses written across the page without lineation. Ruling indistinct, sometimes on two or more sheets at a time, for example, in quire 10. Single bounding lines. Script The Nowell Codex is written by two contemporary insular scribes, with the change visible at folio 175v. Scribe A writes in the round insular script influenced by Carolingian minuscule, whereas Scribe B writes in a more old-­ fashioned square insular minuscule.

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Textual Contents This manuscript contains a number of separate items, first bound together for Sir Robert Cotton: 1. Medieval flyleaf, containing fifteenth-­to sixteenth-­century historical notes in Latin and French, fol. 3 Southwick Codex (second half of the twelfth century), fols. 4r–93v 2. Augustine of Hippo, Soliloquia, fols. 4r–59v (imperfect) 3. Gospel of Nicodemus, fols. 60r–86v (imperfect) 4. Debate of Saturn and Solomon, fols. 86v–93v 5. Homily on St. Quintin (fol. 93v: imperfect) Nowell Codex (late tenth to early eleventh century), fols. 94r–209v 6. Homily on St. Christopher, fols. 94r–98r (imperfect) 7. Wonders of the East, fols. 98v–106v 8. Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, fols. 107r–131v 9. Beowulf, fols. 132r–201v 10. Judith, fols. 202r–209v (imperfect) Previously, the manuscript began with a psalter leaf (once fol. 1, now London, British Library MS Royal 13 D I*, fol. 37). The current folio 2 is a seventeenth-­ century flyleaf connected with Cotton’s rebinding. Decoration A number of colored drawings accompany the Wonders of the East, including many in frames set into the text block. Subjects include: a single horned sheep, facing right; two horned sheep, facing left (fol. 98v); a cock and a hen; a creature with two bodies, two heads, and eight legs (fol. 99r); a double-­headed serpent; a serpent on the left and a two-­horned beast on the right (fol. 99v); a cynocephalus, a man with a doglike head (fol. 100r); three doglike ants attacking a tethered camel, with a man in a tunic on the left with a camel, and a young camel tied to a tree (fol. 101r); two elephants, resembling camels; a two-­faced man (fol. 101v); a naked man holding a plant; two men talking, and between them a lertix, a sheeplike beast (fol. 102r); a man with his eyes and mouth in his chest; two snakes, each 150 feet long; a centaur with a bangle on each wrist (fol. 102v); two wheels side by side (fol. 103r); a tree from which balsam grows; a donestre, a beast-­headed man, on the left, holding a human leg and foot, and a man on the right (fol. 103v); a man with ears projecting on stems, holding what looks like a bow (fol. 104r); a long-­haired man in a cloak and tunic, whose eyes shine at night like lamps; the temple called Beliobiles (fol. 104v); a golden vine tree; three people talking, representing a kindly nation who rule the Red Sea, where the best pearls are found

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(fol. 105r); a bearded woman facing right, and an upright beast; a long-­haired woman holding a plant (fol. 105v); a man sitting on a cushion under an arch; two catini, open-­mouthed beasts like dogs; a robed man with a staff, extending his hand to another man (fol. 106r); a man lifting a woman; a tree on which gems grow; two men representing the race of Ethiopians (fol. 106v). Binding Bound, with each fragile folio in a paper frame, by the British Museum in 1845. Provenance This manuscript, as its modern British Library shelfmark reveals, was once a part of the collection of the great early modern bibliophile Sir Robert Cotton (d. 1631). The first section was previously owned by Southwick Priory (Hampshire), and the second was previously owned by Laurence Nowell (d. 1570). The manuscript was damaged in the famous Ashburnham House fire of 1731, and its pages have suffered further flaking damage since. In 1753 it became part of the foundation collections of the British Museum. Connections Beowulf and Judith are unique texts. For copies of the Wonders of the East in Old English and Latin, see London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.v and Oxford, Bodleian MS Bodley 614. A Latin version of the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle can be found in London, British Library MS Royal 13 A I.

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The section of British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv known as the Nowell Codex is justly famous as one of only four extant codices to contain the vast majority of Old English verse—alongside the Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library MS 3501), the Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Cathedral Library MS 117), and the Junius Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11). Moreover, it preserves the single copy of Beowulf, an epic poem that is central to modern understandings of Old English literary culture, both in its heroic subjects and in its oral modes of performance. If all medieval manuscripts seem to assure their modern readers direct access to the reading cultures of the past, this iconic one makes assurance doubly sure. But for all of the originary power that comes from locating Beowulf and its manuscript near the very start of English literary history, both the poem and the object prove upon closer inspection to be remarkably layered in time, and even in some sense residual or belated. The realities of both text and book are visible primarily through their material afterlives, which explore and ultimately perhaps question the relevance of any single point of origin.

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The first afterlife to note is the most fundamental, and that is simply the existence of the medieval text in the physical form of a manuscript. Scholars agree that the Nowell Codex should be dated in the late tenth or early eleventh century, but they do not agree about when in that period it was made. The date of the manuscript, moreover, hardly provides a secure point of origin for its texts. Beowulf may have been transmitted orally before—perhaps centuries before—someone committed it to writing. Although it is not certain that the poem was composed orally, according to the formulaic principles proposed for ancient Homeric contexts, it certainly participates in cultures of oral performance. At several crucial moments, for example, Beowulf takes as its subject the singing of the scop (an Old English term for “poet,” or “bard”), self-­consciously representing its own poetic production as a part of its narrative. The monster Grendel, for example, is driven mad in the darkness outside Heorot by overhearing the festivities inside: “hearpan swég / swutol sang scopes” (the harmony of the harp, the sweet song of the poet; lines 89–90). If the poem originated in a similar performative context, the manuscript cannot represent the ephemeral point of the text’s origin, but, at the earliest, the moment of its first inscription. And even that first moment of inscription is not recorded in the manuscript we have. Patterns of mechanical scribal error reveal that the copy of Beowulf in Cotton Vitellius A.xv does not represent an autograph of the poem, nor even the first time someone committed the text to the page. There must have been a now-­ missing exemplar—at least one—preceding this copy of the extant text. The manuscript, therefore, already attests to an early medieval afterlife far removed from the poem’s creation—a record of its own historical moment that provides little or no information about earlier oral or literate instantiations of the text. Into this breach have leapt generations of Old English scholars with speculations about the genesis of Beowulf and the codex in which it appears. That the origin of the text is some time before the creation of the manuscript is not generally in doubt—but how long before? And how might we know? Do the political circumstances surrounding any given decade help us to decide? What do the physical details of the manuscript reveal? Is the poem as we have it even the result of a singular act of composition, or might it be rather a layering of one text upon another? Earlier critics generally believed that the poem was composed orally in the seventh or eighth century, but since Kevin Kiernan argued in 1981 that “no linguistic or historical fact compels us to believe that Beowulf was written before the time of the only extant manuscript” (ix), the dating of the poem has been a subject of passionate dispute. Proposals ranging from the seventh to the eleventh century now proliferate, as multiple conferences on the question have questioned the findings of other conferences, and many collec-

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tions of essays have challenged their predecessors. The ongoing critical conversation has sketched an array of potential lives and afterlives for the poem but has come no closer to finding consensus. Passions run high in direct proportion to the depth of the mystery: because the evidence that could date the poem is so partial and hard to interpret, any attempt to argue one scenario over another inevitably raises far-­reaching questions about method, interpretation, how to read evidence, and the limits of scholarly knowledge. The controversies over the dating of Beowulf suggest that basic aspects of the past remain unknowable, and yet even those scholars who call cautiously for agnosticism have not persuaded everyone. Beowulf may have been composed as much as three centuries before the tenth-­century Nowell Codex, making that moment of the manuscript’s creation already (perhaps) one kind of “afterlife” to the poem. But even the earliest date proposed for the poem’s composition still means looking backward, for the narrative of the poem is set in fifth-­or sixth-­century Scandinavia. The Beowulf-­poet takes a historical subject, recollecting with some nostalgia a society distanced from himself in both space and time. Anglo-­Saxon England can be read through this poem as an “afterlife” of continental Germanic cultures, just as Beowulf itself is a site of powerful nostalgia for the Anglo-­Saxon past in the twenty-­first century. Moreover, the histories narrated within the poem revolve around looking both backward and forward—time is “interlaced” (to use a metaphor derived from early insular visual arts) in the presentation of events, making it clear that history does not just move swiftly forward, but consists of layers of past and present, always talking to each other—both afterlives and foreshadowings. The grammatical apposition that has been celebrated as central to the poem’s structure creates these layers as a point of style: words, subjects, or episodes held in apposition are simply set side by side, suspending both past and present for readers to put into relationship for themselves. Apposition is a feature of the poem’s material context, as well. The manuscript known as Cotton Vitellius A.xv implicitly asks its readers to determine the relationships among all of the disparate things brought together between its covers. Beowulf appears in a part of the volume now known as the “Nowell Codex” (fols. 94r–209v) after the sixteenth-­century antiquarian who wrote his name at its start (“Laurence Nowell ao 1563,” fol. 94r; see Figure II.1). This section of the manuscript includes five Old English texts: a homily on St. Christopher, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the Wonders of the East, Beowulf, and Judith. Although these texts would seem on the surface to be quite disparate—a biblical narrative, a heroic epic, a travelogue, a pedagogical letter, and a sermon—they have been linked by their common theme of monstrosity. St. Chris-

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topher comes from a race of dog-­headed people, the marvels of the East are largely monstrous hybrids including “healfhundingas” (half-­dogs), Judith’s beheading of Holofernes is an unnatural act for a woman, and, of course, Beowulf revolves around the hero’s battles with monstrous enemies: Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. Moreover, some of the texts in the Nowell Codex are also linked by common lexis, punctuation, and contexts of production: similar episodes and vocabulary link Beowulf to the Letter of Alexander, for example, and the same scribe wrote the ending of Beowulf and Judith. Whether or not the collection can be neatly characterized as a liber monstrorum (book of monsters), the thematic and codicological similarities among works in the Nowell Codex arguably make a single book out of disparate texts and ensure that the physical context of these works helps to shape their meaning. The relation among individual items in a manuscript may not have been a part of the compiler’s design, but these five texts were encountered by medieval as well as modern readers as a part of a single group. Their physical proximity has shaped their interpretation in an important form of afterlife. Although the term miscellany is more commonly applied to later medieval manuscript compilations, Ralph Hanna reminds us that it is a useful category through which to consider this early medieval codex as well. Moreover, the afterlife of the “miscellaneous” Nowell Codex includes numerous complex additions and changes to its medieval structure, even in the process of its creation. The codex was written by two scribes, one responsible for the three prose items and part of Beowulf, and the other for the rest of Beowulf and Judith (for the change of hands, see fol. 175r; see Figure II.2). Although medieval bookmaking was often a collaborative enterprise, it is not clear what circumstances of production led to the scribal change at this point. The transition from the first to the second scribe may represent a change to the ending of the narrative; Kevin Kiernan has argued that the story of the hero’s death is a new poem, a new ending rewritten over the story of his youth. If true, this would reveal the final episode of the text to be an afterlife of the episodes that precede it and would show the extreme malleability of this poem—a written text not yet set or concluded but still and always creating its own history. Paleography provides an additional kind of temporal dislocation, for Scribe B continues the poem in a more old-­fashioned script than the one in which Scribe A begins it: a “square” insular minuscule, rather than a “round” one. Moreover, at some point quires have been shifted and are now out of place; quire 3 comes after quire 4, for example, and patterns of wear and wormholes reveal that Beowulf, rather than Judith, was once the last text in the manuscript. Because Judith was not originally at the end of the manuscript, the Old Testament story forms a con-

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structed or added “afterword” to Beowulf in the material object that is now Cotton Vitellius A.xv. Judith is an addition with a loss, however, for the poem both begins and ends imperfectly. The folio that once contained its last lines went missing early on, but a sixteenth-­century hand squeezed them onto the last folio remaining (fol. 209v; see Figure II.3). This scribe from a different era attempted to reproduce the Anglo-­Saxon style of script in his addition, compensating for the loss and recreating a complete text in as historically and materially responsible a way as he could imagine. Many of the physical features of the codex register the temporal layers of the poem’s existence. The look of the poetry in the manuscript reflects its origins in oral cultures but also embraces its literate inscription. Like most Old English poetry, the verses are not lineated in the modern fashion, but run across the page in blocks of text that look like prose. The verse form is sometimes indicated by punctuation, but the alliterative accentual verses would have been recognizable to any contemporary reader—this layout preserves a trace of the oral in the literate, as poetic structure must generally be recognized from the sounds of the words rather than the marks on the page. In addition, the manuscript preserves residues of older verse forms, vowels, and lettering—for example in the scribe’s allusion to Roman square capitals in the display script that opens Beowulf (fol. 132r; see Figure II.4). These varied material allusions to the literary cultures of the past layer the text with a performed monumentality, ventriloquizing its previous life in multiple ways. Seventeenth-­century bibliophile Sir Robert Cotton made further layers of addition to Beowulf, and to the Nowell Codex, by adding a section now known as the Southwick Codex (fols. 4r–93v), to create the composite volume we have today. That volume, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, takes its shelfmark from the organizational system of Cotton’s library, which identified each book by the Roman emperor whose bust topped the bookcase (here Vitellius), the shelf on the bookcase (A), and the manuscript’s place on the shelf (xv). The Southwick Codex includes a series of prose texts written in the mid-­twelfth century: Augustine’s Soliloquia, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Debate of Saturn and Solomon, and a homily on St. Quintin. The prefatory flyleaves that Cotton also added at this time offer a single table of contents for the two discernibly different Old English books, now become one: Cotton’s librarian Richard James lists all the texts by title except Beowulf, leaving a mysterious space for the epic poem (fol. 2r; see Figure II.5). James’s provision of a space seems to confirm that the poem is included in the volume he knows, but that its title and description are still to be revealed to him. Despite the absence of the manuscript’s predominant poem from this composite list, the combination of the Southwick Codex with the

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Nowell Codex creates an afterlife shaped by what seventeenth-­century medievalism and antiquarianism brought to interpretation of these texts. The rearrangements and additions to Cotton Vitellius A.xv create a new book out of several old ones. But the multiple losses visible in the tenth-­century Nowell Codex also necessarily shape twenty-­first-­century readers’ understanding of it. In 1731 (after the lifetime of its founder and original collector), the famous Cottonian library suffered an extensive fire in the poignantly named Ashburnham House. This fire threatened the Beowulf-­manuscript, which still bears traces of the danger it was in. Edges are singed, darkened, crumbling—they disintegrated so quickly that in places modern readers must rely on the partial transcripts of Humphrey Wanley (from 1705) and the full transcripts of Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1787, 1789) to piece together now-­lost areas of the text. The fragile folios were rebound by the British Museum in 1845, mounted in paper frames that were meant to stop or slow the disintegration, but these paper frames obscure any evidence of the original collation, effecting their own kind of loss. The modern study of Beowulf relies on the records of these early antiquarians, raising a number of profound questions about the limits of textual integrity and the security of our access to the past. The kinds of layered temporality that created Cotton Vitellius A.xv can be seen, in some ways, in the histories of all manuscripts. This object necessitates questions about the gap between the creation of the texts and the creation of the manuscript: when were the texts composed? When was the manuscript produced? But this gap is a feature of inscriptional textuality itself, and even though the kinds of questions raised by other manuscripts (or, indeed, printed books) are rarely as complex as those surrounding the text of Beowulf, they are always important to consider. Any manuscript forms a medieval afterlife to the texts it contains, and any manuscript also generates modern afterlives in the form of later readings and editions of its texts. The scholarly afterlife of Beowulf certainly depends upon its manuscript. The Nowell Codex is not a copy of a thing that exists elsewhere—including an idealized text of Beowulf—but rather a complex artifact that itself richly rewards analysis. This, too, is true of all books in a manuscript culture, but the reality of studying Cotton Vitellius A.xv, with all of its gaps, inconsistencies, and mysteries, makes manuscripts’ layered, haunted nature uniquely clear.

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Figure II.1. London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fol. 94r. Opening of Nowell Codex (Homily on St. Christopher), with Laurence Nowell’s signature. Note the edges charred and crumbling as a result of the Ashburnham House fire.

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Figure II.2. London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fol. 175v. Change of scribe, line 4.

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Figure II.3. London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fol. 209v. Ending of Judith with sixteenth-­century additions.

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Figure II.4. London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv fol. 132r. Opening of Beowulf.

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Figure II.5. London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fol. 2r. Sir Robert Cotton’s contents list, omitting but leaving space for Beowulf. Later readers have filled in the title and stamped the manuscript as belonging to the British Museum.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile British Library Digitised Manuscripts. “Cotton MS Vitellius A XV.” http://www .bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_vitellius_a_xv.

Catalogs and Editions Gneuss, Helmut, and Michael Lapidge. Anglo-­Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Ker, N. R. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-­Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Kiernan, Kevin, et al. “Cotton Vitellius A.xv.” From Electronic Beowulf. http://ebeowulf .uky.edu/#vitelliusoverview. Malone, Kemp, ed. The Nowell Codex: British Museum Cotton Vitellius A. XV, Second MS. Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 12. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1963. ———. The Thorkelin Transcripts of “Beowulf ” in Facsimile. Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 1. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1951. Temple, Elzbieta. Anglo-­Saxon Manuscripts, 900–1066. London: Harvey Miller, 1976. See 72 (no. 52). Tite, Colin G. C. The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Formation, Catalogu­ ing, Use. London: British Library, 2003.

Secondary Studies Bredehoft, Thomas. “Anglo-­Saxon Textual Production.” In The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from “Beowulf ” to “Maus,” 23–57. Oxford Textual Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Doane, A. R., and Carol Braun Pasternak, eds. Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Dumville, D.  N. “Beowulf Come Lately: Some Notes on the Palaeography of the Nowell Codex.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 225 (1988): 49–63. Ford, A. J. Marvel and Artefact: The “Wonders of the East” in Its Manuscript Contexts. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Frank, Roberta. “A Scandal in Toronto: The Dating of Beowulf a Quarter Century On.” Speculum 82, no. 4 (2007): 843–64. Frantzen, Allen. Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradi­ tion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Hanna, Ralph. “Texts and Their Books: The Case of Beowulf.” In Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, the Producers and Their Readers, 1–29. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

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Howe, Nicholas. “Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland.” In Migration and Mythmak­ ing in Anglo-­Saxon England, 143–80. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. ———. Writing the Map of Anglo-­Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Kiernan, Kevin. “Beowulf ” and the “Beowulf ” Manuscript. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981. Reprint, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Lapidge, Michael. “The Archetype of Beowulf.” Anglo-­Saxon England 29 (2000): 5–41. Lucas, Peter J. “The Place of Judith in the Beowulf-­Manuscript.” Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 463–78. Mittman, Asa Simon, and Susan M. Kim. Inconceivable Beasts: The “Wonders of the East” in the “Beowulf ” Manuscript. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013. Niedorf, Leonard, ed. The Dating of “Beowulf ”: A Reassessment. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014. Orchard, Andy. A Critical Companion to “Beowulf.” Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003. See especially “Manuscript and Text,” pp. 12–56. Robinson, Fred C. “Beowulf ” and the Appositive Style. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. ———. “Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context.” In Old English Liter­ ature in Context, ed. John D. Niles, 11–29, 157–61. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980. Sisam, Kenneth. “The Beowulf Manuscript.” Modern Language Review 11 (1916): 335–37. ———. “The Compilation of the Beowulf Manuscript.” In Studies in the History of Old English Literature, 65–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. Trilling, Renée. The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representations in Old English Verse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Weiskott, Eric. Review of The Dating of “Beowulf ”: A Reassessment, ed. Leonard Niedorf. Review of English Studies 67, no. 281 (2016): 788–90.

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C A S E S T U DY I I I  

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St. Albans Psalter Hildesheim, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St. God. 1 Dimensions: 276 × 184 mm Date: ca. 1120–46 Place of Origin: England Languages: Latin, French Foliation: 209, one separated leaf in the Schnütgen Museum, Cologne (Inv. No. M694) Material: Parchment Quiring I–II8, III10, IV2, V8, VI–XIV10, XV9 (wants 8), XVI–XXII10, XXIII2–XXIV2 Layout Variable and complex throughout the manuscript, as the requirements of its contents range widely. The pictorial preface consists of nothing but full-­page images, for example, and the psalter incorporates images into the text at the start of each psalm. The first three pages of the Life of Saint Alexis are written in alternating lines of red and blue, with an initial marking the start of each stanza throughout. The account of spiritual battle in the Alexis quire is written in alternating lines of red, blue, and green. Ruling in lead point, orange crayon, sharp point.

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Script Protogothic, with Roman capitals. Six different scribes have been identified working in the manuscript, some of whom can be seen in other work from St. Albans. For example, separate scribes wrote the main text of the calendar, the main text of the psalms, the Alexis quire, the main additions to the calendar and obits, and the dedication of Markyate Priory. The outer bifolio of quire 6 (pp. 73, 74, 91, 92) was also written by a different hand, suggesting a change in the design of the opening of the psalms. Rodney Thomson has suggested that the scribe of the personal Alexis quire, the least professional in the book, was possibly Abbott Geoffrey himself. Textual Contents Although the main text of the psalter is the book of Psalms, the manuscript includes a number of other items: 1. A liturgical calendar, pp. 1–16 2. Forty full-­page miniatures narrating biblical scenes, pp. 17–56 3. The “Alexis quire,” a gathering containing the Life of Saint Alexis and a letter of Pope Gregory, both written in French; three pictures of Christ at Emmaus; a discourse on Good and Evil in Latin; and the letter B (Beatus vir), marking the start of the psalms, pp. 57–72 4. The psalms, prayers, and canticles, pp. 73–414 5. A diptych showing full-­page images of the martyrdom of St. Alban and David the Musician, pp. 415–18 Decoration The manuscript is extensively decorated, with both illustrations and multicolored hierarchies of script. The calendar pages include the labors of the months and signs of the zodiac. A series of forty full-­page painted images from biblical history includes: (1) Fall of Adam and Eve, (2) Expulsion from Paradise, (3) Annunciation, (4) Visitation, (5) Nativity, (6) Annunciation to the Shepherds, (7) Magi Before Herod, (8) Journey of the Magi, (9) Adoration of the Magi, (10) Dream of the Magi, (11) Return of the Magi, (12) Presentation at the Temple, (13) Flight into Egypt, (14) Massacre of the Innocents, (15) Return from Egypt, (16) Baptism, (17)  First Temptation, (18)  Second Temptation, (19)  Third Temptation, (20)  Christ in the House of Simon the Pharisee, (21)  Entry into Jerusalem, (22) Washing of the Feet, (23) Christ in the Garden of Gesthemene, (24) Christ and the Sleeping Apostles, (25)  Last Supper, (26)  Betrayal, (27)  Mocking of Christ, (28)  Flagellation, (29)  Pilate Washing His Hands, (30)  Carrying the Cross, (31) Descent from the Cross, (32) Entombment, (33) Harrowing of Hell,

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(34) Three Women at the Sepulchre, (35) Mary Magdalene’s Annunciation to the Apostles, (36) Incredulity of Thomas, (37) Legend of St. Martin, (38) Ascension, (39) Pentecost, (40) David as a Musician. The Alexis quire includes a half-­page tinted drawing illuminating the Life of Saint Alexis (p. 57); three full-­page tinted drawings of Christ on the road to Emmaus (p. 69); Christ at supper in Emmaus (p.  70); and Christ disappearing from supper at Emmaus (p. 71); as well as a marginal tinted drawing of two knights on horseback (p. 72). Each psalm, canticle, and prayer boasts a large, decorated initial, and the final bifolium adds full-­ page paintings of the martyrdom of St. Alban and David the Musician. Binding The psalter is bound with some medieval materials (wooden boards covered in pigskin), reworked and resewn in the 1930s. Provenance The manuscript now belongs to the parish church of St. Godeshard, Hildesheim. It contains inscriptions indicating that it was previously owned by the monastery of Lamspringe, suppressed in 1803. Lamspringe was a haven for English Catholics fleeing the civil war, and it is possible that one of refugees brought the psalter with him from England by 1657. Erasures of the word pape indicate that the manuscript was in England at the Reformation, and internal evidence from the litany and the calendar localizes the production of the book at St. Albans. It was likely given soon after its production to Christina of Markyate, near St. Albans in Hertfordshire. Connections The text of the psalms is, of course, very commonly found. The texts of the Alexis quire are rarer, and unique in combination. This version of the popular Chanson d’Alexis is found additionally in the following manuscripts: Manchester, John Rylands University Library, French 6, fol. 10; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Français 19525, fols. 26va–30vb; Paris, BnF, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises, 934, fols. 31r–32v; Paris, BnF, Nouvelles acquisitions françaises 4503, fols. 11v–19v; and Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticani latini 5334, fol. 125. Similar scribal hands have been noted in London, British Library MSS Harley 2624, fols. 3v–46v; Egerton 3721, fols. 1v–7v; Royal 2 A X, fols. 1v–8; and Cotton Ch. XI 8. Artists similar to the Alexis Master, the artist responsible for the manuscript’s full-­page paintings, have been identified in Verdun, Bibliothèque municipale MS 70; Hereford, Cathedral Library MS O.1.VIII; and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M 736. The anonymous life of Christina of Markyate is found in London, British Library MS Cotton Tiberius E.i.

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The St. Albans Psalter offers a stunning example of Romanesque manuscript painting. The pictures are so numerous, so early, and so significant that one might be tempted to think that the most interesting questions raised by this liturgical book have little to do with literary form. But in addition to its rich program of illustration, the manuscript also contains a number of important texts—some common and some more idiosyncratic—that interact in revealing ways with its remarkable pictorial contents. The history of scholarship has tended to keep this book’s images separate from its texts, but both together offer indispensable perspective on literary cultures of the twelfth century in England, and particularly on the range of possible relationships between manuscripts and their readers. Although the psalter was most likely created at the monastery of St. Albans, it was apparently modified soon after its creation and given to the recluse Christina of Markyate (ca. 1096 to after 1155), probably by Geoffrey de Gorham (or Gorron), abbot of St. Albans (1119–46). Details added to the psalter’s calendar witness to Christina’s close connection with the book, including her own obit on December 8 as the “first prioress of Markyate” and obits for her family members and friends. It is difficult to make sense of the manuscript’s multiple parts without considering Christina as a reader for whom it was specially designed. Valuing histories of patronage and ownership as much as histories of production can help make women’s history visible in medieval books. And yet her connection with the manuscript inevitably raises questions: whose lives are visible within this manuscript, and how are they registered in text and image? How do the traces of the manuscript’s original creation (either by Abbot Geoffrey, or his predecessor Abbot Richard d’Aubigny) differ from the traces of Christina’s ownership? Does the design of the volume reveal how the manuscript was used, as well as how it was made? Evidence for the biography of Christina of Markyate comes primarily from a source far removed from the St. Albans Psalter itself: a vita preserved in British Library MS Cotton Tiberius E.i, Of S. Theodora, virgin, who is also called Chris­ tina. The author of this saintly life was an anonymous monk of St. Albans (which he calls “our monastery”), but some of the details seem to have been dictated by Christina herself, for no one else would have known, for example, that she secretly scratched a cross with her fingernail on the door of St. Albans as a young girl inspired to religious life. Christina was born in Huntingdon circa 1096–98 to a prosperous Anglo-­Saxon family who married her advantageously to a nobleman named Beohrtred. She rejected the match that was made for her, however, refusing her husband’s propositions and hiding from his advances. Eventually she left her unconsummated marriage to become a recluse, living a solitary holy life under the influence of a series of protectors, both women and

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men. One of the most important of these early protectors was Roger, a monk of St. Albans and hermit of Markyate, who fondly referred to Christina as his “Sunday daughter.” The St. Albans Psalter records an especially elaborate notice of Roger’s death in the calendar on September 12, connecting his memory to the longevity of the manuscript itself, and looking forward to future owners of it: “The death of Roger the Hermit, monk of St. Albans; whoever has this psalter should hold his memory in honor on this day.” After Roger’s death Christina moved into his hermitage, ultimately becoming the head of a priory founded at Markyate in 1145. In that location, she developed relationships with the nearby monastery at St. Albans, becoming especially close to Abbott Geoffrey, an ecclesiastic who recognized and supported her religious calling, and whom she served as spiritual adviser. The intensity of their friendship drew some criticism from others in the community, but it was a significant shaping force in both of their lives. Christina’s life was solitary, then, but it was far from isolated. She developed spiritual community with other women solitaries and notably with men in religious life who could provide, as women could not, access to both worldly autonomy and sacramental power. Her friendship with Roger, for example, allowed her to escape her marriage and establish an independent life as a solitary. Her relationship with Abbott Geoffrey was even more complexly layered, as he held not only an exalted position in the worldly institution of the church but also the power of the sacraments. Their connection thus forms a part of the complex cura monialium, or “pastoral care of nuns,” that structured holy women’s affiliations in the Middle Ages with men in religious life. But although Geoffrey held many varieties of institutional power, Christina had extraordinary access to divine inspiration, heavenly visions, and assistance from God—as a result, she became Geoffrey’s spiritual adviser, as much as he was hers. The St. Albans Psalter, likely Geoffrey’s gift to Christina, can be understood as a material representation of this complicated relationship—an embodiment of the care and teaching (and salvation) that a male spiritual director can offer to a female acolyte. But it is just as clearly a reflection of Christina’s charismatic life, her spiritual convictions, and her visionary connections to the divine. Reading Geoffrey’s gift to Christina as a reflection of her life in community speaks to these varied aspects of the manuscript, even while it remains difficult to sort out conclusively the relationships among its parts. Like any psalter, the manuscript from St. Albans places the book of Psalms at its core. The psalms formed the foundation of monastic devotional practice, and also the practice of those in quasi-­religious forms of life, like Christina, who sought to imitate the rhythms of the monastic day. She read a selection of psalms daily, divided such that she would move through the whole psalter in the course

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of a week. An anecdote from her vita illustrates the importance of this practice to her devotional life, and the instrumental role her psalter played. Christina’s constant reading and singing of the psalms provoked devils, who sought to frighten her away from her prayer: In order to terrify the holy maiden of Christ, toads invaded her prison to distract her by all kinds of ugliness. Their sudden appearance, with their big and terrible eyes, was most frightening, for they squatted here and there, settling themselves right in the middle of the Psalter which lay open on the lap of the Bride of Christ for her use at all hours. When she refused to move and would not give up singing her psalms, they went away, which makes one think they really were devils, especially as they appeared unexpectedly, and since her cell was closed and locked on all sides it was impossible to see where they came from, nor how they got in or out. (Talbot, 38) This account of Christina’s experience with diabolical toads in her cell witnesses to her constant and faithful praying of the psalms. Moreover, those central prayers depend upon her use of a psalter, perhaps even the St. Albans Psalter itself, so intimately connected to her person that it lies constantly open on her lap in order to be available for her use. Even though the text of the psalms was no doubt lodged in her memory, the psalter is the essential material vehicle for Christina’s prayer; accordingly, in order to challenge her unshakable devotion to praying the psalms, the devil-­toads attempt to appropriate the space of the physical book. The illustrations of the St. Albans Psalter often parallel Christina’s spiritual life in suggestive ways. For example, an intriguing initial C was added to Psalm 105 on a separate piece of vellum sometime after the decoration of the psalter was first completed (see Figure III.1). This modified initial, painted by a different artist from the others, depicts a woman interceding with Christ on behalf of a group of monks behind her. She leads them from the earthly space on the left into the heavenly space on the right with the following words written in alternating red and green ink over the image: “Spare your monks, I beseech you, O merciful kindness of Jesus.” The woman’s intercession is so effective that she not only crosses the metaphysical boundary but touches Christ himself. Although it is not certain that this image represents Christina, it can be read productively in connection with several aspects of her biography. Christina brought several monks into monastic life, “some of whom owed their monastic vocation to her” (Talbot, 127); such events could be represented by this image of a woman

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leading a group of monks to Christ. Moreover, after her first meeting with Geoffrey (perhaps to be identified with the figure mirroring her gesture and placing an intimate hand on her back), “all he asked was her intercession with God” (Talbot, 59). Later, in a vision, Geoffrey asks more specifically for Christina’s help in connecting with the divine: “giving her a sign with his eyes and head, he humbly begged her to introduce him to the people standing in the divine presence at her side” (Talbot, 69). The initial for Psalm 105 appears to show such a similar introduction. Another revealing illustration in the manuscript may depict a very similar visionary scene. As her vita describes it, Christina “saw herself in a certain room; it was finely built and it smelt sweet. Two venerable and handsome figures clothed in white garments were present. They stood side by side, differing neither in stature nor beauty. On their shoulders a dove, far more beautiful than any other dove, seemed to rest” (Talbot, 69). Geoffrey sought to enter this room, begging for an introduction to the divine persons he saw there. In the picture that illustrates the opening of the litany in the psalter, six kneeling nuns in two groups hold up books that contain the litany to the Trinity, while a monk in between the groups gestures toward the books as if to reinforce their message (see Figure III.2). The second book contains the words “Sancta Trinitas unus Deus,” which suggest a specific connection with the priory of Markyate, Sanctae Trinitatis de Bosco. To the left, the Holy Trinity is pictured as two identical human figures, mirroring each other, with a dove resting in between them. Faint underdrawings show that the dove was originally planned to have open wings, but ultimately was depicted with closed wings, perhaps aligning with the vita’s description of the dove as seeming to “rest” between the two figures. Although no figure in this image is singled out as Christina, the community of women seems to point the way to the Trinity, and the first one, like the figure in the initial for Psalm 105, has such access that her hand crosses the visual barrier between the earthly figures and the divine ones. The women kneel, but, even so, the standing male figure is drawn at a larger scale—perhaps indicating the greater institutional status of the abbot of St. Albans. The St. Albans psalter also contains traces of its owner in several idiosyncratic and fascinating additions to its central texts. Following the calendar, for example, is an innovative series of forty full-­page miniatures narrating biblical scenes, largely from the life of Christ. These striking paintings form an extensive pictorial preface to the psalms themselves, in an early example of a feature that would become characteristic of English psalters, and they have been related iconographically to similar scenes in contemporary dramatic texts. Some of the pages show stitching holes, indicating that there were once protective curtains

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sewn in to cover these valuable and fragile images (e.g., quire 2), creating a dynamic of concealment and disclosure, of blindness and revelation, in the experience of reading this sacred book. Christina is less tightly connected to these narrative images than to the initials in the psalms, but, in support of a connection with her, some critics have pointed out that women play a larger role in this version of Christ’s life than they sometimes do. The Virgin is unusually present in the scenes of Christ’s Ascension and Pentecost in the St. Albans Psalter, for example. And Mary Magdalene’s Annunciation to the Apostles, though known in Byzantine manuscripts at this date, is an iconography very unfamiliar in the West (see Figure III.3). This unusual image shows Mary Magdalene revealing to a group of shocked apostles that she has been granted a vision of the risen Christ, the first of his followers to witness to the Resurrection. Like the images elsewhere in the psalter of women offering divine aid to monks, this image emblematizes and celebrates the kind of authority a visionary woman could hold over a group of men in religious life. Christina’s identity as a reader of the St. Albans Psalter has also left directly textual traces in its pages. After the pictorial preface comes the so-­called “Alexis quire,” the center of literary interest in the manuscript. This quire adds distinctive new material to the standard texts of the psalter, including the earliest full-­length narrative preserved anywhere in Old French, the Life of Saint Alexis. The editor of Christina’s vita calls this poem an “incongruous intruder” “quite irrelevant to a purely liturgical book” (Talbot, 23). But the dislocated saint’s life in fact demonstrates that the St. Albans Psalter is more than a purely liturgical book; the Life of Saint Alexis offers useful perspective on the connections between Latin liturgical reading and vernacular literature, as well as the identity of the book’s probable owner. Like Christina, Alexis spurned his noble family and an earthly marriage to dedicate his solitary life to God. The images at the start of the text reflect precisely these events—the rejection of the marriage bed, the departure by ship— emphasizing the refusal of marriage as the most significant episode in the saint’s life (see Figure III.4). In these prefatory images, the saint convinces his wife that they should live apart, mirroring the moment in which Christina lectures to her husband, Beohrtred, about the chaste marriage of St. Cecelia. The gender reversal here—Christina as Alexis—may at first seem strange, but it parallels moments in Christina’s Life in which her valor is imagined in masculine terms: fleeing her parents’ house, for example, she disguises herself as a youth and takes on “manly courage” as she leaps on a horse to make her escape (Talbot, 34). Christina must have recognized her own matrimonial struggle in Alexis’s desire for chastity and taken the male saint, along with Cecelia, as an exemplary model for her own life. Indeed, the resonances between Christina’s situation and this particular hagiog-

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raphical text offer one of the most convincing explanations for its inclusion in the repurposing of the psalter for her. It is easy to imagine Christina taking inspiration from reading the Life of Saint Alexis, especially since it is—unusually—in French. The use of a non-­Latin language in a psalter suggests a readership beyond a limited male clerical milieu, but it is notable that—thirty years after the Norman Conquest—the vernacular language incorporated into the psalter is not English. Perhaps the choice of French suggests that the St. Albans Psalter was a Norman book, that it reflects the aristocratic social aspirations of the abbey at a time when language choice illuminated varied social contexts for reading. One also wonders about the implications of language choice for Christina’s family position and her education: could she read French, perhaps more comfortably than English? Would she have been entirely unable to read Latin? The presence of this early French text in an English book also raises many questions about the conventional contours of literary history—it would appear not only that French and English were equivalent vernaculars in twelfth-­century Hertfordshire, but that French literature itself could have an Anglo-­Norman origin. The texts of the St. Albans Psalter provide one more reminder of the interconnectedness of the two languages; in this period and indeed throughout the Middle Ages the importance of the French language for literary practice in England is hard to overstate. There is another significant French text in the Alexis quire: the famous letter of Pope Gregory in defense of images, written here in both Latin and French translation (see Figure III.5). The Gregorian letter is a touchstone for debates about the propriety of instrumental art in Christian worship: pictures are the books of the illiterate, Gregory says, indicating that religious art serves the purpose of widening the audience for Christian teachings. If one is illiterate in Latin, the letter implies in this context, both vernacular French and narrative images can offer some aid. And the text is followed precisely by such exemplary narrative images: Christ on the road to Emmaus, Christ at dinner with his disciples, and Christ disappearing from the supper table. These color wash images, stylistically similar to the initial St. Alexis image, are out of sequence with the fully painted life of Christ, but they, too, can be related to dramatic versions of the biblical story. The meaning of the images is further enriched by a range of possible connections to the owner of this manuscript: St. Alexis was a pilgrim who traveled unrecognized, and Christina herself had three visions in which Christ appeared as a pilgrim, once sitting on her bed, once taking a meal of bread and fish with her and her sister, and once celebrating mass (Talbot, 83– 87). But the Gregorian letter articulates an equivalence between text and image that more broadly underlies the whole psalter. Whatever the letter implies

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about the owner’s literacy in one language or another (and the inclusion of both Latin and French here, as well as the female forms found in adjacent Latin captions, are intriguing), it explicitly articulates a value for religious imagery that the psalter as a whole confirms. The St. Albans Psalter offers a rich collection of unusual texts and images that repay many different kinds of scholarly attention. In particular, the psalter provides an unparalleled opportunity to imagine a variety of relationships between a medieval reader and a material book. Whether the impetus for the inclusion of the Alexis quire, for example, comes from the community at St. Albans (via Abbott Geoffrey’s interests) or the community at Markyate (via Christina’s interests), the psalter as a whole records the intersecting influences of many medieval communities and medieval readers. And its postmedieval legacy is equally interesting: canceled references to the pope show that the manuscript was in England at the Reformation, but it was at the monastery of Lamspringe by 1657, probably brought by English Catholics fleeing persecution during the English Civil War. The multiplicity of reading communities in the psalter’s long history emerges in the variety of names scholars have given it: the Hildesheim Psalter, HS St. Godehard 1, the St. Albans Psalter, the Psalter of Christina of Markyate, and—most recently proposed in Kristen Collins and Matthew Fisher’s valuable 2017 collection inspired by the rebinding of the manuscript—the Markyate Psalter. Whatever we call this manuscript, its combination of images and texts reveals fascinating traces of how its first individual owner engaged in her own kind of literary devotion and also inspired others. Its visual and textual structures of prayer create an unusually intimate, if still obscure, sense of a person within a book.

