Instructional Writing in English, 1350-1650: Materiality and Meaning [1° ed.] 140945262X, 9781409452621

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Instructional Writing in English, 1350–1650

Exploring the nature of practical or instructional works in English transmitted from the later Middle Ages to c. 1650, this volume considers textual and material strategies for the presentation and organisation of written knowledge and information. The volume examines textual and material conditions of such works in manuscript, tracing their development through and beyond the arrival of the printing press in England in the late fifteenth century. Works on surgery, courtesy, astrology, writing for women, and codicological recipes are examined closely from the perspective of frameworks, conventions, and structures, and more broadly in terms of transmission and dissemination, attitudes and traditions, readers and audiences, and shifting ideas about knowledge and the professional realm. Instructional Writing in English makes a significant contribution to the study of so-called non-literary textual genres and their transmission, circulation and reception, in manuscript and in early modern printed books. Carrie Griffin is a Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Material Readings in Early Modern Culture

Series editor: James Daybell, Plymouth University, UK and Adam Smyth, Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK

The series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms of texts as part of an investigation into the culture of early modern ­England. The editors invite proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary nature, and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research with an attention to theoretical models that might illuminate the reading, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take innovative approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms of the kinds of primary materials under investigation and in terms of methodologies. What are the questions that have yet to be asked about writing in its various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of materiality that are critically neglected? How does form mediate and negotiate content? In what ways do the physical features of texts inform how they are read, interpreted and situated? Recent in this series: Text, Food And The Early Modern Reader Eating Words Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher Reading Drama in Tudor England Tamara Atkin Impressive Shakespeare Identity, Authority and the Imprint in Shakespearean Drama Harry Newman Instructional Writing in English, 1350–1650 Materiality and Meaning Carrie Griffin

For more information on this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ literature/series/ASHSER2222

Instructional Writing in English, 1350–1650 Materiality and Meaning

Carrie Griffin

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Carrie Griffin to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Griffin, Carrie, 1977– author. Title: Instructional writing in English, 1350–1650 : materiality and meaning / Carrie Griffin. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Material readings in early modern culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019001703 (print) | LCCN 2019008094 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Didactic literature, English—History and criticism. | English prose literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. | English prose literature— Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR408.D49 (ebook) | LCC PR408.D49 G75 2019 (print) | DDC 828/.20809—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001703 ISBN: 978-1-4094-5262-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-58888-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Graham and Matthew

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Preface: Instruction and the Material Text Abbreviations List of Manuscripts A Note on Transcription

ix xi xiii xxxi xxxiii xxxvii

1 The Professional Text from Manuscript to Print: Lanfranc of Milan and John Hall 1 2 Courtesy and the Book 33 3 Texts and Textuality: Recording the Written Word 73 4 Reading the Future: Almanacs and Astrology 110 5 Instructing and Constructing Women 144 Afterword Bibliography Index of Manuscripts Index

183 187 207 209

List of Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3

London, British Library, MS Royal 17.D.15, f. 1r 34 London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 287, f. 105r 49 London, Society of Antiquaries MS 282, f. 33r 51 London, British Library, MS Harley 4011, f. 71r 54 London, British Library, MS Sloane 2027, f. 37r 57 National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn II.i, f. 33r 80 London, British Library, MS Harley 2252, f. 142r 87 Arnold’s Chronicle (1502) sig. Qiii 96 London, British Library, MS Sloane 965, f. 25r 120 A Perfyte Pronostycacion Perpetuall (1556) sig. Bi 126 Title page; Leonard Digges, A Prognostication Euerlasting (1585) 130

Acknowledgements

I owe a great debt of gratitude to both Julia Boffey and Margaret Connolly. Julia, my mentor when I was a postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, generously read earlier drafts of this book, and her keen commentaries and wise suggestions helped to shape this volume in untold ways. Margaret read the final draft of this study and sent me in the post a beautifully annotated hard copy, with notes that were crucially important in the final stages of writing and revision. Many readers of this volume will know Julia and Margaret, and will know them to be excellent scholars, wonderfully generous with their time and knowledge, and consistently supportive of colleagues and mentees alike, and I remain extremely grateful for their professional and personal support. I also wish to thank friends and colleagues who read and commented on chapters and sections; needless to say, any errors that remain in the book are my own. As mentioned, the work for this book was carried out while I was an Irish Research Council CARA Marie Curie Fellow and Queen Mary, University of London, and I gratefully acknowledge the support and assistance of the Council during that time. Sincere thanks to colleagues at the School of English, University College Cork (UCC), my home institution at the time of the postdoctoral fellowship, and particularly to Patricia Coughlan and James Knowles who acted as mentors. I received financial support from the School of English publication fund, which helped to pay for images and permissions used in this volume. I wish to thank in particular the following for permission to reproduce images here: the Society of Antiquaries, London; The British Library; and the National Library of Wales. Moreover, I am grateful to the staff of the many research libraries that allowed me to use their archives. I also thank the editorial team at Routledge, and especially the editors of the Material Readings in Early Modern Culture series: James Daybell and Adam Smyth. I extend my thanks too to Erika Gaffney, who worked with me on an early iteration of this book. I am also hugely appreciative of the support of academic colleagues and friends, and thank them for various favours, close reading, tea breaks, and encouragement: Tamara Atkin, Anne Baden-Daintree,

xii Acknowledgements Ann Buckley, Susan Burke-Trehy, Ian Burrows, Danielle Clarke, Lisa H. ­Cooper, David Coughlan, Lesel Dawson, Andrea Denny-Brown, Stephanie Downes, Martha W. Driver, Tony Edwards, Rob Ellis, David Fleming, Michael J. Griffin, Jane Grogan, Michael Johnston, Richard Kirwan, Helen Matheson-Pollock, Christina Morin, Margaret Mills Harper, Órla Murphy, Ad Putter, Mary O’Connell, Margaret O’Neill, Niamh Pattwell, Emer Purcell, Fergal Quinn, John J. Thompson, Mary Wellesley, and Tessa Whitehouse. I must especially express my deepest admiration for and thanks to Mary C. ­Flannery, Colin Lahive and Cian O’Mahony. Finally, the most humble thanks are due to my close friends and family for their unwavering understanding, support, and affection. It almost goes without saying that my greatest debt is to Graham and Matthew, to whom I dedicate this book with much love, and with a promise to be more present (and less stressed) from now on.

Preface Instruction and the Material Text

Works of instruction and information of all kinds enjoyed wide circulation in England in the late medieval and early modern periods. Based on the material that is extant in late medieval manuscripts, and on the subject matter of certain early printed books, we can say for certain that these works were frequently copied and read. Perhaps as a consequence of readerly appetite, the field of instructional and informational writings from c. 1350–1650 in England is vast and varied, and this is due in part to considerable overlap, in particular in the late medieval period, between genres of writing that we in modernity would consider to be distinct; what might now be considered a work of literature in the medieval period may have been read for instruction or edification as well as for pleasure. Such ideas about the function of written word, often linked more definitely to Renaissance ideals, were certainly current in the medieval period wherein writers and readers were influenced by classical thinking about the purpose of reading. The directive of Chaucer’s host Harry Bailey to pilgrims that they deliver “[t]ales of best sentence and moost solaas” (General Prologue 798) stresses the dual function of literature at this time, and indeed it might be argued, as James Morey has, that “nearly all Middle English literature was written with instruction as its primary aim.”1 Moreover, Braswell (Means) has noted that readings of medieval scientific texts were motivated by both utilitas and curiositas.2 As such, instruction is embedded into works in a variety of ways, to such an extent that instructive function is not an “unchanging and ahistorical property of texts, but is shaped contextually across three dimensions”: it is linguistically coded, visible in the intentions of the producers of texts, and in the reception of texts.3 Nonetheless, some scholars have suggested parameters for the field and in terms of straightforwardly practical works; we might say, then, that the general area of practical useful information encompasses alchemy, cosmology, astronomy, astrology, mathematics and music, medicine in many different forms and with many different specialities, hunting and hawking, virtues of stones, cookery and household management, farming and veterinary medicine, technology and crafts, heraldry, and education.4

xiv Preface The present work is by no means an exhaustive study; rather, it makes its focus specific, emphasising meaningful engagement with instructional writings based both on how they were presented and transmitted historically and how they now survive. The five case studies that comprise this volume are connected not just by an interest in instruction but also by attention to the relation between the nature of the instruction, the intended audience or reader, and the material reality of the works in question. By spanning the years in which the printing press began to be established across Europe and in England, it is also alive to the impact of a particular moment in the history of the production, transmission, and reception of such writings. Moreover, it is also particularly attuned to the holistic examination of texts and traditions across manuscript and print contexts. The notion that the arrival of printing in Europe heralded a complete “break” with the past and with the manuscript has of course been seriously challenged with instead an emphasis on continuity and symbiosis emerging in the literature. 5 Indeed, in the words of Jeffrey Todd Knight, print in relation to manuscript culture has “additive rather than supersessive temporalities” and that “old and new necessarily translate each other and occupy the same space” (2015, p. 79). This is an important re-­conceptualisation: even though, as Pettegree notes, we now think of manuscripts and printed books as “separate entities,” this kind of distinction would have been alien to anyone in this period, a period which saw collectors and scholars “mix and bind together texts they had acquired according to a highly personal order” (2011, p. 16). Furthermore, just as the compilers of manuscripts began to copy from newly available printed books (Pettegree, 2011, p. 16), the early printers mined the world of hand-­ produced works to feed their new business enterprises. Some of the case studies below examine this latter phenomenon: for instance, the more-or-less direct translation from manuscript to print of Lanfranc of Milan’s work is the subject of the first chapter. However, underpinning this entire study is a concern not just with how a work is represented in both media but also attitudes to new technologies and older book arts, as well the various textual and material strategies for the presentation and organisation of written knowledge and information. This study is interested in traditions of medieval instructional writing that may have been reconceptualised and restructured in order to render them more suitable for a book in print and for a new, perhaps more discering audience. That close relationship between printed books and manuscripts is very much at issue here, but it is complicated because of a focus not just on continuity but also on the often subtle shifts in the ways in which instruction is presented and iterated in a new medium; in fact, the question posed by Jucker and Pahta (2011, p. 4) is germane here: “[w]hat happens to a text and its communicative context if it is committed to print?”