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Figure III.1. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St. God. 1, p. 285. St. Albans Psalter. Psalm 105, pasted-in initial showing a woman interceding with Christ on behalf of a group of monks.

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Figure III.2. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St. God. 1, p. 403. St. Albans Psalter. Opening of the litany; the Trinity, adored by a group of nuns and a monk.

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Figure III.3. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St. God. 1, p. 51. St. Albans Psalter. Mary Magdalene’s Annunciation to the Apostles.

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Figure III.4. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St. God. 1, p. 57. St. Albans Psalter. Opening of the Life of Saint Alexis.

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Figure III.5. Hildesheim, Dombibliothek Hildesheim MS St. God. 1, p. 68. St. Albans Psalter. Letter of Pope Gregory in Latin and French.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile The St. Albans Psalter. https://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml.

Catalogs and Editions Kauffmann, C. M. Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190. Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 3:68–70. London: Harvey Miller, 1975. Pächt, Otto, C. R. Dodwell, and Francis Wormald. The St. Albans Psalter (Albani Psal­ ter). Studies of the Warburg Institute 25. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1960. Perugi, Maurizio, ed. La vie de Saint Alexis en ancien français. Trans. Valerie Fasseur and Maurizio Perugi. Geneva: Droz, 2017. Talbot, C. H., ed. and trans. The Life of Christina of Markyate. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford, 1959, rev. 1987. Revised and reprinted, Toronto: Medieval Academy of America, 1998.

Secondary Studies Alexander, J. J. G. “Ideological Representation of Military Combat in Anglo-­Norman Art.” Anglo-­Norman Studies 15 (1992): 1–14. Camille, Michael. “Philological Iconoclasm: Edition and Image in the Vie de Saint Alexis.” In Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 371–401. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Carrasco, Magdalena Elizabeth. “The Imagery of the Magdalen in Christina of Markyate’s Psalter (The St. Albans Psalter).” Gesta 37 (1999): 67–80. Caviness, Madeline H. “Anchoress, Abbess, and Queen: Donors and Patrons or Intercessors and Matrons?” In The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash, 105–53. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Collins, Kristen, and Matthew Fisher, eds. St. Albans and the Markyate Psalter: Seeing and Reading in Twelfth-­Century England. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. Geddes, Jane. The St Albans Psalter: A Book for Christina of Markyate. London: British Library, 2005. Gerry, Kathryn. “The Alexis Quire and the Cult of Saints at St. Albans.” Historical Re­ search 82 (2009): 593–612. Goldschmidt, Adolph. Der Albanipsalter in Hildesheim. Berlin: G. Siemens, 1895. Hamburger, Jeffrey F. “Art, Enclosure and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript.” Gesta 31, no. 2 (1992): 108–34. Haney, Kristine E. The St. Albans Psalter: An Anglo-­Norman Song of Faith. Studies in the Humanities 60. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. ———. “The St. Albans Psalter and the New Spiritual Ideals of the Twelfth Century.” Viator 28 (1997): 145–73.

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———. “The St. Albans Psalter: A Reconsideration.” Journal of the Warburg and Cour­ tauld Institutes 58 (1995): 1–28. Heslop, T. A. “The Visual Arts and Crafts.” In The Cambridge Guide to Arts in Britain, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, ed. Boris Ford, 164–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Holdsworth, Christopher J. “Christina of Markyate.” In Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker, 185–204. Studies in Church History, Subsidia 1. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. Koopmans, Rachel M. “The Conclusion of Christina of Markyate’s Vita.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, no. 4 (2000): 663–98. Kumler, Aden. “The Patron-­Function.” In Patronage: Power and Agency in Medieval Art, ed. Colum Hourihane, 297–319. Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art and Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with Penn State University Press, 2013. Matthew, Donald. “The Incongruities of the St. Albans Psalter.” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 4 (2008): 396–416. Openshaw, Kathleen. “Weapons in the Daily Battle: Images of the Conquest of Evil in the Early Medieval Psalter.” Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 17–38. Pächt, Otto. The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-­Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960. Perugi, Maurizio. Saint Alexis: Genèse de sa légende et de la “Vie” française; Révisions et nouvelles propositions, accompagnées d’une nouvelle édition critique de la “Vie.” Geneva: Droz, 2014. Powell, Morgan. “Making the Psalter of Christina of Markyate (The St. Albans Psalter).” Viator 36 (2005): 293–335. ———. “The Visual, the Visionary and Her Viewer: Media and Presence in the Psalter of Christina of Markyate (St. Albans Psalter).” Word & Image 22 (2006): 340–362. Sargan, J. D. “Psalmic Authority in the Life of a Twelfth-­Century Holy Woman: Christina of Markyate and Psalm 37.” English Studies 98, no. 1 (2017): 73–83. Thomson, Rodney M. Manuscripts from St. Albans Abbey, 1066–1235. 2 vols. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1982. Verini, Alexandra. “Performing Community and Place in the St. Albans Psalter.” En­ glish Studies 98, no. 1 (2017): 63–72.

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C A S E S T U DY I V  

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Language

Orrm, The Orrmulum Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1 Dimensions: ca. 500 × 200 mm Date: ca. 1170–85 Place of Origin: England, perhaps Lincolnshire Languages: Middle English and Latin Foliation: [i] + ii + 117 + [i] Material: Parchment (irregular, near complete skins) Quiring The collation of this manuscript is complex, due in part to the use of rough, irregular parchment folios, and in part to multiple losses (of at least thirty-­four leaves) and multiple additions (twenty-­nine inserted leaves) made after binding. For a complete assessment of the manuscript’s structure, see Mark Faulkner, “Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 1: The Orrmulum.” Faulkner’s simplified collation, omitting the twenty-­nine inserted slips of parchment, follows:

I II III IV V VI VII

(7: all singletons) [fols. 3–9] (10: +1 before 1 (lost), +1 after 10; 4, 5, 6, 7 lost) [fols. 10–22] (8: 1, 2, 7, 8 lost) [fols. 23–30] (12: 6, 7 lost) [fols. 31–43] (10: +1 before fol. 47 (lost), + 1 after fol. 51; 4, 9 lost) (12: 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 lost) [fols. 63–69] (12: 2, 6, 7, 11 lost) [fols. 70–79]

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VIII (12: 4, 9, 12 lost) [fols. 80–89] IX (16) [fols. 90–105] X (16: 8, 9, 15 lost, 3 and 16 largely torn out) [fols. 106–“119”] The first bifolium contains thirteenth-­century writing, and quire signatures in the rest suggest that it is not an integral part of the manuscript. Layout Irregular. Two columns after quire 1, usually fifty to seventy lines per folio, varying according to the size of the leaf. Text fills every available parchment space, including occasional vertical writing in the margins. A seventeenth-­century reader, likely Franciscus Junius, numbered the columns, providing useful evidence of what has been lost since then. Script Heavy insular protogothic. There are three identifiable hands, the scribe of the main text (Hand A), a corrector who is close to the original scribe and may be the same (Hand B), and a scribe who wrote the biblical extracts at the start of each homily (Hand C). Hands A and B probably belong to the author himself. The doubled consonants are often stacked on top of each other, perhaps to economize space. Textual Contents 1. An “Alphabetum anglicum” with runes, written vertically, fol. 2r 2. The Orrmulum, fols. 3–119 (incomplete) (Digital Index of Middle English Verse [DIMEV] 3722) Decoration Multiple-­line initials at the start of most homilies, mostly in black but a few in green. Binding Modern pulp boards, probably bound after multiple bifolia were lost. Provenance The earliest attestation of the manuscript’s ownership is a note in London, Lambeth Palace MS 783, where the Dutch antiquarian Jan van Vliet indicates that the Orrmulum excerpts he transcribes come from a manuscript then in the possession of Sir Thomas Aylesbury (1579/80–1658). A note on folio 2 of Junius 1 itself records that Van Vliet purchased it in 1659. It was sold from his estate in 1666 (lot 107), probably to Franciscus Junius, with whose collection it entered the Bodleian Library in 1678.

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Connections London, Lambeth Palace MS 783 contains notes of Jan van Vliet and Franciscus Junius, including excerpts from the Orrmulum (42r–91r), some no longer extant in Junius 1. These excerpts include the dedication, the preface, a lost homily on Luke 2, and glossaries.

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Bodleian MS Junius 1 is one of the most eccentric of medieval literary manuscripts, and yet it raises issues central to the linguistic forms and the literary cultures of early Middle English. The text inscribed here—a set of metrical homilies identified by its author as the Orrmulum—provides a rich seam of evidence that linguists have mined to explore the evolving histories of English spelling, meter, and even pronunciation. Most strikingly, the Orrmu­ lum offers an unusual system of orthography that has long been valued as a rich repository of philological history. In addition to providing evidence of idiosyncratic literate practices in the late twelfth century, the stylized text also provides commentary on them, expressing a surprisingly principled dedication to system and regularity. The manuscript’s language demonstrates how important the material shapes of English were to at least one author in the period, highlighting social attitudes toward changing linguistic forms in early Middle English. The idiosyncrasies of Junius 1 present a case for the cultural importance of language choices: this author, deeply committed to how his words are formed from specific combinations of letters, connects the literal construction of words to his project for using them. The materiality of language is both this manuscript’s theme and—if orthography is understood as one way of giving language physical form—its method. Junius 1 contains the single copy of an incomplete set of exegetical homilies self-­titled as the Orrmulum, written by an author who also names himself with unusual directness in the textual preface to the collection: Þiss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum forrþi þatt Orrm itt wrohhte (Pref., 1–2) This book is named Orrmulum, since Orrm created [wrought] it. The explicit self-­referentiality of this title forges a connection, or even an identity, between the text and its author. The word Orrmulum is often said to echo

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the form of speculum (mirror), a title for medieval texts that became more common slightly later, in the thirteenth century. But along with making a verb into a noun (specio + culum = speculum), the suffix also potentially makes the book into a diminutive version of the author himself (cf. rex + ulus = regulus). In this sense, the self-titled text offers a material emblem of its author doing something, engaging in literate practices that he hopes will have an outsized effect on the world. Who was this activist author? Linguistic evidence suggests an association with the East Midlands, for the name Orrm comes from Old Norse (meaning “worm” or “dragon”), and the text is also associated with the former Danelaw through its dialect and significant Old Norse borrowings. Taken together, the geographical and biographical evidence suggests that Orrm was probably an Augustinian canon in Lincolnshire, perhaps at Bourne Abbey. In addition to naming its author, the preface also less directly announces the work’s surprisingly grand ambitions: the Orrmulum models a new, comprehensive, orthographic system for the highly irregular lexical forms of early Middle English. It hopes to transform the spelling of English, offering these instructions to any person who might wish to copy the book: & tatt he loke wel þatt he An bocstaff write twiȝȝess, Eȝȝwhær þær itt uppo þiss boc Iss wriȝtenn o þatt wise. (Dedication, lines 103–6) And that he take care that he Write one letter twice Everywhere that it in this book Is written in that way Orrm calls attention here to the conspicuous doubling of consonants used throughout his text and seeks to impose his orthographical system on those he is sure will follow him in transcribing it. This system, insofar far as it can be deduced from the practice of the manuscript itself, seeks to rationalize spelling phonetically around vowel sounds, so that the quantity of vowels is sometimes marked by breves or macrons, and a short vowel is followed by a double consonant if it is the last consonant in the word or is followed by another consonant: þatt instead of þat, Ennglissh instead of English. This doubling of consonants, often written one above the other, gives the English of the Orrmulum a distinctive and peculiar look (see Figure IV.1).

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Orrm pays attention to regularity of writing across his text, preferring simple e to the dipthong eo, ȝho to ho, and f to ph. He was perhaps the first to use the more modern wh for Old English hw and sh for sc consistently. Even more strikingly, he cares as much about letterforms as he does about orthography, preferring thorn (þ) to eth (ð), for example, and using the continental and insular forms of g strategically to denote differing pronunciations (see, e.g., Figure IV.1). These changes are deliberate and surprisingly thorough; Orrm keeps to his system fairly consistently across the whole 18,000 lines of his poem, even when that consistency has required him to painstakingly revise and correct material written earlier. For example, he seems to have decided around line 13000 that he preferred e spellings to eo ones; after that, he regularly used e alone, and also returned to the earlier parts of his text to scrape off the unnecessary o (see Figure IV.2). All of these choices, so carefully implemented, show a meticulous concern for how the language of the text is realized on the page—not only in the letters that make up words, but also in the pen strokes that make up letters. In this connection, it is fascinating to note that a thirteenth-­century hand added the archaic letterforms of a runic alphabet—“Alphabetum Anglicum”—on folio 2r (see Figure IV.3). Orrm takes an equally distinctive and consistent approach to his meter, which is strictly syllabic. Although the text is lineated like prose, its poetic lines fall into a clear pattern of long lines of fifteen syllables, or short lines of eight syllables alternating with seven—a form related to septenaries in Latin poetry and to common meter in later English verse. This syllable-­counted meter is unusual in England at this early date, when Old English styles of alliterative meter still dominated. Though they do not rhyme, the lines of the Orrmulum are generally iambic, making Junius 1 an important early witness to the accentual syllabic poetic forms that would become standard in English prosody. Despite Orrm’s close attention to his systems and his concern for their legacies, however, it remains difficult to fit the Orrmulum into the history of English literature. The text exists in only one copy, an author’s personal working draft, and it seems not to have circulated at all. The work is dedicated to one William— described as both a spiritual and biological brother to the author (see Figure IV.1)—but there is no evidence that anyone besides its scribes ever read it. Although other copies of the text may once have existed, they left no trace of subsequent influence. It is also possible that Orrm’s unusual orthographic ideas met with flat resistance, typified by a persistent and basic confusion over how to spell the title of the work and the author’s name: should it be Orrm and Orrmulum, as the manuscript would have it, doubling the consonants according to the text’s orthographical system? Or should these odd forms be smoothed into the more familiar Orm and Ormulum—a tempting emendation that only highlights the

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failure of Orrm’s orthographic innovation to take hold (and, indeed, no comprehensive proposal to regularize English spelling ever has). Elsewhere in the text, the author also names himself as Orrmin, a disyllabic form of the name that may have appealed for metrical reasons, but one that, like Orrm’s syllabic meter itself, has failed to catch on. For all of the work’s interest and verbal energy—Christopher Cannon calls Orrm’s writing “impertinent,” “brave,” and “insightful” (85)— its cultural impact, if it ever had one, has been lost. A further paradox is that Orrm’s care for system in orthography and meter and his efforts to perfect his text have led him to create a chaotic and haphazard book. The sloppy physical state of the manuscript begins with its oddly shaped pieces of untrimmed, low-­grade parchment—each piece rough and irregular in size (see Figure IV.4). The bold and sturdy script shows signs of haste, as well as inconsistency in inks and badly cut quills. Almost every inch of parchment has been filled with writing. The written text exhibits numerous insertions, deletions, and revisions—this is an autograph, a working copy that reveals its author’s process, and was most likely intended for recopying into a final version. Three scribal hands are visible in the manuscript, two of them (Hands A and B) so similar that they may both have been Orrm’s own, differentiated only by youth or age, or by whether he was writing formal text or marginal notes. The third hand (Hand C), responsible for the biblical extracts before each homily, may have been an assistant working under the author’s supervision. Orrm inserted some twenty-­nine extra leaves with revisions to his text (see, e.g., Figure IV.5), making the physical structure of the manuscript extremely complex, despite the signes de renvoi that show where the inserted text is to be read (see, e.g., Figure IV.4). And even with these multiple additions, the text as presented in Junius 1 is only partial: the incomplete table of contents found between the dedication and the preface promises 242 homilies to correspond with masses throughout the liturgical year, but only 32 remain. A scribal note in the table of contents after homily 50 marks the end of volume 1, perhaps indicating that the work was planned as a five-­volume set of roughly fifty homilies each. Orrm may never have finished the complete set of homilies he originally envisioned, but some that he did write have undoubtedly been lost. Seventeenth-­ century readers, including the manuscript’s early owner Dutch antiquarian Jan van Vliet, certainly had access to more of the Orrmulum than now exists—a certainty that mandates some caution in interpreting the lack of evidence for the text’s circulation. An early reader numbered the columns in the manuscript, whose extensive navigational system now consists of quire numbers, folio numbers, and column numbers. Gaps in this early numbering reveal that the seventeenth-­century manuscript had an additional 108 columns of text, now

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missing. Much more of the Orrmulum may once have existed, and readers may have responded to it with more enthusiasm, and with different kinds of enthusiasm, than one might initially assume. Van Vliet’s notes, for example, show that he was uninterested in Orrm’s spellings, for despite the embedded warning—“An bocstaff write twiȝȝess”—he did not replicate the words of the text letter by letter. The antiquarian was more interested in Orrm’s archaic vocabulary than in his orthographic forms, underlining words of interest in the excerpts he copied and noting where they appeared in the text. The dissonance between Van Vliet’s primary interests and those of contemporary scholars raises the additional question: what was the purpose of Orrm’s idiosyncratic English in its late twelfth-­century context? What were its effects? Some scholars have investigated these questions by considering the fluid, multilingual environment in which the text was written, asking specifically what relation Orrm’s English has to Latin or to French. Although the Orrmulum postdates the Norman Conquest of 1066 by about a century, there is not much French influence to be seen. The awkwardness of Orrm’s English is sometimes seen as the result of his familiarity with Latin, but Stephen Morrison has shown that Old English sources better account for his phraseology. One hypothesis is that the regularized spelling system was meant to respond precisely to the challenges of multilingualism: to help priests who were not entirely comfortable with English—perhaps those who spoke French and worked in Latin. This suggestion reorients an understanding of the vernacular as always “accessible,” instead providing interesting evidence of a multilingual environment in which English was its own kind of challenge. Meg Worley, in fact, has argued that the Orrmulum was written to help French-­speaking clergy deliver comprehensible homilies to English-­speaking audiences. Many of the text’s idiosyncrasies could have helped with reading aloud: Orrm’s phonetic spelling system indicates the quality of vowels, his metrical patterns may have helped to reinforce patterns of sound, and the text is marked up with an extensive and regular system of punctuation. Thus, even though it is manifestly the written form of the language that concerns Orrm, his preachers’ text navigates between the written and the oral in a way that provides intriguing clues to historical pronunciation. If the purpose of Orrm’s new spelling system was in fact to communicate the sounds of the spoken language, he mobilized a specific concern of literate culture in the service of oral delivery. Whatever the linguistic competence of the preachers in Orrm’s audience, it seems clear that his sense of urgency around linguistic forms is driven in large part by the practice and purpose of preaching itself. He constructs an elaborate variety of written English in order to communicate the gospels (“Goddspelless”)

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specifically. As Cannon has shown, the forms of what Orrm calls “rihht writing” (right writing) are connected to the spiritual purpose of the written text: the Orrmulum offers an exegesis of the gospel, which, in an etymology reflected in Orrm’s version of the word, is “good” “spell.” Spellen in this period means “tell”; only in the late sixteenth century would the verb acquire its modern meaning, and Orrm uses the different word spelldrenn to mean to write out letter by letter, to give a word orthographic form. For Orrm, good “spelling” will always simply be good telling. But Orrm believed his own orthographical work to be perfect, exemplary in the project of writing rightly, of telling properly. The Orrmulum offers his specific kind of regulated English writing, then, as a form of spiritual practice. Orrm’s manuscript of homilies is designed to transform the spelling of English, and, moreover, to transform through the influence of this “rihht writing” the spiritual state of those who write and speak the language. As Laura Ashe has argued, the Orrmulum seeks theological as well as linguistic innovation. Finally, the Orrmulum focuses important questions about how to interpret an idiosyncratic object in relation to the culture that surrounds it: How does this singular text in its singular manuscript fit into the larger history of English manuscripts, or of English literature? Does the text represent continuity with Old English, reflect the ongoing influence of Old Norse, or epitomize a spirit of innovation in Middle English? Although various kinds of continuities with the past are traceable, some aspects of the spelling system and metrical system seem to plant the flag on the side of modernization. Orrm’s orthographic practice shows a drive toward philosophical regularity and the suppression of variants: one word is to have one spelling in Junius 1, and each letter is to have a single form or shape. This is very different in principle from later and more general Middle English linguistic culture, which seems to have embraced variation without much concern. Orrm showed concern: his careful revisions evince not only the working out but the full implementation of a rigorous system of normalization. Ironically, Orrm’s concern for system produced a thoroughly unsystematic manuscript; his concern for regularizing the material forms of language seriously disrupted the material forms of his book. But although the quirky ­Orrmulum has a strong local address and a seemingly narrow circulation, it does have high ambitions to bring “Goddspelless hallȝhe lare” to “all Crisstene follkess“ (lines 114, 116). The material forms of its language go beyond the undoubted interest of its spelling practices to offer perspective on broader, indeed universalizing, medieval literary cultures. The odd English of Junius 1 offers unique evidence for the history of the language, but as a linguistic specimen, and especially as a physical manuscript, it also offers valuable perspective on the meanings that medieval linguistic forms could carry.

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Figure IV.1. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1, fol. 3r. The Orrmulum; opening lines of the dedication, showing the doubling of the r in “brotherr” both within and above the first line. Note also the graphic difference between the continental g and the insular one in “goddspelless hallȝhe lare” (line 11).

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Figure IV.2. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1, fol. 94v (detail). Line 13853 of the Orrmulum; last example of eo for e (eorþe), (line 5).

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Figure IV.3. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1, fol. 2r. The Orrmulum; a runic alphabet added in a thirteenth-­century hand.



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Figure IV.4. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1, fol. 10r. The Orrmulum; intro­ductory text and a double homily on Luke 1:5 and Lk 1:18. Note additions, corrections, deletions, and the oval signe de renvoi between the two columns marking an insertion.

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Figure IV.5. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1, fol. 39r. The Orrmulum; example of an added parchment slip.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 1. https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/90a06 f70-­880a-­4b5b-­bd30-­798710afff11/.

Catalogs and Editions Faulkner, Mark. “Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 1: The Orrmulum.” In Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220, ed. Orietta Da Rold, Takako Kato, Mary Swan, and Elaine Treharne. University of Leicester, 2010; last update 2013. http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220/mss/EM.Ox.Juni.1.htm. Holt, Robert, ed. The Ormulum, with the Notes and Glossary of Dr. R. M. White. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1878. Ker, N. R. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-­Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Laing, Margaret, ed. A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, 1150–1325. Edinburgh: ­Version 3.2, 2013, © The University of Edinburgh. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd /laeme2/laeme2.html.

Secondary Studies Anderson, John, and Derek Britton. “Double Trouble: Geminate Versus Simplex Graphs in the Ormulum.” In Studies in Middle English Linguistics, ed. Jacek Fisiak, 23–58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997. ———. “The Orthography and Phonology of the Ormulum.” English Language and Linguistics 3, no. 2 (1999): 299–334. Ashe, Laura. “The Originality of the Orrmulum.” Early Middle English 11 (2019): 35–54. Burchfield, Robert W. “The Language and Orthography of the Ormulum MS.” Trans­ actions of the Philological Society 55, no. 1 (1956): 56–87. ———. “Line-­End Hyphens in the Ormulum Manuscript (MS Junius 1).” In From Anglo-­Saxon to Early Middle English: Studies Presented to E. G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray, and Terry Hoad, 182–187. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ———. “Ormulum: Words Copied by Jan van Vliet from Parts Now Lost.” In English and Medieval Studies: Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn, 94–111. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962. Cannon, Christopher. “Right Writing: The Ormulum.” In The Grounds of English Lit­ erature, 82–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. This is a revised version of the essay “Spelling Practice: The Ormulum and the Word.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 33, no. 3 (1997): 229–44. Dekker, Kees. “The Ormulum in the Seventeenth Century: The Manuscript and Its Early Readers.” Neuphilologus 102 (2018): 257–77.

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Faulkner, Mark. “Rewriting English Literary History 1042–1215.” Literature Compass 9, no. 4 (2012): 275–91. Holm, Sigurd. Corrections and Additions in the Ormulum Manuscript. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1922. Johannesson, Nils-­Lennart. “The Etymology of ‘Ríme’ in the ‘Ormulum.’” Nordic Jour­ nal of English Studies 3, no. 1 (2004): 61–74. ———. “Lexical Cruces in Orrmulum: The Importance of Context.” Studia Neophilo­ logica 87, no. 2 (2015): 131–51. Ker, N. R. “Unpublished Parts of the Ormulum Printed from MS. Lambeth 783.” Me­ dium Ævum 9 (1940): 1–22. Kwakkel, Erik. “Discarded Parchment as Writing Support in English Manuscript Culture.” In English Manuscripts Before 1400, ed. A. S. G. Edwards and Orietta Da Rold, 238–61. London: British Library, 2012. McMullen, A. Joseph. “‘Forr þeȝȝre sawle need’: The Ormulum, Vernacular Theology and a Tradition of Translation in Early England.” English Studies 95, no. 3 (2014): 256–77. Mancho, Guzmán. “Considering Orrmulum’s Exegetical Discourse: Canon Orrmin’s Preaching and His Audience.” English Studies 85, no. 6 (2004): 508–19. ———. “Is Orrmulum’s Introduction an Instance of an Aristotelian Prologue?” Neo­ philologus 88, no. 3 (2004): 477–92. Milroy, James. “Middle English Dialectology.” In Cambridge History of the English Lan­ guage, vol. 2, 1066–1476, ed. Norman Blake, 156–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Morrison, Stephen. “Orm’s English Sources.” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen (und Literaturen) 221 (1984): 54–64. Napier, Arthur Sampson, ed. History of the Holy Rood-­Tree: A Twelfth-­Century Version of the Cross-­Legend, with Notes on the Orthography of the Orumulum (with a Facsim­ ile) and a Middle English Compassio Mariae. Early English Text Society, o.s., 103. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894. Page, B. Richard. “Double Consonant Graphs in the Ormulum.” Interdisciplinary Jour­ nal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 5, no. 2 (2000): 245–71. Parkes, M. B. “On the Presumed Date and Possible Origin of the Manuscript of the ­‘Ormulum’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 1.” In Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson, ed. E. G. Stanley and Douglas Gray, 115–27. Cambridge: Brewer, 1983. Roberts, Jane. Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500. London: British ­Library, 2005. Scragg, D. G. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974. Solopova, Elizabeth. “The Metre of the Ormulum.” In Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt wisely”; Papers in Honour of E. G. Stanley, ed. M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler, 423–39. London: Routledge, 1996.

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Turville-­Petre, Joan. “Studies on the Ormulum MS.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 46 (1947): 1–27. Worley, Meg. “Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity.” In The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, 19–30. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

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C A S E S T U DY V  

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Trilingual Miscellany London, British Library MS Harley 2253 Dimensions: 293 × 188 mm Date: ca. 1340 Place of Origin: Hertfordshire, England Languages: Middle English, French, and Latin Foliation: iv (paper) + i (parchment) + 141 + i (parchment) + ii (paper) Material: Parchment Quiring The manuscript begins with four quires of professional thirteenth-­century tex­ tura (not in the published facsimile): these quires make up two independent blocks (i.e., “booklets,” in which a new text begins on a new quire). The rest of the quires (eleven) contain varying numbers of bifolia and constitute seven independent blocks. There are no catchwords or quire numbers. I12, II10, III–IV12, V4, VI10, VII–VIII8, IX12, X10, XI6, XII–XIII8, XIV12, XV7 Layout Variable, including single-­column prose, one-­, two-­, and three-­column verse. Ruling patterns include only one pencil line along the left margin, a line in the right margin on pages of prose, a line by the first column of two-­column verse pages. There is sometimes a pencil line along the top of the page.

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Script The script of the poetic miscellany is a formalized version of an ordinary business Anglicana. There are distinctive thick ascenders only on the top line of the page. At least three scribes were involved in the production of this manuscript: Scribe A, folios 1r–48v; Scribe B (the Ludlow Scribe), folios 49r–140v; Scribe C, folio 52v. Textual Contents The article numbers given here follow Fein and Ker; an asterisk (*) marks the beginning of a new booklet. *1. “The Lives of the Fathers,” fols. 1r–21v (French verse) 1a. “The Story of Thais,” fols. 21v–22r (French verse) *2. Herman de Valenciennes, “The Passion of Our Lord,” fols. 23r–33v (French verse) 3. “The Gospel of Nicodemus,” fols. 33v–39r (French prose) 3a. “The Letter of Pilate to Tiberius,” fol. 39r (French prose) 3b. “The Letter of Pilate to Emperor Claudius,” fols. 39v–41v (French prose) 4. “The Life of St. John the Evangelist,” fols. 41v–43v (French prose) 5. “The Life of St. John the Baptist,” fols. 43v–45v (French prose) 6. “The Life of St. Bartholomew,” fols. 45v–47v (French prose) 7. “The Passion of St. Peter,” fols. 47v–48v (French prose) *8. “ABC of Women,” fols. 49r–50v (French verse) 9. “Debate Between Winter and Summer,” fols. 51r–52v (French verse) 10–17. Recipes for pigments, fol. 52v (English prose) *18. “The Life of St. Ethelbert,” fols. 53r–54v (Latin prose) 19. “Soul of Christ, Sanctify Me,” fol. 54v (Latin verse) 20. “A Goliard’s Feast,” fol. 55r (French verse) 21. “Harrowing of Hell,” fol. 55v–56v (English verse) 22. “Debate Between Body and Soul,” fols. 57r–58v (English verse) 23. “A Song of Lewes,” fols. 58v–59r (English verse) 24. “Lament for Simon de Montfort,” fol. 59r–v (French verse) 24a. “Carnal Love Is Folly,” fol. 59v (French verse) 24a1. “What Allures Is Momentary,” fol. 59v (Latin verse) 24b. “Earth upon Earth,” fol. 59v (English verse) 25. “The Execution of Sir Simon Fraser,” fols. 59v–61v (English verse) 25a. “On the Follies of Fashion,” fol. 61v (English verse) 26. “Lesson for True Lovers,” fols. 61v–62v (French verse) 27. “The Three Foes of Man,” fol. 62v (English verse)

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*28. “Annot and John,” fols. 63r–v (English verse) 29. “Alysoun,” fol. 63v (English verse) 30. “The Lover’s Complaint,” fol. 63v (English verse) 31. “Song of the Husbandman,” fol. 64r (English verse) 32. “The Life of St. Marina,” fols. 64v–65v (English verse) 33. “The Poet’s Repentance,” fol. 66r (English verse) 34. “The Fair Maid of Ribblesdale,” fol. 66v (English verse) 35. “The Meeting in the Wood,” fols. 66v–67r (English verse) 36. “A Beauty White as Whale’s Bone,” fol. 67r (English verse) 37. “Gilote and Johane,” fols. 67v–68v (French verse) 38. “Pilgrimages in the Holy Land,” fols. 68v–70r (French prose) 39. “The Pardons of Acre,” fol. 70r–v (French prose) 40. “Satire on the Consistory Courts,” fols. 70va, 71ra, 71va (English verse) 41. “The Laborers in the Vineyard,” fol. 70vb, 71rb (English verse) 43. “Spring,” fol. 71v (English verse) 44. “Advice to Women,” fols. 71v–72r (English verse) 45. “An Old Man’s Prayer,” fol. 72r–v (English verse) 46. “Blow, Northern Wind,” fols. 72v–73r (English verse) 47. “The Death of Edward I,” fol. 73r–v (English verse) 48. “The Flemish Insurrection,” fols. 73v–74v (English verse) 49. “The Joys of Our Lady,” fol. 75r (French verse) 50. “Sweet Jesus, King of Bliss,” fol. 75r–v (English verse) 51. “Jesus Christ, Heaven’s King,” fol. 75v (English verse) 52. “A Winter Song,” fol. 75v (English verse) 53. “A Spring Song on the Passion,” fol. 76r (English verse) 54. “I Pray to God and St. Thomas,” fol. 76r (French verse) 55. “While You Play in Flowers,” fol. 76r (French, English, and Latin verse) 56. “Song on Jesus’ Precious Blood,” fols. 76v–77r (French verse) 57. “Mary, Mother of the Savior,” fol. 77v (French verse) 58. “Jesus, Sweet Is the Love of You,” fols. 77v–78v (English verse) 59. “Sermon on God’s Sacrifice and Judgment,” fols. 78v–79r (French verse) 60. “Stand Well, Mother, Under Rood,” fol. 79r–v (English verse) 61. “Jesus, by Your Great Might,” fol. 79v (English verse) 62. “I Sigh When I Sing,” fol. 80r (English verse) 63. “An Autumn Song,” fol. 80r (English verse) 64. “The Clerk and the Girl,” fol. 80v (English verse) 65. “When the Nightingale Sings,” fols. 80v–81r (English verse) 66. “Blessed Are You, Lady,” fol. 81r–v (English verse) 67. “The Five Joys of the Virgin,” fol. 81v (English verse)

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68. “Maximian,” fols. 82r–83r (English verse) 69. “Maiden, Mother Mild,” fol. 83r (French and English verse) 70. King Horn, fols. 83r–92v (English verse) 71. Ludlow Scribe, “Old Testament Stories,” fols. 92v–105r (French prose) 72. “Names of the Books of the Bible,” fol. 105v (Latin prose) *73. “God Who Wields All This Might,” fol. 106r (English verse) 74. “The Sayings of St. Bernard,” fols. 106r–107r (English verse) 75. “The Jongleur of Ely and the King of England,” fols. 107v–109v (French verse) 75a. “The Three Ladies Who Found a Prick,” fol. 110r–v (French verse) 76. “The Song on Women,” fols. 110v–111r (French verse) 77. “The Blame of Women,” fol. 111r–v (French verse) 78. Nicholas Bozon, “Women and Magpies,” fol. 112r (French verse) 79. “Urbain the Courteous,” fols. 112r–113v (French verse) 80. “Trailbaston”, fols. 113v–114v (French verse) 81. “The Man in the Moon,” fols. 114v–115r (English verse) 82. “The Knight and the Basket,” fols. 115v–117r (French verse) 83. “Against Marriage,” fols. 117r–118r (French verse) 84. “The Wager, or The Squire and the Chambermaid,” fol. 118r–v (French verse) 85. “A Book of Dreaming,” fols. 119r–121r (English verse) 86. “The Order of Fair Ease,” fols. 121r–122v (French verse) 87. “The Knight Who Made Vaginas Talk,” fols. 112v–124v (French verse) 88. “Satire on the Retinues of the Great,” fols. 124v–125r (English verse) 89. “Hending,” fols. 125r–127r (English verse) 90. “The Prophecy of Thomas of Erceldoune,” fol. 127r–v (English prose) 91. “Distinguishing Features of the Bodily Form of Jesus Christ Our Lord,” fol. 127v (French prose) 92. “The Way of Christ’s Love,” fol. 128r (English verse) 93. “The Way of Woman’s Love,” fol. 128r–v (English verse) 94. “The Teachings of St. Louis to His Son Philip,” fols. 128v–129v (French prose) 95. “The Land of the Saracens,” fols. 129v–130v (French prose) 96. “Heraldic Arms of Kings,” fol. 131r (French prose) 97. “Letter for Pilgrims on the Relics at Oviedo,” fols. 131v–132r (Latin prose) 98. “The Legend of St. Etfrid, Priest of Leominster,” fols. 132r–133r (Latin prose)

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99. “Prayer for Protection,” fol. 133v (French and Latin prose) *100. “Occasions for Angels,” fol. 134r (French prose) 101. “Occasions for Psalms in French,” fol. 134r (French prose) 102. “Glory to God in the Highest in French,” fol. 134v (French verse) 103. “Prayer of Confession,” fol. 134v (Latin prose) 104. “Prayer on the Five Joys of Our Lady,” fols. 134v–135r (French verse and prose) 105. “Prayer for Contrition,” fol. 135r (Latin prose) 106. “Reasons for Fasting on Friday”, fol. 135r (French prose) 107. “Seven Masses to Be Said in Misfortune,” fol. 135r (French prose) 108. “Seven Masses in Honor of God and St. Giles,” fol. 135v (French prose) 108a. “Prayer to the Three Kings,” fol. 135v (French prose) 109. “All the World’s a Chess Board,” fols. 135v–136r (Latin prose) 109a. “Three Prayers That Never Fail,” fol. 136r (French prose) 110. “Occasions for Psalms in Latin,” fol. 136r–v (Latin prose) 111. “Occasions for Psalms Ordained by St. Hilary of Poitiers,” fols. 136v–137r (Latin prose) 112. “Heliotrope and Celandine,” fol. 137r (Latin prose) 113. “St. Anselm’s Questions to the Dying,” fol. 137r–v (Latin prose) 114. “Against the King’s Taxes,” fols. 137v–138v (French and Latin verse) 115. “Seven Hours of the Passion of Jesus Christ,” fols. 138v–140r (French prose) 116. “The Martyrdom of St. Wistan,” fol. 140v (Latin prose) For more details, see Fein, Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, 1:477–80. Decoration Decoration is minimal, with only some red two-­line initials and some red paraphs and touching of initials elsewhere. Binding Rebound in 1963. Provenance The earliest known owner was John Batteley (archdeacon of Canterbury, d. 1708). The manuscript was acquired from his nephew (also John Batteley) for the Harleian library in 1723 and was sold to the nation in 1753 as one of the foundation collections of the British Library.

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Connections The texts copied by Scribe A in the first distinct section of the manuscript are related to similar collections of texts in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) MS Français 19525 and London, British Library MS Egerton 2710. Scribe B also worked on London, British Library MSS Royal 12 C XII and Harley 273.

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The Middle English lyrics in British Library MS Harley 2253 have dominated critical interest in the manuscript, for they are numerous, accomplished, and rare. Their secular subjects are unusual in early Middle English verse, and together they include the majority of extant secular love lyrics before Chaucer, as well as many unique political poems. For these reasons alone the manuscript is rightly considered a landmark in the history of English literature. But there is more here: in spite of the significance of the secular material, more than half the manuscript’s texts are religious, and in spite of the manuscript’s interest in lyrics, there is also extensive narrative poetry and prose. Moreover, the manuscript’s French and Latin texts are at least as important as its English ones. Yet the “Harley lyrics” remain the major focus of most critics; even the published facsimile does not include the whole volume. Susanna Fein’s welcome recent edition and translation of the complete manuscript lowers some of the barriers to more comprehensive scholarly work, but there remain theoretical as well as practical issues to consider. The manuscript has been treated piecemeal because it cannot be unified by any familiar analytical categories: language, subject, or form. In fact, the complexity of this book’s contents has occasioned important discussion of how best to understand the quality of miscellaneity in the construction of medieval manuscripts. An important feature of the miscellaneity of Harley 2253 is linguistic: the trilingual manuscript includes texts in English, Latin, and French, as well as a number of macaronic poems that move between and among languages. There is also mixing of literary forms in the manuscript: there are more items in verse (80) than prose (38), but of course the lyric items tend by nature to be much shorter. There is no absolute association here between language and form: in general terms most of the Latin is prose, most of the English is verse, and French is fairly equally split, but Harley 2253 includes items in all three languages both in verse (French, 28; English, 47; Latin, 2) and prose (French, 22; English, 2; Latin, 12). In addition, there is one text in each of the following categories: French verse and prose, French and Latin verse, French and Latin prose, French and English verse, and trilingual verse. Modern editors sometimes work to sep-

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arate the manuscript’s languages, collecting the English poems alone, for example, or printing the manuscript’s mixed or macaronic poems with separate short lines of Latin and French. But the point of the macaronic text in its manuscript context and indeed the point of the trilingual collection as a whole seem to work against such discriminations. This is not to say, however, that the deployment of various languages in Harley 2253 is meaningless. “Dum ludis floribus,” the manuscript’s only trilingual poem (fol. 76r; see Figure V.1), begins: Dum ludis floribus velud lacivia, Le Dieu d’Amour moi tient en tiel angustia, Merour me tient de duel e de miseria, Si je ne la ay quam amo super omnia. (lines 1–4) While you play in flowers as if in wantonness, The God of Love binds me in such anguish, Holding for me a mirror of sorrow and misery, Since I don’t have her whom I love above all. (Fein trans.) Each stanza mixes French and Latin: an initial Latin line gives way to three lines that move internally from French toward final Latin rhymes. But the poem ends with a stanza of a different pattern that adds two English lines in conclusion: Scripsi hec carmina in tabulis. Mon ostel est enmi la vile de Paris. May Y sugge namore, so wel me is; Yef Hi deye for love of hire, duel hit ys! (lines 17–20) I’ve written these songs on a tablet. My lodging’s amid the city of Paris. I may say no more, as seems best; Should I die for love of her, sad it is! (Fein trans.) As Fein notes, this writer here uses the Latin language to describe the physical act of bookmaking, French to localize himself in Paris, and English to sigh his love lament. Whether or not it is possible to distinguish different uses for the three languages throughout the manuscript, it is clear that the main scribe (if he was also

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the compiler) revels in their mixing and that this poet has found it aesthetically valuable. What a macaronic poem does in parvo, the trilingual miscellaneous manuscript itself does at a larger scale, and indeed the general culture of medieval Britain can be distinguished by its striking and productive conjunctions of languages. Harley 2253 follows a miscellaneous impulse to mix genre, as well as form and language, including (in addition to its secular lyrics) debates, legends, fabliaux, dream lore, prayers, and proverbs. There is no obvious correlation between language and topic: scurrilous texts make use of both English and French, for example, and texts on religious subjects appear in all three languages. The religious texts include a wide variety: biblical materials, hagiography, religious lyrics, and practical religious instruction. The satirical and political texts show an equally wide range of interest, from anticlerical caricature to versified accounts of historical events, and from celebration of king and nation to strongly regional subjects. The political events named in the poems are arranged in roughly chronological order in the manuscript, so that the last poem, which complains of taxation in 1337–38, establishes some temporal parameters for dating the manuscript. Some of the texts in the manuscript are translations, some seem to be scribal compositions, and others were almost certainly copied from exemplars. The most interesting thing about Harley 2253 is not any of its texts in isolation, nor any consistent connections among them, but rather the physical and intellectual act of bringing such disparate pieces together into a single material object. That manuscript, as an aesthetic whole, makes a number of claims that its individual poems do not—for example, Thorlac Turville-­Petre has argued that Harley 2253 creates rather than asserts a place for the English nation in literary history. Some of the choices that generated the manuscript’s variety are visible in the history of its production. The contents of Harley 2253 were shaped by two scribes: the first, Scribe A, wrote two booklets in a thirteenth-­century textura including a number of Anglo-­Norman prose texts (fols. 1–48): moral sayings, narratives of Christ’s trial and passion, and saints’ legends. Several decades later, Scribe B added a series of booklets including a wide variety of multilingual material (fols. 49–140). This second scribe, the primary compiler of the manuscript, seems to have collaborated in some sense with the first scribe’s work, for he wrote rubricated titles for the earlier texts. But his work, which begins in earnest with booklet 3, exhibits a decided break in topic from what came before. Booklet 3 includes secular courtly entertainments, such as an “ABC of Women” and a “Debate Between Winter and Summer.” In the blank spaces at the end, a later hand (Scribe C) has written recipes for paint and other illuminator’s materials. Booklet 4 includes moral and political poems, with courtly comedy. Booklet 5, the biggest and most complex, includes the set of Middle English lyrics for

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which the manuscript is most famous, but also a parodic “Life of St. Marina,” the comic dialogue “Gilote and Johane,” pilgrimage texts, religious lyrics, the romance King Horn, and—most intriguing—translations of bible stories that seem to have been produced by the scribe himself. It concludes with a Latin list of books of the Bible. Booklet 6 offers the largest collection of Anglo-­Norman fabliaux in England, “The Jongleur of Ely,” “The Man in the Moon,” and the sacred/ secular pair “The Way of Christ’s Love,” and “The Way of Woman’s Love.” This booklet is mostly in Anglo-­Norman but includes some Middle English texts, as well as Anglo-­Saxon saints’ lives in Latin prose. It concludes with geographic texts on pilgrimage and crusading, which turn a corner thematically from secular concerns to the texts of practical religion that occupy booklet 7: a collection of French and Latin prose texts including a meditation on the hours of the Passion and another Anglo-­Saxon saint’s life. The construction of Harley 2253 in discrete booklets suggests that the rationale for the collection goes beyond a general medieval interest in encyclopedism, prompting the question of how its disparate contents might have been organized. The manuscript’s texts are differentiated into quires or groups of quires that make up independent blocks of texts. Was the book written in these blocks? Was it planned in these blocks? Did it circulate in these blocks before being bound together in its present form? Do the physical divisions of the manuscript imply some ideational organization? Not only the booklets themselves but also the meaningful grouping of texts within booklets have seemed to many critics to suggest units of topical and thematic organization, as well as units of construction. Is the manuscript, then, properly a miscellany, or should it be considered a deliberate selection of somehow representative texts, an anthology? This question, as well as the related one of how to draw such a distinction, has shaped the theories of the miscellaneous occasioned by Harley 2253. Even if there is not a single and uniform overriding structure to its contents, many readers have discerned a fugitive sense of order in the collection: groupings and clusterings of texts that indicate the compiler’s rationales at work. Critics such as Carter Revard and Theo Stemmler have argued that Harley 2253 exhibits a planned arrangement in varying degrees, that the texts are linked (though not necessarily ordered) by all kinds of characteristics: form, meter, genre, language, subject, even rhyme words. The manuscript’s most recent editor, Susanna Fein, backs off a little from this position, describing Harley 2253 as “something of a hybrid, that is, a miscellany that idiosyncratically and frequently veers toward the nature and purposes of an anthology” (Fein 2015). The manuscript then would seem to occupy a middle ground between a miscellany—that is, an arbitrary and casual collection—and an ordered, carefully planned whole.

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Questions about miscellaneity are ultimately connected to questions about the intentions of the person or people who put together the book. In the case of Harley 2253, we know something about that anonymous person, and something more about the scope of his work. Carter Revard has been able to identify, localize, and date the hand of Scribe B based on documents from his work as a professional legal clerk. Those documents reveal that he worked in the area of Ludlow on the Welsh border from 1314 to 1349, and changes in his hand over time suggest that his work on Harley 2253 took place circa 1331–41. This “Ludlow scribe” also wrote part of British Library MS Royal 12 C XII, another miscellaneous collection of texts in Latin, French, and English. The texts in the Royal manuscript include macaronic verses, as in Harley, as well as hymns and prayers, political verses, prophecies and prognostications, recipes, medical notes, the Speculum Ecclesiae of Edmund Rich, the Brut chronicle, and French romances, including Fouke le Fitz Waryn and Amis and Amiloun. The Somnia Danielis included in Royal 12 C XII is the Latin version of Harley 2253’s “Book of Dreaming.” Moreover, the Ludlow scribe’s hand is also found in MS Harley 273, a miscellaneous collection of recipes, dream lore, and devotional texts in Anglo-­French and Latin assembled circa 1314–15 (see Figure V.2). Putting together the evidence from all three manuscripts is revealing. A calendar in Harley 273 noting the dedication date of Ludlow parish church of St. Laurence may help to locate the Harley manuscript and its scribe geographically. The binding leaves of Harley 2253 reinforce a tissue of connections with the region, for on folio iv (and 142r) Scribe B has written extracts from the ordinal of Hereford Cathedral. The flyleaf also contains, on the reverse, older accounts from Ardmulghan, an Irish estate of Roger de Mortimer, 1st Earl of March. Intriguingly, the Latin saints whose lives are collected in Harley 2253 are connected to towns in the same area: Ethelbert (Hereford), Etfrid (Leominster), and Wis­ tanthow (Wistan). A cross appears to mark the beginning of the life of St. Etfrid (see Figure V.3), and it may be that the scribe’s special interest in this text suggests that he was connected to the priory at Leominster. But the cross may also be intended as a quasi-­liturgical response to the previous text, which authenticates the relics at Oviedo. Although the presence of the cross is difficult to interpret conclusively in this miscellaneous context, the evidence pointing to the manuscript’s connection with the area around Ludlow seems strong. Who was this scribe working in the early fourteenth century in the Ludlow area of Herefordshire? Because he seems to have been educated in Latin, religion, and law, as well as broadly interested in courtly entertainments such as romances and debates or dialogues that might have been performed aloud, scholars have surmised that he might have been a chaplain in minor orders or a household cleric. Perhaps he was a priest in a parish, but more likely he was a

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part of a private household, perhaps even overseeing the education of that household’s young boys. Such guesses about the identity of the scribe are connected to the question of how to understand the category of miscellaneity, as they emerge from the effort to imagine a single person who could be connected to all of its disparate pieces. But are all the pieces in the manuscript, in all of their heterogeneity, necessarily reflected in the scribe’s biography? Perhaps we should take the variety of the collection simply as evidence that a parish priest sometimes likes to read romances. Even the pieces for which scribal authorship has been proposed are striking in their variety: the regional romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn (French verse) in Royal 12 C XII (see Figure V.4), as well as the summarized Bible stories, the redacted “Martyrdom of St. Wistan” (Latin prose), and the “Book of Dreaming” (English verse) in Harley 2253. The juxtaposition of secular and sacred literature, offered in material form by the construction of the manuscript, also motivates Harley poems that bring secular courtly language into the love metaphors in religious lyrics. On a single page, for example, two poems with similar forms and opposing content that might have been set to the same melody—a construction known as a contrafac­ tum—ask to be read together (fol. 178; see Figure V.5). The two poems share identical first lines (“Lutel wot hit any mon”), setting up a parallel that will be undone by the ensuing contrasts between a celebration of the constancy of divine love, on the one hand, and a complaint about an unfeeling human paramour, on the other. The poems’ modern titles emphasize the difference: “The Way of Christ’s Love” versus “The Way of Woman’s Love.” It is likely that the sacred version (of which several traces exist elsewhere) was created from a popular secular song (which exists only in Harley 2253). And yet the manuscript itself destabilizes what might have been a comforting and doctrinally correct movement from this world to the next: the religious poem precedes the romantic one on the page, so a reader is left, not with the solace of God’s constancy, but with the uncertainties of mortal affections. The contrafactum provides an emblem of the deliberate miscellaneity that has led some readers of Harley 2253 to characterize the manuscript, instead, as an anthology: the two poems register a range of topic and mode that is far from haphazard. Organized precisely by an impulse toward breadth and variety, the contrafac­ tum is a literary reflection of the deliberate material miscellaneity of the manuscript as a whole. Similar ordering principles that emerge from the construction of the book include not only hierarchy and progression, but also symmetry, mirroring, and opposition. These structures of relation are evident at a larger scale in the way the manuscript sets up feminist and antifeminist debates (e.g., “Le dit des femmes” [fol. 110v] and “Le blasme des femmes” [fol. 111r]), or other proximate texts that

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stage opposing views (e.g., “Lenten ys come with love to toune” [fol. 71v] and “In May hit murgeth when hit dawes” [fol. 71v]). At the largest scale of all, Ralph Hanna has memorably suggested that the miscellany is a codicological model for the literary genre of the framed story collection so popular in the late Middle Ages, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Gower’s Con­ fessio Amantis. The miscellaneous texts collected in Harley 2253 provide this same kind of variety, linked by the material fact of the manuscript they share, rather than a framing fiction. Capacious even beyond its own multitudinous contents, Harley 2253 shows revealing affiliations with larger patterns and habits in late medieval literary culture. For all of its rarity, then, Harley 2253 is far from isolated.

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Figure V.1. London, British Library MS Harley 2253, fol. 76r. Note the use of multiple languages on this folio, even within one text (“Dum ludis floribus,” item 3). Note also the pre-existing holes in the parchment, around which the scribe has written.

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Figure V.2. London, British Library MS Harley 273, fol. 82r. See the break in the first column for an addition by the Ludlow scribe to a text he had collected, Robert Grosseteste’s Rules for the management of a household. His added note, “Ce serra ixe quart(er)s,” specifies the correct amount of grain required for sowing.

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Figure V.3. London, British Library MS Harley 2253, fol. 132r. Note the ambiguous cross in the middle of the page, which might mark either the preceding or the following text.

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Figure V.4. London, British Library MS Royal 12 C XII, fol. 33r. Fouke le Fitz Waryn. This example shows the hand of the Ludlow scribe, probably earlier than Harley 2253.

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Figure V.5. London, British Library MS Harley 2253, fol. 128r. This folio shows two poems that are formally similar but thematically distinct, “Lutel wot hit any mon . . .” (known as “The Way of Christ’s Love”), and “Lutel wot hit any mon . . .” (known as “The Way of Woman’s Love”). The layout displays the refrain with brackets to the right.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile British Library Digitised Manuscripts. “Harley MS 2253.” http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts /FullDisplay.aspx?index=0&ref=Harley_MS_2253.

Catalogs and Editions Brook, G. L., ed. The Harley Lyrics: The Middle English Lyrics of Ms. Harley 2253. 4th ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978. Fein, Susanna, ed. and trans. The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript. With David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. 3 vols. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2015. Ker, N. R., intro. Facsimile of British Museum MS Harley 2253. Early English Text Society, o.s., 255. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Secondary Studies Birkholz, Daniel. “Harley Lyrics and Hereford Clerics: The Implications of Mobility, c. 1300–1351.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 175–230. ———. “Histoire Imparfaite: Gilote et Johane and the Counterfactual Lessons of Harley 2253.” Exemplaria 27, no. 4 (2015): 273–306. Boffey, Julia, and John J. Thompson. “Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts.” In Book Production and Publishing in Britain, ed. Derek Pearsall and Jeremy Griffiths, 279–315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Connolly, Margaret and Raluca Radulescu, eds. Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain. Proceedings of the British Academy 201. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2015. Corrie, Marilyn. “Kings and Kingship in British Library MS Harley 2253.” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 64–79. Dane, Joseph A. “Page Layout and Textual Autonomy in Harley MS 2253 ‘Lenten Ys Come wiþ Love to Toune.’” Medium Aevum 68 (1999): 32–41. Fein, Susanna. “Compilation and Purpose in MS Harley 2253.” In Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century, ed. Wendy Scase, 67–94. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007. ———, ed. Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Fisher, Matthew. Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Especially chap. 3, pp. 100–145. Green, Richard Firth. “The Two ‘Litel Wot Hit Any Mon’ Lyrics in Harley 2253.” Medi­ eval Studies 51 (1989): 304–12. Hanna, Ralph. “Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England.” In The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval

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Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, 37–52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Hardman, Philippa, ed. “Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies and Anthologies.” A special issue of the Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003). Lerer, Seth. “‘Dum ludis floribus’: Language and Text in the Medieval English Lyric.” Philological Quarterly 87, nos. 3–4 (2008): 237–55. ———. “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology.” PMLA 118, no. 5 (2003): 1251–67. Nelson, Ingrid. Lyric Tactics: Poetry, Genre, and Practice in Later Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Nichols, Stephen G., and Siegfried Wenzel. The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. O’Rourke, Jason. “Imagining Book Production in Fourteenth-­Century Herefordshire: The Scribe of British Library, Harley 2253 and His ‘Organizing Principles.’” In Imagining the Book, ed. Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, 45–60. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005. Pearsall, Derek. “The Whole Book: Late Medieval English Manuscript Miscellanies and Their Modern Interpreter.” In Imagining the Book, ed. Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, 17–31. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Putter, Ad. “Dialects in the Harley Miscellany: The Song of the Husbandman and The Poet’s Repentance.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 27 (2013): 61–77. Revard, Carter. “Gilote et Johane: An Interlude in BL MS Harley 2253.” Studies in Phi­ lology 79 (1982): 122–46. ———. “Oppositional Thematics and Metanarrative in MS Harley 2253, Quires 1–6.” Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Mid­ lands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century, ed. Wendy Scase, 95–112. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007. ———. “Three More Holographs in the Hand of the Scribe of MS Harley 2253 in Shrewsbury.” Notes and Queries 28, no. 3 (1981): 199–200. Revard, Carter, and D. C. Cox. “A New ME O-­and-­I Lyric and Its Provenance.” Me­ dium Aevum 54, no. 1 (1985): 33–46. Stemmler, Theo. “Miscellany or Anthology? The Structure of Medieval Manuscripts, MS Harley 2253, for Example.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik un Amerikanistik 39, nos. 3–4 (1991): 111–21. Turville-­Petre, Thorlac. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Iden­ tity, 1290–1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Especially pp. 192–217.

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C A S E S T U DY V I  

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Roman d’Alexandre and Other Items Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264 Dimensions: 415 × 300 mm Date: 1338–44 (part 1); ca. 1410 (part 2) Place of Origin: Tournai or Bruges, Belgium (part 1); England (part 2) Languages: French, Middle English Foliation: 271 Material: Parchment Quiring Part 1: I8 (wanting 1), II8–XIV8 (wants 5th leaf after fol. 109), XV8–XVII8 (wants 7th leaf after fol. 134), XVIII8–XXII8 (wants 8th leaf after fol. 174), XXIII8– XXV8, XVI10. Layout Two columns, usually of forty-­five to forty-­six lines. Illustrations in column. First letters separated from remainder of verse line. Script This manuscript is written in a formal Gothic textualis by a number of hands. The two texts of part 2 were written by the same scribe and added at the same time to part 1, when that scribe also added rubrics to part 1.

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Textual Contents 1. Lambert li Tors, then Alixandre de Bernai, Li romans du boin roy Alixandre, fols. 3r–208r, (French verse in a Picard dialect), with interpolations Le duc Melchis (fols. 101v–109v, 182v) Jake de Longuion, Li veu du Pauon (fols. 110–164v) Jehan Brisebare, Le restor du Pauon (fols. 165–182v) Alexander’s journey to paradise (fols. 185–88) Jehan li Venelais, La vengeance du boin roy Alixandre (fols. 196v–208) 2. Alexander and Dindimus (Alexander Fragment B), fols. 209r–215v (with fol. 1) (Middle English verse, West Midlands dialect) (DIMEV 6842) 3. Marco Polo, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, fols. 218r–271v (with fol. 2v) (Anglo-­Norman prose) Decoration This book is heavily illustrated, with around 190 miniatures in part 1 (not counting bas-­de-­page scenes), and 48 miniatures in part 2. The work of multiple artists can be discerned in part 1: scholarly assessments range from three to seven, including both Jehan de Grise and Pierart dou Tielt, as well as members of their workshops. In part 2, there are as many as four less sophisticated artistic hands, including one artist responsible for folio 1r and folios 209r–215v, and another self-­described as “Johannes” on folio 220. There are also two identifiable border artists, one responsible for sprays on the second frontispiece, the initials and pictures for Alexander and Dindimus, the border around the Marco Polo frontispiece, the two-­line initials with sprays after folio 218v, and all the partial borders and sprays after folio 224v. Uniquely in this copy of the text, there is a line of musical notation on folio 181v. Provenance This manuscript is made up of two separate sections with different points of origin. Part 1 is Flemish, and part 2 is English. Part 1 contains unusually helpful colophons. On folio 208: “Li romans du boin roi Alixandre. Et les veus du Pauon. Les accomplissemens. Le Restor du Paon. Et le pris. Qui fu perescript le .xviiie. ior de Decembre. Lan M.CCC.xxxviij.” Below, in gold lettering: “Che liure fu perfais de le enluminure au xviij iour. Dauryl. Per Jehan de Grise.. Lan de grace M.CCC. xliiij.” Also on folio 208 a fifteenth-­century addition names the scriptor as “Thomas plenus amoris.” On folio x verso a later hand has picked this up: “Nomen authoris est Thomas plenus amoris.” Later ownership marks include the following names: “Richart de Wideuielle siegneur de Riuieres,” who bought the book in London in 1466; Thomas Smythe

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(sixteenth century); Jaspere Fylolle (sixteenth century); and Sir Gyles Strangwayes (sixteenth century). The manuscript came to the Bodleian Library circa 1603–5, perhaps from Sir Thomas Bodley. At his death in 1397, Thomas Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, owned “vn large liure en fraunceis tresbien esluminez de la Rymance de Alexandre et de les Avowes al poun,” valued at 16 shillings and 8 pence. This may have been part 1 of Bodley 264. Connections For additional fragments that seem to be from the same alliterative Alexander romance (Skeat’s Alexander Fragment A), see Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Greaves 60 (fols. iv–16 [incl. false start on fol. 16v]; 21–24v; 17–20), where they are given the title Þe Worþie King and Emperour Alisaunder of Macedoine. See also Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 44 (fols. 1–97v) and Dublin, Trinity College MS 213 (fols. 27–66v), which contain another version (Skeat’s Alexander Fragment C). All three fragments derive ultimately from the same Latin source, the Historia de preliis by Leo Archpresbyter. London, British Library MS Royal 19 D I is the direct source for the text and layout of Li Livres du Graunt Caam in Bodley 264, and it contains Alexander material as well. Other illustrated texts of Marco Polo include Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) MS Français 2810 and Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 5219. The artist “Johannes” worked on other manuscripts, including Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library Richardson 36 (psalter), London, British Library MS Royal 2 B VIII (psalter), Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 902 (Gower, Confessio Amantis), and possibly Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.446 (Lydgate, Troy Book).

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The magnificent manuscript Bodley 264 contains only three texts, but it is the product of a lengthy production process that spanned sixty or seventy years and involved multiple scribes and artists, first in Europe, and then in England. Its thematic geography is still more expansive, ranging across the Middle and Far East to the boundaries of the known world. The manuscript begins with the fullest version of the interpolated French verse Roman d’Alexandre, an extensive account of the adventures and conquests of Alexander the Great, with a particular interest in Alexander’s encounters with other nations and peoples. Taking this interest even further—now in alliterative Middle English rather than rhymed French verse—a later compiler added Alexander and Dindimus, a

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poem based on the letters Alexander exchanged with the king of the Brahmans at the far ends of the earth. Finally, moving from Hellenistic romance and epistolary debate into contemporary travel literature, the book’s third section adds the French prose Li Livres du Graunt Caam, which famously records Marco Polo’s thirteenth-­century journeys in the Far East and his meetings with the people who lived there. Many fifteenth-­century readers and bookmakers had interests in orientalist compilation, but this manuscript reveals a particularly intense set of temporal and spatial explorations. It thereby opens a wide-­ranging set of questions about how medieval readers might have understood the geographies and politics of cultural difference, as well as the relations between romance and reportage, in texts that traverse past, present, and even future. The earlier part of the book, the interpolated Roman d’Alexandre, includes an unusually and valuably detailed record of its production. Colophons record two stages in the manuscript’s construction: a scribe reports in black ink that he finished his labors in 1338, and illuminator Jehan de Grise adds in gold lettering that he completed his own work in 1344 (fol. 208r). Another hand on the same folio gives the scribe the perhaps fanciful name of “Thomas Plenus Amoris” (also described as author on fol. x verso). Because the Roman d’Alexandre includes images by the hand of Pierart dou Tielt, illuminator of romances and keeper of manuscripts at the abbey of Saint-­Martin in Tournai, that is a possible place of production for this part of the manuscript. While some clues help to suggest likely dates and places of origin, it is less clear for whom the magnificent book was made. The text is beautifully written and also carefully collated to include the most comprehensive extant accounting of episodes from the traditions of Alexander romance. The program of illuminations is especially luxurious, including around 190 miniatures placed within the textual columns, and nearly as many bas-­de-­page scenes. The Roman’s large size, careful manufacture, and sumptuous program of illustration suggest that it might have been intended for a king; David II of Scotland, Edward II of England, and Philippe VI of France have been suggested. The French scribe alludes to the manuscript’s exhaustive ambition in his colophon, where he describes the text by naming all of its component parts: “Li romans du boin roi Alixandre. Et les veus du Pauon. Les accomplissemens. Le Restor du Paon. Et le pris.” As this multiplicity suggests, Alexander romance might be better considered as a genre, not a single text, so various and widespread are its versions—from Greek to Arabic, Syriac, and Ethiopian. With all of its interpolations and additions, Bodley 264 reflects the global appeal of the Alexander genre in material terms; Keith Busby has described the manuscript as “the ultimate Alexander romance, a kind of verbal and visual summa Alexandriana” (308). More than simply textual, this encyclopedic compilation operates in multiple media:

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the many images included with the text represent new iconographies intended to depict Alexander as an ideal leader in a variety of marvelous circumstances. The images in the bas-­de-­page are also especially numerous, and instructions to the artist (e.g., fol. 22r) indicate that, even though they treat homely subjects, the marginalia form as integral a part of the manuscript’s production as any other facet of its illustrative program. Their inclusive subjects imply that Alexander’s dominion encompasses not only the sea and the heavens (as in the famous episodes of his aerial flight in a chariot drawn by griffins and his oceanic descent in a bathysphere), but all contexts of human existence, from the courtly to the domestic. Sometime after its initial production, Bodley 264 traveled to England. Although it is not certain when or how the manuscript made the cross-­Channel journey, it may have been brought from Bruges to London soon after its creation, and it may have been owned by Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. At his death in 1397 he owned a book described as “un large livre en ffraunceis tresbien esluminez de la Rymance de Alexander et de les avowes al poun.” The manuscript was certainly in England by around 1400 to 1410, when a new scribe-­compiler added rubricated Anglo-­Norman captions to the images in the Franco-­Picard Roman and also decided to include an episode he deemed missing from the French text. This is the Middle English alliterative poem of Alexander and Dindimus, fully extant only here, in which Alexander travels to India to meet and debate the Brahmans and their king. The English scribe writes careful directions for readers into a codicological gap probably occasioned by the illustrative program: “Here fayleth a prossesse of þis rommance of alixander, þe wheche prossesse þat fayleth ȝe schulle fynde at þe ende of þis bok ywrete in engelyche ryme; and whanne ȝe han radde it to þe ende, turneþ hedur aȝen, and turneþ ouyr þis lef, and bygynneþ at þis reson: Che fu el mois de may que li tans renouele; and so rede forþ þe rommance to þe ende whylis þe frenche lasteþ” (fol. 67r; see Figure VI.1). This detailed set of instructions remarks the failure of the French narrative (the “process,” or story) to include every episode from Alexander’s life, and it offers a remedy: readers should insert the English text they will find “at þe ende of þis bok” into their reading of the Roman at this point, and then pick up again on the next page when they are done. Notably, this scribe expects the manuscript’s readers to make a seamless transition from reading French verse to reading Middle English alliterative lines (loosely described as “engelyche ryme”), and back again. Despite the fact that the French Roman d’Alexandre in Bodley 264 is already uniquely comprehensive, the English compiler adds a new text that contrasts linguistically and formally with the French poem, extending the inclusive impulses of the Alexander genre. The addition of Alexander and Dindimus also aids in the manuscript’s project of geographical completeness, for both Alexander texts include evocative imagin-

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ings of the farthest point a journey could reach. Two moments in the manuscript, one from the French text and one from the English, offer contrasting visions of Alexander’s encounter with geographical limits. In the Roman d’Alexandre, the hero’s adventuring brings him to the “bornes Artu” (line 128), that is, the “limits of Arthur,” a misread reference to the Pillars of Hercules. Doubling both the Greek hero and the mythic English king, Alexander stops his horse in front of two statues that mark the limits of the known world (fol. 62r; see Figure VI.2). Interestingly, the golden statues, here placed on top of an altar, have the look of idols— and the rubric below the image implies that at least one viewer took them that way. The rubric reads: “Comment Alexandre chevacha in ynde conquerant tout le pays ou grant force” (How Alexander rode through India conquering all the land with great force). The specter of idolatry here turns a narrative of travel into a vision of conquest, transforming the familiar translatio imperii that moves from east to west into a colonizing movement back in the other direction. And, indeed, as Mark Cruse has argued, both Alexander romance in general and this manuscript itself can be seen to promote crusading culture. In militarizing this moment as an encounter between the Christian West and the idolatrous East, Bodley 264 polices and reinforces the difference between the familiar and the foreign. A comparable moment in the narrative of Alexander and Dindimus works a bit differently, however. The conqueror himself places a pillar to mark the farthest eastern reaches of his own travels (fol. 215v; see Figure VI.3). This pillar has a decidedly Greek look, making it a visual emblem of the incursion of the West into the East. Or, if one recognizes that the Hellenistic worthy is not exactly a straightforward marker of a singular and unified West, but rather indexes the mixing or crossing of numerous geographies and traditions, the pillar might embody the geographically and culturally liminal position of Greece itself. The text sits similarly on the border between lands, taking as its central subject the question of understanding cultural difference. The Alexander and Dindimus episode comprises five letters between Alexander and the Brahman king, arguing the relative merits of their contrasting ways of life. The Brahmans follow an ascetic path, dwelling in caves, neither farming nor hunting nor making war. Not admiring this lifestyle, Alexander believes these strangers to be living as beasts, not men. They accuse him, in turn, of warmongering. The complicated encounter between these two cultures raises a number of interesting questions, for although the episode seems to narrate the most alien style of life imaginable to the West, the asceticism of the Brahmans and their humble relation to nature make them familiar emblems of virtue, even especially of Christian virtue. If this debate stages a familiar contrast between active and contemplative life, for example, the foreigners puzzlingly argue on the side of the contemplative. Despite Walter Skeat’s dismissal of Alexander and Dindimus as mere academic debate

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(“there is nothing else to be learnt from the story of it”), the sympathetic questions raised about another mode of existence suggest that there is more here. The alternating viewpoints embedded in the epistolary form imply a reversal of perspective suggesting physical distance between the parties—in this case, they are encamped across a river from each other and must communicate through letters—but also suggest that their cultural distance can be bridged. Dindimus is imagined here in a naked innocence, covered with leafy green designs (tattoos?) that signal his closeness to nature, and yet he wears the same crown as Alexander (see Figure VI.4). The poem and its illustrations leave open the question of which mode of life is better, a suspension of judgment that, as Frank Grady has suggested, recalls the Piers Plow­ man tradition and the enduring fourteenth-­century interest in the problem of the virtuous pagan, a problem that similarly recognizes and values otherness in a variegated way. Beyond this Alexandrian ultima thule (one specifically located in India), there are places still farther from England included in this manuscript’s geography. When the English scribe-­compiler wrote the instructions directing his reader to Alexander and Dindimus, he imagined it to be the final text in the manuscript, for he tells the reader to turn to “þe ende of þis bok” to find it. But he must have added Marco Polo’s Li Livres du Graunt Caam very soon afterward, for the scribal hand is the same, as well as the trefoil sprays that decorate the page. As Consuelo Dutschke has shown, the text was derived from another French royal manuscript that combines Alexander material with Eastern travelogues (Royal 19 D I). Both the text and the disposition of images of Li Livres du Graunt Caam follow the Royal manuscript closely. But the images in Bodley 264 depart from their model in substance, and they raise a number of important questions about the artists’ efforts to navigate the representation of difference. What is the role of this travel narrative in the “triptych of the East” offered by Bodley 264? How can we identify strains of the ethnographic—or the marvelous—in Marco Polo’s roughly contemporary narrative, and how do they compare to the balance between those two impulses seen in the antique Roman d’Alexandre? Can the encounter between a traveler from the medieval West and a new place in the East be characterized as neutral, or is it always colored by the specter of colonial conquest? Bodley 264 acknowledges the complexity of these questions, offering a number of answers impossible to address fully here. But a few images of cross-­cultural encounter can begin to suggest how both words and pictures in this manuscript attempt, in their different ways, to sort out and represent richly contradictory Western understandings of the East as exotic, profane, mysterious, holy, attractive, repellant, exalted, depraved, advanced, benighted, similar, different.

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Emblematic geographies structure the most famous illumination to come from this section of the manuscript: the image of Marco Polo’s departure from Venice, placed at the head of the entire text (see Figure VI.5). The well-­known picture represents particular architectural features of the city, such as St. Mark’s Cathedral, the square, the colonnade of the Doge’s Palace, and the pillars with St. George and the winged lion of St. Mark. It is unusual in English illumination at this date to locate a contemporary place so clearly in illustration, and this surprising verisimilitude marks Venice as both familiar and—for the manuscript’s English readers—foreign enough to need close description and exact reproduction. The detail in the image perhaps parallels the relatively factual aspects of Marco Polo’s reporting from afar, for although he does relate marvels in India and Vietnam, his account as a whole is notably and unusually ethnographically correct. The picture of Venice, too, combines eyewitness reporting with some fanciful elements, for it places startlingly realistic buildings against an abstract diapered sky. Both text and image showcase a reportorial effort to understand a particular place as different, abstract, perhaps mysterious, but also real, historical, and human. If a touch of foreign reporting enters Bodley 264’s image of Venice, an allusion to the medieval West conversely appears at the moment of most direct encounter with the East. As if to draw a more explicit connection between Marco Polo’s encounters with faraway subjects and the production of the manuscript itself, the illuminator inscribes his name at the hem of the Great Khan’s robe: “Johannes me fecit” (fol. 220r; see Figure VI.6). This signature associates the artist with the foreign prince who is pictured, and whose European features mark him as different from the darker-­skinned Tartars. Indeed, this image perhaps even points toward the Western prince for whom the book was made; the familiar form of the presentation miniature may allude to the patronage of Bodley 264 itself. Status, then, bridges the gap between culture and even race, just as the two kings Alexander and Dindimus find commonality in their identical crowns. The exotic monarch is demystified by familiar iconographies, as the Western artist finds it impossible to depict difference other than through the representational systems he and his audience know. But just as the meeting between Alexander and Dindimus leaves open the possibility that the foreigners’ way of life might be superior, Marco Polo’s careful observation of the foreign place and its customs testifies to an awareness of difference and even a respect for it. If “Johannes” has made the Great Khan—and if Western artists have created the visions of the East that are preserved in Bodley 264—the manuscript as a whole nonetheless offers visions of cultural encounter that acknowledge the potential for influence to travel in more than one direction. If, as Mark Cruse has suggested, the manuscript might represent “the seeds of a worldview that would

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sprout into colonialism and imperialism” (Illuminating the “Roman d’Alexandre,” 183), it also dramatizes encounters across space in ways that preserve the possibility of other kinds of relation. Bodley 264 enacts the close relation of England, France, and Flanders—which in this period are deeply entangled political entities, despite diversity in place and language. But, while it erases some kinds of national and cultural difference, the collection also prizes the exotic and the foreign in the Alexander legends and even more obviously in Marco Polo’s travel reporting. The formal and linguistic differences among the manuscript’s three texts, alongside their unexpected thematic affiliations, register the crucial play of self and other, difference and similarity, at the center of this encyclopedic repository of geographical and cultural knowledge. Bodley 264 beautifully weaves together a number of late medieval geographies in order to pose, though not necessarily to answer definitively, questions about their complex relation.

Figure VI.1. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264, fol. 67r. Instructions directing readers to insert the English Alexander and Dindimus into their reading of the French Roman d’Alexandre.

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Figure VI.2. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264, fol. 62r. Alexander reaches the two statues that mark the “bornes Artu”—the farthest limit of Arthur’s travels.

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Figure VI.3. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264, fol. 215v. Alexander placing a marble pillar at the point of his own farthest travels.

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Figure VI.4. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264, fol. 212r. Alexander disputing with Dindimus; “how he spareth not Alexandre to telle him of his gouernance.”

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Figure VI.5. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264, fol. 218r. Marco Polo departing from Venice.

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Figure VI.6. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264, f. 220r. “Johannes me fecit,” inscribed at the bottom of the robe of the Great Khan.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile Digital Bodleian. “Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 264.” https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk /objects/ ae9f6cca-­ae5c-­4149-­8fe4-­95e6eca1f73c/.

Catalogs and Editions Armstrong, Edward C., et al., ed. The Medieval French “Roman d’Alexandre.” 6 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1937–55. Reprint, New York: Kraus, 1965. James, M. R., intro. The Romance of Alexander: A Collotype Facsimile of MS. Bodley 264. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933. Khalaf, Omar, ed. Alexander and Dindimus, Edited from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264. Middle English Texts 55. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. Magoun, Francis Peabody, ed. The Gests of King Alexander of Macedon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. Skeat, Walter W., ed. The Alliterative Romance of Alexander and Dindimus. Early English Text Society, e.s., 31. London, 1878. Reprint, Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1987.

Secondary Studies Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Busby, Keith. Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Especially pp. 307–15. Cruse, Mark. Illuminating the “Roman d’Alexandre”: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bod­ ley 264; The Manuscript as Monument. Gallica 22. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011. ———. “Making a ‘Super-­Alexander Romance’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264): Tradition and Innovation in Workshop Practice.” Troianalexandrina 14 (2014): 65–90. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.TROIA.5.108307. ———. “Pictorial Polyphony: Image, Voice, and Social Life in the Roman d’Alexandre (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 264).” In The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, and Kathryn A. Smith, 371–401. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013. ———. “Romancing the Orient: The Roman d’Alexandre and Marco Polo’s Livre du grand Khan in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 264.” In Medieval Romance and Material Culture, ed. Nicholas Perkins, 233–51. Studies in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Dutschke, C. W. “The Truth in the Book: The Marco Polo Texts in Royal 19.D.i and Bodley 264.” Scriptorium 52, no. 2 (1998): 278–300. Elias, Marcel. “Interfaith Empathy and the Formation of Romance.” In Emotion and Medieval Textual Media, ed. Mary Flannery, 99–124. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018.