Preface  xv Because the field is so diverse and comprised of works intended to address an ever-growing number of medieval and early modern readers both professional and non-professional (Keiser, 2004, p. 231), it is difficult to be specific about the limits of the genre simply because instructional literature manifests such variety of content, form, and materiality. Although Glaisyer notes that the genre (in print) was “dominated by prose writing divided into chapters,”6 the case studies show that this kind of writing deployed vastly different strategies for the presentation of information, even within a single volume. So, for instance, while the printed almanacs that are discussed in Chapter 4 might be described as a distinctive, easily recognised, and predictable format, in reality there is incredible formal and organisational diversity in evidence even in the small sample of printed fifteenth- and sixteenth-century volumes that feature here. Equally, even within single printed volumes, there are different navigational aids and ways of presenting text in evidence: Thomas Tusser’s volume on husbandry and housewifery, discussed in Chapter 5, exploits strategies as diverse as epistles, lists, short precepts, prayers, rhymed couplets, and more prosaic pieces in order to instruct his readers. Instructional works have not always enjoyed scholarly attention or indeed full recognition that they are important survivals in particular for literary and cultural studies.7 They received a certain amount of notice when early editors and philologists like F.J. Furnivall and James Halliwell began to record, describe, and produce editions and transcriptions. Indeed, many of the works that are referred to in this book can even now only be accessed in early editions or by recourse to versions in incunables and early printed books, or using databases such as Early English Books Online.8 Instructional, practical, and didactic works are so prevalent in the medieval and early modern periods, and were evidently read at all levels of society, to such an extent that the ambivalence about them in much modern scholarship cannot readily be explained9; but it can perhaps be linked to modern sensibilities and sensitivities with respect to literature and the tendency to strongly connect “literature” to belletristic writings, an equation that does not adequately or accurately reflect medieval attitudes to texts. Litteratura, for the medieval reader, would have indicated anything that circulated in written form,10 and Green goes on to explain that modern scholarship has seriously neglected works that fall outside its view of literature but that were central to the medieval world view (a clear example being the religious or devotional works that courted so many female readers and listeners). Our modern understanding of literature may be in constant flux, but scholarship consistently measures medieval literature according to modern sensibilities about literature, and the increase in scholarly activity in particular over recent years arguably indicates a conscious movement to reassess what is considered “literary” and canonical.11 Practical works, such as those under discussion in this volume, not

xvi Preface only closely intersect with and influence literary works from the medieval and early modern period but also at times display certain of the features most strongly associated with works of literature. Some of the medical texts published in print from the 1560s onwards by William Bullein, for example, have been “recognised for their literary merits, transgressing the borderlines between literary and non-literary writing.”12 Many of the authors and editors discussed here – Gervase Markham, Thomas Tusser, John Hall – were also engaged in the more traditional aspects of literary production as poets, and both Hall and Tusser include literary elements such as verses and rhymed couplets in their printed tracts. These authors were no doubt conscious of a long and well-established tradition when they wrote instruction in verse: the evidence of extant works from the medieval period shows that instruction was frequently transmitted as verse, and there are many extant examples of recipes, prologues, dialogues, incantations and charms that have overtly literary qualities.13 This is widely acknowledged but under-investigated in scholarship, though recent work by Lisa H. Cooper, for instance, has compellingly explored representations of artisans (bakers, smiths, builders, butchers and so on) in medieval English literature, defining the impact which those descriptions have on the form and content of the texts in which they appear and investigating how the figure of the artisan in many ways reminds the reader of the tension between the abstract and the concrete.14 This imbalance – a comparative lack of attention to Middle English and early modern works that are in one way or another considered to be non-literary – has been redressed somewhat by important new scholarship, such as that of Cooper, among others, and by the sustained publication of high-quality handlists, finding aids, catalogues, and new editions,15 with the result that interest in those widely circulated and read works of instruction and information from the Middle Ages and early modern period has been revived, and work in this area facilitated, in recent decades. Primarily, studies in this field in terms of what is extant in late medieval manuscripts have been greatly assisted by the appearance of increasingly sophisticated resources. Among these are important early essays by Laurel Braswell (Means) and Linda E.  ­Voigts that defined the field and catalogue known manuscripts and prose works, published in A.S.G. Edwards’ 1984 volume dedicated to the then relatively neglected area of Middle English prose.16 This work was vastly expanded by George R. Keiser, whose publication of volume ten of The Manual of Writings in Middle English: Works of Science and Information has been invaluable for students of instructional verse and prose.17 Work on the recording of Middle English verse has also foregrounded the many kinds of instruction that were transmitted as poetry in English,18 and the continued and regular publication of volumes of The Index of Middle English Prose has highlighted extant works that might be found in lesser known collections as well as in the larger and more

Preface  xvii accessible repositories and research libraries. In addition, volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain19 have been central to the recovery of instructional and didactic works and represent critical jumping off points for the student of medieval and early modern works, manuscripts and printed books. Keiser’s survey of extant medieval works, published in 2004, gives a useful and comprehensive overview of the work that has been carried out and outlines some of the possibilities for further studies20; and new work continues to be published, in particular in online contexts. 21 In recent times case studies of individual texts and manuscripts have shown that medieval literature, and in particular the literature of instruction, continued to be of relevance and use well into the early modern period. 22 Printed texts and works have been much better served by finding devices and catalogues, but there is no doubt that much remains to be done on instructional and didactic work in incunables and early printed volumes. There are several large and important online databases that assist research into primary materials, such as the ongoing project The Universal Short Title Catalogue based at the University of St Andrews, a collective database of all printed books published in Europe to the end of the sixteenth century and that includes references to the Short Title Catalogue. 23 Additionally, the resource Early English Books Online provides access to different editions of early printed books as well as, increasingly, searchable full texts of some works. There have been some major studies of the development of scientific knowledge and information in the early modern period, arguably chief among them the aforementioned study by Johns, The Nature of the Book, which has as its focus the relation between specifically natural knowledge or the history of science and print. Several studies and essay collections, many of which are cited throughout the present volume, have appeared in the last decade and are concerned to investigate how instruction and knowledge is presented to, packaged for, and consumed by early modern readers. 24 A welcome recent trend in scholarship has been the increased appreciation of women as consumers and producers of, in particular, medical and household texts in the early modern period as well as the medieval, reflected in, for example, a recent special issue of Renaissance Studies and in work by Elaine Leong, among others25; moreover, new editions of material continue to be published, such as the 2017 edition by Kowalchuk of receipt books from the seventeenth century. 26 Of late, studies approach instructional works as part of what might be described as “popular” reading and writing from both the late medieval and early modern periods have included work by Elisabeth Salter and Joad Raymond. 27 The analytical work that has been produced as a direct result of better access to and knowledge is extant in late medieval manuscripts and early printed books has led to some important and influential studies. Alongside the editions, mentioned already, of discrete works published

xviii Preface by the Early English Text Society and Middle English Texts, research that takes a more theoretical and discursive approach has continued to appear. With respect to Middle English instructional works, specifically extant in manuscript, some of the most important analytical work has emerged from Scandinavia, in particular from the University of Helsinki and groups led by Irma Taavitsainen. These valuable studies feature important work on utilitarian and non-literary genres of writing, often focusing on the technical study of text-type and approaching extant works from the perspective of discourse and linguistic analysis. 28 The last decade or so has witnessed the publication of essay collections and dedicated issues of journals that have privileged case studies and trend-based scholarship in the production and reception of instructional writing. 29 Why the focus works of instruction, then, in this volume? Simply, such works are so pervasive that, despite the newly focused attention of scholars on them, we are scratching the surface in terms of their significance. Practical or instructional writings are the most basic blueprints for how a society, or how sections of a society, operates, and how its individuals and groups live, behave, and communicate. They are revealing with respect to cultural and social practices and attitudes as well as to social change; importantly, however, they can also contain valuable information about contemporary attitudes to, among other things, particular kinds of literature, textual, and documentary production, technological innovations such as the arrival of the printing press, and the shifting role of the author. In other words, they are works that are in dialogue with the dynamic world that produced them, and this is perhaps one of the main reasons why they are full of interest for historians and literary scholars: they communicate certain realities about the past in ways that are at once tangible and abstract. Instruction as such always involves the roles of the instructor and the instructed, so it emphatically brings to the fore the idea of written texts as communicative events (Peikola et al., 2009, p. 1). It is perhaps easy to underestimate the importance and impact of instructional writing in English, which was prevalent and with a wide scope from the Anglo-Saxon period. Certainly, devotional works and works of religious instruction were produced in very large numbers, 30 and works of instruction covering a wide range of genres and ­formats – practical manuals, treatises, recipe collections – survive in large numbers in late medieval manuscripts; indeed, the publication in print of practical texts from the early days of the printing presses in England and into the seventeenth century is testament to the variety of material that was in circulation (Peikola et al., 2009, p. 3). Literature that can be described as didactic – such as the “how-to and instructional books that claimed to educate readers in a wide range of skills or areas of knowledge from cookery and measuring time to animal care and calculating interest”  – was widely produced from the seventeenth

Preface  xix century, and some of the first books produced in print in England were handbooks and manuals (Glaisyer, 2011, p. 510). These works are interesting not just in terms of practical concerns but also in relation to the social contexts that produced them and the attitudes and conditions of their audiences, authors, and readers; importantly, Glaisyer cautions against categorizing how-to books in a simple way, arguing that didactic literature itself resists neat categorization since such texts can often respond to investigation that is motivated by political, literary, and social ­interest.31 It is hoped that an appraisal of instructional and practical texts in conjunction with a consideration (insofar as is possible) of the material condition of those texts will go some way towards more fully contextualising their contemporary relevance and importance. Such works are often labelled as “popular,” but this is a term that I have endeavoured to avoid precisely because my dual focus – on the literature, and on the manner in which it is transmitted materially – greatly problematises any general application of that term. The term “popular” might indicate that a work is widely read or known, but it also carries with it an implication that that work is inferior in some way to other literatures or that it was read or accessed in certain, non-elite contexts.32 Indeed, popularity as a concept remains difficult to define perhaps because of our modern sensibilities and biases, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the works under discussion here are examples of popular literature merely because they transmit information that is arguably readily understood and therefore appeals to the less sophisticated reader. A work like John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, though it is at a basic level an instructional text, has its origins apparently in a very specific, privileged context, and its extant manuscripts suggest that it reached very specific, mainly privileged audiences circulating as a late medieval text. There seems to be general agreement amongst scholars that ownership of a text like the Boke of Nurture in manuscript was in fact an indicator of gentility, and that it attracted a particular rather than a general readership; when it is printed as the Book of Kervynge (see Chapter 2 below) we might assume that it reached a wider, differently complexioned audience, but is the fact of its printing sufficient to describe it as “popular” or is it more accurately understood as marketable? As several of the chapters in this volume show, not all widely read instructional writings – such as the Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy, for instance – found their way into print, but manuscripts of that work continued to be produced into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Moreover, instructional writing and the compilation of instructional texts was at times an individual affair, perhaps popularly or widely carried out but yielding quite different results. We might describe the printed almanac as a popular product because of its ephemerality and low price, but the diversity of content,

xx Preface form, structure and sophistication evident in these productions surely asks us to reconsider the facile use of that definition. Almanacs were indeed widely produced and read or used, but they were to be found in the hands of readers and users in all parts of society, reaching more people than might be suggested by their cheap format and accessibility, and therefore their connotations with non-elite reading. Additionally, a focus on materiality allows for consideration of not just textual but physical strategies for the presentation and organisation of written knowledge and information and may even challenge the sense of a narrow audience or reading context for the practical text. Though the devices used by printers, compilers, and authors to assist the reader to navigate the practical text developed considerably throughout the seventeenth century, 33 the ways in which early scribes and compilers sought to present texts, co-locating them with certain other works and paying attention to their layout, accessibility, and attractiveness, also suggest specific attitudes to a particular work and to its intended use and function. My focus here on manuscript-to-print contexts also allows an appraisal of what happens directly to one work – Lanfranc’s surgery – as it moves between circulation in handwritten volumes to printed contexts; I also more generally trace aspects of instructional literature in manuscript that were retained or dropped in the printing of similar or related texts. Those aspects are sometimes material and at times textual, but taken together they attest to shifting attitudes, markets, readerly expectations, and cultural practices, and are important signifiers in any discussion of the intended or actual audience for works in manuscript and print. Who read these texts and owned the manuscripts? Who purchased the early printed books? Did texts reach their intended audiences? As noted by Glaisyer, “[m]any books specified their potential readers” while “others promised to meet everyone’s needs” (2011, p. 515). Indeed provenance research has its limits, at times revealing very little about the complexion of the audience that instructional and practical texts attracted, and only scant evidence sometimes survives concerning the engagement of individual readers with books. 34 Clues such as marginal notes, signatures, pen trials, and other marks in manuscript and printed volumes can at times be difficult to date, but some are at least “suggestive of the long afterlife that books had in the decades after they were published” (Glaisyer, 2011, p. 514) and they can sometimes indicate how a book was used. In some cases, such as the manuscript household book that was compiled from various printed sources by the mistress of a Kingston household, Dorothy Lewkenore (see Chapter 5), now preserved as part of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1477, we can be fairly certain about the context in which the information was used, and the emphatic statement of ownership by Dorothy links her inextricably to the volume’s creation, accretion and function. Other potential

Preface  xxi clues are perhaps less revealing about the audience that directly engaged with certain works; the notes and reminders that are to be found in some almanacs from the sixteenth century, such as those written into the blank pages interleaved with the calendar in one copy of Allestree’s A New Almanack and Prognostication (1639) which seem to confirm that the publication doubled up as a diary of sorts, recording meetings and events that were important to the owner (for which see Chapter 4, below). We cannot tell who this owner was, but it seems clear that he used his almanac as a place of record, perhaps intending it to be retained for consultation, and not discarded, at the end of the year. Much information can be gleaned from the prologues to texts in both manuscript and print and from the levels of explanation that certain texts require; indeed, it has been argued that the lack of overt statements that accompany many recipe texts in manuscript, for instance, implies that those texts were written for professionals who have familiarity with the instructional function (Peikola et al., 2009, p. 7).35 This situation seems not to persist when it comes to similar works in print; Glaisyer cites the example of Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660) which, Sherman argues, could not be used by a beginner alone without any support.36 And as we shall see in Chapter 1 of the present volume, which examines John Hall’s edition of the thirteenth-century surgical treatise attributed to Lanfranc of Milan, instructional texts in print designed for the professional were often extremely explicit with about their ideal audience and intended reader. In an extremely lengthy and varied set of prefaces, dedicatory epistles, and essays, Hall attempts to ward off untrained readers, claiming that their lack of knowledge and education will result in the corruption and unregulated spread of the specialised medical knowledge contained in his edition. In some instances, works in print were specially tailored for specific types of readers. The different audiences for medical texts in particular were responded to in separate publications by William Bullein, who published two handbooks, one aimed at a “broad and heterogeneous readership,” and the other a more specialised handbook of surgery, appealing to a more expert audience. 37 Certainly, as Taavitsainen observes, health issues were germane for laypeople as well as for practitioners (2009, p. 106), and this kind of tailoring of information depending on a certain readership occurred too in manuscript contexts for instructional and didactic texts. The work known as The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy (discussed in Chapter 4), which circulated widely in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and which (in its fullest version) is in parts quite technical, requiring the use of specific instruments, was modified and altered by copyists and perhaps by specific patrons according to the direct requirements of a reader or set of readers, leading to a variant textual tradition that is revealing in terms of the audience for individual manuscripts and versions of the text.38