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Gaunt, Simon. Marco Polo’s “Le Devisement du Monde”: Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. Gilbert, Jane. “Genus and Genre: The Old French Verse Roman d’Alexandre, Alexander and Dindimus, and MS Bodl. 264.” Exemplaria 27 (2015): 110–28. Grady, Frank. “Contextualizing Alexander and Dindimus.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 18 (2004): 81–106. Harf-­Lancner, Laurence. “From Alexander to Marco Polo, from Text to Image: The Marvels of India.” In The Medieval French Alexander, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara-­ Sturm Maddox, 235–57. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Heffernan, Thomas J. “The Use of the Phrase Plenus amoris in Scribal Colophons.” Notes and Queries 6 (1981): 493–94. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Khalaf, Omar. “An Unedited Fragmentary Poem by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264.” Notes and Queries 58, no. 4 (2011): 487–90. Khanmohamadi, Shirin A. In the Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Kinoshita, Sharon. Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Litera­ ture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Melis, Tine. “An Alexander Manuscript for a Powerful Patron (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Bodl. 264).” In “Als ich kan”: Liber Amicorum in Memory of Professor Dr. Maurits Smeyers, 961–81. Leuven: Peeters, 2002. Scott, Kathleen. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490. 2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1996. See 2:68–73 (no. 13). Strickland, Debra Higgs. “Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence in Marco Polo’s Divisa­ ment dou monde.” Viator 36 (2005): 493–529. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR .2.300020. Warren, Michelle R. “Take the World by Prose: Modes of Possession in the Roman d’Alex­ andre.” In The Medieval French Alexander, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-­ Maddox, 143–60. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Zuwiyya, David, ed. A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

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C A S E S T U DY V I I  

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Authorship

The Gawain Manuscript (Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2 Dimensions: 180 × 155 mm Date: ca. 1375–1424 Place of Origin: North West Midlands, England Languages: Middle English, French Foliation: 90. There are two systems of foliation in this manuscript; this description uses the later one, in pencil. Material: Parchment Quiring The four alliterative Middle English poems Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir ­Gawain and the Green Knight were originally article 3 (fols. 41–130) of a volume bound together by Sir Robert Cotton (d. 1631). This history has led to continuing confusion over foliation (cf. the differences between the British Library and the Cotton Nero A.x Project). Since 1964, articles 1–2 and 4–6 have been stored separately as Cotton Nero MS A.x/1. Collation: I2 (fols. 41–42), II–VIII12 (fols. 43–126), IX4 (fols. 127–30). The pictures were added on separate leaves or fill white space at the end of texts. Layout One column of thirty-­six lines to a page. The images are full page, with the exception of the first of the Patience images (fol. 86r), which fills two-­thirds of the page after the end of Cleanness. 217

Script One scribe, writing in a Gothic textura rotunda script with features of Anglicana. Textual Contents Four alliterative and alliterative/rhymed Middle English poems: 1. Pearl, fols. 41r–59v (Digital Index of Middle English Verse [DIMEV] 4356-­1) 2. Cleanness, fols. 60r–86r (DIMEV 1036-­1) 3. Patience, fols. 86r–94r (DIMEV 4349-­1) 4. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, fols. 94v–130r (DIMEV 4920-­1) 5. Middle English couplet: “Mi minde is mukul on on þat wil me noȝt amende / Sum time was trew as ston & fro schame couþe hir defende,” fol. 129v (DIMEV 3642-­1) Decoration The manuscript boasts decorated initials throughout, ranging in size from fourteen lines (at the start of Pearl) to three, four, six, eight, and nine lines elsewhere. Narrative illustrations were added to this manuscript circa 1400 to 1410, in the first decade or so after the writing of the texts. There are four images preceding Pearl, two before Cleanness, two before Patience, and one preceding and three following Gawain. Briefly, their subjects are as follows: 1. Dreamer asleep (fol. 41r) 2. Dreamer approaches stream (fol. 41v) 3. Dreamer sees maiden (fol. 42r) 4. Dreamer attempts to cross (fol. 42v) 5. Noah’s ark (fol. 60r) 6. Daniel at Belshazzar’s feast (fol. 60v) 7. Jonah and the whale (fol. 86r) 8. Jonah preaching to the Ninevites (fol. 86v) 9. Green Knight at Arthur’s court (fol. 94v) 10. Bertilak’s wife tempting Gawain (fol. 129r) 11. Gawain at the Green Chapel (fol. 129v) 12. Gawain returns to Arthur’s court (fol. 130r) Provenance The inscription “Hony soit q[ui] mal pence[e]” (fol. 128v), added in a fifteenth-­ century hand, perhaps suggests a connection with Edward III (r. 1327–77) and the Order of the Garter. The fragmentary name “Hugo de” (fol. 95r) is probably further obscure evidence of ownership. The manuscript is listed before 1607 in a catalog of Henry Savile of Banke (d. 1617) (London, British Library MS Har-

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ley MS 1879, fol. 8v, no. 275). It is also listed in the first catalog of Sir Robert Cotton’s extensive collection (London, British Library MS Harley MS 6018, no. 279), as well as his later catalogs in British Library MSS Add. MS 36789 (fol. 4) and Add. 36682 (fol. 114r). The Cottonian library formed one of the foundation collections of the British Museum in 1753. Connections It has long been proposed that St. Erkenwald, an alliterative hagiographic poem about an early bishop of London, shares an author with the poems of Cotton Nero A.x/2. St. Erkenwald exists in only one copy, London, British Library MS Harley 2250. Kathleen Scott has suggested that the artist of Cotton Nero A.x might also have illustrated London, British Library MS Sloane 2002, a copy of John of Arderne’s Practica.

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British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2 (once known as “Article 3” of a differently bound volume) contains the only extant manuscript collection consisting solely of Middle English alliterative poems: Pearl, Cleanness, Pa­ tience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One might infer, therefore, that the organizational principle bringing these four texts together could be meter or, more loosely, style. Although the metrical systems employed by the poems vary, all four rely on alliteration as a fundamental part of their structure, and they show a special interest in highly wrought patterns and forms. The four poems use a similar lexical set: the varied, Germanic, and sometimes archaic vocabulary that marks the alliterative tradition. In addition, all four poems share a single scribe and a single scribal dialect from Cheshire; it is thought that the poetic dialect can be localized farther south, in Staffordshire. There are even some similarities in subject among the poems: interests in numerology, for example, and in particularly detailed description of the material world. Because of these commonalities in style, form, lexis, dialect, and theme, the manuscript also has long been assumed to be organized by the further category of authorship, for these evident unities linking all four of the poems seem to suggest that they were composed by a single person. The four poems of Cotton Nero A.x are divided as well as linked, however. Their alliterative meters differ—Patience and Cleanness use the alliterative long line strictly as their fundamental metrical structure, but Gawain exhibits unique verse forms that, although built on alliterative units, include rhyme and even syllable-­counting in the bob and wheel that concludes each stanza. Alliteration is largely ornamental in Pearl, whose rhyming lines can be better described as an

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elastic iambic tetrameter. Moreover, the genres of the poems vary widely—from an elegiac dream vision grieving the death of a young girl (Pearl), to a versified sermon (Cleanness), to a retelling of the biblical story of Jonah (Patience), to an Arthurian romance with Christian overlays (Gawain). Early descriptions of the manuscript reveal library catalogers puzzling over the variety of its contents: the earliest notice of the manuscript, made before 1614 in a list kept by bookseller Henry Savile of Banke, calls it “an owld booke in English verse beginninge Perle pleasant to princes pay in 4o limned.” This seventeenth-­century description already notes the antiquity of the object, gives priority to Pearl as the first item in the manuscript, describes the manuscript in terms of its size (a quarto, or rather small, volume), and—finally—records the fact that it is illustrated. By contrast, the 1621 description of the manuscript in Sir Robert Cotton’s library (British Library MS Harley 1608) calls it simply “deeds of King Arthur and other matters in English verse” (Gesta Arthuri regis et aliorum versu anglico), focusing on Gawain, instead of Pearl, though again noting the variety of topics covered by the book’s texts. Oddly, both Pearl and Gawain, the manuscript’s best-­known texts, are the outliers among its contents, Pearl formally and Gawain topically. Thus, although the correspondences in form and language are numerous enough to make a single author most likely, the evident variety in the manuscript, reflected even superficially in scholars’ indecision about whether this author should be styled “the Pearl-­poet” or “the Gawain-­poet,” makes certainty on this point impossible. The ubiquitous but unprovable assumption of a single author for the poems of Cotton Nero A.x raises some urgent theoretical questions: What kinds of criteria establish authorship? That is, in which elements of a text can we see immutable features of a single voice, a singular human consciousness or subjectivity? Is dialect more important than verse form, for example, and is verse form more significant than subject matter? What kinds of variation can a single authorial perspective encompass? Do we imagine that a single person cannot share vocabulary with another, for example? Can a single artist vary in style over time, or at will, choosing intentionally to write differently on one occasion or another? Or are passive markers of identity, uncontrollable by the subject him-­or herself, nonetheless visible to outside observers and detectable by modern scholarship? What is the role of literary excellence as a marker of identity, and can kinds of excellence be quantified and measured? The argument for common authorship in Cotton Nero A.x has often relied on a kind of commonsense appeal to the rarity of literary genius: is it likely that there were several such talented poets writing at the same time and place? Since these are medieval poems, they also raise a more fundamental question: how might historical distance matter? Authorship was imagined differently in the

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past, and the edges of human subjectivity were differently drawn. If this is an authorial collection, it is the first such collection in English to survive, and yet the poet seems markedly uninterested in the expressions of writerly self-­consciousness that characterize some of his contemporaries. Alastair Minnis has shown one important mode of medieval authorship to be compilatio, and Chaucer and Gower to be different kinds of “compilers.” One wonders, then: Is Cotton Nero A.x a compilation? Perhaps the poems themselves result from a practice of bringing together and arranging a variety of materials, and perhaps the people responsible for creating this book understand authorship in that light. Occasional internal evidence can help to elucidate this poet’s practices: the author of Gawain, for example, celebrates his verses as “lel letteres loken” (line 35) that have circulated throughout the land for a long time. In other words, he points both to the oral transmission of his material in bygone days—a form of authorship ancient, often anonymous, and communal—and suggests that the most important feature of his own authorial practice might be alliteration. Many of these bigger questions about authorship arise from consideration of another text long proposed as a companion to the four poems of Cotton Nero A.x. St. Erkenwald, an appealing alliterative poem preserved in the late fifteenth-­century collection Harley MS 2250 (fols. 72v–75v), was composed, probably between 1385 and 1410, in a dialect similar to that of the Cotton Nero poems (see Figure VII.1). The poem’s eponymous subject is the patron saint of London, and the story of his miraculous baptism of a pagan judge at St. Paul’s asks some of the same theological questions as, for example, Pearl. Many of the grounds on which the attribution was originally made, however, have become less stable over time: shared stylistic features mean less once we know more about the formulas of alliterative style; common vocabulary does not seem so conspicuous on the fuller evidence of newer dictionaries; striking locutions, such as certain kinds of periphrases for God (e.g., “He that on hyghe syttes”) or synonyms for humans (e.g., “segge” or “lede”), seem less striking when measured against a larger alliterative corpus. Moreover, the fundamental question persists: what kinds of tests would distinguish a single hand from an imitator, a unique author from a contemporary school of alliterative poetry? The not-­quite alliterative meter of Pearl, for example, makes it an outlier from the other three poems in many quantitative metrical tests: this could be evidence of another author, or merely evidence of an author choosing to write in a different structure. The fact that another poem has been insecurely identified as belonging to the canon of the Pearl-­poet also raises questions about the influence of the material book—the common authorship of the four poems in Cotton Nero is surely most plausible because they are materially bound together. And yet the

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material context of these poems also generates questions: What if St. Erkenwald were also copied into that manuscript, or even a manuscript closer to it in date? What if one of the other poems were not? The affiliations we now recognize as common authorship might then take on a different character. If the poems of Cotton Nero A.x were composed by a single person, who might this single author have been? “Huchoun of the Awle Ryale,” named in a fifteenth-­century chronicle as the author of a text called “the Awntyre off Gawane,” is one venerable possibility. The name “Huchoun” has been connected with “Sir Hew of Eglintoun,” named in William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makaris,” and with the partial name “Hugo de” found in the Cotton Nero manuscript itself (fol. 95r; see Figure VII.2). These connections are challenged, however, by dialectal evidence that the Gawain-­poet was not Scottish. Another early candidate was Ralph Strode, credited in the fifteenth-­century library catalog from Merton College, Oxford, as the author of elegaic verses called Phan­ tasma Radulphi. This could be taken to mean that the “philosophical Strode” of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (5.1857) was the author of Pearl, but the evidence is thin. And although most scholars today reject the idea that St. Erkenwald was written by the same poet responsible for Gawain or Pearl, efforts to identify the author occasionally rely on the comparison. For example, some have read “Masse” as a name written in the St. Erkenwald manuscript together with “Hugo de” from Cotton Nero A.x to name the poet as Hugh or John Massey. Cryptograms and numerological patterns in both manuscripts have been marshaled as further support. Other ingenious identifications have been made, but none has found widespread acceptance. Critical efforts to identify a single author for the four poems in Cotton Nero A.x (and possibly St. Erkenwald) are understandable, for readers are curious about the voice they hear speaking through these extraordinary works. But even if we accept the conventional wisdom, the manuscript itself is the work of multiple hands. The making of this manuscript was a collective enterprise, involving not just one or more authors, but also potentially a compiler, scribe, rubricator, artist—all participating in the work of authorship, as they together are responsible for the ultimate shape of the medieval artifact. Cotton Nero A.x is remarkable as the only manuscript of Middle English verse with a dedicated series of narrative illustrations: four full-­page images each illustrating Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and two each associated with Patience and Cleanness. Both stylistic and physical evidence indicates that all twelve pictures were added as much as several decades after the poems were composed and also probably shortly after the texts had been copied onto the pages of the manu-

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script. The illustrations, though not highly accomplished, can offer useful perspective on the questions of artistic coherence raised by the codex as a whole. Specifically, the pictures give alternate versions of each poem’s narrative, by another hand, and in another medium. Perhaps seeing two creative hands at work—writer and artist—can allow us to, paradoxically, recognize a unity of intention. The pictures draw the poems together in such a unity, for even if these four texts were collected from various places and various creators, in assembling the manuscript—and, even more, its pictures—the single artist tells us they belong together. Maidie Hilmo has suggested that the artist and the scribe were identical, a circumstance that would argue even more strongly for the creation of the manuscript as a unitary aesthetic object. Even if the artist is a distinct person, the illustrations comprise the activities both of writers and of readers: the pictures represent a creative impulse, but they also (probably) reflect a reading of the text, an interpretative impulse. They dignify the collection as a collection, elevating the verse by the careful design of the codex. But these are impulses of the scribe or compiler, translated into the experiences of the reader, which might not have anything to do with the author. The pictures precede or follow the text they illustrate, meaning that a reader encounters them as a kind of preface or coda—in other words, they are not physically integrated with the text itself. Sometimes they were deliberately inserted by the addition of an extra bifolium (Pearl, fols. 41r–42v), but sometimes they were added where extra unfilled space offered itself (Patience, fol. 86r). The illustrations of Cotton Nero A.x are narrative, but they are almost textless. The image of Daniel at Belshazzar’s feast includes a banderole with the writing on the wall: “mane tekel phares” (see Figure VII.3). But more often the images replicate the text, and they seem to use the narrative technique of doubling a figure to show a progression in time (see, e.g., possibly two figures of Gawain at King Arthur’s court; Figure VII.4). In addition to the hand(s) of the scribe/­illustrator and the painter (if those were different people), there is another “authorial” hand in the contemporary couplet added at the top of the scene of Gawain’s temptation by Bertilak’s lady (see Figure VII.5). This couplet is not alliterative, but rhymed—suggesting, if we take metrical structure to be an authorial signature, that these lines were composed by another author, as well as written by another scribe. For comparison, the blind fifteenth-­century poet John Audelay, who claims in a colophon to have “composed” the book he marks with a number of other insistent authorial signatures (Oxford, Bodleian MS Douce 302), is usually considered to have written the rhymed but not the alliterative poems in the collection. The couplet with Gawain reads:

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Mi minde is mukul on on þat wil me noȝt amende Sum time was trew as ston & fro schame couþe hir defende My mind is much on one who will not rescue me Who was once as true as stone and could defend herself from shame. This addition can be understood both in relation to Gawain and in relation to the image with which it shares a folio. The couplet exhibits both end rhyme and medial rhyme, notable enthusiasm for a different form in a manuscript whose other texts emphasize alliteration. Insofar as the sense of it can be derived, the couplet addresses themes of love-­longing, betrayal, and shame familiar from the poem, though here the (male?) narrator implies that a woman once true has fallen into disgrace. In Gawain itself it is the protagonist’s fidelity that is under pressure, particularly in the scene pictured here, in which the lady of the castle offers kisses to her guest. There is not a perfect parallel between the couplet and the scene, in other words, even though there may be a stronger connection between the couplet and the poem overall. If, as Arthur Bahr suggests, the couplet emphasizes female agency, it could echo the poem’s final revelation that Morgan LeFay was the mover behind its plot. Moreover, the lady’s agency in the couplet turns on the various shades of meaning in “amende”: she will not “save” or “rescue” the speaker, nor will she make him better. The narrative of Gawain similarly pairs these meanings: the hero’s desire for physical rescue (in the form of the girdle) requires him at the end of the poem to reform his spiritual state. The word “amende” that anchors the couplet implies both physical safety and also spiritual or ethical salvation. Medieval authors are frequently anonymous, but in Cotton Nero A.x that anonymity is laced with urgent critical speculations about the author’s biography and identity. Would knowing more about the person (if it is one person) who wrote these poems help readers to make sense of them? Most of what we know about the Gawain-­poet comes from the circumstances of the manuscript itself— and their unique appearance in this codex creates, as Arthur Bahr has shown in an evocative reading of Pearl, both impediments and opportunities for their interpretation. Chiefly, the uniqueness of the manuscript links the poems indissolubly together, creating a presupposition about the singular origin of the texts. But the manuscript also cautions readers to think multiply about authorship, in its textual and visual intersections with other books and its own many points of origin. The multiple hands at work in British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x prompt far-­reaching inquiries about how manuscript culture both conditions and destabilizes the nature of authorship and the status of the author.

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Figure VII.1. London, British Library MS Harley 2250, fol. 72v. Opening of St. Erkenwald. Note marginal translations of difficult words by a later hand.

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Figure VII.2. London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2, fol. 95r. Opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Note “Hugo de” in the top margin.

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Figure VII.3. London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2, fol. 60v. Daniel at Belshazzar’s feast with the writing on the wall.

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Figure VII.4. London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2, fol. 94v. The Green Knight at Arthur’s court.

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Figure VII.5. London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x/2, fol. 129r. Temptation scene with added couplet.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile British Library Digitised Manuscripts. “Cotton MS Nero A X/2.” http://www.bl.uk /manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Nero_A_X/2&index=4.

Catalogs and Editions Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. 5th ed. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008. Audelay, John the Blind. Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302). Ed. Susanna Fein. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009. Borroff, Marie, trans. The Gawain Poet: Complete Works; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, Saint Erkenwald. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Cotton Nero A.x Project. http://people.ucalgary.ca/~scriptor/cotton/. Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain: Reproduced in Facsimile from the Unique MS Cotton Nero A.x in the British Museum. Intro. I. Gollancz. Early English Text Society, o.s., 162. London: Oxford University Press, 1923.

Secondary Studies Andrew, Malcolm. “Theories of Authorship.” In A Companion to the Gawain-­Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, 23–34. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Bahr, Arthur. “Chasing the Pearl Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight.” Unpublished manuscript, February 1 2019, typescript. ———. “Finding the Forms of ‘Cleanness.’” Studies in Philology 110, no. 3 (2013): 459–81. ———. “The Manifold Singularity of Pearl.” English Literary History 82, no. 3 (2015): 729–58. Benson, Larry D. “The Authorship of St. Erkenwald.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64, no. 3 (1965): 393–405. Borroff, Marie. “Narrative Artistry in St. Erkenwald and the Gawain-­Group: The Case for Common Authorship Reconsidered.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 41–76. Edwards, A. S .G. “The Manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x.” In A Com­ panion to the Gawain-­Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, 197–219. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Fredell, Joel. “The Pearl-­Poet Manuscript in York.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 1–39. Hilmo, Maidie. “Did the Scribe Draw the Miniatures in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x (The Pearl-­Gawain Manuscript)?” Journal of the Early Book Society 20 (2017): 111–36.

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———. “The Image Controversies in Late Medieval England and the Visual Prefaces and Epilogues in the Pearl Manuscript: Creating a Meta-­Narrative of the Spiritual Journey to the New Jerusalem.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3, no. 1 (2001): 1–40. McGillivray, Murray. “Digitizing Sir Gawain: Traditional Editorial Scholarship and the Electronic Medium in the Cotton Nero A.x Project.” In Mind Technologies: Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community, ed. Raymond Siemens and David Moorman, 33–45. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006. McGillivray, Murray, and Christina Duffy. “New Light on the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Manuscript: Multispectral Imaging and the Cotton Nero A.x. Illustrations.” Speculum 92, no. 1 (October 2017): 110–44. Minnis, Alastair. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. London: Scholar Press, 1984. Partridge, Stephen and Eric Kwakkel, ed. Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Peterson, C.  J. “Pearl and St. Erkenwald: Some Evidence for Authorship.” Review of English Studies, n.s., 25 (1974): 49–53. Reichardt, Paul F. “‘Counted . . . bi a Clene Noumbre’: The Design of the Pearl Manuscript.” Manuscripta 38, no. 2 (1994): 116–37. ———. “Paginal Eyes: Faces Among the Ornamental Capitals of MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3.” Manuscripta 36 (1992): 22–36. ———. “A Seventeenth-­Century Acknowledgement of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in an Early Catalogue of the Cottonian Library.” Studies in Bibliography 49 (1996): 129–33. ———. “Sir Israel Gollancz and the Editorial History of the Pearl Manuscript.” Papers on Literature and Language 31, no. 2 (1995): 145–63. Scala, Elizabeth. “The Wanting Words of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England, 37–70. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Scott, Kathleen L. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490. 2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1996. See 2:66–68 (no. 12).

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C A S E S T U DY V I I I  

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Writing

The Ellesmere Chaucer (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales) San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9 Dimensions: 394 × 284 mm Date: 1400–1410; sixteenth-­century additions Place of Origin: London, England Language: Middle English Foliation: [ii] + iv + 232 + iv + [ii] Material: Parchment Quiring I–XXIX8 Layout Double ruling lines in reddish-­brown ink for a single column of text, forty-­eight lines per page, with running title in top margin. Additional space ruled in the outer margins for glosses or decoration. When there is a double line in the outer margin, pricking holes appear between them. Round pricking in three margins, sometimes cropped. Contemporary flyleaves ruled in the same manner as the text pages, though without the provision for marginalia. Script Anglicana formata, written by one scribe (Adam Pynkhurst?).

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Textual Contents 1. “Take thou this treatise thi time therin to vse,” fol. ii recto (sixteenth century) (Digital Index of Middle English Verse [DIMEV] 5110) 2. Rotheley, “A Ballad on the House of Vere,” fol. ii verso (DIMEV 1762) 3. “From Ioue aboue a spendyng breath,” signed “R. North,” fol. iv verso (DIMEV 1468.5) 4. “Retaine, refuse, no frend, no foe,” signed “R.N.,” fol. iv verso (DIMEV 4470.5) 5. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, fol. 1 6. “Thes worldly ioies, that faier in sight apeares,” signed “R.N.,” fol. v recto (DIMEV 5622) 7. “In triflieng tales, by poets told,” signed “R.N.,” fol. v recto (DIMEV 2656) 8. Geoffrey Chaucer, “Truth,” fol. viii recto (DIMEV 1326) Decoration This manuscript includes relatively extensive and accomplished decoration, including a range of decorated initials, bar and foliage borders, and paraph marks. It is most famous for the equestrian portraits of Chaucer’s pilgrims in the margins of the text: 1. Knight, fol. 10r 2. Miller, fol. 34v (labeled “Robin with the Bagpype,” sixteenth-­century hand) 3. Reeve, fol. 42r 4. Cook, fol. 47r 5. Man of Law, fol. 50v 6. Wife of Bath, fol. 72r 7. Friar, fol. 76v 8. Summoner, fol. 81r 9. Clerk, fol. 88r 10. Merchant, fol. 102v 11. Squire, fol. 115v 12. Franklin, fol. 123v 13. Physician, fol. 133r 14. Pardoner, fol. 138r 15. Shipman, fol. 143v 16. Prioress, fol. 148v 17. Chaucer, fol. 153v 18. Monk with his dogs, fol. 169r 19. Nun’s Priest, fol. 179r

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20. Second Nun, fol. 187r 21. Canon’s Yeoman, fol. 194r 22. Manciple, fol. 203r 23. Parson, fol. 206v The first sixteen portraits and the last were painted by a single hand. The Chaucer portrait was created by a different artist. And the figures of the Monk, Nun’s Priest, Second Nun, Canon’s Yeoman, and Manciple were all painted by a third artist. The figures in this third group are larger, and the horses stand on green grass. Binding Rebound in 1995. Provenance Following the identification of Adam Pynkhurst as its scribe, it is most likely that the manuscript was produced originally in Westminster, London. The poem on folio ii connects it to the De Vere family, earls of Oxford—possibly as early as John de Vere (1408–61/62). One of the executors of John de Vere’s will was Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted in Suffolk; Drury and his family are probably those mentioned on folio i verso: “Robertus drury miles, William drury miles, Robertus drury miles, domina Jarmin, domina Jarningam, dommina Alington.” For further details on these and other sixteenth-­century names in the manuscript, see C. W. Dutschke’s Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library. By the seventeenth century, a pressmark in the hand of John Egerton (1579–1649), 1st Earl of Bridgewater, reveals that the manuscript was in the Bridgewater Library, where it spent three centuries. In 1917, it was acquired by Henry E. Huntington from Francis Egerton, Earl of Ellesmere. Connections Other manuscripts showing Pynkhurst’s hand include: Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.15.17 (353); Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2; Cambridge, University Library MS Kk.1.3 Part 20 (XX); Hatfield, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, Box S.1; London (Kew), National Archives, SC 8/20/997; London, Guildhall Library 5370 [Scriveners’ Company Common Paper]; London, Mercers’ Company, Accounts Book, 1391; Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 392D; Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 393D. The portrait of Chaucer on folio 153v is an ancestor to the portrait of Chaucer in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes as realized, for example, in London, British Library MS Harley 4866 and to subsequent traditions of Chaucer portraiture.

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The manuscript known as the “Ellesmere Chaucer,” written circa 1400– 1410, is one of the earliest and most authoritative manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. It is a large, beautifully made, and well-­planned book, including twenty-­three accomplished equestrian portraits of Chaucer’s pilgrim-­tellers in the margins. One of these portraits depicts the author himself, wearing a pen case around his neck and pointing toward the start of the Tale of Melibee (fol. 153v; see Figure VIII.1). The text in Ellesmere offers an especially complete and well-­ordered version of the Canterbury Tales, and it has often served as the basis for modern editions of the poem, including the standard Riverside Chau­ cer. Interestingly, the Ellesmere manuscript was written by a scribe whose hand was noted by A.  I. Doyle and M.  B. Parkes in a number of other significant English literary manuscripts, and whom they called “Scribe B.” In 2006, Linne Mooney identified the scribe responsible for writing the Ellesmere Chaucer as Adam Pynkhurst, a scribe working in London in the decades around 1400. In the register of the Scriveners’ Company of London in 1392, she recognized Pynkhurst’s distinctive hand both in an oath that established his professional membership in the company and in a large, decorated signature that revealed his name (Figure VIII.2). Despite the important objections raised by scholars such as Jane Roberts and Lawrence Warner, most have accepted this identification, embracing the certainties that it has established, along with the further questions it has raised. As the premier product of an author and a newly named scribe who may have worked closely together over decades, the Ellesmere Chaucer has a strong claim to being the most famous literary manuscript in Middle English. What does this exceptional example reveal about the nature of scribal production in late medieval England and how it might matter? Adam Pynkhurst’s characteristic letterforms and styles of decoration appear anonymously in a variety of other documents and literary manuscripts besides the Ellesmere, including some quires of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a version of Langland’s Piers Plowman, a leaf from a copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and an authoritative copy of Chaucer’s Boece—as well as what is probably the earliest copy of the Canterbury Tales, now known as the Hengwrt manuscript (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 392D). This broad evidence for Pynkhurst’s scribal career indicates that he had extensive experience copying the monuments of Ricardian poetry and suggests also that his work was specially connected with Chaucer. In fact, the identification probably strengthens the case for a historical reading of a short poem attributed to Chaucer, “Adam Scriveyn,” an imprecation addressed to a sloppy scribe named Adam who has worked on both Troilus and Boece (see Introduction). Even though it

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relies on circumstantial reasoning, the temptation to consider this short poem as an index to the career of Adam Pynkhurst has been nearly irresistible. For one thing, it suggests that Chaucer himself supervised the writing of both Troilus and Boece, perhaps correcting texts with his own hand, a practice that is otherwise unsubstantiated. The poem also implies that Chaucer worked closely with one scribe over a long period of time, a fact that could shape our understanding of the production of medieval texts. But even setting aside the complicated testimony of “Adam Scriveyn,” other kinds of evidence helped Mooney and her collaborators to sketch the historical career of the scrivener Adam Pynkhurst. The identification rests on the detailed comparison of letterforms across documents. Features characteristic of this scribe’s known writing include the relatively wide spacing of letters, strokes that do not meet fully, spiky turnings at the feet of letters, and distinctive otiose and decorative strokes, such as the double slash dot on ascenders. Most strikingly, Mooney claims that Adam Pynkhurst “signed” his work with a scribal mark that appears almost ubiquitously, often connected to decorated ascenders—a kind of graphic signature. These decorative scribal signatures are visible in the Scriveners’ Company register (see Figure VIII.2), but they are even more striking in the first line of the Hengwrt Canterbury Tales, where the mark is connected to almost every ascender (see Figure VIII.3). In Hengwrt the mark seems to have been added at the same time as the text, but in the Boece (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales Peniarth MS 393D), it is added in red ink, sometime after the main text had been copied in black (see Figure VIII.4). Distinctive letterforms that Mooney thinks point strongly to Pynkhurst are his D, N, and g (for further examples of Pynkhurst’s hand, see the useful website Late Medieval English Scribes). Mooney points out that Pynkhurst’s documentary script varies somewhat from the more familiar version of his hand in the literary manuscripts; in bureaucratic contexts he uses more Secretary forms among the Anglicana ones (such as single-­rather than two-­compartment a’s) and the look of the script is spikier, also in keeping with Secretary influence. But evidence from the other literary manuscripts, and especially from his writing in Latin, helps to support her secure identification of the Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe by name. This venerable method of identifying scribes by comparing features across many samples of contemporary handwriting nonetheless raises some questions about the promise and limits of this evidence: how secure can these identifications be? The positive identification of a scribe requires, first of all, a hand that can be securely attached to a name. Then it requires demonstrable correspondences between letterforms and decorative features in the named document and those found in other places—correspondences that are not widespread in

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other kinds of contemporary writing. These details are reinforced by scholarly judgment trained by years of study of vernacular scribes, a degree of connoisseurship that seeks the spirit of one person as revealed through the ductus of his hand. But identifying a singular consciousness behind a scribal (or artistic) hand is as difficult as establishing a single author behind a series of anonymous texts. This is especially true when scribes made every effort—on some occasions, at least—to imitate each other’s letterforms and aspect and thus to anonymize themselves. Regularity was a common value in medieval book production, which can make it difficult even to discern where one scribal hand changes to another within a manuscript. Paradoxically, range was also a virtue, as the existence of scribal pattern books can demonstrate: the accomplished scribe writes in a variety of styles and scripts in order to please a variety of customers. Control, then, is important to a talented scribe. But the identification of a scribal hand relies on the assumption that there are aspects of any hand that reveal a singular creative consciousness, that those elements are outside of the scribe’s control, and that they are detectable by modern observers. Unsettling these assumptions a bit, one wonders: perhaps scribes liked to vary their hands, perhaps they liked to imitate their colleagues, or perhaps differences can be attributed as much to a single scribe’s choice of script as to fixed characteristics of his hand. Like authorial identity, scribal identity is difficult to derive absolutely from the available evidence, which explains why it might be difficult or even impossible to arrive at universal agreement about the proposed resemblances. Despite these general cautions, the process of sifting through the evidence can help to uncover meaningful networks of production surrounding medieval texts. Mooney’s identification of Adam Pynkhurst has opened a new and revealing window onto the intersections between documentary cultures of writing and literary ones: it is valuable to know that a relatively small group of professional legal and bureaucratic scribes centered in London seems to have been responsible for copying a large volume of Middle English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Pynkhurst himself wrote documents for the Mercers’ Company, as well as the Guildhall, apparently keeping their accounts for a number of years in the 1390s. The same scribes copied not only Chaucer manuscripts, but also those of Gower and Langland. Pynkhurst’s colleagues in and around the London Guildhall, including Richard Osbarn, John Merchaunt, John Carpenter, and Thomas Hoccleve kept accounts for the city while also copying poetry. Scribes collaborated, though some seem to have made a career out of specializing in certain kinds of texts. And more manuscripts in these networks have London connections than had previously been supposed. The professional documentary cultures from which the scribes and even authors came

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provide an important material and cultural surround for the literature that they wrote in their off moments. This knowledge has changed or at least modified our sense of how Middle English literature was produced and of how it fit into larger landscapes of written culture in the metropolis and beyond. Whether Scribe B is Pynkhurst or not, the manuscripts he wrote provide particularly useful evidence of the range and breadth of scribal production. Most interestingly, he wrote the other significant early manuscript of the Can­ terbury Tales, the Hengwrt manuscript. This manuscript, probably even earlier than Ellesmere, offers quite a different text of the poem: individual readings vary widely, as well as the selection and order of tales. Interesting questions about how best to present medieval texts for modern readers can be crystallized in the debate about these two most famous Chaucer manuscripts. The two manuscripts together have come to stand for the “best text” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and yet the scholarly disputes about them reflect the instability of that text at its most extreme. Ellesmere has formed the base text for editors of Chaucer from Skeat in the nineteenth century to Robinson and Benson in the twentieth. There has been strong movement at times in the direction of Hengwrt, a preference argued especially by Norman Blake. The Hengwrt manuscript was probably earlier and therefore can perhaps claim a greater proximity to Chaucer’s own intention. But the manuscript shows signs of incomplete revision and perhaps even incomplete composition—the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is not represented there at all, and several links between tales found elsewhere are missing. Should we base our understanding of the work on a copy that is patently unfinished? The Ellesmere manuscript, by contrast, seems to reflect the intervention of an editor—in all likelihood, not the author. It is closer to a complete copy of the poem scholars agree that Chaucer wrote, and the ordering of the tales, though occasionally unsatisfying, comes close to making sense of the various puzzles the sequence presents. It is a smoother, more presentable copy on which much effort and expense has been lavished—shown not least in the illumination and decoration so rare in other Canterbury Tales manuscripts. But does this make it more desirable as a representation of the historical text, or less? Ellesmere is perhaps closer to what Chaucer would have wanted had he finished— that is, it makes more sense—but it is also probably farther away from the text he actually did leave. Scholars’ difficulties in determining how to value the texts of Ellesmere and Hengwrt are made all the more perplexing by the fact that these two manuscripts were written by the same scribe. Does that fact help to reconcile their differing visions of the text? Or does it introduce the new problem of understanding how the same person could have two such different views of the Can­

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terbury Tales? On the one hand, scribes are the creators of medieval literature, in a very tangible sense. They are also, as they read their copy-­texts, its first consumers. Those who made medieval books—including artists as well as scribes—provide the first contemporary response to the text as they create it. The case of the Ellesmere “editor” shows more clearly than most how much our sense of a medieval text depends on people who were not its “author.” But who determined how the Ellesmere text should look? If Scribe B/Pynkhurst was the Ellesmere scribe, and if he was also, in an extension of his responsibilities for merely writing the text, an editor of Chaucer’s unfinished text, he was largely responsible for the forms in which generations of readers have encountered the Canterbury Tales. On the other hand, perhaps the difference between these two early manuscripts implies that he had less autonomy in copying than we assume, that he was following different directives in each case. Apart from the stunning and contentious naming of the most famous scribe of the most famous manuscripts of Middle English literature, the identification of hands proceeds apace. And, although the conclusions of such study will never be uncontroversial, it is clear why it matters so much: knowing the name of a scribe often allows a manuscript to be localized and dated more securely. Merely identifying hands allows a manuscript to be set within a network of other books copied by the same person, giving insight into its date and location, but also building up a sense of how literary culture was transmitted—a thick description of late medieval literary cultures. In the aggregate, the number of scribes working in London and in documentary contexts such as the Guildhall has the potential to reframe our sense of where medieval English literature came from, who read it, and how. The controversies over scribal identifications signal the importance of the questions they seek to answer, ontological questions about the nature of medieval writers, readers, and texts. Knowing the identity of a scribe provides modern readers with a tangible sense of medieval book culture, a link that mediates between the creation of the manuscript and our study of it, offering the possibility for insight into the author and the genesis of the text. We want to know the hands we see on the manuscript page.

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Figure VIII.1. San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9, fol. 153v (detail). The opening of the Tale of Melibee, with portrait of Chaucer.

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Figure VIII.2. Scriveners’ Company Common Paper. London, Guildhall Library MS 5370, p. 56 (detail). Oath and decorated signature of Adam Pynkhurst.

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Figure VIII.3. Opening of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, with Adam Pynkhurst’s scribal mark on ascenders.

Figure VIII.4. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 393 D, fol. 4r. Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (Boece), with Adam Pynkhurst’s scribal mark on ascenders, rubricated.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile Huntington Digital Library. “Canterbury Tales.” https://hdl.huntington.org/digital /collection/p15150coll7/id/2838/.

Catalogs and Editions Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. The Canterbury Tales: The new Ellesmere Chaucer facsimile (of Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9) by Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Daniel Woodward and Martin Stevens (Tokyo: Yushodo Co.; San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1995). Dutschke, C. W. Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington ­Library. 2 vols. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1989.

Secondary Studies Blake, N. F. “The Relationship Between the Hengwrt and the Ellesmere Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.” Essays and Studies 32 (1979): 1–18. ———. The Textual Tradition of the “Canterbury Tales.” London: Edward Arnold, 1985. Boffey, Julia, and A. S. G. Edwards. “Chaucer’s ‘Chronicle,’ John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 201–18. Donaldson, E. Talbot. “The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts.” In Speak­ ing of Chaucer, 102–18. London: Athlone Press, 1970. Doyle, A. I., and M. B. Parkes. “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century.” In Medieval Scribes, Manu­ scripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson, 163–210. London: Scolar Press, 1978. Edwards, A. S. G. “Chaucer and ‘Adam Scriveyn.’” Medium Aevum 81, no. 1 (2012): 135–38. Fletcher, Alan J. “The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College, MS 244, Some Early Copies of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Canon of Adam Pynkhurst Manuscripts.” Review of English Studies, n.s., 58 (2007): 597–632. Gillespie, Alexandra. “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam.” Chaucer Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 269–83. Hanna, Ralph. “Scribal Oeuvres: ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’ and His Canterbury Tales.” In In­ troducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, Their Producers, and Their Readers, 132–65. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Horobin, Simon. “Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer Review 44, no. 4 (2010): 351–67. Horobin, Simon, and Linne Mooney. “A Piers Plowman Manuscript by the Hengwrt/ Ellesmere Scribe and Its Implications for London Standard English.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 65–112.

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Lerer, Seth. Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-­Medieval England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Especially pp. 117–46. Mann, Jill. “Chaucer’s Meter and the Myth of the Ellesmere Editor of The Canterbury Tales.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 71–107. Mooney, Linne R. “Chaucer’s Scribe.” Speculum 81, no. 1 (2006): 97–138. Mooney, Linne, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs. Late Medieval English Scribes. https://www.medievalscribes.com. ISBN 978-­0-­9557876-­6-­9. Mooney, Linne R., and Estelle Stubbs. Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425. York: York Medieval Press, 2013. Partridge, Stephen. “Questions of Evidence: Manuscripts and the Early History of Chaucer’s Works.” In Writing After Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel J. Pinti, 1–26. New York: Garland, 1998. Pearsall, Derek. The Canterbury Tales. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985. Especially pp. 1–23, 321–26. Roberts, Jane. “On Giving Scribe B a Name and a Clutch of London Manuscripts from c. 1400.” Medium Aevum 80 (2011): 247–70. Sánchez-Martí, Jordi. “Adam Pynkhurst’s ‘Necglygence and Rape’ Reassessed,” English Studies 92.4 (2011): 360–74. Steiner, Emily. Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Stevens, Martin, and Daniel Woodward, eds. The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpre­ tation. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1995. Wakelin, Daniel. Scribal Correction and Literary Craft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Warner, Lawrence. Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ———. “Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 55–100. Weiskott, Eric. “Adam Scriveyn and Chaucer’s Metrical Practice.” Medium Aevum 86, no. 1 (2017): 147–51. Windeatt, B. A. “The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics.” In Writing After Chaucer: Es­ sential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel J. Pinti, 26–44. New York: Garland, 1998.