xxii Preface Equally some texts were intended for audiences who may not have been able to access them directly or easily, such as the Trotula gynaecological material that circulated in manuscript in late medieval England, discussed in Chapter 5, the prologue to which asks that the texts be read to women who are not literate. Some texts were specifically designed to overcome the issue of illiteracy; the Perfyte Pronostycacion Perpetuall, a mainly pictorial almanac published in 1556, claims to be accessible to “them whiche knoweth not a letter on the Booke” (see Chapter 4). Certain works are more oblique in terms of who the intended reader might be. John Russell’s Boke of Nurture and similar courtesy volumes, discussed in Chapter 2, were likely composed both for princes and courtly audiences as well as for their social inferiors, 39 despite Russell’s description of his primary audience – a young man exhibiting ‘wanhope’ – in the literary prologue to his instructional texts. It seems clear that, when we examine materiality, format, content, and paratextual features like prologues and introductory essays, instructional literature had a broad reach in the period c. 1350–1650. The case studies here show that these literatures were intended for, if not accessed by, the lower ends of the social order as well as for the gentrified reader, for the amateur as well as for the professional, and for the avid reader alongside the less well-read. We can certainly conclude that there was an expanding and dynamic market for manuals in the early days of print (Glaisyer, 2011, p. 519), and the prevalence of various kinds of works, ranging from short recipes and collections, to longer and learned surgical and medical tracts, in late medieval manuscripts, indicates that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English society demanded, read, copied, and used instructional literature at a steady rate.40 This study cannot claim to be exhaustive, but it considers some of the strategies, both textual and material, for the presentation of instructional information in English manuscripts and examines also the effect that the coming of print and the early printers had on the general field of instructional literature. Even though some of the works under discussion here, as mentioned, were never printed, so at times the direct connection between manuscript and print is lacking; in such cases I make the argument for tracing texts of a specific genre or from certain milieus. The result is that each chapter maintains a focus on the material text and on that shift from the handwritten to the printed work, specifically the effect that movement has on the text, readership, intended audience or complexion of the text or work in question. The volume’s first chapter, “The Professional Text from Manuscript to Print: Lanfranc of Milan and John Hall,” examines both the manuscripts that survive in English of Lanfranc of Milan’s Little Treatise on Surgery, circulating in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the adaptation and packaging of that text in 1565 for a new, professional audience by the London career-surgeon John Hall, a member of the Barber-Surgeons guild. Hall

Preface  xxiii uses the manuscripts to establish his text, collating them with Latin and French versions borrowed from fellow-surgeons, but he remains wary of their veracity and reliability, articulating this in various ways throughout the exhaustive set of prefaces that he appends to the work. Hall also wishes to discourage readers who may not possess sufficient knowledge to responsibly utilise the information that Lanfranc’s treatise preserves and his anxiety about this is articulated materially and textually in the many layers of preface that precede the text proper in his printed edition. I also consider the post-medieval life of the manuscripts of Lanfranc, in particular since Hall expresses such profound anxiety about the unchecked circulation of handwritten knowledge and lore. Likewise Chapter 2, entitled “Courtesy and the Book,” is concerned with the fortunes in manuscript and print of a specific work. The Boke of Nurture, a fifteenth-century courtesy manual prefaced by an evocative literary prologue that is replete with contemporary resonances, was apparently compiled by John Russell, a servant in the household of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, brother to Henry V. The Boke is extant in five late medieval manuscripts, each offering a context that asks us to read the work in a slightly different way; how does, for example, the preservation of the text with a copy of The Canterbury Tales alter our perspective on its function and likely use? Similarly, what can the repackaging and printing of the text by Wynkyn de Worde reveal about shifting attitudes to specific types of instruction and the circulation of knowledge that was perhaps previously intended for consumption in specific contexts? Chapter 3, “Texts and Textuality: Recording the Written Word,” approaches instructional writing from a different perspective, investigating the proliferation of codicological works and recipes – texts that instruct readers on how to make ink, parchment, colours, gold and silver leaf, washes, binding materials and so on – in order to elaborate on some of the ways in which instructional texts are also invested in the most basic but profound ways in their own transmission. We might say that the Middle English recipe is the basic building block of instruction, and the abundance of recipes that are extant in manuscript that relate to book- and document-making, and that are also transmitted in print, testify to a sense of ownership and control, as well as practical need, amongst a rising number of readers and consumers relating to the production of books and the compilation of knowledge. In this section I look at how changing attitudes to textuality and textual production can reveal increasing tendencies, from c. 1450 onwards, to produce texts and books almost as a matter of course alongside the other common household items that were fabricated rather than purchased. The prevalence of codicological recipes and tracts in print might, however, reveal a different set of concerns, and their existence differently confirms that the two media – print and manuscript – were involved in a

xxiv Preface symbiotic relationship and did not merely coexist for some time after the firm establishment of the printing presses in England. As mentioned, some chapters in this book are concerned with trends rather than the life of a specific work; for example, Chapter 4 argues for the replacement of perhaps outdated, prosaic works such as the Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy, a compendium of instruction to do with astrology and astronomy, with the more standardized and accessible format common to the early printed almanac in England. “Reading the Future: Almanacs and Astrology,” rather than tracing the fortunes of a particular work in manuscript and then in print, begins with a discussion of a text that was never printed, asking why that might have been, examining some of its material contexts in late medieval manuscript, and looking to the early modern almanac as a material form that in some ways repackaged the often densely presented information in manuscript prose. I discuss in detail the Wise Book before considering the unique materiality and organizational schemes of the earliest almanacs and theorizing contemporary attitudes to them: I also theorise on what their material condition can tell us about functionality and relevance, as well as on wider reading habits as well as social and political change.41 The final section in this volume, “Instructing and Constructing Women,” has a similar structure, but it investigates some of the ways in which women are imagined and addressed in late medieval and early modern didactic literatures. The material interrogated here is a combination of works that specifically address women, such as the medieval Trotula texts on gynecology and childbirth; works that embody or voice female advice-givers, for instance, the verse-text that is extant in manuscript as well as print known as How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter which is an imagined dialogue between a mother and daughter on behaviour, morality, household management, and related matters, but which is complicated by the misogynistic tone that pervades it; and early printed texts by Thomas Tusser and Gervase Markham on the appropriate behaviour of housewives or women in the home. In addition, the chapter explores the tension and relationship between feminine home-compiled instructional manuscripts that survive in large numbers from the post-medieval period (and that frequently depended on printed works for their creation) and the apparently male-dominated monopoly of lay instruction for women in print, evidenced in publications by Tusser and Markham, and others. The Trotula gynecological material has already been the subject of excellent studies by Monica H. Green, Alexandra Barratt and others, but my concern here is to read it alongside other works of instruction intended for women and as part of – or perhaps distinct from – other modes and forms of written instruction. Rather than offering a prescriptive or overly general conclusion, it is intended that this study should stimulate further discussion about just

Preface  xxv how illuminating instructional treatises and trends can be, and what they can tell us about how and why people copied, purchased, and accessed instructional literatures. It may also have something to say about the manuscript-print nexus and the impact that print has on readers of vernacular works. Does material such as that under discussion here find a larger audience of readers when it is printed? Or does the printing of a work such as Lanfranc’s little surgery that, according to John Hall, circulated in uncontrolled ways in manuscript, appeal to a much narrower section of society? Instructional literatures are arguably part of a more general trend that sees the narrowing and specialization of textual forms with print42; however, we cannot fully divorce the instructional text from its ancestors in manuscript, nor are we always encouraged to do so by early modern editors. Even though John Hall is wary of unchecked circulation of privileged material in manuscript, he is required to consult and collate manuscripts to establish his text, and he discusses the veracity of those manuscripts in his Epistle ­Dedicatorie. The printed codicological texts and recipes that are the focus of the latter part of Chapter 3 are, by their nature, invested in the preservation not only of texts that circulate in manuscript but in the methods by which handwritten texts, books, and documents are created and embellished, and people like Dorothy Lewkenore actively used printed works to create their own homemade manuscript volumes. And of course collectors continued to preserve and conserve both manuscripts and the texts they contained; sometimes, as is the case with witnesses to The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy, manuscript copies were still being produced into the seventeenth century. Printed works evoke the manuscript, preserving recipes for ink and other substances, supplying material suitable for commonplacing and recopying into miscellanies, and containing advisory verses that may be copied and displayed in the home. Instructional literatures, then, are produced, read, copied, sold, purchased, and collected in a landscape in which the manuscript and the printed book not only co-existed but co-existed symbiotically, each contributing to the creation of the other. The works that are the focus of this volume are very definitely part of wider literary culture in the period 1350–1650, a period in which we witness not a break with older knowledge and instruction but in fact a renewal and renewed appraisal of its witnesses.

Notes 1 James H. Morey, “Middle English Didactic Literature,” in Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, eds David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), pp. 183–97 (p. 183). 2 Laurel Braswell (Means), “Utilitarian and Scientific Prose,” in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed A.S.G. Edwards (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984), pp. 337–88 (p. 337).

xxvi Preface 3 Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, Janne Skaffari and Matti Piekola, “Approaching instructional writing in English,” in Instructional Writing in English: Studies in Honour of Risto Hiltunen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), pp. 1–12 (p. 4). The authors also note that there is considerable variation in this paradigm: instruction may be implicit or explicit, for example, or instructional language may not always be present. Instructional texts that lack overt statements about their purpose are also extant (pp. 6, 7). 4 George R. Keiser, “Scientific, Medical and Utilitarian Prose,” in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 231–48 (pp. 231–32). 5 See for example Julia Boffey, Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475– 1530 (London: British Library, 2012), which stresses “points of intersection […] between the production and use of manuscripts and the production and use of printed material” in the five decades following Caxton’s establishment of a press at Westminster (p. 5). See also David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998). 6 Natasha Glaisyer, “Popular Didactic Literature,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, volume I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed Joad Raymond (Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 510–19 (p. 513). 7 The work of Laurel Braswell (Means), Monica Green, George R. Keiser, Linne R. Mooney, Päivi Pahta, Teresa Tavormina, Irma Taavitsainen and Linda Voigts, among others, is exceptional in this respect. 8 http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home [accessed 30 June 2018]. 9 Morey (2005, p. 183) states that didactic verse is “the largest single body of Middle English poetry” and “there is an even greater amount of didactic prose”. His chapter, however, is restricted to discussion of works of religious didacticism. 10 D.H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 218. 11 Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, eds, Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, Studies in English Language (Cambridge: ­Cambridge UP, 2004), p. 3. 12 Irma Taavitsainen, “Authority and Instruction in Two Sixteenth-Century Medical Dialogues,” in Instructional Writing in English: Studies in Honour of Risto Hiltunen, eds Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), pp. 105–24 (p. 108). In particular Bullein’s work The Feuer Pestilence has a literary frame involving several characters who have become infected with the plague, each representing a different stereotype; see also Irma Taavitsainen and Saara Nevanlinna, “’Pills to purge melancholy’ – Nonstandard Elements in A Dialogue Against Fever Pestilence,” in Writing in Nonstandard English, Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 67, eds Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), pp. 151–91. 13 See for example George Keiser, “Verse Introductions to Middle English Medical Treatises,” English Studies 84 (2004): 301–17; and Carrie Griffin, “Reconsidering the Recipe: Materiality, Narrative and Text in Later Medieval Instructional Manuscripts and Collections,” in Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, 1350–1550: Packaging, Presentation and Consumption, eds Emma Cayley and Susan Powell (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013), pp. 135–49. 14 Lisa H. Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).

Preface  xxvii 15 In particular publishers such as the Early English Text Society (Oxford) and Middle English Texts (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter). The latter who, at the time of writing, have published fifty-four editions, privilege lesser-known, shorter and extra-canonical works Middle English, including some editions of instructional works. For a recent discussion of matters relating to the editing and publication of Middle English texts see Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu’s “Introduction” to their edition of Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx. Texts and Transitions 12. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018, pp. 1–17 (in particular pp. 3 ff). 16 Linda E. Voigts, “Medical Prose” (pp. 315–37) and Laurel Braswell, “Utilitarian and Scientific Prose” (pp. 337–88), in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed A.S.G. Edwards (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984). 17 George R. Keiser, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, Volume X: Works of Science and Information, ed A.E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998). 18 Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British Library, 2005); The DIMEV: An Open-Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse. www.dimev.net/index.html [accessed 30 June 2018]. 19 See in particular the essays in volume II (1100–1400) and volume III (1400– 1557) by Peter Murray Jones (“Medicine and Science,” pp. 433–48); George R. Keiser, “Practical Books for the Gentleman,” pp. 470–94; and Nicholas Orme, “Schools and School-Books,” pp. 449–69); see also Keiser, 2004a, pp. 231–48. This latter essay concludes with a useful bibliography of major studies of instructional texts in medieval England. 20 George R. Keiser, “Scientific, Medical and Utilitarian Prose,” in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 321–48. 21 See for instance the Voigts-Kurtz Search Programme (or eVK), a database of scientific and medical writings in Old and Middle English compiled by Linda Voigts and Patricia Deery Kurtz, hosted by the University of Missouri (and building on Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin [Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy, 1963] and supplements): http://cctr1.umkc.edu/search [accessed 30 June 2018]. Another online resource, the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts is a “diachronic corpus” of Middle English texts categorized under six headings, two of which related to didactic texts: instruction religious and instruction secular; see www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/ Helsinki­Corpus/ [accessed 30 June 2018]. A database compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Marti Mäkinen entitled Middle English ­Medical Texts in 2005 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins) is available as a CD-ROM. 22 See, for instance, Margaret Connolly, “Evidence for the continued use of medieval medical prescriptons in the sixteenth century: a fifteenth-century remedy book and its later owner,” Medical History 60.2 (2016): 133–54. 23 http://ustc.ac.uk/index.php [accessed 30 June 2018]. 24 For instance, Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (eds), Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects and Texts, 1400–1800 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2007). Many studies, for example Joan Fitzpatrick (ed), Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), focus on the intersection between literary texts and representations and the more practical works in circulation that may have informed them.

xxviii Preface 25 See in particular Helen Smith, ‘Grossly material things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012); Sharon T. Strocchia (ed), Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe, Renaissance Studies special issue 28.4 (2014); see also Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (eds), Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction and Performance, Ashgate Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Aldershot, 2011); Elaine Leong, “Herbals she peruseth: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Studies 28.4 (2014): 556–78. See also chapter five (below). 26 Kristine Kowalchuk, ed, Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century ­Englishwomen’s Receipt Books (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2017). 27 Elisabeth Salter, Popular Reading in English, c. 1400–1600 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013); Joad Raymond (ed), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol. I: Beginnings to 1600 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011). 28 See for instance Irma Taavitsainen and Paivï Pahta (2004) and Irma ­Taavitsainen and Paivï Pahta, (eds), Medical Writing in Early Modern ­English (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011). 29 Among them Javier E. Diaz Vera and Rosario Caballero (eds), Textual Healing: Studies in Medieval English Medical, Scientific, and Technical Texts, Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication 101 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), and Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 30 The Lateran Council of 1215 approved the production of texts in the vernacular to educate the literate laity, with particular reference to confession (Peikola et al., 2009, p. 2). 31 Glaisyer, 2011, pp. 510–11; she cites the example of Walton’s Compleat ­Angler (1653), a much reprinted book that has been read by scholars as a literary/political as well as practical text (p. 510). 32 See Salter (2013, pp. 6–18) for a discussion of definitions of popular literature and culture. The term ‘popular fiction’ might be said to have similar connotations; for a concise and useful discussion see Bernice M. Murphy, Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017), in particular the Introduction. 33 Wendy Wall, “Reading the Home: The Case of The English Housewife,” in Renaissance Paratexts, eds Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 165–84; cited in Glaisyer (2011, p. 513). 34 David Pearson writes about the extent to which owners have marked their books, stating that there are “numerous ways in which this may be done – such as inscriptions, bookplates, armorial stamps”; but it is important to remember that many readers will have not left any traces. See further his Provenance Research in Book History: A Handbook (London: The British Library/Oak Knoll Press, 1994, repr. 1998), p. 8. Similarly Peikola et al. note that the identification of an owner for a book “does not necessarily reveal anything about its reading processes” (2009, p. 8). 35 See also Ruth Carroll, “The Middle English Recipe as a Text-Type,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100 (1999): 27–42; and Ruth Carroll, “Middle English Recipes: Vernacularisation of a Text-Type,” in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, eds I. Taavitsainen and P. Pahta (­Cambridge: Cambridge UP), pp. 174–191. 36 Glaisyer, 2011, p. 511, citing Sandra Sherman, “The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Life 28 (2004): 115–35. 37 The Gouernment of Health (1558/9; STC 4040; USTC 505747) and ­Bulleins Bulwarke of Defence Against All Sicknes, Sorenes and Woundes (1562; STC 4033; USTC 505938); see Taavitsainen, 2009, p. 107.

Preface  xxix 38 See Carrie Griffin, The Middle English Wise Book of Philosophy and ­A stronomy: A Parallel-Text Edition Middle English Texts 47 (Universitätsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg: Middle English Texts 47, 2013), in particular pp. lv–lxv. 39 Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 76. 40 According to Keiser, there was an “ever-growing number of late medieval readers, professional and non-professional, for practical and useful information” (2004, p. 231). 41 Almanacs, particularly those dating from the seventeenth century, are important repositories of information for the political and intellectual historian; Marjorie Nicolson, “English Almanacs and the ‘New Astronomy’,” Annals of Science 4.1 (1939): 1–33 (4). 42 See James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 2: Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), p.  1, who suggests that “institutional simplifications and centralizations of the sixteenth century provoked correlative simplifications and narrowings in literature.”

Abbreviations

Briquet comp. DIMEV Diss. EETS OS ES SS eVK2 f. ff. fig. fl. JEBS introd. LALME MED MET Ms Mss NIMEV ODNB PMLA qtd. repr.