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C A S E S T U DY I X  

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William Langland, Piers Plowman; John Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels; Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde; and Other Items San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS HM 114 Dimensions: 215 × 140 mm (165 × 100 mm) Date: Early to mid-fifteenth century Place of Origin: England Language: Middle English Foliation: 325 + ii Material: Paper, with parchment used for the outer and inner bifolia of each quire Quiring I–VI16, VII18, VIII16, IX16 (wanting 7, 10), X–XII16, XIII–XVI16, XVII16 (+5, fols. 261), XVIII16 (+5 and 6, singletons, fols. 278, 279), XIX16, XX16 (+10 and 17, fols. 317, 324). The added leaves, folios 261, 278–79, and 317, contain Troilus’s hymn to love (3.1744–71), his soliloquy on predestination (4.953–1085), and his flight to heaven (5.1807–27). Because of an error in foliation, folios 20–117 are numbered as folios 21–118. Catchwords are in red or brown ink frames. Leaf signatures in Arabic numerals are sometimes visible in the first half of each quire. At the end of each of the three booklets that make up the volume, a contemporary hand has counted and totaled the quires: “quaternus (?) 8 quarus” (fol. 130v), “q—4 quares” (fol. 192v), and “ad 8 quares summa 20” (fol. 325v).

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Layout Single-column verse and prose, red brackets to show verse structure in Susan­ nah. Frame ruled in dry point or lead. Script One scribe writing in Anglicana, some sections more hurried than others. Corrections in another contemporary hand. Textual Contents 1. William Langland, Piers Plowman, fols. 1–130v (B-text with substantial interpolations from A and C) (Digital Index of Middle English Verse ­[DIMEV] 2459) 2. John Mandeville, Travels, fols. 131–84 (defective version, subgroup B; unedited) 3. Susannah (also known as The Pistil of Swete Susan), fols. 184v–190v (DIMEV 5607) 4. The Legend of the Three Kings, fols. 190v–192v. 5. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, fols. 193–318 (subgroup with addition) (DIMEV 5248) 6. English translation of Epistola Luciferi ad Cleros, fols. 319–325v. Decoration Two- to five-line initials throughout, mostly blue with red flourishing. Headers, rubrics, Latin quotations, and paraphs in red. Provenance Sixteenth-century names in the manuscript include “Richard” (back flyleaves) and “Thomas Browne” (fol. 299v, back flyleaf ii verso). Owned by Sir Henry Spelman (1564?–1641), Dr. John Taylor (1704–66), Anthony Askew (1722–72), Richard Gough (1735–1809), Richard Heber (1773–1833). Possibly owned by Sir Thomas Phillipps (Phillipps MS 8252; the Phillipps shelfmark B3b.550 corrected to a.25.550 in pencil on the front flyleaf ). Henry E. Huntington bought the manuscript through the bookseller A. S. W. Rosenbach in 1923. Binding Rebound in 2002. Eighteenth-century binding preserved for study. Flyleaf and pastedown from twelfth- to thirteenth-century antiphonal, offices De Judith and De Esther. Connections The same scribe is seen at work in London, British Library MS Harley 3943 (Hand 1, also in a copy of Troilus and Criseyde; fols. 2–7v, 9–56v, 63–67v), and

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London, Lambeth Palace 491 (main hand, fols. 1–290v). Other manuscript compilations that bring together some of the same texts include Cambridge, Cambridge University Library MS Dd.i.17 (B-Text Piers Plowman, Mandeville’s Travels); Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Ff.5.35 (C-Text Piers Plow­ man, Mandeville’s Travels); London, British Library MS Harley 3954 (A-Text Piers Plowman, Mandeville’s Travels); London, University of London Library V 17 (C-text Piers Plowman and Mandeville’s Travels); New York, Morgan Library MS M.818 (A-text Piers Plowman, Susannah); Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet. A.1 (Susannah, A-Text Piers Plowman); and San Marino, Huntington MS HM 143 (Troilus and Criseyde, C-Text Piers Plowman).

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Because William Langland’s Piers Plowman is one of the most complex and unstable of all Middle English texts, editors have struggled to find its proper textual form. The poem exists in fifty-three manuscripts (excluding fragments), each of which testifies differently to its existence, and all of which are hard to reconcile with each other. Early editors sorted the variety of witnesses to Piers Plowman into three distinct versions known as A, B, and C, generally understood to represent Langland’s own early, middle, and late revisions of the poem. The changing shapes of the poem Piers Plowman during its author’s lifetime challenge readers to define the limits of a single work in a manuscript culture. How do we establish the core identity of a poem that varies so much? When does one text (Piers Plowman A) become something else (Piers Plow­ man B)? Does it matter how extensive the changes between two versions are, and whether they are authorial or scribal? At what point does textual variability become so great that readers (or editors) might recognize and recategorize an alternative version as a new textual object? These are important questions, since manuscript textuality is characterized by change and instability. The variations in copying endemic to any manuscript culture make it difficult to determine the ideal shape of many medieval texts— even those much less complicated than Piers Plowman. One even wonders whether the effort makes sense: the urge to “fix” or stabilize texts, or to uncover their ur-version, emerges from modern concerns that might have been irrelevant to medieval writers and readers. Paul Zumthor identified the kind of fluidity characteristic of medieval manuscript culture as mouvance—that is, an extreme textual mobility especially familiar in the context of anonymously authored texts, which often vary not only in relatively small ways (such as dialect and wording) but also in more significant ways (such as rewriting, rearrangement, and major additions or omissions). Because anonymous texts are not tied to the

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identity of a particular author, they traffic less in the promise of authenticity, they are open to intervention and revision by successive scribes, and the variations across versions reflect local circumstances of immediate use rather than some large and abstract sense of the work in its ideal form. Any medieval work, Zumthor recognized, should be conceived as shifting and mobile, rather than fixed and stable—a vision of medieval literate culture that approaches an oral mode. But it is not necessary to claim a direct connection to orality, for others have argued that such variability can be found in medieval writings themselves; Bernard Cerquiglini, for these reasons, prefers the term variance. However described, the changeable and mobile culture of medieval literacy suggests a comparison with digital literature in the twenty-first century, and indeed the textual problems of Piers Plowman manuscripts can be compared to the theoretical and practical difficulties raised by versioning and version control for electronic text. Huntington Library MS HM 114 exemplifies the fluid qualities of literate culture in the Middle Ages. The manuscript includes a number of substantial literary texts, including Mandeville’s Travels, the alliterative Susannah, and Troilus and Criseyde—and it begins with a copy of Piers Plowman that can be comfortably categorized as neither an A-, B-, nor C-text of that poem. Although it has been described in older scholarship as a highly contaminated B-text (George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson in the Athlone edition call it “ruinously corrupted”), the additions from A and C are so systematic and so significant that they transform the poem from a faulty B-text into something else: the version of Piers written here is a deliberate fifteenth-century fusion of all three texts. The HM 114 scribe had access to at least one copy of all three versions of the poem, and he conflated them in an apparent effort to produce a composite text of Piers Plowman that was as full and comprehensive as possible. His choice suggests that the three versions identified as A, B, and C might not be fixed and separable poems, and that Piers Plowman would be better described as the product of “rolling revision”—a practice in which the text moves from version to version without any stark lines of demarcation. Interestingly, Robert Crowley’s 1550 printed edition of the poem operates on a similar logic, for its text appears to be based on as many as three B versions, as well as A and C. These composite copies of Piers Plowman imply that at least some of the poem’s early readers thought of it as a single work of literary craft, rather than three that should remain separate. The scribe most likely responsible for the conflation in HM 114 has been identified by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs as Richard Osbarn, chamber clerk for the London Guildhall, 1400–1437. Mooney and Stubbs argue that Osbarn’s name can be attached to a hand found in civic documentary records such

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as the Liber Albus (an early fifteenth-century index of London’s laws and customs), Guildhall Letter Book H, and Guildhall Letter Book I—and, further, that this hand is the same as that found in HM 114. Such identifications locate the copying of this manuscript’s literary texts, like so many, within the legal and documentary cultures of the city of London. Whether or not Richard Osbarn was the scribe of HM 114—and, as Lawrence Warner has pointed out, there are reasons to doubt the specific attribution, as well as to accept it—significant production of late medieval literature by professional copyists in London is a certainty, suggesting that the assumptions and practices of literary and documentary writing might have influenced one another. In this essay I will refer to the HM 114 scribe anonymously. I will also assume that the scribe was the person responsible for making decisions about the form of the texts he copied, as well as the shape of the compilation in which they appear, even though all of these questions could usefully remain open. The HM 114 scribe’s adjustments to Piers Plowman include interventions both large and small: not only adding A and C lines to the base B-text, but also omitting lines, rearranging the sequence of lines, telescoping several lines into one, modifying lines to a lesser or greater extent, and writing entirely new lines. One of the largest and most significant modifications that he made was to incorporate the waking “autobiographical” passage from the C-text (C 5.1–108). In this section of the poem, the narrator, Will, confesses to his faults and paints a portrait of his clerkly life that abounds in personal and local detail. This is one of the most significant additions that C makes to the B-text, and indeed is one of the passages twenty-first-century readers are most sorry to miss in reading B alone. In HM 114 these lines are copied in before passus 5 (omitting line 21) and concluding with C 5.195–96. Labeled “Passus Quintus” (fol. 22r; see Figure IX.1), the autobiographical excursus precedes B’s own passus 5, which retains its number. A number of other C borrowings from passus 6, 7, and 8 are inserted throughout B 5, mostly in the form of individual lines. Moreover, because some of the C material is the result of revision that moved it from B 13, in HM 114 that material is repeated both in passus 5 and in passus 8. In spite of the scribe’s close engagement with the A-text in other sections, there are few borrowings from A in this passus. The patterns of addition and conflation in HM 114 demonstrate that this scribe, unlike modern scholars, worked to find one coherent form for a poem that he imagined to be a single stable work. Rather than choose once between the B-text and the C-text, he sought to bring the best of each version into an integrated, if sometimes sloppy, experience of the poem. But even as this scribe understood Piers Plowman as a unitary and coherent work, and compiled as compre-

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hensive a version of the poem as he could, he also imagined it as a text that was soft around the edges. He felt he could intervene in the shape of the text, rewriting Langland’s poem where he deemed his changes an improvement. His work therefore combines activities that seem editorial, responsibly assembling the most complete possible account of Langland’s work, with activities that come closer to authorial, actively altering the poet’s preexisting verses. And perhaps the implication of his method is that these two activities are not ever so different and that the line of demarcation between them can be difficult to draw. Some of the scribe’s work very clearly participates in the creative process: HM 114 contains fifty-one new lines that appear in none of Langland’s three versions. Although these are mostly single lines that help to smooth out textual transitions, and they show more insouciance about standard patterns of metrical alliteration than Langland typically does, they establish a collaborative process of composition. HM 114 substitutes modern words for archaic ones—takyn for ynome, or ashamyd for asbasshed—changes that bring the language of the poem into the scribe’s present, updating the text and shaping it to contemporary uses. If these scribal activities differ from Langland’s own revisionary endeavors, they nonetheless come near enough to raise some fundamental questions. For, of course, Langland was an editor of his own work, as well as its author, and some of his revising habits—such as an ambition to be comprehensive, and the resulting danger of repetition—are common to both author and scribe. If Langland felt comfortable in the continual revision and serial “publication” of his poem, scribes such as this one felt no less authorized to contribute their own improvements. How can we tell the differences between the editorial activities of authors and those of scribes? Some traditional ways of distinguishing depend on questionable assumptions: that the author’s vision for the text is unified and comprehensive, that anything surprising or difficult is more likely to be authorial, and, more generally, that an author’s revisions show an identifiably creative quality of thought and language that scribes cannot attain. There are problems with this vision: the startling lectio difficilior, or “more difficult reading,” might be the result of a poetic genius challenging convention, but it might also be the result of an unthinking error. As Lee Patterson showed in an electrifying analysis of the Kane-Donaldson edition of the Piers Plowman B-text, authors are less authoritative than we might think, genius is less transcendent, and scribes did more than merely corrupt pristine texts that they encountered. In the end, Patterson embraces the creativity involved in the work of copying and also in the work of editing—for it is editors, in the end, who are charged with sifting obvious error from brilliant innovation, in the process crafting the medieval texts we read.

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The conflation of scribal corruption with authorial innovation finds a limit case in scholarly arguments about the proposed Z-text of Piers Plowman in Oxford MS Bodley 851. This manuscript version of the poem had seemed, to its earliest modern editor W. W. Skeat and to many who followed him, beneath notice as a belated and fragmentary scribal corruption of Langland’s work. A. G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer, on the contrary, argued that the manuscript reveals an early authorial draft—not a debasement of poetic genius, but one of the poem’s nascent forms. Although the idea of a separate Z-text has not been universally accepted, the hypothesis echoes questions raised by the HM 114 Piers. Does this copy reveal the deep history of its author’s creative inspiration—an originary moment—or the radical later interventions of its scribes? Ralph Hanna (who is unconvinced of the existence of the Z-text, or its separability from the textual traditions of A, B, and C) points out that the Bodley scribe is like the scribe of HM 114, both making efforts to reconcile “deviant” textual detail to produce the most complete possible text of Langland’s poem. The scribe’s tendency toward compiling and even rewriting comprehensive versions of texts is visible in the whole project of HM 114, not just in its engagement with Langland. The alliterative forms of Piers are echoed in the stanzaic alliterative Middle English poem Susannah, a vernacular reworking of the story of the biblical heroine. The manuscript’s prose texts include a version of Man­ deville’s Travels (another famously variable and unstable text), as well as a Middle English prose translation of the Legend of the Three Kings. Most interestingly, Langland’s poem appears here alongside a copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, one of two manuscripts that bring these rather unlikely poems together. The three long texts that anchor each of the booklets in HM 114—Piers, Mandeville’s Travels, and Troilus—all show evidence of comparable care and deliberation in confecting the best possible text from a range of exemplars. In assembling these booklets together, the manuscript sets its conflated version of Piers Plowman alongside a collection of other carefully and comprehensively assembled, and often radically modified, texts. As M. C. Seymour has noticed, the copy of Mandeville’s Travels in HM 114 diverges widely from the more standard textual traditions; he suggests that perhaps the scribe was writing quickly, from memory, rather than closely and laboriously copying an exemplar. The Three Kings excerpt is similarly loose, based increasingly on paraphrase and summary. It is likely, moreover, that the Three Kings was included in the collection as a way to fill gaps in the Mandeville text, combining two separate pieces of prose together to offer a single, more complete, description of Egypt. One might imagine that prose texts are particularly susceptible to this kind of textual adaptation, but the HM 114 scribe is equally

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willing to revise or rework verse. His version of Troilus is most interesting in comparison to his Piers: the text copied here conforms closely to the alpha subgroup of manuscripts of Chaucer’s poem, but the scribe has added missing passages from the main textual tradition on supplementary leaves. Troilus’s hymn to love, for example, missing from the scribe’s primary exemplar, is added on an inserted leaf (fol. 261v; see Figure IX.2) and the margin marked on the following page where it should be read (fol. 262r; see Figure IX.3). In other words, the scribe used at least two archetypes of Chaucer’s Troilus and sought by comparing them to construct a composite version. The additions to Troilus show that, even beyond his unusual treatment of Piers Plowman, the HM 114 scribe held textual completeness as a value and had access to a range of exemplars that allowed him, in more than one case, to attempt it. In this, the medieval scribe was not so different from modern editors, though they have often condemned his intrusive work. Even the contemporary attempt at collation in HM 114, though it may indicate simply that the scribe was paid by the quire for his work, is another sign of bookmaking care that reflects something like editorial, or at least codicological, values (see Figure IX.4). This is a scribe of a scholarly disposition, who prefers to improve his text by comparison with other versions—becoming, in effect, the interventionist editor of a critical edition of Langland’s poem. Not overly concerned for textual stability, authenticity, or accuracy of copying, he is willing to revise and adapt both prose and verse in the service of a better, more complete version. His revisions do not make his texts shorter, or easier to copy, nor does he make changes to fit the text to illustrations, other material constraints, or identifiable local needs. But the nature and extent of his changes suggest that he bears considerable responsibility for the ultimate, shifting and unstable, shape of the works he copies.

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Figure IX.1. San Marino, CA, Henry E. Huntington Library MS HM 114, fol. 22r. Interpolated autobiographical passage from Piers Plowman C 5.1–108 marked as “Passus Quintus.”

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Figure IX.2. San Marino, CA, Henry E. Huntington Library MS HM 114, fol. 261v. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Troilus’s hymn to love on an inserted leaf, with a signe de renvoi at the top.. The recto of this leaf is blank.

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Figure IX.3. San Marino, CA, Henry E. Hunt­ington Library MS HM 114, fol. 262r. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. Marginal note with signe de renvoi indicating where Troilus’s hymn should be read.

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Figure IX.4. San Marino, CA, Henry E. Hunt­ington Library MS HM 114, fol. 130v. The con­clusion of Piers Plowman and the manu­script’s first booklet. Note the faint calculation of quire numbers in the lower left corner: “[quaternus?] 8 quarus.”

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS HM 144. Huntington Digital Library. http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15150coll7/ id/31197/rec/1.

Catalogs and Editions Horstmann, C., ed. The Three Kings of Cologne: An Early English Translation of the “His­ toria triuum regum” by John of Hildesheim. EETS, o.s., 85. London: Published for the Early English Text Society by N. Trübner, 1886. Pp. 90/21–94/24. Kane, George, ed. Piers Plowman: The A Version. Rev. ed. London: Athlone Press, 1988. Kane, George, and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. Piers Plowman: The B Version. Rev. ed. London: Athlone Press, 1988. Pearsall, Derek, ed. Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C‐Text. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of the Z-Text in Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 851. Intro. Charlotte Brewer and A. G. Rigg. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. http://piers.chass.ncsu.edu/. Rigg, A. G., and Charlotte Brewer, eds. Piers Plowman: The Z Version. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1983. Russell, George, and George Kane, eds. Piers Plowman: The C Version. London: Athlone Press, 1997. Schmidt, A. V. C., ed. Piers Plowman: A Parallel‐Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Ver­ sions. 2nd ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2011.

Secondary Studies Bart, Patricia. “Intellect, Influence, and Evidence: The Elusive Allure of the Ht Scribe.” In Yee? Baw for Bokes: Essays on Medieval Manuscripts and Poetics in Honor of Hoyt N. Duggan, ed. Michael Calabrese and Stephen H. A. Shepherd, 219–43. Los Angeles: Marymount Institute, 2013. Benson, C. David. “Another Fine Manuscript Mess: Authors, Editors and Readers of Piers Plowman.” In New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. Derek Pearsall, 15–28. York: York Medieval Press, 2000. Benson, C. David, and L. Blanchfield, eds. The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman: The B‐ Version. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Especially pp. 102–5. Bowers, John. “Two Professional Readers of Chaucer and Langland: Scribe D and the HM 114 Scribe.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 113–46. Brewer, Charlotte. Editing Piers Plowman: The Evolution of the Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Chambers, R. W. “The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman in the Huntington Library and Their Value for Fixing the Text of the Poem.” Huntington Library Bulletin 8 (1935): 1–25. Cerquiglini, Bernard. In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology. Trans. Betsy Wing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Eyler, Joshua R., and C. David Benson. “The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman.” Lit­ erature Compass 2, no. 1 (2005): ME 132, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17414113.2005.00132.x. Freistat, Neil, and Julia Flanders, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Galloway, Andrew. “Uncharacterizable Entities: The Poetics of Middle English Scribal Culture and the Definitive Piers Plowman.” Studies in Bibliography 52 (1999): 59–87. Hanna, Ralph. “On the Versions of Piers Plowman.” In Pursuing History: Middle En­ glish Manuscripts and Their Texts, 203–43, 314–19. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. “The Scribe of Huntington HM 114.” Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 120–33. Hudson, Anne. “The Variable Text.” In Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism, ed. A. J. Minnis and C. Brewer, 49–60. Cambridge: Brewer, 1992. Jacobs, Nicolas. “Kindly Light or Foxfire? The Authorial Text Reconsidered.” In A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. Vincent P. McCarren and Douglas Moffat, 3–14. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Kane, George. “An Open Letter to Jill Mann About the Sequence of the Versions of Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 13 (1999): 5–33. Kelemen, Erick. Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Save As: Michael Joyce’s Afternoons.” In Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Lawler, Traugott. “A Reply to Jill Mann, Reaffirming the Traditional Relation Between the A and B Versions of Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 10 (1996): 145–80. Machan, Tim. Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Mann, Jill. “The Power of the Alphabet: A Reassessment of the Relation Between the A and B Versions of Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 8 (1994): 21–49. Mooney, Linne, and Estelle Stubbs. “Richard Osbarn, Chamber Clerk, 1400–37.” In Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Scribes and the Dissemination of Middle En­ glish Literature, 1375–1425, 17–37. York: York Medieval Press, 2013. Patterson, Lee. “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective.” In Negotiating the Past: The His­ torical Understanding of Medieval Literature, 77–113. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

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Pearsall, Derek. “Editing Medieval Texts: Some Developments and Some Problems.” In Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. J. J. McGann, 92–106. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ———. “Texts, Textual Criticism, and Fifteenth Century Manuscript Production.” In Fifteenth-Century Studies, ed. Robert F. Yeager, 121–36. Hamden: Archon, 1984. Phillips, Noelle. “Compilational Reading: Richard Osbarn and Huntington Library MS HM 114.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014): 64–104. Raymo, Robert R. “A Middle English Version of the Epistola Luciferi ad Cleros.” In Me­ dieval Literature and Civilization, ed. D. A. Pearsall and R. A. Waldron, 233–48. London, 1969. Russell, G. H., and Venetia Nathan. “A Piers Plowman Manuscript in the Huntington Library.” Huntington Library Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1963): 119–30. Scase, Wendy. “Two Piers Plowman C-Text Interpolations: Evidence for a Second Textual Tradition.” Notes and Queries 34 (1987): 456–62. Seymour, M. C. “The Scribe of Huntington Library MS HM 114.” Medium Aevum 43, no. 2 (1974): 139–43. Thorne, John. “Updating Piers Plowman Passus 3: An Editorial Agenda in Huntington Library, MS HM 114.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2006): 67–92. Wakelin, Daniel. Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts, 1375–1510. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Warner, Lawrence. Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ———. The Lost History of “Piers Plowman”: The Earliest Transmission of Langland’s Work. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. ———. The Myth of “Piers Plowman”: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Especially pp. 87–105. Wood, Sarah. “Confession and Compilation: The Seven Deadly Sins in Huntington Library, MS HM 114.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 29 (2015): 117–49. ———. “Monologic Langland: Contentiousness and the ‘Z’ Version of Piers Plowman.” Review of English Studies 68 (2017): 224–43. ———. “Non-Authorial Piers: C-Text Interpolations in the Second Vision of Piers Plowman in Huntington Library, MS HM 114.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114, no. 4 (2015): 482–503. Zumthor, Paul. Towards a Medieval Poetics. Trans. Philip Bennett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Originally published as Essai de poétique medieval (1972).

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The Book of Margery Kempe London, British Library MS Additional 61823 Dimensions: 215 × 140 mm Date: ca. 1440 Place of Origin: East Anglia (perhaps King’s Lynn) Language: Middle English Foliation: vii + 124 (folios v and vii are parchment sewing guards) Material: Paper, with flyleaves in modern and medieval parchment Quiring I12 (fols. 1–12), II14 (wants 1) (fols. 13–25), III12 (wants 1) (fols. 26–36), IV–XIII12 (fols. 37–96), IX12 (wants 2) (fols. 97–106), X10 (fols. 107–16), XI8 (fols. 117–24) Layout Text block outlined, but no ruling of lines. Around thirty-­two to thirty-­five lines per page. Script A current Anglicana with Secretary features. A colophon on folio 123r identifies the scribe by name: “Jhesu mercy quod Salthows.” Textual Contents 1. The Book of Margery Kempe, fols. 1r–123r 2. Late fifteenth-­/early sixteenth-­century recipe for digestive elixir, fol. 124v

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3. A letter from Pietro del Monte, a papal legate, to William Bogy (d. 1442), vicar of Soham (Cambridgeshire) Decoration Some red multiline initials, with occasional decoration (e.g., faces). Drawings in the margins. Binding Contemporary binding of tawed parchment over beveled wooden boards. Two clasps (now missing). Chemise kept separately as Add. MS 61823*. Provenance The manuscript was at the Charterhouse of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mount Grace, Yorkshire, by the fifteenth century, when an ownership note records “liber monte grace. this boke is of montegrace” (fol. iv verso). Mount Grace prior and mystic John Norton (d. 1521/2) is mentioned in the margins (fols. 33v and 51v). A letter to William Bogy, vicar of Soham, Cambridgeshire, has been used as a parchment flyleaf (fol. vii). In the collection of the Butler-­Bowden family from the time of Henry Bowden (b. 1754). Discovered by William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-­Bowden in 1934 in Southgate House, Chesterfield. Sold by Captain Maurice Butler-­Bowden to the British Library, Sotheby’s, London, June 24, 1980, lot 58. Connections There are two early prints of extracts from The Book of Margery Kempe: Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of lyn[n] (London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1501; STC 14924); and the same text entitled “A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryst, or taken out of the boke of Margery kempe ancresse of Lynne,” reprinted in Here foloweth a veray deuoute treatyse (named Benyamyn) of the myghtes and vertues of mannes soule & of the way to true con­ templacyon (London: Henry Pepwell, 1521; STC 20972), sigs. Dvir–Eiiir.

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The manuscript now known as British Library MS Additional 61823 was discovered by William Butler-­Bowden during a game of ping-­pong in his family’s library in 1934, and was soon identified by Hope Emily Allen as The Book of Margery Kempe. Often understood to be the first autobiography in English, this extended piece of medieval life writing reveals that Margery Kempe (ca. 1373 to after 1438), the daughter of the mayor of Lynn, had a full and un-

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usual life: married, the mother of fourteen children, a sometime brewer and owner of a horse mill, she also was known (if not always admired) as a visionary and mystic. She traveled widely in Britain and abroad, meeting and sometimes disputing with figures of spiritual and ecclesiastical authority. Kempe’s distinctive authorial voice with its weeping and roaring has seemed to most readers to offer a remarkably unfiltered account of the existence of a bourgeois woman in early fifteenth-­century East Anglia, and the work has been celebrated not only for its literary qualities but also for its social and cultural reportage. But is it truly unfiltered? The material forms of Margery Kempe’s narrative witness to multiple ways in which The Book of Margery Kempe has been shaped by interventions large and small. The production of both manuscript and text reveal many layers of mediation, complicating any easy sense that twenty-­first-­century readers have direct access to a fifteenth-­century life, but also enriching our understanding of medieval strategies of representation. Before the discovery of the manuscript, Margery Kempe was known only through two sets of early printed excerpts that present quite a different character from the one visible in the Book as a whole. In 1501 Wynkyn de Worde published an excerpt of seven pages, entitled: Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of lyn[n] (see Figure X.1). Later, Henry Pepwell included this excerpt among seven other English mystical treatises in his 1521 anthology (edited by Gardner in 1910 as The Cell of Self-­Knowledge), adding the unconfirmed detail that this Margery Kempe was a “deuoute ancres.” The abbreviated text offers sober guidance for contemplatives, largely in Christ’s own voice, enjoining them to remain “in scylence” (A.i)—as Margery Kempe almost never did. Presenting the text tendentiously in this way as a set of visions of a pious holy woman, shorn of any of the local details or dissenting energies that make the Book so memorable to twenty-­first-­century readers, these sixteenth-­century editors (or their sources) offer only a partial view of Margery Kempe’s capacious life. Perhaps, as Jennifer Summit has suggested, they are responding to political and theological pressures specific to their own sixteenth-­century context. Their choices give readers a highly mediated text, one whose fundamental character has been changed by the filter through which it is seen. But even in Additional 61823, the substance of Margery Kempe’s personal narrative is mediated through a number of different and complicated frames. The text begins with two prefaces that explain (and repeat) the complex history of its own production, providing a detailed etiology of the original manuscript of the Book, now lost. Kempe refused calls to have her story written (“don wryten” [Staley ed., 59]) for some twenty years, but finally agreed to work with a

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scribe born in England, then living in Germany—perhaps her son, whose biography shares these details. After his sudden death, a second amanuensis (perhaps her confessor, Robert Spryngolde) tried to take over the project, but the manuscript was “so evel wretyn that he cowd lytyl skyll theron, for it was neithyr good Englysch ne Dewch [German], ne the lettyr was not schapyn ne formyd as other letters ben” (74–76). After this second scribe abandoned the project, Margery Kempe herself then paid a “grett summe” (89) to have someone else write her book: “And this good man wrot abowt a leef, and yet it was lytyl to the purpose, for he cowd not wel fare therwyth the boke was so evel sett and so unresonably wretyn” (89–91). Finally, the well-­meaning second scribe, a priest, came back and was miraculously able to read the difficult text: “it was mych mor esy, as hym thowt, than it was beforntym. And so he red it ovyr beforn this creatur every word, sche sumtym helpyng where ony difficulté was” (97–99). After all the difficulty, there is finally something miraculous—a “special grace,” as the manuscript itself puts it (123)—about the way in which The Book of Margery Kempe comes to be. This self-­reported account describes Margery Kempe’s continuing close involvement with the production of her book: she pushed it into circulation and even, by her close collaboration with the scribe, had a hand in determining its final shape. Her authorship is defined by acts of mediation, communicating the events of her life to her readers through the medium of her amanuenses. Moreover, Kempe’s crafting of the narrative is explicitly artful: it does not represent events chronologically arranged, but rather it presents them as they are filtered through her mind and memory: “Thys boke is not wretyn in ordyr, every thyng aftyr other as it wer don, but lych as the mater cam to the creatur in mend whan it schuld be wretyn” (99–101). Whether this disordering is an authentic failure of memory (“for it was so long er it was wretyn that sche had forgetyn the tyme and the ordyr whan thyngys befellyn” [101–2]) or the inventive rearranging of emotion recollected in tranquility, the structure is not chronological. Even the writing of the book is done in a manner that produces bibliographic as well as temporal disorder, as the end of chapter 16 offers this advice to readers: “Rede fyrst the twenty-­first chapetre, and than this chapetre aftyr that” (863). Similarly, the priest explains that he appends the second preface (or “proym”), which comes before the first: “And for this cause, whan he had wretyn a qwayr, he addyd a leef therto, and than wrot he this proym to expressyn mor openly than doth the next folwyng, whech was wretyn er than this” (110–12). The scribe has to move backward, offering to readers first the proem written second. Because the manuscript we have does not show evidence of a leaf added to the first quire, it must not be the scribe’s original, written probably from Margery Kempe’s

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dictation, but a copy of that text at one remove, at least. The scribe of Additional 61823 names himself as “Salthows” in a colophon at the end of the book: “Jhesu mercy quod Salthows” (see Figure X.2). Anthony Bale has recently proposed that he be identified as Richard Salthouse (fl. 1443, d. before 1487), a monk at Norwich’s Benedictine cathedral priory. The prominent involvement of multiple amanuenses in the production of the Book raises another question: was Margery Kempe illiterate? The evidence of the Book itself is contradictory. She repeatedly seeks out clerics to write letters for her and claims she is “not letteryd.” But she is nonetheless a full participant in literary community of all kinds. She hears devotional texts read by priests over a period of many years, for example: “He red to hir many a good boke of hy contemplacyon and other bokys, as the Bybyl wyth doctowrys [doctors, i.e., theologians] therupon, Seynt Brydys boke, Hyltons boke, Boneventur, Stimulis Amoris, Incendium Amoris, and swech other” (3389–92). Listening to all of this devotional writing read aloud provides Margery with a literary and spiritual education, and Christ himself accounts hearing books the same as reading them in any other way (5187). Margery makes literary pilgrimages to visit with figures such as the well-­known anchoress Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–1416) and also carries a book with her to church. She may not have had the scribal skills to write down her life herself, nor even have known how to read well on her own in Latin or in English, but she was not therefore excluded from meaningful participation in traditions and cultures of late medieval devotional writing. As she describes it, literary culture sought her out: “Sum proferyd hir to wrytyn hyr felyngys wyth her owen handys” (60–61). The genre of “autobiography”—anachronistic in the fifteenth century—implies a singular perspective and a kind of unimpeded historicity. But putting The Book of Margery Kempe instead in the context of medieval genres of life writing highlights the multiplicity of its connections and the many varieties of artistry that shape its historicity. The Book constructs affiliations with hagiography, for example: many of the episodes in Margery Kempe’s life are clearly modeled on features of saints’ vitae (e.g., conversion, ordeal, and miracle). Particular figures, such as St. Mary Magdalene or St. Katherine of Alexandria, served as inspiration for the fifteenth-­century woman’s life and also for certain features of her book. The ideal of saintly imitation (imitatio) no doubt informed her experience of events ranging from her visions of Christ to her examination by ecclesiastical authorities, and the generic patterns of saints’ lives also shaped her representation of those episodes in her narrative. Even the mediating frame of the narrative, in which a saintly female life is verified and recorded by male followers, alludes to hagiographical convention.

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A narrative that seeks to establish generic affiliations, to model itself on one kind of text or another, is a narrative that self-­consciously participates in literary history. And so it is important to acknowledge connections, too, between The Book of Margery Kempe and other kinds of late medieval authorial self-­ presentations—indeed, the Book’s sustained prose narrative could be seen as an ancestor to prose fictions such as the novel, just as well as to autobiography or memoir. To what extent did Margery Kempe shape her own Book to aesthetic ends? Lynn Staley among others has argued that we should understand the author (Kempe) as a distinctly different figure from the persona (Margery), and one who exerts a significant measure of creative control. From this perspective, the embedded persona of Margery becomes analogous to the figure of Geoffrey deployed by Chaucer, or the figure of Will by Langland. Read in this light, the text of her life is mediated by the author herself, who stages her narrative in as deliberately artful a way as her male contemporaries. The distance interposed by the Book’s third-­ person narration—“this creature,” not “I”—has sometimes been taken as a sign of Kempe’s piety and humility: the speaker is remembering always that she is a part of the world created by God. But the distance between the author and “this creature” also perhaps acknowledges a degree of literary craft: Margery Kempe’s narrative, though personal, is constructed in many ways to exceed her individual experience, to offer an exemplary model to any creaturely reader. The prefaces establish the Book as a reaction to the demand for a text of Margery’s life, setting it in relation to community—not against community, but as an effect of community. Multiple acts of mediation helped to get the book into physical form, which was then also mediated by and for readers afterward. Readers of Additional 61823 reacted to Kempe’s story, filtering or interpreting it for themselves and others. The hands of perhaps as many as six annotators offer commentary and corrections in the manuscript, as well as occasional marginal drawings. Some of these readers were no doubt Carthusians of Mount Grace Priory, as the fifteenth-­century flyleaf inscription announces that the book belonged early on to that foundation: “liber montis gracie. this boke is of mountegrace” (fol. iv verso). The association is a little puzzling, as the life of a boisterous visionary bourgeoise would seem to have little appeal to a cloistered and silent monastic order. But the manuscript seems to have had Carthusian readers: a fifteenth-­ century annotator, for example, writes in a small and careful hand, similar to the chapter headings of the main scribe. He makes notes in the margins of interesting moments in the narrative: “nota de clamore” to mark Margery’s famous roarings, or “nota de vestura” alongside her provocative choice to wear white. He identifies the fable of the pear tree—perhaps approvingly—as “narracion,” but he seems to have crossed out the section in which Margery makes a “good cawdel” (a sooth-

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ing drink) for the Virgin (see Figure X.3a). That detail, often celebrated as one of the distinctively homely touches in this narrative, may have domesticated Mary in too earthly a manner for his monastic sensibility. It is not certain that this early annotator was a Carthusian, of course, but the case is still more likely for one of the most important hands to mark the manuscript in the sixteenth century—the so-­called red-­ink annotator. This reader marks some of the earlier comments, as if to agree with or reinforce them. He strikes through passages that might seem too lurid or sensational (see Figure X.3b). He echoes words of the text itself and notes intertextual allusions to figures such as R. Hampole (i.e., hermit and mystic Richard Rolle of Hampole) or Marie of Oignies. He also notes moments that correspond to the spiritual legacies of two priors of Mount Grace and authors of contemplative treatises, Richard Methley and John Norton. His interests tend toward affective devotion, for he includes images of hearts and marks the “ignis divini amoris” with a picture of flames (see Figure X.4). He is interested in Margery Kempe’s religious fervor, and he joins his own pious feelings to it with notes in his own voice such as “deo gracias” or “amen.” For the red-­ink annotator, Kempe’s story aligns with devotional traditions represented by Rolle, Methley, and Norton; he seems less interested in the quotidian events of her life, particularly her conflicts with authority figures. But although his annotations may be taken to represent his own interests, they also filter the text for subsequent readers, just as he himself responded to the annotations in brown ink. At the end of MS Additional 61823, a nearly contemporary hand has written a recipe, now quite faded and difficult to read, for a digestive made entirely of sugar (see Figure X.5). Another kind of readerly addition, this recipe seems less obviously linked with Carthusian reception of the Book and less obviously linked with its text. How should we understand the relation between The Book of Margery Kempe and this addition to the last leaf of the manuscript in which it is preserved? Some readers might assume that the recipe is irrelevant to the text, that its writer only added it because parchment was available; flyleaves were often used in this way to record notes, accounts, and also recipes. But whether the two can be linked in an interpretative or only a practical way, the recipe forms part of the media environment of the Book. Whether this addition provides evidence for early readers of the manuscript who were not monastic—would such a sugary drink have been too luxurious for the priory or charterhouse?—or whether it richly adumbrates the imagery of dulcor and sweet healing that Margery Kempe finds in her dalliances with Christ, it registers an intriguing use of the manuscript for material incidental to its main text. Like Margery Kempe’s own complex compositional process, her multiple amanuenses, her scribe, and her readers, this recipe participates in the mediation of the Book, and finally helps to shape its meaning.

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Electronic media raise more obvious questions, perhaps, about how communicative acts are shaped by the physical circumstances of their transmission, but medieval manuscripts—as historical media forms—raise equally interesting and productive ones. Approaching historical texts with an awareness that medium can influence message reveals the complexity of continuing interactions among oral accounts, scribal artifacts, visual images, and nascent print culture. Kempe’s representation of herself is determined by the multiple layers of mediation visible in MS Additional 61823: Margery’s recollections and recitations of the events of her life, her multiple amanuenses with their varying levels of scribal skill and linguistic competence, the readers who mark the important bits of the text for those who come after, the early printers who excerpt the Book so radically. Understanding the manuscript itself as a medium makes clear that The Book of Margery Kempe is anything but an unfiltered fifteenth-­century life.

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Figure X.1. Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie Kempe of lyn[n], fol. Ai. Wynkyn de Worde, 1501.