C.M. Briquet, Les filigranes: dictionnaire historique des marques du papier, dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600 (New York: Hacker, 1985) compiled Digital Index of Middle English Verse, www.dimev.net Dissertation Early English Text Society Original Series Extra Series Supplementary Series Voigts-Kurtz Search Program, Center for Academic Research Computing at the University of Missouri, http:// cctr1.umkc.edu/search folio folios figure Floruit Journal of the Early Book Society introduced by A. McIntosh, M. L. Samuels and M. Benskin (1986), A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English 8 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1986) Middle English Dictionary Online, http://quod.lib.umich. edu/m/med/ Middle English Texts manuscript manuscripts New Index of Middle English Verse, eds J. Boffey and A.S.G Edwards (London: The British Library, 2005) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online version) Publications of the Modern Language Academy of America quoted reprinted

xxxii Abbreviations sig. STC UP USTC

signature Short Title Catalogue University Press Universal Short Title Catalogue, www.ustc.ac.uk

List of Manuscripts

Aberystwyth National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn II.i (olim Porkington 10) National Library of Wales, Peniarth 394D (olim Hengwrt 92)

Cambridge Emmanuel College, I.4.31 Trinity College, O.9.38 Trinity College, O.10.21 Trinity College, R.3.19 Trinity College, R.14.41 Trinity College, R.14.45 University Library, Ee.4.31 University Library, Ff.2.38 University Library, Ii.6.2 University Library, Ii.6.33 University Library, Ll.4.14

Copenhagen Royal Library New Collection, 314

Exeter Cathedral Library, 3510 (Exeter Book)

Lincoln Lincoln Cathedral, 91

London British Library, Additional 10440

xxxiv  List of Manuscripts British Library, Additional 12195 British Library, Additional 29729 British Library, Additional 31042 British Library, Additional 48031A British Library, Cotton Nero A.x British Library, Cotton Nero D.iv British Library, Egerton 2433 British Library, Harley 273 (Ludlow Manuscript) British Library, Harley 1684 British Library, Harley 2252 British Library, Harley 2253 British Library, Harley 2381 British Library, Harley 4011 British Library, Royal 17.C.15 British Library, Royal 17.D.15 British Library, Royal Appendix 70 British Library, Sloane 421A British Library, Sloane 686 British Library, Sloane 783B British Library, Sloane 965 British Library, Sloane 1315 British Library, Sloane 1317 British Library, Sloane 2027 British Library, Sloane 2453 British Library, Sloane 2584 Lambeth Palace, 853 Society of Antiquaries, 282 Society of Antiquaries, 287 University College, Anglia 6 Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 397 Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 564

Manchester Chetham’s Library, 8009 (Mun.A.6.31)

New Haven Yale Center for British Art, R486.M43 1450

New York Columbia University, Plimpton 260

List of Manuscripts  xxxv

Oxford Balliol College, 354 Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61 Bodleian Library, Ashmole 189 Bodleian Library, Ashmole 1477 Bodleian Library, Bodley 483 Bodleian Library, Douce 37 Bodleian Library, Lat. Misc. C. 66 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 813 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D. 238 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D. 1220 Bodleian Library, Tanner 2 Bodleian Library, Tanner 407

Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 8216 Bibliothèque National, anglais 25

San Marino Huntington Library, HM 128

Washington Folger Shakespeare Library, v.a.430

A Note on Transcription

Unless otherwise stated, all transcriptions from manuscript texts are my own. I have added light modern punctuation in some cases, and I expand abbreviations silently. I have also, in some cases, introduced capitalisation and modern word division.

1 The Professional Text from Manuscript to Print Lanfranc of Milan and John Hall

Lanfranc of Milan’s Chirurgia parva, also known as the “Little Treatise on Surgery,” appeared for sale in London in 1565, printed by Thomas Marshe of St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street.1 The prefaces accompanying this edition, compiled and part-authored by the surgeon John Hall, are considerable, 2 consisting variously of introductory essays, letters, poems, and other paratextual material. These documents are a rich vein of information relating to the processes behind the creation and organisation of the volume, and indeed also transmit important evidence of sixteenth-century attitudes towards what was by then a centuries-old text, as well as indications as to how it might have been received by a reading audience. The volume opens with a portrait of Hall, along with an epithet, 3 and then features a poem, The bookes verdict (sig. +2r); then follows The Epistle Dedicatory (sig. +2v) to the company of Barber-­ Surgeons of London and two essays, each by fellow surgeons of Hall’s: the first is an essay written for “the professors of Chirurgie” by William Cunningham, a London doctor and reader in anatomy (sig. ¶3v), and the second is a greeting to John Hall himself, by Thomas Gale, an officer of the company of surgeons, described as a master of surgery (sig. *2r). There is also a second verse to the reader, and a long preface, To the reader, penned by Hall himself; finally, we find a preface allegedly written by Lanfranc himself to a dear friend (sig. B1r), a feature that Hall has apparently retained from the text in manuscript. The author recovered by Hall for the new professional class of surgeons in England was likely to have already been well known, the writings attributed to him having circulated in manuscript for centuries and his name popularly linked to medicine. Lanfranc of Milan (c. 1250–306) completed his Chirurgia parva in Lyon where he had set up a practice having been banished from Milan by the Visconti c.1290.4 He had been a pupil of the famous surgeon William of Saliceto at Bologna and his works – both the Chirurgia parva and the Chirurgia magna (which he completed in Paris around 1296, and which was an expansion of the more popular parva) – are now credited with the transmission of aspects of Islamic and Italian medical practice and theory to northern Europe, in particular to France (Keiser, 1998, p. 3645); indeed, his Chirurgia

2  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print magna was considered one of the most important surgical textbooks of the Middle Ages.5 Both works were translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Dutch, and Hebrew.6 At Paris, Lanfranc worked as a medical physician and teacher, habitually conducting public clinics to instruct in surgery. Crucially, he “maintained the importance of the surgeon’s having a profound knowledge of medicine,”7 and that is perhaps one of the reasons why his work was still considered relevant for sixteenth-century medical professionals across Europe. It was one of those professionals, John Hall, who was responsible for the compilation of the 1565 printed version of Lanfranc’s Chirurgia parva. Hall was a member of the Guild of Barber-Surgeons of London (1529–68) and a contemporary of the renowned surgeon-royal Thomas Vicary8; but importantly, in his re-presentation of Lanfranc, he was participating in a tradition that had seen Lanfranc’s works disseminated to an English audience since the fourteenth century, when a sustained programme of translation of surgical texts into the various European vernaculars had occurred, sparked by the desire for more professional but accessible texts.9 The Chirurgia parva had been in circulation in manuscript in Latin since the 1300s and the English versions in manuscript that are extant survive from the middle of the fifteenth century, testifying to an increased appetite for the learned, specialised tracts that were spreading northwards (in line with the relocation of the centre of surgical practice from Bologna to Germany, the Netherlands, and Paris) at a steady pace.10 However, the English edition of Lanfranc was a relatively late arrival to the world of print; in fact, works by Lanfranc had been popular and widely disseminated in print from the 1480s onwards in continental ­Europe, where they first became available in Latin and then in translation.11 A Latin text of the Chirurgia parva was printed with texts by Guy de Chauliac, Bonaventura de Castello and others in a folio volume that is illustrated with woodcuts, published in Venice by Bonetus Locatellus for Octavianus Scotus in 1498.12 Indeed, the Chirurgia parva in particular was one of the texts that appealed to many early European printers, being translated and printed several times throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As early as 1481 the Chirurgia parva (again paired with some of de Chauliac’s texts) was printed in Dutch by Conradus Braem in Louvain13; the Middle Dutch version is preserved in two medieval manuscripts: London, British Library, MS Harley 1684 and Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 8216 (Huizenga, 2008, p. 441).14 As well as that, versions of the Kleyne wundartznei translated by Otto Brunfels were printed in Strasbourg by Christian I Egenolff and Paul Götz in 1528 and 1529; a second version of Brunfels’ translation was printed in 1528, also in Strasbourg by Johann Schott.15 In addition, Heinrich von Augsburg Steiner published the Kleine wundartzney at his press in Augsburg in 1528.16 Otto Brunfels also translated Ein

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  3 nützliches wunderartzney büchlein (“A useful little book on surgery”), a similar work that appears to be a reduced Chirurgia parva; this work was immensely popular, being printed in 1529 in Zwickau by Gabriel Kantz17; also in 1529, 1530 and 1534 in Erfurt, by Melchior I. Sachse; and by Hermann Gülfferich in 1552.18 It was printed in Frankfurt by Christian Egenolff in 1569, this time as the Klein wundartznei, but in the translation by Brunfels.19 More generally, Lanfranc’s works were also being published and, we must assume, were being read through the early years of the establishment of the printing presses in Europe: his Chirurgia magna was published in French in Lyon, 1480, translated by Guillaume Yvoire and again in Lyon in 1490, from the shop of Jean de la Fontaine20; it was also published in Paris by Pierre Le Dru and Durand Gerlier in 1508, 21 while a version in Spanish was available in Seville from 1495, printed by Juan Pegnitzer, Magno Herbst and Thomas Glockner. 22 Hall’s compilation took its place, then, in a rich European tradition in which many surgical works – not only those attributed to Lanfranc – were more readily available; nonetheless an anxiety around this fact finds itself in tension with a desire to increase accessibility, expressed by Hall and his colleagues in the paratextual material.

John Hall’s Edition of Lanfranc In a period when many authors and printers made good use of publicity to sell their wares in a competitive marketplace, Hall approaches the compilation of the 1565 edition both as a cautious editor and a judicious surgeon, and his version of the work is infused with an awareness of the incompatibility of those roles. 23 Avoiding sensationalism and grand statements, he appeals instead to the educated reader whilst actively discouraging the curious. In this he is undoubtedly conscious of the long history and reputation of the work and of his role as a catalyst in the textual tradition, and is keen to impart to his reader the pains he has taken to restore the work for a modern audience; simultaneously, however, he wants to ensure that the work will be properly accessed and understood by a very select section of the public. He therefore introduces that tension into the prefatory material: the desire to at once open up and restrict access to the information, and his laborious layering of various paratexts at the beginning of the edition seems to be motivated both by a genuine concern about the correct dissemination of the text and by a desire to be understood as a bona fide editor, well versed in the conventional expectations around publication in this period. Hall gives the treatise a new title: “Lanfrance of Mylayne his briefe,” insisting that it has been “reduced from dyuers translations to our vulgar or vsuall frase” (emphasis mine): this statement is more complex than may initially be apparent. For Hall does not claim to have merely translated the text, as might be implied in the use of the verb “reduce” (which

4  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print can mean “to translate” [MED reducen v. 4(a)]); in fact, there were several English translations that have circulated in manuscript throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, versions of which Hall is aware. Rather, his concern is with the filters through which the text has passed on its way to being translated, filters which have transformed the text, altering it so that its originality or reliability has been altered. The dissemination of the text has apparently diminished its completeness in ways that implied but are not fully articulated by Hall: there is perhaps a contrast in the first lines of the title page between the exaltation of Lanfranc’s “most excellent and learned woorke” and the perhaps rather disappointing rendering in the “vsuall frase” of English. However, Hall’s choice of verb reduce is quite deliberate and charged, given its frequent occurrence in medical and surgical texts; some of the primary meanings of the verb reducen relate to restoration and recovery. 24 Hall’s recovery of Lanfranc is essentially completed in a twofold process: primarily, he restores a text of Lanfranc, which has circulated until now in diverse (and in, we must infer, diversely sophisticated) translations, but he also replenishes the text at an intellectual level, thus ensuring that its vernacular version does not lack in authority or information. For Hall, this process is central to the textual project, and the reader cannot help but imagine the surgeon at work as he repairs, stitches and, effectively, breathes new life into a text or textual tradition which has been damaged or nearly lost. This conceit is extended in Hall’s reassertion of his professional credentials: he is acting as a “Chirurgien” in his compilation of additional material, which is described thus: … first published in the Englyshe prynte by Iohn Halle, Chirurgien, who hath thervnto necessarily annexed A table, as wel of the names of diseases and simples with their vertues, as also of all other termes of the arte opened Very profitable for the better vnderstanding of the same, or other like workes. And in the ende a compendious worke of Anatomie, more vtile and profitable, then any here tofore in the Englyshe tongue publyshed An Historiall Expostvlation also against the beastly abusers, both of Chyrurgerie and Phisicke in our tyme: With a goodly doctrine, and instruction, necessary to be marked and folowed of all true Chirurgies (1565 title page). Hall’s surgical amendment, and thereby improvement, of Lanfranc’s work suggests that he is not just another filter in the transmission history of the text, but rather a catalyst in that trajectory. Positioning himself as someone who restores the tradition of the great surgeon, he therefore explicitly aligns himself with Lanfranc, with his influence and, importantly, with his authority. This he achieves by focusing on the shortcomings of Lanfranc’s work in manuscript, thereby foregrounding his own suitability both as an authority figure and an heir to Lanfranc.

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  5 As we might expect he is extremely deferent to his ancestor, mainly by preserving the key facets of his tract: instead of correcting it he enlarges it, appending a table of diseases, simples and other terms, “opened” or explained; and he adds to the surgery a “compendious worke of ­A natomie.” These additions do not constitute a critique of Lanfranc’s work; rather, they may be intended to signal that there is or should be a specific audience for the work, or to emphasise the expertise and the skill of the compiler who has a unique understanding of how to effectively frame the surgery. Hall positions himself, then, as a key agent in the transmission of Lanfranc’s expertise particularly to an English-speaking audience: effectively. For while he does not interfere with the text per se, he offers what is in fact a new aspect of a tradition, appealing to fresh readers and even ultimately forming and cementing opinion by assisting readers in the understanding of “other like workes.” His assertions are bold, yet measured: the Anatomy added by him is useful and profitable, for instance, but only more so “then any here tofore in the Englyshe tongue publyshed” (title page). What emerges from Hall’s self-fashioning on the title page is his deliberate construction of himself in relation to his ghostly ancestor. Where Hall provides the textual apparatus that enables readers to better appreciate Lanfranc, Lanfranc is the conceptual framework through which we are encouraged to read Hall. The reader is left in no doubt as to the synergy between Hall and Lanfranc, but also between Hall’s dual identities as surgeon and compiler and editor, who has “faithfully gathered, and diligently set forth” this work. Hall reminds us that he is comfortable both in the professional realm of surgery and in the world of literary authorship and bookish endeavours. In fact, our editor also practised as a poet, and he combined this interest rather successfully with his professional activities. He found himself in some demand for his verse, though for the most part the demand was from his own colleagues in surgery: in 1563, for example, Hall was commissioned to write some laudatory verses for Thomas Gale’s Enchiridon of Chirurgery (Beck, 1974, p. 194). 25 His first published work had been a metrical version of The Proverbs of Solomon, which appeared in 1549/50, printed by Thomas Raynalde, 26 and he composed The Court of Virtue (also printed by Marshe) in July 1565. 27 He is as familiar, then, with rhetoric and persuasive writing as he is with anatomy and surgery. We might say, consequently, that Hall is aware of the power of strong authorial statements and the careful contextualisation of a work. He chooses a very particular term to describe his setting forth of Lanfranc’s Chirurgia parva, showing that he is aware that his restoration of Lanfranc has material and textual as well as intellectual implications. He describes the material as “furst published in the Englyshe prynte” (title page), and it is ultimately this first English edition, and the standardising power of the relatively new technology, that allows

6  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print Hall to claim authority as a foil to the unreliable witnesses to the work in manuscript. The so-called “dyuers translations” are a function of the preprint landscape, where are found unstable texts and sloppy scribes that for Hall threatened the very integrity – if not the existence – of the work itself. Hall sees the text rescued from obscurity: part of the restoration of the text – a central aspect to that restoration, in fact – is the rendering of the text stable in reliable “Englyshe prynte.” Moreover, he anticipates any questions that his reading public may have in the Epistle Dedicatorie. This section opens with yet another assertion of Hall’s authority: a reminder of his professional credentials, since it dedicates the work to Hall’s colleagues and fellow surgeons: “[v]nto the Worshipvl, the maisters, Wardens, and consequently to all the whole company and brotherhod of Chirurgiens of London, Iohn Halle, one of the leste of them, sendeth hartie and louynge salutation” (sig. +iiv); and it is under their guidance and direction, he claims, that the work was produced: I therfore, as preparatiue to the reste that shall folowe, dedicate thys my symple laboure, in settyng forth this excellent compendious worke, called Chirurgia parua Lanfranci, vnder your ayde, helpe succor, tuition, and defence: whiche was translated out of Frenche into the olde Saxony englishe, about twoo hundred yeres past (sig. ¶ir). Here, the process by which John Hall has sourced the text that he presents to the London Barber-Surgeons is described in more detail. On the evidence of the quoted excerpt, Hall has not freshly translated the work, but has corrected that which was already in circulation, modernising some of the linguistic features of “the olde Saxony englishe”: Which I haue nowe not only reduced to our vsuall speache, by changyng or newe translating suche wordes, as nowe be inueterate, and growne out of knowledge by processe of tyme, but also conferred my labours in this behalf with other copies, both in Frenche and latin: (sig. ¶ir). The repetition of the word “reduce” would seem to signal that Hall’s primary intention is to renew the language, a process he describes as “newe translating” words and phrases that are now “inueterate” and “growne out of knowledge.” Hall has not carried out this work unilaterally, but has consulted French and Latin copies of Lanfranc for accuracy. In this task he acknowledges his limitations, and cites and colleagues in order to lend gravitas to the project. Hall is painstaking in this, even thanking colleagues for loans of manuscripts and copies in other languages. 28 He acknowledges