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Figure X.2. London, British Library MS Additional 61823, fol. 123r. Final page of The Book of Margery Kempe, with concluding colophon: “Jesu mercy quod Salthows.”

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Figure X.3a. London, British Library MS Additional 61823, fol. 95r. Passage— “mad for owr Lady a good cawdel & browt it hir to comfortyn hir, and than owr Lady seyd on-­to hir, ‘Do it a-­wey dowtyr. ȝeue me no mete but myn owyn childe.’ The creatur”—canceled by one of the brown-­ink annotators of The Book of Margery Kempe.

Figure X.3b. London, British Library MS Additional 61823, fol. 100v. Passage— “And than cam on with a baselard knyfe to hir sight & kytt that precyows body al on long in the brest”—canceled by the red-­ink annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe.

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Figure X.4. London, British Library MS Additional 61823, fol. 43v. The “red-­ink annotator” drawing flames (labeled as “ignis divini amoris”) to mark a discussion in the text of the “fyer of loue.” The note underneath, “so s. R hampall,” alludes to the fervent mysticism of Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle.

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Figure X.5. London, British Library MS Additional 61823, fol. 124v. A recipe for a sweet digestive.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile British Library Digitised Manuscripts. “Add MS 61823.” www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Full Display.aspx?ref=Add_MS_61823.

Catalogs and Editions The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Joel Fredell et al. http://english.selu.edu/humanities online/kempe/index.php. The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Lynn Staley. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996. The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Sanford Brown Meech with notes and appendixes by Meech and Hope Emily Allen. Early English Text Society, o.s., 212. London: Oxford University Press, 1940. Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of lyn[n]. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1501 (STC 14924). “A Short Treatyse of Contemplation Taught by Our Lord Jesu Christ, or Taken out of the Book of Margery Kempe, Ancress of Lynn.” In The Cell of Self-­Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises Printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521, ed. Edmund G. Gardner, 49–. London: Chatto & Windus, 1910.

Secondary Studies Bale, Anthony. “Richard Salthouse of Norwich and the Scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe.” Chaucer Review 52, no. 2 (2017): 173–87. Beckwith, Sarah. “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe.” In Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers, 34–57. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Buygis, Katie Ann-­Marie. “Handling The Book of Margery Kempe: The Corrective Touches of the Red Ink Annotator.” In New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall, ed. Kathryn Kerby-­ Fulton, John J. Thompson, and Sarah Baechle, 138–58. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. A Companion to “The Book of Margery Kempe.” Ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Ellis, Roger. “Margery Kempe’s Scribes and the Miraculous Books.” In Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition, ed. Helen Phillips, 161–76. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990. Erwin, Rebecca Schoff. “Early Editing of Margery Kempe in Manuscript and Print.” Journal of the Early Book Society 9 (2006): 75–94. Fredell, Joel. “Design and Authorship in The Book of Margery Kempe.” Journal of the Early Book Society 12 (2009): 1–28.

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Hirsh, John C. “Author and Scribe in The Book of Margery Kempe.” Medium Aevum 44 (1975): 145–50. Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Margery Kempe and Wynkyn de Worde.” In The Medieval Mys­ tical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe, 27–46. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987. Johnson, Lynn Staley [see also Staley, Lynn]. “The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.” Speculum 66 (1991): 820–38. Kelliher, Hilton. “The Rediscovery of Margery Kempe: A Footnote.” Electronic Brit­ ish Library Journal, article 19 (1997): 259–63. http://www.bl.uk/eblj/1997articles /pdf/article19.pdf. Kerby-­Fulton, Kathryn. “Annotations and Corrections in The Book of Margery Kempe: Cruxes, Controversies, and Solutions.” In Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, ed. Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, 234–39. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Lavinsky, David. “‘Speke to Me Be Thowt’: Affectivity, Incendium Amoris and the Book of Margery Kempe.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112, no. 3 (2013): 340–64. Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Morse, Mary. “Seeing and Hearing: Margery Kempe and the Mise-­en-­Page.” Studia Mystica 20 (1999): 15–42. Parsons, Kelly. “The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience.” In The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, 217–38. Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2001. Rees Jones, Sarah. “‘A Peler of Holy Cherch’: Margery Kempe and the Bishops.” In Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne et al., 377–91. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Riddy, Felicity. “Text and Self in The Book of Margery Kempe.” In Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton, 435–53. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Robinson, Pamela. “The Manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe.” In Recording Me­ dieval Lives: Proceedings of the 2005 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Julia Boffey and Virginia Davis, 130–40. Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2005. Smith, Julia Marie. “The Book of Margery Kempe and the Rhetorical Chorus: An Alternative Method for Recovering Women’s Contributions to the History of Rhetoric.” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 17, no. 2 (2014): 179–203. Sobecki, Sebastian. “‘The Writyng of This Tretys’: Margery Kempe’s Son and the Authorship of Her Book.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 257–83.

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Staley, Lynn. Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Summit, Jennifer. Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380– 1589. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Especially pp. 126–38 Tarvers, Josephine K. “The Alleged Illiteracy of Margery Kempe: A Reconsideration of the Evidence.” Medieval Perspectives 11 (1996): 113–24. Uhlman, Diana R. “The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script: Orality and Literacy in The Book of Margery Kempe.” Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 50–69. Watson, Nicholas. “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe.” In Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-­Fulton, 395–434. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Williams, Laura Kalas. “The Swetenesse of Confection: A Recipe for Spiritual Health in London, British Library, Additional MS 61823, The Book of Margery Kempe.” Stud­ ies in the Age of Chaucer 40, no. 1 (2018): 155–90.

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C A S E S T U DY X I  

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Illustrated Carthusian Miscellany London, British Library MS Additional 37049 Dimensions: 270 × 220 mm (text space 230/5 × 140/60) Date: ca. 1460–70 Place of Origin: Yorkshire, England Language: Middle English and Latin Foliation: [iv] + i + 96 + [iv] Quiring First bifolium in parchment, remainder in paper. Because of modern rebinding, the original collation of the manuscript is impossible to determine. Greater wear at the start of the manuscript’s longest text, the Desert of Religion, as well as a difference in the main scribe, suggest that perhaps this text was once the first in the collection, or even that it circulated alone. Layout Layout is erratic, with both one-­column pages (e.g., fols. 3r–10v) and also two-­ column ones (e.g., 45r–v). No ruling. Script Current Anglicana with Secretary features. There are at least two scribes involved in the writing of this manuscript: Scribe 1, who wrote the bulk of the miscellany, including the subsidiary texts in the Desert of Religion; and Scribe 2, who wrote the main text of the Desert.

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Textual Contents Many short devotional texts, in Middle English prose and verse. The more substantial texts include the Desert of Religion, excerpts from Mandeville’s Travels, The Seven Poyntes of Trewe Wisdom (translation of excerpts from Suso, Horolo­ gium sapientiae), and Chaucer’s “Truth.” Many meditative lyrics, including some attributed to Richard Rolle, and catechetical dialogues. Poem on the founding of the Carthusian Order. For more complete details, see Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, “Appendix.” An asterisk (*) preceding the item number indicates that the item is as yet unpublished. 1. Byzantine Virgin, fol. 1v 2. Byzantine Christ, fol. 2r 3. Mappa mundi (with prose note: “The thre sonnes of Noe dyuyded þe warld in þre partes”), fol. 2v 4. John Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels (epitome), fols. 3r–9v 5. Martinus Polonus (or Oppaviensis), Chronicon pontificum et imperato­ rum (translated excerpts), fols. 9v–10v 6. Pseudo-­Methodius, Of þe Begynyng of þe Warld and of þe Endyng, fols. 11r–16v *7. Prayer on the Last Judgment, fols. 16v–18r 8. Prose note on the Last Judgment (“Of the cumym of þe day of dome”), fol. 18r–v 9. Verses on the Last Judgment, fol. 18v 10. Deathbed scene (trans. “O spes in morte me salua maria precor te,” by ­“ Wilfridus”), fol. 19r 11. Unicorn apologue from Barlaam and Josaphat, fol. 19v 12. Querela divina/Responsio humana, fol. 20r 13. Christ’s speech to man (scroll), fol. 20r 14. Ten Commandments in verse, from the Speculum Christiani, fol. 20v *15. Prose note on the beauty of the Virgin (“Of þe fayrnes of saynt mary gods moder our lady”), fol. 21r *16. Prose rhapsody on the name of Mary, fol. 21v *17. Prose tale of the lazy servant of St. Anselm, fol. 21v 18. Verses on the founding of the Carthusian Order, fol. 22r–v 19. Short Charter of Christ, fol. 23r *20. Verses on the Holy Name: Iesus Nazarenus, fol. 23v *21. Three Miracles of Name Salvation, fols. 23v–24r 22. Querela divina, fol. 24r

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23. Verses on the number of Christ’s wounds (“The nowmer of Jhesu cristes wowndes”), fol. 24r 24. Rollean lyric, fol. 24r 25. Verses on the number of Christ’s wounds (“The nowmer of our lords droppes alle”), fol. 24r 26. Verses on purgatory (“Of þe relefyng of saules in purgatory”), fol. 24v 27. Verses on the appearance of Christ (acephalous), fol. 25r 28. Poem with refrain “Quia amore langueo,” fols. 25v–26v *29. Prose note on the power of the name of Mary, 26r *30. Indulgences of St. Clement (Verbum caro factum est, etc.), fols. 26v–27r 31. Marian miracle of the Clerk of Oxford, 27r 32. Ave maris stella, fol. 27v 33. Versification from Suso, Horologium sapientiae, fol. 28r 34. Verses on self-­crucifixion, 28r 35. Morality play on the seven ages of man (“Of þe seuen ages note wele þe sayng of þe gode angel and þe yll”), fols. 28v–29r 36. Salve Regina, fols. 29v–30r *37. Prayer to Mary (scroll), fol. 29v 38. Verses on Christ’s wounds as a remedy for sin, fol. 30r 39. Ego Dormio prayer (scroll), fol. 30v 40. Virgin’s reply (scroll), fol. 30v 41. Description of three grades of love from Richard Rolle’s prose epistle Ego Dormio, fols. 30v–31r 42. “Dawnce of Makabre,” fols. 31v–32r 43. Transi tomb verses, fol. 32v 44. Macaronic couplets (scroll), 32v 45. Dialogue between the Body and Worms (“A Disputacion Betwyx þe Body and Wormes”), fols. 33r–35r 46. Prose note on despising the world (“Note þis wele of dispisyng of þe warld”), fol. 35v 47. Excerpts from the Prick of Conscience (“Apostolus dicit Ciuitatem hic manentem non habemus, sed futuram inquirimus”), fol. 36r 48. Vado mori verses (scrolls), fol. 36r 49. Verses on the Holy Name (“IHC est amor meus”), fol. 36v 50. Rhyming paraphrase of Richard Rolle’s Incendium amoris (15.189) and two lyrics from his Ego Dormio and Commandment, fol. 37r 51. Verses on the monastic life (“Of þe State of Religion”), fols. 37v–38r 52. Deathbed scene with monk (version of trans. “O spes in morte me salua maria precor te,” by “Wilfridus”; scroll text added in later hand), fol. 38v

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53. Chapter 5 from “Tretyse of þe Seven Poyntes of Trewe Love and Everlastynge Wisdame” (trans. Suso, Horologium sapientiae), fols. 39r–43v 54. Excerpts from chapter 4 of “Tretyse of þe Seven Poyntes of Trewe Love and Everlastynge Wisdame” (trans. Suso, Horologium sapientiae), fols. 43v–44v 55. Prayer on the Pains of the Passion, fol. 45r 56. Continuation of complaint of Christ on the cross (stanzas 10–23), fol. 45v *57. Dialogue between St. Peter the Dominican and the Crucifix, fol. 45v 58. Desert of Religion, fols. 46r–66v 59. Rollean lyric, fol. 52v *60. Lyric on heavenly heights, fol. 67r *61. Lyric of moral counsel, fol. 67r 62. Complaint of Christ on the cross, fol. 67v *63. Fifteen joys of the Virgin (acephalous), fol. 68r 64. Verses on the hours of the Passion and the five senses, consent, and free will, fol. 68v 65. Excerpts from the Prick of Conscience, fol. 69r 66. “The Apple of Solace,” from Pilgrimage of the Soul (4.1–2), fols. 69v–70r 67. Thomas Hoccleve, “Cantus peregrinorum,” in Pilgrimage of the Soul, fol. 70v 68. Thomas Hoccleve, “Cantus angelorum,” in Pilgrimage of the Soul, fols. 70v–71r 69. Thomas Hoccleve, “The Aungelles Songe within Heuene,” in Pilgrimage of the Soul, fol. 71r–v 70. Excerpts from the Prick of Conscience, fol. 72r 71. Flowchart of redemption, fols. 72v–73r 72. Dialogue from Pilgrimage of the Soul (part 2, chaps. 12–13), fol. 73v 73. Vision of damned souls from Pilgrimage of the Soul (part 2, chap. 6, “A Vision of Saules þat war Dampned”), fol. 74r 74. Thomas Hoccleve, “The Angels’ Second Song Within Heaven,” in Pil­ grimage of the Soul, fols. 74v–75r *75. Vision of St. Antony, fol. 75v 76. Thomas Hoccleve, “Angels’ Song on Epiphany,” in Pilgrimage of the Soul, fol. 76r 77. Thomas Hoccleve, “Angels’ Song on Easter Day,” in Pilgrimage of the Soul, fol. 76r–v 78. Thomas Hoccleve, “The Song of Graces of All Saints,” in Pilgrimage of the Soul, fols. 76v–77r 79. Thomas Hoccleve, “Song of Angels and All Saints at Pentecost,” in Pil­ grimage of the Soul, fol. 77r

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*80. Celestial hierarchy, Te Deum, and John 10:9, fol. 77v *81. Tract on orders of angels, fols. 78r–79r *82. Heavenly city with Christ in majesty and four Evangelists, fols. 79v–80r 83. Lyric on heavenly vision, fol. 80v 84. Heavenly procession with cart of the faith, wise and foolish virgins, fols. 80v–81r *85. Prose note on the Ascension, fol. 81v 86. Excerpt from the Pilgrimage of the Soul (part 2, chaps. 20–27), with added exemplum (“A dysputacion betwyx þe saule and þe body when it is past oute of þe Body”), fols. 82r–84r 87. Versa est in luctum cithara mea, fol. 84v 88. Moral distichs, fols. 85r–86r 89. ABC of Aristotle (“þis is þe a.b.c. of arystotyll of gode doctrine”), fol. 86v 90. Verse warning against lending, fol. 86v 91. Dialogue between the late emperor Antiochenus and his son, fols. 86v–87r 92. “On Active and Contemplative Life” (“Of actyfe lyfe and contemplatyfe declaracion”), fols. 87v–89v 93. “Against Despair” (“Agayne despayre”), fols. 89v–94r (fols. 91v–94r incorporate material from “Remedies Against Temptations,” a translation of William Flete’s De remediis contra temptaciones) *94. “The Drowned Sacristan” (damaged), fol. 94r–v *95. “A Hand on the Scales of Justice” (damaged), fol. 94v *96. “A Compact with the Devil Rescinded,” fols. 94v–95r *97. “A Monk of Cluny Rescued from Despair,” fol. 95r *98. “The Devil and a Young Man Make a Charter” (damaged), fol. 95r *99. “The Virgin Bares Her Breasts for a Sinner,” fol. 95v *100. “The Knight Who Refused to Abjure Our Lady” (damaged), fol. 95v 101. Tract on God’s mercy and justice, fol. 96r

Decoration This manuscript is very heavily illustrated, with painted ink drawings in bright colors on almost every page. The illustrations include devotional emblems such as bleeding hearts and holy monograms, and also numerous pictures of Carthusian monks. The decorations do not seem to be the work of a professional, and the material intimacy of text and image suggests that the manuscript’s main scribe was also its illustrator. The longest text in the collection, the Desert of Reli­ gion, is one of few Middle English poems to be illustrated in all of its exemplars.

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Provenance On folio [iv] verso are old numbers 94, 181c. A woodcut of the Ego Dormio image (fol. 30v) was owned by W. T. Freemantle of Barbot Hall, Rotherham, given to him by a friend who had discovered it abroad. Bought by the British Museum from L. M. Rosenthal, bookseller of Munich, on May 13, 1905. Connections The Desert of Religion (fols. 46r-­66v); the deathbed scene (fols. 19r, 38v); and the Vado mori verses (fol. 36r) can be found in London, British Library MSS Stowe 39 and Cotton Faustina B.vi. Almost every other text and image is attested elsewhere, as well. For details, see Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, “Appendix.”

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The subject of illustration calls to mind those images in books that are closely connected with text. But illustration need not be construed in the narrow sense only, of separate pictures representing textual subjects. Texts can be “illustrated” by many features of their visible existence, ranging from the ornamental borders that surround words with jewel-­toned frames, to the complex penwork that fills margins with visual extravagance, to the line fillers that regularize the look of the text block, to the hierarchical variation in letter size that draws attention to the structure of written material. The ordinatio (or organizational layout) of the page, scripts, and even orthographies can contribute to the look of the text. From this expanded perspective, a whole manuscript can be considered an object designed to be seen, a text presented to readers in a visually embodied form. The illustration of a literary text, then, certainly includes any pictures that accompany that text. But illustration is also part of the larger endeavor of rendering language visible—which is one way of understanding the project of literacy itself. British Library MS Additional 37049 illustrates its texts in the narrow sense, for almost every text in the miscellaneous manuscript is associated with a picture. But the manuscript’s complex design points toward illustration in the broader sense, as well, for it implies that joining text with image is necessary for the kind of reading experience it imagines. The fifteenth-­century miscellany contains a complex collection of about one hundred Middle English texts, mostly relatively short and mostly devotional in subject matter. Almost all are illustrated with colored pen drawings in the margins and in the text block, making the volume significant for the sheer number of illustrated texts it offers. Still more significant are the close interactions between its images and its texts. Even

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though the manuscript is not a luxury production in terms of either materials or decoration—the script is informal and the drawing amateurish—the relationship between the two art forms here is unusually intimate. Moving beyond decoration that has a merely economic or social impact, these simple pictures constitute a representational system that is as fully meaningful and as communicative as the words they accompany. So what do the pictures mean? For one thing, they provide some information about provenance. Numerous pictures of Carthusians at prayer indicate that Additional 37049 was likely produced in a Carthusian monastery. Dialect suggests that the manuscript was written in the north, and the Yorkshire charterhouse of Mount Grace is known in this period for the production of vernacular devotional texts, such as the popular Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ written by Prior Nicholas Love—but Additional 37049 cannot be linked for certain to any particular foundation. The strongest evidence for the manuscript’s general Carthusian provenance is an illustrated poem on the founding of the order by Bruno of Cologne, later St. Bruno (see Figure XI.1). This poem is worth considering for its multiply meaningful modes of illustration. A roughly half-­page pictorial narrative, divided into four quadrants, prefaces the text. In the first image, Bishop Hugh of Grenoble (later St. Hugh) dreams on his episcopal throne of seven stars, which divide him in the visual syntax of the picture from Bruno, in a doctor’s cap, and his six companions. In the next scene, Hugh relates the premonitory dream to the seven who kneel, now, in front of him. He then directs the group to a wilderness place, the desolation of which is indicated by a forest. Finally, the new Carthusian monks, arrayed in their distinctive white robes, enter the monastery they have built, while the bishop presides—whether metaphorically or literally is unclear—in the background. Interestingly, it seems that a later reader of the manuscript has sketched the bishop’s head again in a lower margin beside the text, perhaps responding to a particularly compelling aspect of the story. However roughly drawn, this series of images belongs to well-­established visual traditions of illustrating the Carthusian foundation story. And it takes up a number of formal illustrative modes: it occupies at least as much space on the page as the text below, it replicates the narrative method of that text through neatly delimited sequential images, and it reproduces the textual subject. This image that precedes the text operates quite differently from the second image associated with the poem, found with its conclusion on the verso (see Figure XI.2). Here, there is no obvious narrative: a Carthusian monk stands as an icon or emblem in the margins of the text, holding an open book as he reads in front of his cell. This marginal image is less closely related to established Car-

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thusian visual traditions, but it is a much more common type of Middle English book illustration (cf. the marginal figures in the Douce 104 Piers Plowman, or even the equestrian pilgrim portraits in the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales [see Case Study XIII]). The uncertain relation of this simple image to the text is also at least potentially more complex: the figure could indeed represent the subject of the poem, one of the original inhabitants of La Grande Chartreuse, but it could also emblematize one of the fifteenth-­century Carthusian readers of the manuscript itself. It could even conflate the two, representing the poem’s historical subject and also constructing a connection between that subject and the manuscript’s late medieval context, modeling for its reader a mode of experiencing the text. Thus, the pictures associated with this small Carthusian poem— central or marginal, narrative or iconic, reflecting circumstances of production or reception—offer a range of possibilities for modes of book illustration. The second mode of illustration, the one that connects the manuscript’s subjects with its readers, pervades the volume. For whatever the manuscript’s institutional affiliations with the Carthusian Order, its illustrations also reflect the markedly personal nature of its compilation. Most likely written and illustrated by the same person, the manuscript provides evidence of an unusual type of informal and individual production. Given the hermit-­like habits of the Carthusians, the manuscript might only ever have been used by its first owner and maker. It may have also been used in pastoral outreach, however, for Carthusians understood their practice of translating Latin devotional texts into the vernacular as a kind of preaching. The introductory and didactic nature of much of the Christian doctrine conveyed here, and the choice of the Middle English vernacular, suggest that this manuscript formed a bridge between the enclosed monastery and the world outside. For, even though the manuscript has a personal and idiosyncratic edge, the material contained within it is not of a particularly specialized or eremitic kind. In fact, the miscellany represents many more popular strands of late medieval affective devotion. The book is filled with the images of affective piety: Christ crucified, often covered with abundant drops of blood (e.g., fols. 23r, 67v), images associated with measuring or numbering physical relics of the Passion (e.g., fols. 20r, 24r), and images associated with lyrics ascribed to the hermit Richard Rolle (e.g., fols. 30v, 37r, 52v). And the visual evidence supports the possibility of a wider readership: images of praying figures within this manuscript who could be taken for images of its reader include many figures of Carthusian monks, but also include figures of laypeople. Some of the manuscript’s popular, personal devotions are especially concerned with the relation of text to image, such as the dedication to emblems of the Holy Name. Both “Jesus” and “Maria” are honored repeatedly in this book,

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in textual prayers and miracle stories, as well as in visual emblems and illustrations. Sometimes the letters of the names themselves are simply enlarged and beautified (see, e.g., “iesus nazarenus” on fol. 23v). On other occasions, the visual celebration of the holy words is still more elaborate: on folio 36v, for example, the holy monogram of Christ—already a transformation of the name into a recognizable but unvoiceable symbol—becomes the centerpiece of a personal crucifixion tableau, in which Christ hangs on a cross constructed from the central h (see Figure XI.3). Flowers inscribed with “luf ” twine around the letters ihc and Mary and John take their places at each side of the crucified figure. In the lower register of the image, a small Carthusian kneels in prayer, while a banderole pierces the heart from which the upper image grows: “est amor meus.” The presence of Mary and John confirms this image as image, as does its recognizable iconography of the crucifixion, but at the same time, the banderole transforms it into a textual sentiment that can literally be read (or prayed): “ihc [the monogram] est amor meus.” This conflation turns the text fully into image, and the image back into syntactically functioning text—achieving the full integration of the two. The longer texts below this remarkable picture include rapturous lyrics that celebrate the power of the Holy Name in the face of the horror of the Passion, but the emblematic image joins those two ideas in another key. As the name becomes the monogram, and finally becomes the ur-­Christian symbol of the cross itself, the Word becomes its own illustration. The close integration of word and image so fundamental to the popular devotions of Additional 37049 can be understood as one aspect of the manuscript’s inclination to bring the entire world into the cloister, its impulse toward the encyclopedic. Few of the texts included in the collection are unattested elsewhere, and most of the images are also familiar from other locations—and sometimes from other media, such as sculpture, glass, or wall painting. The impulse for the compilation, then, is not so much inventive, as comprehensive. The organization of items in the miscellany offers no easy sequence, giving instead the impression of simple plenitude. Beginning with a pictorial preface, a vellum bifolium (diptych) depicting portraits of the Virgin and Christ (fols. 1v–2r), the manuscript continues with a world map (fol. 2v), Mandeville’s Travels (fols. 3r–9v), universal histories (fols. 9r–10v), apocalyptic material (fols. 11r–16v), and other all-­encompassing matter. Mixing text with image might be seen as the most important of many ways in which this miscellany seeks to bring the fullness of creation within the covers of one book. The manuscript’s central and longest text, the Desert of Religion, emblematizes its impulse toward multimedia encyclopedism. The Desert comprises various modular pieces of text and image, seemingly unrelated (see Figure XI.4).

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Each opening consists of two columns on the verso page, continuous verses (in one column) alongside portraits of hermit saints of the desert surrounded by captions (in the other). On each recto, these are matched by a diagrammatic tree of vice or virtue. The minimal formal unit of the work, therefore, is neither literary (a couplet) nor artistic (an image) but material: a single opening of the book. The hermit saints relate only loosely in theme to the text of the poem proper, which describes a spiritual forest of vices and virtues, though the portraits of saints include integral captions, labels, speeches, and other textual components that help to explicate their meaning. The two other manuscripts in which the Desert appears, however, confirm the necessity of considering this complex of texts and images together—all three copies are laid out with the same complicated series of illustrations. The consistency with which this poem travels with its images argues that it cannot exist without them; the Desert is not a text or even an illustrated text so much as an imagetext, a multimedia object constitutively designed and composed of both words and pictures. Still more strikingly copious, and more strikingly intermedial, a remarkable opening toward the end of Additional 37049 epitomizes its impulse toward textual and visual profusion. A collection of images organized by textual captions presents a plan of redemption, in which a universal human history that begins with the fall of man (in the upper left) is channeled through the seven sacraments toward either heaven (on the upper right), or hell (down below) (fols. 72v–73r; see Figure XI.5). Although the general movement of the opening is on a hopeful upward diagonal, the double hellmouth (in the lower right) serves to remind viewers of the constant likelihood of damnation. This opening presents an integration of text and image so thoroughgoing that it would be impossible to disentangle the two, impossible to edit or reproduce this text without this image, or vice versa. Neither pure picture nor pure word, but something more like diagram or schema, this flowchart of redemption takes advantage of both art forms to create a multimedia object that stands at the intersection of them both. Because this manuscript is so clearly interested in mixed media, its methods have often been explained by reference to other mixed forms that combine the sister arts. For example, its dense iconic mixtures of text and image anticipate the emblem-­writing vogue of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, its interest in combinations of dialogue and spectacle recall the theater: it includes, for example, a dialogue on the seven ages of man that might be called a closet drama (fols. 28v–29r). The most celebrated statement of the relation between text and image in the Middle Ages was Gregory the Great’s assertion that pictures are the books of the illiterate (see also Case Study III). Whatever complications of context might

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have nuanced Gregory’s intention in his letter to Bishop Serenus, his original statement was taken up and repeated by many subsequent commentators to indicate that pictures were in some way like books. But, although Gregory asks us to think about books and pictures together, he presumes that they perform the same functions only in order to reach different audiences. How are we to understand, by contrast, words and images that operate in concert? That images and texts in books are not oppositional (read these if you cannot manage to read those) but cooperative (read both of these forms together) might pose a challenge to Gregory’s dictum, or at least to any simple understanding of it. Not every medieval manuscript is illustrated, and not every illustrated manuscript is as deeply committed to the combination of text and image as is Additional 37049. But the especially thorough admixture of the visual and verbal arts in this particular object raises important questions about their relationships elsewhere and can prompt a rethinking of medieval representational modes in general. How do pictures, read with texts, affect our reading of both? How do texts, read as pictures, come to signify differently? Rather than thinking about the book as separable from its illustration, the simple colored pen drawings of Additional 37049 invite its reader to think about the whole manuscript itself as an object to be both read and seen, a text presented in an embodied form. They provide a window into the largest questions related to the role of illustration in the structure of the medieval manuscript.

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Figure XI.1. London, British Library MS Additional 37049, fol. 22r: “At the begynnyng of the chartirhows god dyd schewe.”

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Figure XI.2. London, British Library MS Additional 37049, fol. 22v: “At the begynnyng of the chartirhows god dyd schewe.”

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Figure XI.3. London, British Library MS Additional 37049, fol. 36v: “ihc est amor meus.”

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Figure XI.4. London, British Library MS Additional 37049, fols. 46v–47r. The Desert of Religion.

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Figure XI.5. London, British Library MS Additional 37049, fols. 72r–73v. Flowchart of redemption.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile British Library Digitised Manuscripts. “Add MS 37049.” http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts /FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_37049.

Catalogs and Editions Allen, Hope Emily. Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Mate­ rials for His Biography. New York: Heath; London: Oxford University Press, 1927. Bowers, R. H. “A Medieval Analogue to As You Like It II.vii.137–166.” Shakespeare Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1952): 109–12. ———. “Middle English Verses on the Appearance of Christ.” Anglia 70 (1951): 430–33. ———. “Middle English Verses on the Founding of the Carthusian Order.” Speculum 42, no. 4 (1967): 710–13. Brunner, Karl. “Kirchenlieder aus dem 15. Jahrhundert.” Anglia 61 (1938): 138–51; at 144–46. ———. “Mittelenglische Disticha.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 159 (1931): 86–92. ———. “Mittelenglische Todesgedichte.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 167 (1935): 20–35. Diekstra, F. N. M. “British Library MS 37049, Fol. 96r–96v: A Mutilated Tract on God’s Mercy and Justice and Material for Its Reconstruction.” English Studies 75, no. 3 (1994): 214–22. Embree, Dan. “The Fragmentary Chronicle in BL Additional MS 37049.” Manuscripta 37 (1993): 193–200. Förster, Max. “Kleinere Mittelenglische Texte,” Anglia 42 (1918): 145–224. Hogg, James, ed. An Illustrated Yorkshire Carthusian Religious Miscellany, British Li­ brary London Additional MS 37049: The Illustrations. Vol. 3. Analecta Carthusiana 95. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981. ———. “Selected Texts on Heaven and Hell from the Carthusian Miscellany, British Library Additional MS 37049.” In Zeit, Tod, und Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Liter­ atur, 1:63–89. Analecta Cartusiana 117. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1987. ———. “Unpublished Texts in the Carthusian Northern Middle English Religious Miscellany British Library MS Add. 37049.” In Essays in Honour of Erwin Stürzl on His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. James Hogg, 1:241–84. Salzburger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 10. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literature, Universität Salzburg, 1980.

Secondary Studies Brantley, Jessica. Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Camille, Michael. “Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” Art History 8 (1985): 133–48. Chazelle, Celia M. “Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles.” Word & Image 6, no. 2 (1990): 138–53. Desmond, Marilynn. “The Visuality of Reading in Pre-­Modern Textual Cultures.” Aus­ tralian Journal of French Studies 46, no. 3 (2009): 219–34. Duggan, Lawrence G. “Reflections on ‘Was Art Really the “Book of the Illiterate”?” In Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication, ed. Mariëlle Hageman and Marco Mostert, 109–19. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. ———. “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate’?” Word & Image 5, no. 3 ( July–September 1989): 227–51. Friedman, John B. Northern English Book Owners and Makers in the Late Middle Ages. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Gray, Douglas. “London, British Library, Additional MS 37049—A Spiritual Encyclopedia,” in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchinson, 99–116. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Hamburger, Jeffrey, ed. “The Iconicity of Script: Writing as Image in the Middle Ages.” Special issue, Word & Image 27, no. 3 (2011). ———. “The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions.” In The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, 111–48, 502–10. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Hennessy, Marlene Villalobos. “Passion, Devotion, Penitential Reading, and the Manuscript Page: ‘The Hours of the Cross’ in London, British Library Additional 37049.” Mediaeval Studies 66 (2004): 213–52. ———. “The Remains of the Royal Dead in an English Carthusian Manuscript, London, British Library MS 37049.” Viator 33 (2002): 310–54. Höltgen, Karl Josef. “Arbor, Scala und Fons vitae: Vorformen devotionaler Embleme in einer mittelenglischen Handschrift (B.M. Add. MS. 37049).” In Chaucer und seine Zeit: Symposion fur Walter F. Schirmer, ed. Arno Esch, 355–91. Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series 14. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1968. Kinch, Ashby. Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Luxford, Julian M. “Precept and Practice: The Decoration of English Carthusian Books.” In Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Julian Luxford, 225–67. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. ———. “Texts and Images of Carthusian Foundation.” In Self-­Representation of Medie­ val Religious Communities: The British Isles in Context, ed. Anne Müller and Karen Stöber, 275–306. Berlin: Lit, 2009. Renevey, Denis. “The Name Poured Out: Margins, Illuminations and Miniatures as Evidence for the Practice of Devotions to the Name of Jesus in Late Medieval England.” In The Mystical Tradition and the Carthusians, ed. James Hogg, 9: 127–47.

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Analecta Cartusiana 130.9. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1996. Steel, Karl. “Abyss: Everything Is Food.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 93–104. Van Duzer, Chet, and Sandra Sáenz-­López Perez. “Tres filii Noe diviserunt orbem post diluvium: The World Map in British Library Add. MS 37049.” Word & Image 26, no. 1 (2009): 21–39. Wormald, Francis. “Some Popular Miscellanies and Their Rich Relations.” In Miscella­ nea Pro Arte: Festschrift für Hermann Schnitzler, ed. Peter Bloch, 279–85. Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1965.

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C A S E S T U DY X I I  

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N-­Town Plays London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii Dimensions: 215 × 165 mm Date: Second half of the fifteenth century/ first quarter of the sixteenth century Place of Origin: East Anglia Language: Middle English Foliation: i + 225 (folio i is an early modern flyleaf ) Material: Paper Quiring The manuscript is a complex amalgam of quires of different lengths and (as the evidence of watermarks suggests) from different paper stocks, testifying to both significant interpolations (e.g., the Passion play and the Assumption of Mary) and losses of leaves. In his edition, Stephen Spector gives the following collation: “π1 A–B20 C8 D/F16 E2 (interpolated) G20 (-­G16) H15 + two (ff. 95–6 interpolated after H9) J20 + one (f. 112 interpolated after J9; wants J10, 11) K–L2 M10 N12 + one (f. 143 interpolated after N7) O3 P–Q2 R8 S16 T8 + two (ff. 184–5 interpolated after T4) V20 W6 + ten (ff. 213–22, the ‘Assumption’ interpolated after W3).” Spector names quires with capital letters rather than Roman numerals, following the alphabetical signatures found sporadically in the manuscript itself.

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Layout Single columns of twenty-­six to thirty lines with no visible ruling. Tail-­rhyme bobs and speaker names often placed to the right, along with brackets showing rhyme schemes. Marks of punctuation in many plays seem to function as aids to performance. Script Cursive Anglicana, with some more formal textura quadrata in marginal notes. The manuscript was written by one main scribe (A), with substantial additions by three more (B, C, D), and occasional revisions by others. Textual Contents The manuscript contains forty-­one plays (labeled up to forty-­two by the scribe, but play 17 is missing). 1. The Proclamation (or Banns), fols. 1r–9v 2. (Play 1) The Creation of Heaven; The Fall of Lucifer, fols. 10r–11r 3. (Play 2) The Creation of the World; The Fall of Man, fols. 11v–17r 4. (Play 3) Cain and Abel, fols. 17r–20v 5. (Play 4) Noah, fols. 21r–25v 6. (Play 5) Abraham and Isaac, fols. 25v–30r 7. (Play 6) Moses, fols. 31r–34v 8. (Play 7) Jesse Root, fols. 35r–37r 9. (Play 8) Joachim and Anna, fols. 37v–42r 10. (Play 9) The Presentation of Mary in the Temple, fols. 42r–47v 11. Contemplacio’s link, fols. 47v–48r 12. A passage for insertion in the following play, The Marriage of Mary and Joseph, beginning “This ansuere grettly trobelyth me,” fol, 48v 13. (Play 10) The Marriage of Mary and Joseph, fols. 49r–58r 14. (Play 11) The Parliament of Heaven; The Salutation and Conception, fols. 58v–66r 15. (Play 12) Joseph’s Doubt, fols. 67r–70v 16. (Play 13) The Visit to Elizabeth, fols. 71r–74r (with an alternate conclusion offered at the bottom of fol. 73v, continuing halfway down fol. 74r from “Lystenyth, sovereynys, here is a conclusion”) 17. (Play 14) The Trial of Mary and Joseph, fols. 74v–81v 18. (Play 15) The Nativity, fols. 82r–87v 19. (Play 16) The Shepherds, fols. 88v–91r 20. (Play 18) The Magi, fols. 92r–97r (fol. 96v is blank) 21. (Play 19) The Purification, fols. 97v–100v 22. (Play 20) The Slaughter of the Innocents; The Death of Herod, fols. 101r–104v

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23. (Play 21) Christ and the Doctors, fols. 106r–111r 24. (Play 22) The Baptism, fols. 112r–115r 25. (Play 23) The Parliament of Hell; The Temptation, fols. 116r–119v 26. (Play 24) The Woman Taken in Adultery, fols. 121r–126r 27. (Play 25) The Raising of Lazarus, fols. 127v–135v 28. (Play 26) Prologues of Satan and John the Baptist; The Conspiracy; The Entry into Jerusalem, fols. 136r–146r 29. (Play 27) The Last Supper; The Conspiracy with Judas, fols. 146r–158r 30. (Play 28) The Betrayal; The Procession of Saints, fols. 158r–163v 31. (Play 29) Herod; The Trial Before Annas and Caiphas, fols 165r–169v 32. (Play 30) The Death of Judas; The Trials Before Pilate and Herod, fols. 169v–174v 33. (Play 31) Satan and Pilate’s Wife; The Second Trial Before Pilate, fols. 175r–179r 34. (Play 32) The Procession to Calvary; The Crucifixion, fols. 179v–185r 35. (Play 33) The Harrowing of Hell (part 1), fols. 185r–186r 36. (Play 34) The Burial; The Guarding of the Sepulchre, fols. 186r–191r 37. (Play 35) The Harrowing of Hell (part 2); Christ’s Appearance to Mary; Pilate and the Soldiers, fols. 191r–196r 38. (Play 36) The Announcement to the Three Marys; Peter and John at the Sepulchre, fols. 196r–199r 39. (Play 37 )The Appearance to Mary Magdalene, fols. 199r–201r 40. (Play 38) Cleophas and Luke; The Appearance to Thomas, fols. 202r–209r 41. (Play 39) The Ascension; The Selection of Matthias, fols. 210r–211v 42. (Play 40) Pentecost, fol. 212r–v 43. (Play 41) The Assumption of Mary, fols. 214r–222v 44. (Play 42) Judgment Day (incomplete), fols. 223v–225v Decoration Rubrication marks most stage directions, play titles, and speaker headings. Red capital letters and capitula set off significant textual units. Intriguingly, rubrication also sometimes marks formal changes (octaves and quatrains in the Marian plays, for example) that correspond to stages in the plays’ textual history. Binding British Museum binding, 1907. Provenance Internal evidence links the manuscript to Robert Hegge (b. ca. 1597, d. 1629), antiquary and writer: his signature “Roberti Hegge Dunelmensis” (fol. 10r) and

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the inscription “Ego R. H. Dunelmensis possideo” (fol. 164r). A description of the manuscript (fol. i recto) was provided by Richard James, the librarian of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (b. 1571, d. 1631), 1st Baronet, antiquary and politician. Cotton’s collection was augmented by his son, Sir Thomas Cotton (b. 1594, d. 1662), 2nd Baronet, and his grandson, Sir John Cotton. The entire Cotton collection of books and manuscripts became one of the foundation collections of the British Museum in 1753. Connections Other manuscripts of English cycle drama include London, British Library MS Additional 35092 (York Plays); San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS HM 1 (Towneley Plays); and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 175, London, British Library MSS Additional 10305, Harley 2013, and Harley 2124, and San Marino, CA, Huntington Library MS HM 2 (Chester Plays). Another important dramatic collection from East Anglia is Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.354 (Macro MS).

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Reconstructing historical spectacles is a complicated and uncertain endeavor, but manuscript records point toward a wide range of medieval performance practices and can help to reveal their many forms. One of the most conspicuous performative forms in late medieval England is the civic cycle drama—a communal mode of play-­making attested by a number of institutional archives as well as the dramatic texts themselves. The evidence suggests that lengthy cycles of biblical history were performed annually in some northern cities from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Beginning with the Fall of the Angels and ending with Doomsday, these cycles comprise a series of pageants often performed on wagons that traveled through the city streets over the course of one day, perhaps the midsummer feast of Corpus Christi. Each pageant was presented by a group of amateur actors associated through their membership in an occupational or religious guild. This is largely the story presented by the remaining records concerning dramatic activities in York and Chester, and the congruence of similar evidence from other English cities is so striking that it suggests the emergence of a genre: “the plaie called Corpus Christi.” That phrase—perhaps familiar as the title of V. A. Kolve’s important 1966 reassessment of medieval drama—comes from the medieval label given to the manuscript under consideration here (fol. 1r; see Figure XII.1). British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii has gone by many other names, as well: the Ludus Coventriae, for example (following early guesses at a now-­discounted connec-

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tion with Coventry), and the Hegge cycle (after two signatures left by Robert Hegge, a seventeenth-­century owner of the manuscript). The texts themselves are now most often known as the N-­Town plays, so-­called after the place of performance mysteriously named in the prefatory proclamation or banns, which announce: A Sunday next, yf that we may, At vj [six] of the belle we gynne oure play In N-­town . . .   (Proclamation (or Banns), ll. 525–27) Probably a placeholder for a generic town name (nomen?), this odd locution suggests that the plays were performed in many places, perhaps by a troupe of traveling players. Strangely, then, in spite of the manuscript’s implication that “the plaie called Corpus Christi” is a recognizable generic type, the N-­Town plays conform only uneasily to the template for civic cycle drama suggested by the other, clearer-­cut cases. What can a manuscript like this one reveal about the range of medieval performance culture? For one thing, the plays’ uncertain geography means that they cannot be read—as is so often the case with the York cycle—as the expression of a distinct civic identity. Their association with the nonspecific “N-­Town” seems to suggest precisely that they are not tied to a singular location, that instead they could be adapted for performance in a variety of contexts. Dialectal evidence indicates that the text comes from East Anglia, perhaps near the towns of East Harling, Thetford, or Bury St. Edmunds. Similarly, the attractively specific date of 1468 given at the end of the Purification play in fact suggests a range of possibilities: a date of performance, the date when this individual play was added to the Cotton Vespasian compilation, or even a date copied from the scribe’s exemplar (fol. 100v; see Figure XII.2). Moreover, although the later date has been confirmed by the evidence of watermarks, the language of the texts seems to be closer to 1425–50. These dates make Cotton Vespasian D.viii likely the oldest surviving manuscript of English biblical cycle drama, but they establish only a general temporal context for the N-­Town plays in the middle of the fifteenth century. If the N-­Town plays are not securely connected to one specific place and time, localizing the manuscript more generally to late medieval East Anglia does provide some insight into the religious and artistic cultures from which it probably arose. As the center of the English cloth trade, East Anglia was very wealthy in the fifteenth century. This wealth supported a lively religious culture that included pious patronage of churches, more hermits than any other region of En-

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gland, a special interest in Marian devotion inspired by the popular Marian shrines at Walsingham and Ipswich, and a wide variety of religious arts. As Gail Gibson, among others, has shown, active performative practices in fifteenth-­ century East Anglia both derive from and reflect the religious cultures of the region. Religious drama was notably mobile: the East Anglian Castle of Perse­ verance provides a second example of the kind of itinerant geography suggested by N-­Town, leaving blanks in the text where a place name should be: “At ____ on the grene”; “Ye manly men of ____, ther Crist save you all!” And the two extant copies of the play of Wisdom—one complete, one partial—provide evidence that East Anglian playtexts were sometimes loaned out and copied. Rather than being anchored in the life of one city or another, then, the N-­Town plays participate in an active, mobile, regional dramatic culture. So if it is not exactly a civic cycle, this collection of plays is also—more surprisingly—only arguably a cycle at all. Not a unified set of pageants that tell a single story, the text is instead composed of several distinct collections of plays designed in separate groupings for different purposes. Most obviously, the series of plays that treats the life of the Virgin Mary (Peter Meredith has called it the Mary Play) was probably composed independently and added later to this collection. The series includes pageants 8–11 and 13 (pageant 12, Joseph’s Doubt, was itself inserted later), and is distinguished by an absence of music, a place-­and-­ scaffold mode of staging, and the figure of Contemplacio who serves as a guide to the action. The list of plays announced in the banns reveals incomplete attempts to reconcile the Mary Play with other material in the manuscript: changes of scribe, incomplete revisions and renumbering, omissions of material, and varying verse structures in inserted stanzas all indicate that the compiler brought material from several independent sources into this manuscript. In addition to the Mary Play, the Passion sequence also shows evidence of two separate groups of texts that were swept up into the larger compilation. The quires in which the Passion plays are found are physically independent of the codex, and patterns of wear indicate that these separable booklets probably circulated on their own at some point. The Assumption of Mary is another materially independent play: written on different paper, in another scribe’s hand, and in a somewhat different dialect, this script is designed for indoor performance by a larger cast than is indicated elsewhere in the collection. It also incorporates a figure found nowhere else: a Doctor playing an expository role similar to Contemplacio in the Mary Play. Adding to the irregularity of the N-­Town “cycle,” the manuscript includes ten subjects that do not appear in other play collections: the killing of Lamech in the Noah play (play 4), the Jesse Root play (play 7), the story of Joachim and Anna (play 8), the Presentation of Mary in the Temple

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(play 9), the Parliament of Heaven (play 11), the Trial of Mary and Joseph (play 14), the scene of Mary and the cherry tree in the Nativity (play 15), the Death of Herod (play 20), the scene of Veronica’s kerchief in the Procession to Calvary (play 32), and the appearance of the risen Christ to the Virgin Mary in her Assumption play (play 41). Many of these added subjects are Marian in focus, orienting the N-­Town compilation strongly toward the cult of the Virgin. The dramatic compilation associated with N-­Town is not exactly a textbook civic cycle, then, but it nonetheless obliquely affirms the existence of the genre— “the plaie called Corpus Christi.” The scribe of the N-­Town manuscript compiled its texts from different sources, arranging them in chronological order so that they approximate a full biblical cycle. Although they differ from each other in ways that reveal their independent origins, still they work together here. This manuscript testifies to the generic variation possible in late medieval English performance—not all plays were cycles of biblical history—but it also asserts the dominance of the cyclic idea. The strength of the form was such that this scribe felt it right to confect a cycle out of disparate texts, editing the banns in an (incomplete) effort to bring the texts into coherence. Perhaps the compiler intended to create in this manuscript a library of regional drama, both for performance and for devotional purposes. Or, as Alexandra Johnston has suggested, perhaps he simply wanted a chronological compilation of biblical stories to read and consult, and attempted to create, in the banns, the kind of finding aid such a devotional compilation would need. For finally, if the collection of texts in Cotton Vespasian D.viii is not “civic” in its orientation, and if it is not a unified sui generis “cycle” of biblical history, it is also, from some perspectives, not even securely dramatic. Any record of a dramatic text only points toward ephemeral performance occasions, providing a mere trace of the thing itself: spectacles that have been or those that are about to be. In the case of N-­Town, it is not entirely clear what kinds of spectacles the dramatic texts imply: the manuscript’s connections to actual staged performance are complex and uncertain. The plays were probably performed as a cycle, but they also might have had different or earlier performance occasions as one-­off pageants. It is likely that this compilation was itself played from, but its texts might have been compiled after playing. And it is also quite possible that the manuscript was also used for—was perhaps even intended to be used for— private devotional reading. If this is the case, is it a dramatic manuscript at all? And what relation might this kind of reading have to the conditions of theatrical performance? The N-­Town manuscript includes multiple indications that it was used to support performative occasions, but these are complicated by equally strong in-

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dications of more private use. The person Spector identifies as Scribe C made revisions and notes with an eye to performance, such as “finem 1a die nota” (fol. 196r) to mark the end of a day’s performance, or “vade worlych” and “nota worlych” (fol. 207r) to indicate the comings and goings of an actor. Another trace of the manuscript’s performance history might be the extended alternative ending to the Visit to Elizabeth, which would seem to offer a company the choice between two versions of the text to play on different occasions (fol. 73v; see Figure XII.3). Rubricated crosses marked in the Mary Play could act as gestural stage directions (fol. 39v; see Figure XII.4), prompting actors to cross themselves as they pronounce “Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus.” And in the Passion play, stage directions are especially full, specifying details of costuming and action that could be important in the enactment of the script. But even these stage directions, which might seem to point directly toward a performance situation, instead offer a rich variety of possibilities for reception of the plays. The red crosses resemble similar ones in private prayer books, and scene-­ setting details could also function as aids to the imagination for a play that was read meditatively, describing the action in such a way that precisely these readers without the benefit of a stage picture could recreate the drama in their mind’s eye. Similarly, notations concerning liturgical music in the Mary Play and the Assumption play provide indications of how the plays were to be performed. But was this music also imagined silently by readers as a part of the visualized scene? Did these melodies evoke a remembered performance on stage? Other features of the manuscript cannot have been performed, or even read aloud. Unperformed marginalia include genealogies beginning with Adam (fols. 16v–18r) and Noah (fols. 21v–22v), the dimensions of Noah’s ark and the depth of the flood (fol. 24r), a genealogy of Christ’s relatives through Mary’s mother Anne (fol. 37r), and genealogical notes explaining the relationships of the five Annas (fol. 37v). These writerly additions were not meant for enactment on stage: the ancestry of Joachim and Anna, for example, is traced in a diagram that can only have been appreciated when viewed as a structure on a manuscript folio (fol. 37r; see Figure XII.5). Read silently of necessity, the shapes of the diagram spatialize the lineage it traces through the disposition of names on the page and connective red brackets. The diagram’s Latin language stands in contrast to the performed vernacularity that characterizes the plays. Moreover, the genealogy is written in a monumental Gothic book hand meant for visual display, contrasting with the more casual, cursive script used for the dramatic vernacular text. But although from this perspective the visual aspects of the diagram could be considered formal, it is fitted into open spaces at the bottom of this recto and its verso—it was not originally designed to be the centerpiece of

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the page. Thus it functions as a trace of silent, visual reading in the margins of a dramatic script and shows the ways in which medieval performance is integrated with, and indeed influences, other kinds of readerly activity. The N-­Town plays are in fact enriched by multiple associations with devotional reading, from sources in meditational literature such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror or the Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, to the allusion to contemplative texts in the evocative figure of Contemplacio himself. The intriguing mixture of public performance and private reading in the ­N-­Town manuscript demonstrates close connections between two literary modes. This insight emerges, in part, from a consideration of the manuscript evidence, for close study of Cotton Vespasian D.viii reveals that, over its history, it has functioned as both a script and a devotional book. But if the methodologies of manuscript studies offer insights into the forms and meanings of literary texts, literary criticism can also, conversely, offer insight into the histories of the material object. Just as different scribal hands and paper stocks reveal the heterogeneous origins of the N-­Town playtexts, their varying stanza forms and conflicting staging needs also illuminate the history of the book. Literary analysis is one of many tools that help to reveal how this codex was put together. As a matter of method, then, the history of the manuscript cannot be separated from the formal analysis of its texts and the broad range of medieval performances embodied in both. Robert Hegge’s early modern signature at the start of the second Passion play in the N-­Town manuscript includes a Greek cipher under his name (fol. 164v). Although the meaning of the phrase is somewhat obscure, Gail Gibson has indicated that it is probably related to a contemporary English idiom, “Not possession, but use, is the only riches.” In other words, Hegge seems to note here that he did not merely own the manuscript; he also did valuable things with it. This early owner’s insistence on his use of the manuscript, along with his vagueness about what kind of use he means, call attention to the multiple practices of reading and performance that have long surrounded the book. Cotton Vespasian D.viii was used for collecting, for documenting, for reading, for meditating, and, perhaps especially in the hands of later revisers, for performing. Theatrical staging has been one primary mode of the manuscript’s use, but Hegge’s note reveals that practices of performance, however broadly construed, subtend all readers’ engagement with it.

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Figure XII.1. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii, fol. 1r. Opening of the N-­Town plays, with “the plaie called Corpus Christi” inscribed at the top.

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Figure XII.2. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii, fol. 100v. Date of 1468 marked at the conclusion of the Purification play (note the looping form of the medieval Arabic numeral “4”).

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Figure XII.3. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii, fol. 73v. The alternate ending to the Visit to Elizabeth; note the signe de renvoi after “his mercy” and the corresponding sign below, marking the text to be inserted.

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Figure XII.4. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii, fol. 39v. Play of Joachim and Anna, with rubricated crosses as gestural stage directions.

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Figure XII.5. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D.viii, fol. 37r. Conclusion of Jesse Root play, with Latin genealogy of Joachim and Anna at the bottom.

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Suggestions for Further Reading Digital Facsimile British Library Digitised Manuscripts. “Cotton MS Vespasian D VIII.” www.bl.uk/manu scripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_vespasian_d_viii_fs001r#.

Editions and Facsimiles Meredith, Peter. The Mary Play from the N-­Town Manuscript. London: Longman, 1990. ———. The Passion Play from the N-­Town Manuscript. London: Longman, 1987. Meredith, Peter, and Stanley J. Kahrl, eds. The N-­Town Plays: A Facsimile of British Li­ brary MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII. Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles 4. Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1977. Spector, Stephen, ed. The N-­Town Play: Cotton Vespasian D.8. Early English Text Society, supplementary series 11–12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Sugano, Douglas, ed. The N-­Town Plays. With Victor Scherb. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007.

Secondary Studies Beadle, Richard. “‘Devoute ymaginacioun’ and the Dramatic Sense in Love’s Mirror and the N-­Town Plays.” In Nicholas Love at Waseda: Proceedings of the International Conference, 20–22 July 1995, ed. Shoichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael G. Sargent, 1–18. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. Block, K. S. “Some Notes on the Problem of the ‘Ludus Coventriae.’” Modern Language Review 10 (1915): 47–57. Coletti, Theresa. “Devotional Iconography in the N-­Town Marian Plays.” In The Drama in the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Davidson, C. J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stroupe, 249–71. New York: AMS Press, 1982. ———. “Reading REED: History and the Records of Early English Drama.” In Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson, 248–84. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Collins, Patrick J. The N-­Town Plays and Medieval Picture Cycles. EDAM Monograph Series 2. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1979. Fletcher, Alan J. “Layers of Revision in the N-­Town Marian Cycle.” Neophilogus 66 (1982): 469–78. ———. “Marginal Glosses in the N-­Town Manuscript, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D.VIII.” Manuscripta 25 (1981): 113–17. ———. “The N-­Town Plays.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, 183–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Gibson, Gail McMurray. “Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-­Town Cycle.” Specu­ lum 56, no. 1 (1981): 56–90.

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———. “Manuscript as Sacred Object: Robert Hegge’s N-­Town Plays.” Journal of Medi­ eval and Early Modern Studies 44, no. 3 (2014): 503–29. ———. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Granger, Penny. “Devotion to Drama: The N-­Town Play and Religious Observance in Fifteenth-­Century East Anglia.” In Medieval East Anglia, ed. Christopher Harper-­ Bill, 302–17. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005. ———. The N-­Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009. Holland, Peter. “Theatre Without Drama: Reading REED.” In From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, 43–67. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Johnson, Eleanor. Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Late-­Medieval Prose, Verse, and Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Johnston, Alexandra F. “The Puzzle of the N.Town Manuscript Revisited.” Medieval English Theatre 36 (2014): 104–23. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. Meredith, Peter. “Manuscript, Scribe and Performance: Further Looks at the N-­Town Manuscript.” In Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Cele­ brating the Publication of “A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English,” ed. Felicity Riddy, 109–28. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991. ———. The Practicalities of Early English Performance: Manuscripts, Records, and Stag­ ing; Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies. Ed. John Marshall. New York: Routledge, 2018. Spector, Stephen. “The Composition and Development of an Eclectic Manuscript: Cotton Vespasian D VIII.” Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 9 (1977): 62–83. ———. “The Provenance of the N-­Town Codex.” Library, 6th ser., vol. 1, no. 1 (1979): 25–33. ———. “Symmetry in Watermark Sequences.” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 162–78.

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Case Study XII

G L O S S A RY

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abbreviation. The shortening of words to save space or effort, sometimes employing nonalphabetic marks that symbolize letters or groups of letters. Anglicana. A cursive documentary script that was in widespread use in late medieval England, characterized by a large and decorative w, two-­compartment a, long r below the line, and figure-­eight g. Anglicana formata. A more formal version of Anglicana, used as a book hand. annotation. A written note added to a text, either in the margins or interlinearly. apparatus criticus. The academic “critical apparatus” that surrounds a text, including such aids to study as introductions, footnotes, glossaries, indexes, appendixes, bibliographies. See also critical edition and textual criticism. ars antiqua, or ars vetus. The “old art” of mostly sacred polyphony centered around the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the thirteenth century. ars nova. The “new art” of rhythmically complex and musically expressive polyphony, secular and sacred, that emerged in France in the fourteenth century. ars subtilior. The “more subtle art” of rhythmically complicated and extremely difficult music, mostly secular, from the fifteenth century. ascender. The uppermost stroke of a minuscule letter, which extends above the body, as in b, d, f, h, k, l. atramentum. A very dark black ink, based on carbon black. author portrait. A feature of some illustrated manuscripts, showing an author in the process of creating the text, sometimes presenting it to its patron or first recipient. autograph (adj.). Written by the person who composed or created the text. See also holograph. awl. A pointed tool for creating a small round hole, sometimes used for prickings. banderole. A representation of a scroll or ribbon containing an inscription, sometimes floating from the hand or mouth of a figure to indicate speech. bas-de-page (Fr. bottom of the page). The location of some marginal imagery, in the lower margin of the page.

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Bastard script (also bastarda, lettre batarde). A mixed script including elements of a calligraphic textura and elements of a more informal cursive. A Bastard Anglicana, in particular, is the Gothic Anglicana mixed with features of Secretary script. Beneventan script. A Gothic script from southern Italy in the eighth to thirteenth centuries, associated with the monastery at Monte Cassino and characterized by many ligatures and extensive abbreviation. best-­text edition. A modern edition of an older text in which one copy is chosen as a base according to explicit criteria of judgment, with additions and emendations taken from other copies as appropriate. biccherna (p. biccherne, also tavolette di Biccherna). Painted wooden tablets made to cover treasury records in Siena, derived from the name of the Biccherna, the city’s chief financial office. bifolium. A sheet of paper or parchment folded once, so that it makes up two conjugate leaves, or four pages. binding. The covering of a book, typically boards front and back attached by sewing to the text block, covered in leather and often decorated. binding stay. Narrow strip of durable material, often parchment, used to reinforce stitching in the binding process. biting. A paleographical term referring to the overlap of two contrary curves in adjacent letters (e.g., bo). blind tooling. A technique of decorating in which images are created through low-­relief indentations, with no added color or gilt. body (of a letter). The central part of a minuscule letter resting on the base line, excluding the ascender and descender. book. A machine for reading, most commonly shaped as a codex but also potentially including tablets and other forms of alphabetic inscription. book block. The pages of a codex, folded into quires and stitched together but not bound. book hand. A relatively formal kind of script (as opposed, for example, to a cursive script) used by professional scribes for creating lasting objects such as books (opposite: cursive script). See also calligraphic script. border. Marginal decoration that surrounds a text on many manuscript pages; may be full or partial (e.g., three-­quarter). boss. Decorative raised metal fitting on the cover of a book, usually thought to protect it from rubbing while shelved horizontally or placed on a desk or lectern. calamus. A sharpened, split reed pen. calligraphic script. A formal style of handwriting in which the pen is lifted off the page in the formation of a letter (opposite: cursive script). See also book hand. capital. A majuscule script, deriving from its use at the top, or “capital,” of Roman columns. caret. An inverted v used as a mark of insertion. Carolingian (or Caroline) minuscule. A type of standardized script developed at the court of Charlemagne characterized by open, well-­spaced, legible letterforms.

314

Glossary

catchword. The first word of the next quire, often written at the bottom right of the last page of the previous quire, in order to help the binder keep pages in sequence. chain lines. Prominent, widely spaced, parallel lines in laid paper created by the structure of the paper mold or tray. (Cf. wire lines.) chained book. A book attached to a desk or bookshelf by a chain, intended to prevent anyone from removing it. A feature of libraries or other communally owned collections. chamfered board. A binding board cut at a forty-­five-­degree angle on the outside edges. charta emporetica. The most economical grade of papyrus. charta hieratica. The highest grade of papyrus (also called charta Augusta after the emperor). chemise binding. A soft leather or textile second covering of a book wrapping around its hard boards. codex. A book that takes a traditional shape; that is, some number of pages bound on one side. Codex rotundus. A small devotional manuscript in Hildesheim so-­called because of its round shape. Its spine is only three centimeters long, and it is held together by three metal clasps. codicology. The study of the codex, including script and text, but also such physical features as writing support, decoration, and binding structures. collation. An assessment of the structure of a book’s pages, including the number, nature, and disposition of gatherings. colophon. A scribal statement added at the end of the book or text to provide details about production and sometimes other personal comments, such as requests for prayers or curses on those who would steal the book. commentary. Scholarly response to a text, often formalized and considered a part of the text that should accompany any copy of it. compiler. Someone who brings together different texts from a variety of sources into one text, or into one physical object, without adding anything of his own. Coptic binding. Style of stitching without supportive cords, used in early Eastern bookbinding. consular diptych. Two hinged pieces of ivory, highly decorated, carried by consuls in the late Roman Empire. continuous script. Writing without word separation. contraction. Shortening of a word by removing some letters in the middle (e.g., Mr for Mister). cordiform. Heart-­shaped, as some unusual fifteenth-­century bindings. couching. Part of the papermaking process in which the wet paper is laid between pieces of felt to dry. crayon. A writing implement that makes a relatively thick, colored line, often used for drawing instead of writing. critical edition. A modern edition that systematically collates all existing witnesses to produce a genealogical stemma of manuscripts and to infer a definitive text. See also apparatus criticus and textual criticism.



Glossary315

cropping. Trimming of pages that occurs during the binding process, occasionally cutting text or decoration from the page. cumdach. A shrine in which a book was carried into battle. cursive (or running) script. A script that is produced without often lifting the pen from the page, so that the letters in one word are linked together (opposite: calligraphic script, or book hand). custos (L., guardian). A mark at the end of a musical line that previews the first note on the next line, useful in sight-­reading. cut leather/cuir ciselé/Lederschnitt. A style of binding decoration that involves making decorative incisions into wet leather. deckle. A frame around the edges of a mold used in making paper. deckle edge. Rough, uneven, uncut edge of paper, a feature of handmade laid paper. descender. The lower part, extending below the baseline, of a minuscule letter such as g, j, p, q, and y. diminuendo. The effect created by letters of diminishing size across a page, characteristic of early Insular manuscripts. diplomatics. The study of historical documents and records, including analysis of forms and procedures of authentication. diplomatic transcription. An absolutely literal, faithful translation of what is on the page, including incidentals such as spelling, punctuation, and abbreviation. diptych. Two panels connected by a hinge, often panel paintings. display script. A style of writing meant to call attention to its difference from the main script of a text, often used to mark textual divisions. dorse (L. dorsum, back). The reverse of a single leaf or roll. (Cf. verso.) drollerie. A figure depicted in the margins of an illuminated manuscript, often fantastical, hybrid, or monstrous in nature. See also grotesque. drypoint stylus. A writing instrument that does not carry ink, and so leaves furrows or ridges, rather than marks, on the page. duct. An individual stroke of the pen, as those that make up letterforms. ductus. The distinctive dynamic aspects of a hand, created by the sequence of strokes forming a letter, how much pressure was applied to the pen, or how quickly the scribe wrote; the performative spirit of the scribe. eclectic editing. The practice of reconstructing a text by selecting the best readings from multiple witnesses. electronic edition. A digital version of a text that can, among other things, offer limitless variant readings by hyperlink. endband. Woven textile band that structurally reinforces the top and bottom of a book’s spine. endleaf. A blank bifolium at the beginning or end of the book block, attached to the binding by pasting the outer leaf to the inside of the boards, leaving the inner one free; originally blank, though often used for later inscriptions or additions.

316

Glossary

epigraphy. The study of inscriptions on stone. eschatocol. The last sheet of a roll. evangelist portrait. An image of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John in the process of writing his gospel book, and often including the standard evangelist symbols: man (Matthew), lion (Mark), bull (Luke), and eagle ( John). exemplar. The model manuscript copied by a scribe. explicit. From the Latin explicitus est (it is unrolled), the final few words of the main text, used for identification. expunction. A scribal correction indicating the removal of a word, often marked by a line or a row of dots under the word or phrase to be removed. See also subpunction. facsimile edition (L. fac simile, make similar). A modern photographic copy of a medieval book that seeks to replicate many or all of its material features, from size to illustration. flesh side. The side of the parchment that was internal to the animal. (Cf. hair side.) florilegium (L. gathering of flowers). A compilation of miscellaneous texts, not necessarily without order but not strictly systematized. flourish. (1) An ornamental stroke of the pen. (2) To decorate individual letters by the addition of ornamental pen strokes. See also penwork. flyleaf. A blank leaf at the beginning or end of a book. See also endleaf. folio (L. folium, leaf ). (1) A leaf of parchment, front and back (abbreviated as fol./fols. Or f./ff.); foliation rather than pagination is often used for navigation within a volume (e.g., fol. 74r). (2) The largest size of volume, created by folding a parchment or paper sheet just once (abbreviated as fo or 2o.). (Cf. octavo, quarto.) frontispiece. A prefatory full-­page illustration, often depicting the author, the patron, or a presentation scene. full binding. A binding in which the wooden boards are completely covered by leather, textile, or another material. gathering (or quire). A set of parchment or paper leaves folded together to create a bundle of usually eight, ten, or twelve folios, nesting inside each other; many gatherings are sewn together to create a volume. girdle book. A small portable book bound so that it can be attached, usually by a cord or chain, to a belt. gloss. Commentary on a central text, usually in the margin (a marginal gloss) or between lines (an interlinear gloss); can be casual or formalized, brief or extended. gold leaf (or gold foil). Very thin sheets of gold that can be attached to illuminations by a sticky substrate. gold tooling. Decorative gold inlay impressed into leather bindings. Gothic binding. A style of binding characterized by a difference between the smaller book block and the larger boards, sewing on cords, and a rounded spine. Gothic script. A style of handwriting prevalent across Europe in the high and late Middle Ages, characterized by dense, vertical letterforms and little white space.



Glossary317

grotesque. A figure depicted in the margins of an illuminated manuscript, often fantastical, hybrid, or monstrous in nature. See also drollerie. hair side. The side of the parchment that was external to the animal, with hair follicles usually visible. (Cf. flesh side.) half binding (or half-­calf). A binding in which only the spine and part of the boards are covered in leather. half-­uncial script. A minuscule script developed from the majuscule uncial in which letters such as p and d have descenders and ascenders. See also uncial script. hand. See scribal hand. headcap. The leather covering the top and bottom of the spine of a book. hierarchy of scripts. A ranking of different scripts across manuscripts or on the same page according to their status, often providing information about the organization of the text. historiated initial. From the French histoire (story), a decorative initial letter that contains an illustration of a narrative scene. holograph. A manuscript written entirely in its author’s hand. See also autograph. Hülleneinband. A binding with a second covering over the first covering of the boards. See also chemise binding. humanistic book hand. A formal style of script that developed in late fourteenth-­ century Italy, based on the clarity and legibility of Carolingian minuscule (known then as littera antiqua). humanistic cursive. A current script, developed from humanistic book hand. iconography. The images and symbols traditionally used in the visual arts, and the study of such images and symbols. illumination (L. illuminare, to light up). A richly colored illustration in a manuscript, particularly one that uses gold leaf. incipit (L. incipit, it begins). The opening few words of a text, used to identify it in the absence of a secure title; used by medieval authors as well as modern catalogers. (Cf. explicit.) inhabited initial. A decorative initial letter that contains a figure of a person or animal but does not imply a sense of narrative. (Cf. historiated initial.) initial (L. initium, beginning). The first, usually majuscule, letter in the first word of a text or a section of text. Insular script. A form of writing developed in Ireland and common from the seventh to the ninth century in the British Isles; related to uncial but characterized specially by a diminuendo effect. interlace. Patterns of geometric decoration based on looped, braided, knotted, or interwoven bands, characteristic of early Insular art. iron-­gall ink. A very common medieval ink made from oak galls (outgrowths on oak trees containing tannins), along with iron sulfate and gum arabic. itinerary map. A map that follows a single linear route, rather than one that lays out an entire landscape.

318

Glossary

justified. Aligned to form a straight edge against a margin, as a text block. laid paper. Paper handmade in a mold or frame with closely spaced wires crossing widely spaced chains to leave a distinctive pattern of wire lines and chain lines in the finished sheet. lampblack. A black pigment made from soot, traditionally collected from oil lamps. layout (or mise-­en-­page). The way in which the text and paratext are physically arranged; the visual organization of a page. lead point (or plummet). A dry-­point writing instrument that nonetheless leaves a mark wherever it is pressed, the ancestor of the modern pencil. leaf. A piece of parchment or paper comprising two pages, both front and back. See also folio. ligature (L. ligare, to bind). (1) A pen stroke connecting one letter to another, characteristic of cursive or running scripts. (2) A group of two or three connected musical notes. limp binding. A binding made without wooden boards, typically of leather or parchment. line filler. Decorative element added to the blank space on each line between the end of the text and the right margin. littera notabilior (L. more notable letter). A decorative initial letter that marks an important or notable division of the text. littera rotunda. A Gothic script characterized by a rounder aspect than most, developed in southern Europe, particularly Italy. Luxeuil minuscule. A local and idiosyncratic type of seventh-­to eighth-­century script connected to the abbey of Luxeuil, France. macron. A horizontal line over a letter, usually indicating that the following nasal consonant (e.g., m or n) has been omitted. majuscule. Relatively large letters written between two lines rather than four, often used for display in initial position, also known as capital or (in typography) “upper case” letters (opposite: minuscule). See also capital. manicule (L. manus, hand). A small hand in a margin pointing toward a particular section of text. manuscript (L. manu scriptus, written by hand). Any hand-­written text, abbreviated as MS. marginalia (L. marginalia, things in the margin). Annotations, drawings, doodles, and pen trials written by a reader in the margins of a text. mastara (or ruling board). A device that impresses rulings onto paper, commonly used in Islamic bookmaking. medium. The physical means by which information is communicated, including electronic devices (phonograph, radio, television, computer), but also including older media such as paintings, sculptures, tapestries, books, and manuscripts. melisma. A number of notes sung on a single syllable. miniature. A colored illustration that is independent, separate from text or borders. minim. The basic short vertical pen stroke that makes up the letters i, u, v, n, m—and, incidentally, the word minim itself; can be a cause of confusion in Gothic scripts.



Glossary319

minuscule. Relatively small letters written between four lines rather than two (i.e., including ascenders and descenders), a basic letterform often used for main body of text, also known (in typography) as “lower case” letters. mise-­en-­page. See layout. mouvance. The unstable quality of medieval textual culture based on manuscript transmission, as described by Paul Zumthor. See also variance. neume. Early form of musical note, designed to show relative rather than absolute pitch. Heightened, or diastematic, neumes use the vertical axis as well as note shape to show differences in pitch. notae juris. Legal markings and abbreviations. nomina sacra. The holy names of God, the Trinity, Christ, and Mary, often abbreviated and honored by decoration. octavo. A book of small size, produced when a single large sheet is folded three times, making each resulting page an eighth of the original sheet (abbreviated as 8o). (Cf. folio, quarto.) opistograph. A papyrus roll that has writing on both sides. ordinatio. The layout of a manuscript as it communicates the intellectual structure of the text, the “ordering” of the page. ostracon. A pottery shard with writing inscribed on it. otiose strokes. Superfluous marks of the pen that do not mean anything. page. The front or the back of a folio, one side of a leaf of parchment or paper. paleography (Gr. palaiograph, ancient writing). The study of old writing, including the dating and identification of scripts and hands. palimpsest. From the Greek palimpsestos (scraped away again), a piece of parchment from which one text has been erased in order to reinscribe it with another. paper. The most common writing surface for books since the late Middle Ages, originally made of wool, cotton, or linen rags, though now generally made of wood pulp. papyrology. The study of writings on papyrus. papyrus: (1) A plant whose stalks were used in antiquity to make a writing surface. (2) The writing surface itself. parallel-­text edition. An edition in which two or more witnesses of a text are printed alongside each other for ease of comparison. paraph. A symbol such as ¶ (like a reversed P) indicating the beginning of a new paragraph, stanza, or section of text. paratext. Part of the apparatus of the book, the paratext includes items separate from the main text, such as titles, tables of contents, forewords, afterwords, indexes, and annotations. parchment. From the Greek pergaminon, Latin charta pergamena, referring to Pergamum (a town in western Turkey), a common material that replaced papyrus in the fourth century as the writing support for handwritten books, made of animal skins, specially prepared, stretched, and scraped. See also vellum, with which it is sometime used interchangeably.

320

Glossary

pastedown. The outer endleaf or flyleaf that is attached to the boards; also a single leaf pasted on the inside cover. pen (L. penna, feather). An instrument for writing with ink, including the Roman reed pen (calamus), but also the goose quill that dominated from the sixth to the eighteenth century. pen trial. Doodles or scribbles meant to test a fresh pen. penwork. Decorative designs executed entirely with pen and ink. See also flourish. philology. From Greek philologia (love of words), the study of historical language, including subjects such as textual criticism, literary criticism, and linguistics. plummet. See lead point. polyptych. Multiple hinged panels. post. A stack of one hundred sheets of paper. postilla. From Latin post illa verba (after these words), biblical commentaries or homiletic commentaries on biblical texts. pressmark. An indication of the cabinet (or “press”) in which a book or manuscript is found in a library. See also shelfmark, with which it is sometimes used interchangeably. pricking. The practice of making small parallel holes in parchment to guide the ruling lines for writing text. protocol (Gr. protokollon). The first sheet of a manuscript roll, usually explaining its origin. punctorium. A tool for pricking, a spiked wheel that can be rolled along a page to create a line of equally spaced holes. punctuation. A system of nonalphabetic markings that elucidate the meaning or the structure of a text and aid in reading aloud. punctus. A point, period; also a variety of neume designed to show a musical note that is low in pitch relative to the note before it. punctus elevatus. A mark of medieval punctuation, the “raised point” that looks like an inverted semicolon. punctus interrogativus. A rare mark of medieval punctuation, the ancestor of the question mark. purple parchment. Parchment colored with dye for luxury books. puzzle initial. An initial letter created by red and blue parts that fit together like puzzle pieces, with a white line separating them. quarter binding. A binding in which only the spine is covered in leather. quarto. A book of medium size, produced when a single large sheet is folded twice, making each resulting page a fourth of the original sheet (abbreviated as 4o). (Cf. folio, octavo.) quaternion. A gathering, or quire, of four folded sheets, comprising eight folios or sixteen pages. quill. A pen made from the feather of a bird (e.g., goose) by sharpening and splitting the end.



Glossary321

quinion. A gathering, or quire, of five folded sheets, comprising ten folios or twenty pages. quire (or gathering). From the French cahier (notebook), a set of parchment or paper leaves folded together to create a bundle of usually eight, ten, or twelve folios, nesting inside each other; many quires are sewn together to create a volume. recensionist editing. Editing based on the reconstruction of an original text or archetype from grouping manuscript witnesses according to coincidence of error. recto. From Latin rectus (right), (1) the front side of a folio visible on the right side of an opening, abbreviated r, as in fol. 4r, fol. 89r, and so on. (Cf. verso.) (2) The front side of a roll. reed pen. See calamus. roll. A format of books without hard binding, in which sheets of papyrus or parchment or paper are attached head to foot (chancery rolls) or head to head (exchequer rolls). rolled tooling. Designs on leather book covers produced by a cylindrical tool like a rolling pin. Roman cursive. An informal running hand used in antiquity for documentary purposes. Roman rustic capitals. A less formal majuscule script with rounder letterforms. Roman square capitals. A more formal majuscule script, with strongly rectilinear letterforms, used in monumental inscription. Romanesque binding. A style of binding characterized by covers flush with the book block, sewing on alum-­tawed slit straps, and a flat spine. rubrication (L. ruber, red). The practice of writing in red ink, often used to call attention to titles, captions, and textual divisions. rubricator. The artisan who writes in red ink, often different from the main scribe or scribes. ruling. Regularly spaced guidelines drawn on the page to establish the text block and ensure regularity of writing. ruling board. See mastara. running head. Title or other heading written at the top of every page or every other page for easy reference. scribal error. Many kinds of mistakes are common to the activity of copying text, such as dittography (repetition of words or letters), eyeskip or homoeoteleuton (jumping back to a similar word and omitting a passage), and homoeoarchon (confusion of words with the same beginning). scribal hand. The idiosyncratic writing of one person, as distinct from script. scribe. The writer of a medieval book, often professionalized in court and bureaucratic, as well as monastic, contexts. script. An ideal form of lettering that may be practiced in local ways by many different scribes, as distinct from the idiosyncratic scribal hand. scriptorium. The place in which a group of scribes work, also sometimes designating the group themselves, whether in a monastic or a secular, professional context.

322

Glossary

Secretary script. A cursive, documentary script that developed in France and became widespread in England in the fifteenth century, characterized by a single-­ compartment a, a simple w, and a horned g. secundo folio (second folio). The first words on the second folio of a book, often used as a secure way to identify a particular volume, anticipating that the first folio might be damaged or lost. sequence (L. sequor, to follow). A chant or hymn that followed the alleluia in the mass. The sequence as both textual and musical form was popularized by Notker Balbulus at St. Gall in the ninth century. serif. The small decorative mark at the end of a letter stroke, characteristic of formal book hands. shelfmark. The information that identifies the shelf on which a book or manuscript is found within a library (e.g., British Library MS Cotton Nero A X/2). See also pressmark, with which it is sometimes used interchangeably. signature. A gathering, or quire, or a leaf within a gathering, more commonly used to describe printed books (as, e.g., sig. B3r). signe de renvoi (Fr. sign of return). A mark, like a modern asterisk, that identifies both a passage to be inserted and the place it is to go. sizing. A process of finishing paper by treating it with animal gelatin, allowing it to take ink well. square notation. A form of musical notation that developed from neumes, in which the notes are thicker. stab-­stitching. The practice of sewing a gathering from the front, rather than through the center of the folds. stemma (pl. stemmata). A genealogical structure based on shared error, created to describe the relationship of all manuscripts of a text descending from a lost original. strapwork. Decorative patterns in initial letters that look like interwoven straps. See also interlace. subpunction. A form of scribal deletion signaled by a line or a row of dots under the word to be removed. support. The material upon which text is inscribed, such as stone, wax, metal, wood, ceramic, parchment, paper. suspension. An abbreviation that works by omitting some letters at the end of a word, such as Dr. for Drive. stub. The narrow strip that remains when a conjugate leaf has been cut out of a manuscript. stylus. Probably the earliest writing instrument, a stick used to impress inscriptions in clay or wax. text (L. textus, woven). The words that make up any piece of writing. text block. The section of the page occupied by the words of the main text, as opposed to the borders or margins.



Glossary323

textual criticism. The study of all aspects of a text, from its physical existence to the history of its transmission, usually in the service of establishing a singular text from multiple witnesses. See also apparatus criticus, critical edition. textura (also Gothic script, littera textualis). A formal calligraphic script used heavily from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, characterized by a “woven” appearance (textus), strongly vertical and dense letterforms, not much white space or legibility. (Cf. humanistic book hand.) textura quadrata. A formal textura characterized by squared-­off “feet” at the base of each letter stroke. Tironian notes. A system of abbreviation thought to have been used by Cicero. T-­O map. A common type of medieval world map that divides a circle (O) into three parts via a T. treasure binding. A highly decorated binding using luxury materials such as gold, ivory, and gemstones. triptych. A set of three panels connected by hinges. uncial (perhaps “inch-­high”) script. An early medieval European majuscule script developed from Roman rustic capitals and characterized by rounded letter strokes (m, e.g.), which came to be associated with Christian texts. uterine vellum. Very thin, fine, luxury parchment, once thought to be made from the skin of unborn calves. vade mecum (L. go with me). A personal book that is meant to be kept nearby, for ready consultation. variance. The tendency of texts transmitted by a manuscript culture to show variation as a definitional quality, proposed by Bernard Cerquiglini. See also mouvance. variant. A textual difference—sometimes small, sometimes large—between one manuscript and another. vellum (from L. vitellus, calf ). Specifically parchment made from the skin of cows, as opposed to goats, sheep, and so on. See also parchment, with which it is sometimes used interchangeably. verso. The reverse (or back) side of a folio. (Cf. recto.) virga. A variety of neume, written as a forward slash, designed to show a musical note that is high in pitch relative to the note before it. virgule. A medieval punctuation mark, similar to a modern comma in function, that looks like a forward slash; a double virgule was sometimes used as a full stop. Visigothic script. An eighth-­to thirteenth-­century script prominent in Spain, characterized by an unusual z that developed into a modern cedilla (ç). watermark. A motif introduced to the mold in the process of producing paper to affirm the identity of the maker, such as a bunch of grapes, a vase or urn, a wolf ’s head. wax tablet. A reusable writing machine in which a thin layer of wax creates a surface for temporary writing, to be melted and reapplied for later use. wire lines. The lighter parallel lines perpendicular to the chain lines in laid paper, created by the mesh in the paper mold. (Cf. chain lines.)

324

Glossary

PR I M A RY WO R K S C I T E D  

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Baker, Donald C. et al., eds. The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160. London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1982. Borroff, Marie, trans. The Gawain Poet: Complete Works (Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Cavell, Megan, trans. “Exeter Riddle 26.” The Riddle Ages. https://theriddleages.bham .ac.uk/riddles/post/exeter-­riddle-­26/ Guigo I. Coûtumes de Chartreuse. Sources chrétiennes 313. Paris: Editions de Cerf, 1984. Hollander, Robert, and Jean Hollander, trans. “Paradiso.” Princeton Dante Project. https://dante.princeton.edu/ Jerome. “Epistle 22. To Eustochium.” Patrologia Latina 22, col. 418. Martial. Epigrammata. Trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Vol. I. Loeb Classical Library 94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Panziera, Ugo. “Trattato della Perfezione.” In Mistici del duocento e del trecento. Ed. Arrigo Levasti. Milan: Rizzoli, 1960. Petrarch, Francis. Letters of Old Age/Rerum Senilium Libri I–XVIII, vol. 1, Books I–IX. Trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 198. Pliny the Elder. Natural History. Trans. W. H. S. Jones. Loeb Classical Library 418. 10 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Shakespeare, William. Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans, with J. J. G. Tobin. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Theophilus: De Diversis Artibus. Ed and trans. C. R. Dodwell. Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons; New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

325

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General Andrews, Tara L., and Caroline Mace, eds. Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts: Digital Approaches. Lectio 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Baswell, Christopher, ed. Medieval Manuscripts, Their Makers and Users: A Special Issue of Viator in Honor of Richard and Mary Rouse. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Beadle, Richard, and A. J. Piper, eds. New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995. Bischoff, Bernhard. Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Trans. Dáibhí ó Cróinin and David Ganz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Boyle, Leonard E. Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction. Toronto Medieval Bibliographies 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Brown, George Hardin, and Linda Ehrsam Voigts, eds. The Study of Medieval Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff. Tempe: ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) in collaboration with Brepols, 2010. Brown, Michelle P. “Anglo-­Saxon Manuscript Production: Issues of Making and Using.” In A Companion to Anglo-­Saxon Literature, ed. Philip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne, 102–17. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Brown, T. Julian. A Palaeographer’s View: The Selected Writings of Julian Brown. Ed. Janet Bately, Michelle P. Brown, and Jane Roberts. Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History 8. London: Harvey Miller, 1993. Bühler, Curt F. The Fifteenth-­Century Book: The Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. Clanchy, M. T. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. Introduction to Manuscript Studies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Da Rold, Orietta, and Elaine Treharne, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

327

Da Rold, Orietta, Takako Kato, Mary Swan, and Elaine Treharne, eds. The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220. University of Leicester, 2010. Last update 2013. Available at http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220. ISBN 095323195X Edwards, A. S. G., Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna, eds. The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths. London: British Library, 2000. Gameson, Richard, ed. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 400–1100. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Gillespie, Alexandra, and Daniel Wakelin, eds. The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Greetham, D. C., ed. The Margins of the Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. ———. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 1417. New York: Garland, 1992. ———. Textual Transgressions: Essays Toward the Construction of a Biobibliography. New York: Garland, 1998. ———. Theories of the Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Hanna, Ralph. Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, Their Produc­ ers, and Their Readers. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. ———. Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Hellinga, Lotte, and J. B. Trapp. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1400– 1557. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ivy, G. S. “The Bibliography of the Manuscript Book.” In The English Library Before 1700: Studies in Its History, ed. Francis Wormald and C. E Wright, 32–65. London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1958. Johnston, Michael, and Michael Van Dussen, eds. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cul­ tural Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Kelly, Stephen, and John J. Thompson, eds. Imagining the Book. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 7. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Kerby-­Fulton, Kathryn, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson. Opening Up Middle English Man­ uscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Kwakkel, Eric. Books Before Print. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2018. Marrow, James H., Richard Linenthal, and William Noel, eds. The Medieval Book: Glosses from Friends and Colleagues of Christopher de Hamel. Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2010. Minnis, Alastair J., ed. Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions; Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall. York Manuscripts Conferences, vol. 5. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell Press, 2001. Morgan, Nigel J., and Rodney Thompson, eds. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1100–1400. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pahta, Païvi, and Andreas Jucker, eds. Communicating Early Manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Pearsall, Derek, ed. Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-­Century England: The Liter­ ary Implications of Manuscript Study. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983. ———, ed. New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference. York: York Medieval Press, 2000. “Producing and Using English Manuscripts in the Post-­Conquest Period.” Special issue of New Medieval Literatures 13 (2011). Richards, Mary P., ed. Anglo-­Saxon Manuscripts: Basic Readings. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. New York: Routledge, 1994. Roberts, Jane, and Pamela Robinson, eds. The History of the Book in the West: Library of Critical Essays. Vol. 1. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Robinson, P. R., and Rivkah Zim, eds. Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997. Rouse, Mary A., and Richard H. Rouse. Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Rouse, Richard H., and Mary A. Rouse. Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500. Illiterati et Uxorati. Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2000. Shailor, Barbara A. The Medieval Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1991. Wilcox, Jonathan, ed. Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Me­ dieval Manuscripts. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 23. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013.

Materials Brown, Michelle P. “The Role of the Wax Tablet in Medieval Literacy: A Reconsideration in Light of a Recent Find from York.” Journal of the British Library 20, no. 1 (1994): 1–16. Clarke, Mark, ed. “The Crafte of Lymmyng” and “The Maner of Steynyng”: Middle En­ glish Recipes for Painters, Stainers, Scribes, and Illuminators. Early English Text Society, o.s., 347. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. DaRold, Orietta. Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Edwards, A. S. G. “Middle English Inscriptional Verse Texts.” In Texts and Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society, ed. John Scattergood and Julia Boffey, 26–43. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Fiddyment, Sarah, Bruce Holsinger, et al. “Animal Origin of 13th-­Century Uterine Vellum Revealed Using Noninvasive Peptide Fingerprinting.” PNAS 112, no. 49 (2015): 15066–71. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1512264112. Gordon, Arthur E. Illustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Griffin, Carrie. “Instruction and Inspiration: Fifteenth-­Century Codicological Recipes.” In “The Provocative Fifteenth Century, Vol. 2,” a special issue of Exemplaria 30, no. 1 (2018): 20–34.



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Gullick, Michael. “From Parchmenter to Scribe: Some Observations on the Manufacture and Preparation of Medieval Parchment Based on a Review of the Literary Evidence.” In Pergament: Geschichte, Struktur, Restaurierung, Herstellung, ed. Peter Rück, 145–57. Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1991. Villalobos Hennessy, Marlene. “The Social Life of a Manuscript Metaphor: Christ’s Blood as Ink.” In The Social Life of Illumination, ed. Joyce Coleman, Mark Kruse, and Kathryn Smith, 17–52. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Holsinger, Bruce. “Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal.” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 616–23. ———. “Parchment Ethics: A Statement of More Than Modest Concern.” New Medie­ val Literatures 12 (2010): 131–36. Hunter, Dard. Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. 2nd ed., rev. and enl. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947. Medieval Manuscripts: Some Ink and Pigment Recipes. A booklet compiled by the Special Collections Conservation Unit of the Preservation Department of Yale University Library. Needham, Paul. “Concepts of Paper Study.” In Puzzles in Paper: Concepts in Historical Watermarks, ed. Daniel W. Mosser, Michael Saffle, and Ernest W. Sullivan II, 1–36. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press and the British Library, 2000. ———. “Res papirea: Size and Format of the Late Medieval Book.” In Rationalisierung der Buchherstellung im Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit, ed. Peter Rück and Martin Boghardt, 123–45. Marburg an der Lahn: Institut für historische Hilfswissenschaften, 1994. Reed, Ronald. The Nature and Making of Parchment. Leeds: Elmete Press, 1975. Rust, Martha Dana. “Blood and Tears as Ink: Writing the Pictorial Sense of the Text.” Chaucer Review 47, no. 4 (2013): 390–415. Stallybrass, Peter, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe. “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 4 (2004): 279–419. Stoicheff, Peter. “Materials and Meanings.” In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Leslie Howsam, 73–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Thompson, D. V. “Medieval Parchment-­Making.” The Library, 4th ser., 16, no. 1 (1935): 113–17. Vindolanda Tablets Online. http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/.

Scribes and Scripts Beach, Alison I. Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth-­ Century Bavaria. Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Beadle, Richard. “English Autograph Writings of the Later Middle Ages: Some Preliminaries.” In Gli autografi medievali: Problemi paleografici e filologici; Atti del convegno di studio della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, Erice, 25 settembre–2 ottobre 1990, ed. Paolo Chiesa and Lucia Pinelli, 249–68. Quaderni di cultura mediolatina 5. Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi Sull’alto Medioevo, 1994.

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Brown, Michelle P. The British Library Guide to Writing and Scripts: History and Tech­ niques. Toronto: University of Toronto Press with the British Library, 1998. ———. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. Toronto: University of Toronto Press with the British Library, 1990. Connolly, Margaret. John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth Century England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Derolez, Albert. The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century. Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Doyle, A. I., and M. B. Parkes. “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century.” In Medieval Scribes, Manu­ scripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson, 163–210. London: Scolar, 1978. Dumville, D. N. English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism, A.D. 950–1030. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993. Greetham, D. C. “Normalisation of Accidentals in Middle English Texts: The Paradox of Thomas Hoccleve.” Studies in Bibliography 38 (1985): 121–50. Jones, L. W. “Pricking Manuscripts: The Instruments and Their Significance.” Speculum 21 (1946): 389–403. Mooney, Linne, and Estelle Stubbs. Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425. York: York Medieval Press, 2013. Parkes, M. B. English Cursive Book Hands, 1250–1500. Oxford Palaeographical Handbooks. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. ———. “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book.” In Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Rich­ ard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson, 115–41. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. ———. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ———. Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts. London: Hambledon Press, 1991. ———. Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes; The Lyell Lectures Deliv­ ered in the University of Oxford, 1999. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Petti, Anthony G. English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Roberts, Jane. Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500. London: British Library, 2005. Wakelin, Daniel. Scribal Correction and Literary Craft. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Warner, Lawrence. Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.



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Wright, C. E. English Vernacular Hands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries. Oxford Palaeographical Handbooks. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

Editing Blake, Norman. “Reflections on the Editing of Middle English Texts.” In A Guide to Editing Middle English, ed. Vincent P. McCarren and Douglas Moffat, 61–77. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Connolly, Margaret, and Raluca Radulescu, eds. Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx. Texts and Transitions 12. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018. Da Rold, Orietta. “Should We Reedit the Canterbury Tales?” Studies in the Age of Chau­ cer 32 (2010): 375–82. Edwards, A. S. G. “Manuscripts, Facsimiles, and Approaches to Editing.” In Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt, 202–14. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. Gillespie, Vincent, and Anne Hudson, eds. Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-­First Century. Texts and Transitions 5. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Hanna, Ralph. Editing Medieval Texts: An Introduction, Using Exemplary Materials Derived from Richard Rolle, “Super Canticum” 4. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Kane, George, and E. Talbot Donaldson. “Introduction.” In Piers Plowman: The B-­Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson. London: Athlone Press, 1975. Machan, Tim William. “Editorial Certainty and the Editor’s Choice.” The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour of A. N. Doane, ed. Matthew T. Hussey and John D. Niles, 285–303. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. ———. Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Manly, J. M., and Edith Rickert. The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. McCarren, Vincent P., and Douglas Moffat, eds. A Guide to Editing Middle English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. McGann, Jerome, ed. Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Minnis, Alastair J., and Charlotte Brewer, eds. Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992. Patterson, Lee. “The Logic of Textual Criticism and the Way of Genius: The Kane-­ Donaldson Piers Plowman in Historical Perspective.” In Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome McGann, 55–91. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Pearsall, Derek, ed. Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature; Essays from the 1985 Conference at the University of York. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987.

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———. “Texts, Textual Criticism, and Fifteenth-­Century Manuscript Production.” In Fifteenth-­Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert Yeager, 121–36. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984. Ruggiers, Paul, ed. Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984. Tomasch, Sylvia. “Editing as Palinode: The Invention of Love and The Text of the Canter­ bury Tales.” Exemplaria 16, no. 2 (2004): 457–76. Wakelin, Daniel. “‘Maked na moore’: Editing and Narrative.” Studies in the Age of Chau­ cer 32 (2010): 365–73. ———. “Manuscripts and Modern Editions.” In A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature, ed. Marilyn Corrie, 211–31. Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009.

Decoration and Illumination Alexander, J. J. G. The Decorated Letter. New York: G. Braziller, 1978. ———. Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Binski, Paul, and Stella Panayotova, eds. The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West. London: Harvey Miller, 2005. Camille, Michael. The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-­Making in Medieval Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Coleman, Joyce, Mark Cruse, and Kathryn A. Smith, eds. The Social Life of Illumina­ tion: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in Late Medieval England. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. de Hamel, Christopher. The British Library Guide to Manuscript Illumination: History and Techniques. London: British Library, 2001. ———. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1994. ———. Scribes and Illuminators. Medieval Craftsmen. London: British Museum Publications, 1995. Dodwell, C. R. The Canterbury School of Illumination, 1066–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. ———. The Pictorial Arts of the West, 800–1200. Yale University Press Pelican History of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Drimmer, Sonja. The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403–1476. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Edson, Evelyn. Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World. London: British Library, 1997. Edwards, A. S. G., ed. Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts. Vol. 10 of English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700. London: British Library, 2002. Evans, Michael. “The Geometry of the Mind.” Architectural Association Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1980): 32–55. Hamburger, Jeffrey. Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.



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———. Script as Image. Paris: Peeters, 2014.  Hodnett, Edward. English Woodcuts, 1480–1535. London: Bibliographical Society, 1973. Kauffmann, C. M. Biblical Imagery in Medieval England, 700–1550. London: Harvey Miller, 2003. Kupfer, Marcia, Adam S. Cohen, and J. H. Chajes, eds. The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, 16. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020. Rickert, Margaret. Painting in Britain: The Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Pelican History of Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-­Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family. London: British Library; and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. ———. Studies in Manuscript Illumination, 1200–1400. London: Pindar Press, 2008. Smith, Lesley ,and Jane H. M. Taylor, eds. Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Ev­ idence. British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library, 1996.

Binding Ahern, John. “Binding the Book” PMLA 97, no. 5 (1982): 800–809. Bloxam, Jim. “The Beast, the Book, and the Belt: An Introduction to the Study of Girdle or Belt-­Books from the Medieval Period.” In Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies: Animals as Material Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Aleksander Pluskowski, 80–97. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2007. Christianson, C. Paul. “Early London Binders and Parchmeners.” Book Collector 32 (1985): 41–54. Dorofeeva, Anna. “Visualizing Codicologically and Textually Complex Manuscripts.” Manuscript Studies 4.2 (2019): Article 4. Foot, Mirjam J. “Bookbinding and the History of Books.” In A Potencie of Life: Books in Society; The Clark Lectures, 1986–87, ed. Nicholas Barker, 113–26. London: British Library, 1993. ———. The History of Bookbinding as a Mirror of Society. Panizzi Lectures, 1997. London: British Library, 1998. ———. Studies in the History of Bookbinding. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996. Gillespie, Alexandra. “Bookbinding and Early Printing in England.” In A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1588, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell, 75–94. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014. ———. “Medieval Books, Their Booklets, and Booklet Theory.” English Manuscript Studies 16 (2011): 1–29. Gumbert, J. P. “The Tacketed Quire: An Exercise in Comparative Codicology.” Scripto­ rium 65, no. 2 (2011): 299–320. Hanna, Ralph. “Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations.” Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986): 101–12. Johnson, William A. “Bookrolls as Media.” In Comparative Textual Media, ed. N. Kath-

334

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erine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, 101–24. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Ker, N. R. Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings: With a Survey of Oxford Binding, c. 1515–1620. Ed. David Rundle and Scott Mandelbrote. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, 2004. First published 1954. Marks, P. J. M. The British Library Guide to Bookbinding: History and Techniques. London: British Library, 1998. McGrath, Anthony. “Using Religious Art as Pictorial Evidence for Medieval Book History.” Book History 18 (2015): 33–47. Needham, Paul. Twelve Centuries of Bookbindings, 400–1600. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library; and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Nixon, Howard M., and Mirjam M. Foot. The History of Decorated Bookbinding in En­ gland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Oldham, J. Basil. English Blind-­Stamped Bindings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Pearson, David, ed. “For the Love of the Binding”: Studies in Bookbinding History Pre­ sented to Mirjam Foot. London: British Library; and New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000. Pollard, Graham. “The Construction of English Twelfth-­Century Bindings.” The Li­ brary, 5th ser., vol. 17 (1962): 1–22. ———. “Describing Medieval Bookbindings.” In Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to R. W. Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson, 50–65. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. ———. “Some Anglo-­Saxon Bookbindings.” Book Collector 24 (1975): 130–59. Robinson, P. R. “’The Booklet’: A Self-­Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts.” Codicologica 3 (1980): 46–69. Stallybrass, Peter. “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.” In Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, 42–79. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Szirmai, J. A. The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. VisColl: Modeling and Visualizing the Physical Construction of Codex Manuscripts. https://viscoll.org/

Libraries and Collectors de Hamel, Christopher. The Rothschilds and Their Collections of Illuminated Manu­ scripts. London: British Library, 2005. Ker, N. R. Books, Collectors, and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage. London: Hambledon Press, 1985. ———. Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books. 2nd ed. London: Royal Historical Society, 1964. Parkes, M. B., and Andrew G. Watson, eds. Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Librar­ ies: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker. London: Scolar Press, 1978.



suggestions for further reading335

Ricci, Seymour de. English Collectors of Books & Manuscripts (1530–1930) and Their Marks of Ownership. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960. Sharpe, Kevin. Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern En­ gland. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Singleton, Antony. “The Early English Text Society in the Nineteenth Century: An Organizational History.” Review of English Studies, n.s., 56 no. 223 (2005): 90–118. Summit, Jennifer. Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Tite, Colin G. C. The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Foundation, Cata­ loguing, Use. London: British Library 2003. Wormald, Francis. The English Library Before 1700: Studies in Its History. London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1958.

History of Reading Bell, David N. What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries. Cistercian Studies Series no. 158. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995. Cannon, Christopher. From Literacy to Literature: 1300–1400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Coleman, Joyce. Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Connolly, Margaret. Sixteenth-­Century Readers, Fifteenth-­Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Karnes, Michelle. Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984. Krug, Rebecca. Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Riddy, Felicity, ed. Prestige, Authority, and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2000. Saenger, Paul. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Saenger, Paul, and Michael Heinlen. “Incunable Description and Its Implications for the Analysis of Fifteenth-­Century Reading Habits.” In Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, c. 1450–1520, ed. Sandra Hindman, 225–58. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Sawyer, Daniel. Reading English Verse in Manuscript c. 1350–c. 1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Wakelin, Daniel. Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

336

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Zieman, Katherine. Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval En­ gland. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

History of the Book and Media Studies Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Brantley, Jessica. “The Pre-­History of the Book.” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 1–15. ———. “Medieval Remediations.” In Comparative Textual Media, ed. N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, 201–20. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Cerquiglini, Bernard. Éloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Chartier, Roger. Form and Meaning: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. ———. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Four­ teenth and the Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Dane, Joseph A. Abstractions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. ———. The Myth of Print Culture: Essays on Evidence, Textuality, and Bibliographical Method. Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Darnton, Robert. “History of Reading.” In New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke, 140–67. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Drimmer, Sonja. “The Manuscript as an Ambigraphic Medium: Hoccleve’s Scribes, Illuminators, and Their Problems.” Exemplaria 29, no. 3 (2017): 175–94. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Originally published in French as Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987). Guillory, John. “The Memo and Modernity.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (September 1, 2004): 108–32. Hanna, Ralph. “Middle English Books and Middle English Literary History.” Modern Philology 102, no. 2 (2004): 157–78. ———. “Middle English Manuscripts and the Study of Literature.” New Medieval Lit­ eratures 4 (2001): 243–64. Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Mak, Bonnie. How the Page Matters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ———. Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. ———. A Reader on Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Panizzi Lectures, 1985. London: British Library, 1986. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964; reissued by Gingko Press, 2003.



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Meyer-­Lee, Robert J. “Manuscript Studies, Literary Value, and the Object of Chaucer Studies.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 30 (2008): 1–37. Nichols, Stephen G. “On the Sociology of Medieval Manuscript Annotation.” In An­ notation and Its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney, 43–73. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Rust, Martha Dana. Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrage Macmillan, 2007. Treharne, Elaine. “Fleshing Out the Text: The Transcendent Manuscript in the Digital Age.” Postmedieval  4, no. 4  (December 2013): 465–78.  http://www.palgrave-­ journals.com/pmed/journal/v4/n4/full/pmed201336a.html. Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiévale. Collection Poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Studies of Manuscript Genres Bahr, Arthur. Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Baxter, Ron. Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages. Stroud: Sutton, 1998. Bell, Nicolas. Music in Medieval Manuscripts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Boffey, Julia. Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages. Manuscript Studies 1. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985. Clarke, Mark. The Art of All Colours: Mediaeval Recipe Books for Painters and Illumina­ tors. London: Archetype, 2001. Codices Boethiani: A Conspectus of Manuscripts of the Works of Boethius. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1995. Collins, Minta. Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions. British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library, 2000. de Hamel, Christopher. The Book: A History of the Bible. London: Phaidon, 2001. ———. Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984. Deeming, Helen, and Elizabeth Leach, eds. Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Dillon, Emma. “Music Manuscripts.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music, ed. Mark Everist, 291–319. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Fenlon, Iain, ed. Cambridge Music Manuscripts, 900–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Fisher, Matthew. Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Fox-­Davies, Arthur Charles. Heraldic Designs. Treasury of Decorative Art. London: Studio, 1997. Franzen, Christine. The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Freeman, Elizabeth. Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220. Medieval Church Studies 2. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002.

338

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Friedman, John Block. Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late Middle Ages. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Gameson, Richard. The Earliest Books of Canterbury Cathedral: Manuscripts and Frag­ ments to c. 1200. London: Bibliographical Society, 2008. ———, ed. The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration, and Use. Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. The Manuscripts of Early Norman England (c. 1066–1130). British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph. Oxford: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1999. Gehrke, Pamela. Saints and Scribes: Medieval Hagiography in Its Manuscript Context. University of California Publications in Modern Philology 126. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Gibson, Margaret T. The Bible in the Latin West. The Medieval Book 1. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1993. Haines, John, and Randall Rosenfeld, eds. Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance: Essays Dedicated to Andrew Hughes. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Hanna, Ralph. London Literature, 1300–1380. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Harthan, John P. Books of Hours and Their Owners. London: Thames & Hudson, 1977. Hudson, Anne. Lollards and Their Books. London: Hambledon Press, 1985. Hughes, Andrew. Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organiza­ tion and Terminology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Jones, Peter Murray. Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts. London: British Library Publications, 1998. Kelly, Thomas Forrest. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation. New York: Norton, 2015. Lewis, Suzanne. The Art of Matthew Paris in the “Chronica Majora.” California Studies in the History of Art 21. Berkeley: University of California Press in collaboration with Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1987. Minnis, Alastair J., ed. Late-­Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Hon­ our of A. I. Doyle. York Manuscripts Conferences 3. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Owst, G. R. Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period c. 1350–1450. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926. Reynolds, L. D., ed. Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Reynolds, L. D., and Nigel Guy Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmis­ sion of Greek and Latin Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Smith, Lesley. Masters of the Sacred Page: Manuscripts of Theology in the Latin West to 1274. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Treitler, Leo. With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How It Was Made. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Wenzel, Siegfried. Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.



suggestions for further reading339

———. Verses in Sermons: “Fasciculus Morum” and Its Middle English Poems. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1978.

Studies of Individual Manuscripts Backhouse, Janet. The Sherborne Missal. London: British Library, 1999. Baugh, Nita Scudder. A Worcestershire Miscellany, Compiled by John Northwood c. 1400. Philadelphia, 1956. Brantley, Jessica. Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Camille, Michael. Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. London: Reaktion Books, 1998. Donovan, Claire. The De Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-­Century Oxford. Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations 7. London: British Library, 1991. Fein, Susanna, ed. The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press with the Boydell Press, 2016. ———, ed. Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-­Century Worcestershire. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2019. ———, ed. Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253. Kalamazoo, MI: Published for TEAMS (The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2000. Fein, Susanna, and Michael Johnston, eds. Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press with the Boydell Press, 2014. Geddes, J. The St. Albans Psalter: A Book for Christina of Markyate. London: British Library, 2005. Gibson, Margaret, T. A. Heslop, and Richard W. Pfaff, eds. The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-­Century Canterbury. Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association 14. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1992. Hamburger, Jeffrey. The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland Circa 1300. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Haney, Kristine Edmondson. The St. Albans Psalter: An Anglo-­Norman Song of Faith. New York: P. Lang, 2002. ———. The Winchester Psalter: An Iconographic Study. Leicester, Leicestershire: Leicester University Press, 1986. Higgitt, John, and British Library. The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England, and the Gaelic West. London: British Library and University of Toronto Press in association with the National Library of Scotland, 2000. Kerby-­Fulton, Kathryn. Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman. Medieval Cultures 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998.

340

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Lester, G. A. Sir John Paston’s “Grete Boke”: A Descriptive Catalogue, with an Introduc­ tion, of British Library MS Lansdowne 285. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984. Moore, Deborah L. Medieval Anglo-­Irish Troubles: A Cultural Study of BL MS Harley 913. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. Pearsall, Derek, ed. Studies in the Vernon Manuscript. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990. Rigg, A. G. A Glastonbury Miscellany of the Fifteenth Century: A Descriptive Index of Trinity College, Cambridge, MS.O.9.38. Oxford English Monographs. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-­Century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge (British Library Manuscripts Royal 6 E VI and 6 E VII). London: Harvey Miller, 1996. ———. The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library. London: Harvey Miller and Oxford University Press, 1983. Scase, Wendy, ed. The Making of the Vernon Manuscript: The Production and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.poet.a.1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Smith, Kathryn. Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth-­Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours. London: British Library; and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. ———. The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England. London: British Library; and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Taylor, Andrew. Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Printed Facsimiles Baker, Donald, and J. L. Murphy, intro. The Digby Plays: Facsimiles of the Plays in Bodley MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160. Medieval Drama Facsimiles 3. Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1976. Beadle, Richard, and Jeremy Griffiths, intro. St. John’s College, Cambridge, Manuscript L.1: A Facsimile. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1983. Beadle, Richard, and Peter Meredith, intro. The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290, Together with a Facsimile of the Ordo Paginarum Section of the A/Y Memorandum Book. Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1983. Bevington, David M. The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1972. Brewer, Charlotte, and A. G. Rigg, intro. Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of the Z-­Text in Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 851. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994. Brewer, D. S., and A. E. B. Owen. The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS.91). London: Scolar Press, 1975. Brown, Michelle P., intro. The Holkham Bible Picture Book: A Facsimile. London: British Library, 2006. Cawley, A. C., and Martin Stevens, intro. The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1. Medieval Drama Facsimiles 2. Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1976.



suggestions for further reading341

Davis, Norman, intro. Non-­Cycle Plays and the Winchester Dialogues: Facsimiles of Plays and Fragments in Various Manuscripts and the Dialogues in Winchester College MS33. Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1979. Doyle, I. A., intro. The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Eng. Poet. A.1. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987. Edwards, A. S. G., intro. Manuscript Pepys 2006: A Facsimile; Magdalene College, Cam­ bridge. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1985. James, M. R., intro. The Treatise of Walter de Milemete de Nobilitatibus, Sapientiis, et Prudentiis Regum. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Roxburghe Club, 1913. ———, intro. Facsimile of Ms. Bodley 34: St. Katherine, St. Margaret, St. Juliana, Hali Meiðhad, Sawles Warde. London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1960. ———, intro. The Owl and the Nightingale: Reproduced in Facsimile from the Surviving Manuscripts, Jesus College, Oxford 29, and British Museum Cotton Caligula A. IX. London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1963. ———, intro. The Winchester Malory: A Facsimile. London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1976. Krochalis, Jeanne, intro. The Pierpont Morgan Library Manuscript M.817: A Facsimile. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1986. Meredith, Peter, and Stanley J. Kahrl, intro. The N-­Town Plays: A Facsimile of British Li­ brary MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII. Medieval Drama Facsimiles 4. Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1977. Norton-­Smith, John, intro. Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16. London: Scolar Press, 1979. Parkes, M. B., and Elizabeth Salter, intro. Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 61. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978. Parkes, M. B., and Richard Beadle, intro. Poetical Works: A Facsimile of Cambridge Uni­ versity Library Ms. GG.4.27. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1979. Pearsall, Derek, intro. Piers Plowman: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 104. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992. Pearsall, Derek, and I. C. Cunningham, intro. The Auchinleck Manuscript National Li­ brary of Scotland Advocates’ MS. 19.2.1. London: Scolar Press, 1977. Price, Derek J., intro. The Equatorie of the Planetis: Edited from Peterhouse MS 75.I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Robinson, Pamela, intro. Manuscript Bodley 638: A Facsimile; Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1982. Robinson, Pamela, intro. Manuscript Tanner 346: A Facsimile; Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1980. Ruggiers, Paul G., ed. The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Heng­ wrt Manuscript with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. Scase, Wendy, ed. A Facsimile Edition of the Vernon Manuscript: Oxford, Bodleian MS Eng.Poet.a.1. Bodleian Digital Texts 3. Nick Kennedy, software. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

342

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Tschann, Judith, and M. B. Parkes, intro. Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86. Oxford: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1996. Woodward, Daniel, and Martin Stevens, eds. The Canterbury Tales: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile (of Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9). Tokyo: Yushodo, 1995.

Catalogs and Reference Alexander, J. J. G. Illuminated Manuscripts in Oxford College Libraries, the University Archives, and the Taylor Institution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Insular Manuscripts, 6th to the 9th Century. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 1. London: Harvey Miller, 1975. Baker, John Hamilton, and Cambridge University Library. A Catalogue of English Legal Manuscripts in Cambridge University Library. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1996. Beal, Peter. A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology, 1450–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Briquet, C.-­M. Les filigranes: Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur ap­ parition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600. 2nd ed. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1985. Brown, Michelle P. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms. Rev. Elizabeth Teviotdale and Nancy K. Turner. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018. Cappelli, Adriano. The Elements of Abbreviation in Medieval Latin Paleography. Trans. Davin Himann and Richard Kay. Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1982. Christianson, C. Paul. A Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans, 1300–1500. New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1990. Dean, Ruth J., and Anglo-­Norman Text Society. Anglo-­Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts. London: Anglo-­Norman Text Society, 1999. Guddat-­Figge, Gisela. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1976. Gumbert, J. P. Bat Books: A Catalogue of Folded Manuscripts Containing Almanacs or Other Texts. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. Hanna, Ralph. The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010. Hartzell, K. D., and Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society (Great Britain). Catalogue of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1200 Containing Music. Woodbridge: Boydell Press in association with the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, 2006. Hughes, Andrew. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-­Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. ———. Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts Used as Pastedowns in Oxford Bindings, with a Survey of Oxford Binding c. 1515–1620. Oxford: Printed for the Oxford Bibliographical Society by A. T. Broome, 1954. Kauffmann, C. M. Romanesque Manuscripts, 1066–1190. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 3. London: Harvey Miller, 1975. Ker, N. R. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-­Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.



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———. Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–92. Lewis, Robert E., and Angus McIntosh. A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the “Prick of Conscience.” Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1982. Mooney, Linne R., Daniel W. Mosser, and Elizabeth Solopova et al., ed. The DIMEV: An Open-­Access Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse. https://www .dimev.net Morgan, Nigel. Early Gothic Manuscripts, 1190–1285. A Survey of the Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 4. 2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1982–88. Pelzer, Auguste. Abréviations latines médiévales: Supplément au Dizionario di abbrevia­ ture latine, ed italiane, de Adriano Cappelli. 2nd ed. Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1966. Sandler, Lucy Freeman. Gothic Manuscripts, 1285–1385. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 5. 2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1986. Scott, Kathleen. Dated and Datable English Manuscript Borders, 1395–1499. London: British Library, 2002. ———. Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 6. 2 vols. London: Harvey Miller, 1996. Temple, Elzbieta. Anglo-­Saxon Manuscripts, 900–1066. A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 2. London: Harvey Miller, 1976. Watson, Andrew G. Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 435–1600 in Oxford Libraries. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. ———. Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts, c. 700–1600 in the Department of Manuscripts, the British Library. 2 vols. London: British Museum Publications for the British Library, 1979.

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S  

•

I am grateful to a number of people without whom this book would not exist, all of whom were very patient while it came into being. The idea of a manuscript handbook was first proposed to me by David Way of British Library Publications so long ago that I should not admit it publicly. More recently, Jerry Singer­ man has helped to bring the project into being, with all of the warm support and good counsel that any author could ask, and with his own special talent for building intellectual purpose and scholarly community. Jerry has been a tremendous force for good in humanistic scholarship during difficult decades, and I am glad to have the chance to thank him here for his role in sponsoring this book and so many more. I am grateful to the learned readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press, Arthur Bahr and Daniel Wakelin, whose generous advice saved me from more than one infelicity and outright error. I am also grateful to all of the people at the press itself who worked tirelessly to make this book as accurate and as beautiful as possible. This kind of book is not born in the stacks of a research library, nor at an international academic conference, but in the classroom. So my community at Yale, a community of teachers and of learners, has been the greatest influence on it. Most of all, I owe a debt of gratitude to the students who have thought with me over years of seminars at Beinecke Library about medieval manuscripts and the theoretical issues they raise. It is one of the ironies of this project that working with the abundant riches of the Beinecke collection has inspired me to think about how and why manuscript study might become possible for those without a major manuscript library nearby. But just as Beinecke itself takes seriously its pedagogical as well as scholarly mission, so I hope this book can carry some of the excitement of manuscript study outward. I particularly want to thank the following Yale colleagues, friends, students (and all of the above): Michael

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Abraham, Anya Adair, Shannon Beddingfield, Andie Berry, Ardis Butterfield, Ray Clemens, Ian Cornelius, Diane Ducharme, Irina Dumitrescu, Megan Eckerle, Denis Ferhatovic, Roberta Frank, Anna Franz, Matthew Giancarlo, Kristen Herdman, Katherine Hindley, Gina Hurley, Annie Killian, Andrew Kraebel, Ray Lahiri, Ingrid Lennon-­Pressey, Shu-­han Luo, Alastair Minnis, Kate Needham, Sarah Novacich, Ben Pokross, Alex Reider, Nicole Rice, Meredith Ringel-­ Ensley, Madeleine Saraceni, E. C. Schroeder, Barbara Shailor, Joe Stadolnik, Emily Thornbury, Melissa Tu, Aaron Vanides, Eric Weiskott, Clara Wild, and Jordan Zweck. Special thanks to Bill Rankin and all of the Ph.D. students who worked alongside me every day in the Mellon Writing-­in-­Residence program at Sterling Library in summer 2018. Finally, I am particularly grateful for the collaborations of Anne Schindel, Emily Ulrich, and Rachel Wilson, who co-­taught medieval manuscripts with me at Beinecke Library; and of Seamus Dwyer and Eric Ensley, who, along with offering invaluable research assistance at a crucial time, were this book’s first and most helpful readers. Along with my students and colleagues, I’d like to thank my teachers, who inspired and encouraged me as I began to think about medieval manuscripts. Derek Pearsall first taught me to love Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and his influence, everywhere visible in medieval manuscript studies, continues to shape my own relation to the field. Jill Mann and Richard Beadle both encouraged my exploration of the collections in Cambridge at a time that was deeply formative. Del Kolve showed me how manuscripts might be used to think with, and he supported my crazy plan to write a dissertation on a single medieval book. I also want to express deep gratitude for the intellectual and personal sustenance I’ve received over the years from Elizabeth Allen, Jennifer Bryan, Seeta Chaganti, Cathy Sanok, and Claire Waters. These colleagues model intellectual friendship at its best, and their challenging and fruitful responses to my work have taught me more than they could possibly know. My most profound thanks, as always, go to my family: Richard and Diana Brantley, who have lovingly nurtured my intellectual adventures and have offered wise direction at every turn; Justine Brantley, along with Chris, Rabun, and Leif Williams, who have provided good company through years of lonely cooking and lonely writing; Thomas Fulton, who shares my joy in old books and who truly believes that manuscript culture is at least as interesting as the print revolution; and Gabriel and David Fulton, who share my joy in books of all kinds and who may someday be interested in the ones they find here. This handbook is dedicated to them.

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Acknowledgments