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  7 maister Bacter, for his latine copie, and Symon Hudie for his french copie, and other English copies: of the which I had one of Iohn Chamber, & an other of Iohn Yates, both very auncient with other mo: whose good helpe hath not a little farthered me in these thinges, to the intent that it might perfectly come forth to a publique profite, whiche to doe I was constreigned, not only because I would not truste to muche to myne owne rude iudgementes: but also that by the authoritie of dyuers men of knowledge, this excellent worke (as it is worthy) may ye more effectually be alowed and accepted (sig. ¶ir). 29 He neatly transmits a number of ideas to the reader in this short passage. In the first instance, his reference to the “newe translating” of Lanfranc aligns him with attitudes to information and access to information evident in the textual culture of the mid-sixteenth century, attitudes that seem to find particular expression in medical and surgical works. Despite the controls exerted by the various guilds, works that recovered older learning and practices and reframed them for a wider public using methods similar to those of Hall continued to appear; an example is The Birth of Mankind by Eucharius Rösslin (1540), a midwifery text translated by Thomas Raynalde that warns against hasty and rash midwives, in ways that echo Hall’s own warnings against rogue practitioners.30 The passage quoted above also references Hall’s concern to transmit some sense of the research that he has conducted: he has “conferred” his labour with other copies of the text, taking care to consult older versions of the text primarily borrowed from fellow surgeons, he has looked at Lanfranc in Latin and French, on loan from (fellow surgeons, we must assume) Master Bacter and Simon Hudie, respectively, and he has also consulted other English copies, at least two of which he has borrowed from John Chamber and from John Yates (a fellow officer of the company). He has not produced this work in isolation, then, but has consulted a number of authorities: principally other versions of Lanfranc and, by this action, the authority of his fellow surgeons. He also seems to want to cultivate a sense of his belonging to a coterie, with access to certain expert books and specialist knowledge. 31 As we have seen, such volumes were unlikely to have been widely or generally dispersed: after his death Vicary’s medical and surgical books were passed on to surgeons, specifically members of his guild (Beck, 1974, p. 203). 32 Also, the reader’s sense of having privileged access to living professionals is reinforced in Hall’s citation of his colleagues, “dyuers men of knowledge,” by whom “this excellent worke (as it is worthy) may ye more effectually be alowed and accepted.” Hall gains the confidence of the reader by naming well-known surgeons, notably Dr Chamber, one-time consultant to Henry VIII, implying close relationships with each of them, and drawing not just on their authority but also the authority of the written word. Moreover, barber-surgeons were as likely to have owned books

8  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print as the academically trained physicians, and the supposed intellectual gulf between surgeon and physician was not as profound as is often imagined: even a barber-surgeon like Thomas Plawdon (d. 1413) owned books that contained academic material, therefore adhering to the authority of the written word as well as reliant on the experience gained under an apprenticeship.33 The nature of that written word, however, demands some investigation. According to the dedicatory epistle, Hall consults four other copies of Lanfranc: he looks at one in Latin (borrowed from Bacter) and one in French, which was loaned to him by Hudie. It might be assumed that these were printed volumes; as we have seen, several French translations circulated in the sixteenth century, and there was at least one Latin version being read in the fifteenth century. Moreover, the English copies consulted by Hall (and loaned by Chamber and Yates) are distinguished as “very auncient,” and were therefore probably manuscript versions, since (as far as is known) no printed English version of Lanfranc’s Chirurgia parva existed before Hall’s 1565 edition. The only distinction made by Hall, apart from that of language, is that the English versions are “auncient,” but even this indicates that their authority might be problematic, given that the language itself, in Hall’s view, needs correction and modernisation. The question of authority is linked then to the sense of the instability of the text, with which I argue Hall is preoccupied in this Epistle; he does not state that he prefers the French and Latin versions to the “auncient” older English copies, but implicit in his writing is an awareness of serious variance in the textual tradition. Significantly, Hall borrows not one but two English texts, presumably for comparison with his own version. His insistence on and detailed account of his search for authority in both the earlier versions of Lanfranc and the creation of a new text is fraught with respect to that very authority. Hall attempts to explain this by referring to versions of Lanfranc in multiple languages, saying that he merely wants to check words that are now obscure or no longer in use, but the intricate relation between manuscript and print, scribal and mechanical, and even manuscript and manuscript informs Hall’s account, and his search for authority problematises the nature of authority itself: the documentary sources conferred with ultimate importance are now at once authoritative and not, their significance constantly shifting. The anxiety expressed by Hall also feeds into his primary concern: how is the knowledge and information contained in his volume to be understood and used? The answer to this is not immediately discernible, but what is abundantly clear is that Hall attempts to impose control and order on a tradition that is characterised by disorder. That disorder is represented by multiple versions of a work, both hand-copied and printed. Apparently, potentially anyone literate can possess a text of Lanfranc and can use, retransmit and – importantly – misunderstand its

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  9 instruction. Interestingly Hall namechecks the owners of the books that he takes on loan, perhaps as a way to convince readers of the reliability of the versions consulted by him. Hall’s lenders are discerning, polyglot readers who merit and in turn make good use of the store of privileged knowledge at their disposal. The surgeons are also evidently responsible lenders, not allowing texts to circulate amongst unqualified and unregulated readers, silently approving of Hall’s use of the work. The condition of the text, which in manuscript is subject to mistranscription, abridgement, misinterpretation, and other types of “abuse,” is clearly an issue for Hall. In the context of a textual landscape that is characterised by scribal practices such a reliance on memory, anxiety about the transmission of texts and issues like miscopying, misrepresentation, and textual instability register for several medieval authors: famously, Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde hopes that none will “miyswrite” his work, while, Reginald Pecock complains about copies of his works having “ben runne abrood and copied ayens my wil and myn entent.”34 Such anxiety must have loomed large, too, for the authors, compilers, and translators of texts that transmitted medical and curative information in manuscript, since an instance of eye-skip or faulty copying could render a recipe or formula useless or, worse, dangerous.35 Manuscripts, or more properly the mechanics of transmission in manuscript, had the potential to threaten not just the unity of the text but also the integrity of the proper audience for that text. For Hall, however, the permanence and clarity of print is perhaps more dangerous and more threatening than the undisciplined culture of the book in manuscript, which Hall counters by developing various strategies in order to cultivate and attract an already informed readership for Lanfranc, ordering and prefacing the information in such terms as to actively discourage a lay audience. This is a complex achievement for the language used by Hall, particularly on his title page: the text is simultaneously published but closed, set down in English print but for English surgeons, not for general consumption. Moreover, when Hall refers to the production of the volume for “a publique profite,” it is clear that it should be mediated by credible men of knowledge. Thus, the volume is a semantic space that is multilayered and nuanced. Hall overtly makes this information public but on the condition that the reader is an educated one, a caution that seems to be challenged by the very medium in which the work exists. Hall seems to be aware of the paradox, for his polemic seeks to counteract the conventional phraseology that he is obliged to use on the volume’s front. Moreover, he attempts to impose boundaries on the potential reach of information contained in the book; he achieves this in part by demarcating the discipline, distancing lay or unprofessional readers whilst simultaneously cultivating his desired professional public. The title page offers us a sense of what is to come: as already mentioned, the text is heavily prefaced, one example being the “[h]istoriall expostvlation also against the beastly abusers, both

10  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print of Chyrurgerie and Phisicke in our tyme: With a goodly doctrine, and instruction, necessary to be marked and folowed of all true Chirurgies” (title page). These added materials, literally surrounding the text, function rather like protective layers that ward off curious, untrained readers. And in his attempts to shape a discipline, Hall looks to the conventions of contemporary texts to further make his point, composing an argument or “verdict” to the book, in verse. The verse argument constitutes a ‘who goes there?,’ ventriloquized by the animated book, and reads as very clear, warning those who delight in the pursuit of old learning, in books … Wherin they learne experience, To heale both sicke and sore. Whiche I alowe in dede and worde, In those that understande: For otherwyse it is a sworde, Put in a mad mans hande. Let Idiotes and betles blynde, Therfore lay me aparte: Leste contrarie myne authors mynde, They rudly me peruerte (sig. +iir). These verses, though crudely executed, condense rather efficiently the key message of the wordy introductory essays: books in the hands of the wrong reader will cause untold damage, most critically to the reputation and integrity of the profession. The unchecked reader lacks the judgment and discernment of the professional to such an extent that the information gathered by him is misused and abused. The honeybee analogy perhaps best illustrates this: For as the bee doth honie take, From euery goodly flowre, And spyders of the same doe make, Venum that wyll deuoure (sig. +iir). If accessed by the non-professional, even factual and practical information can be perverted. Moreover, the disquiet expressed by the author specifically relates to the risk to the integrity of the work; in much the same way that Hall’s spiders create deadly venom out of the same nectar with which bees make nourishing honey, he fears the danger that may ensue when good information is misused. That information is not neutral, and the dangers of the facile transmission of knowledge is linked implicitly to the manuscript tradition and the freedom of information that Hall imagines as a direct consequence of the circulation

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  11 of the unfettered text. The two catalysts: untrained readers, capable of receiving important information poorly, and the “[b]okes written long before,” which demand the understanding, new knowledge and discernment of the professional reader, converge in Hall’s mind to create an unsupportable situation involving undisciplined readers and complex, specialist information. In order to be effective, then, the book must paradoxically reach a learned audience (“… all learned men and wyse,/To good purpose can vse”). The consequence for “vyle abusers” is “shame,” whereas the book claims to increase the “fame” of responsible readers. Hall cannot conceal his contempt for the users of the manuscript text that come to it armed only with ideas about “blinde customes.” Once again, Hall focuses his anxiety on the manuscript book, seeing it as damaging to the integrity of Lanfranc’s work. As we have seen, to some extent the warnings foregrounded in the paratextual material are generic, but the compiler registers more than once a sense of discomfort with the nature of some information that circulates in handwritten form. He suggests that the untrained reader will seek out those aspects of writing in manuscript that owe more to folklore than established authority, expressed in the assertion that so-called “blinde customes” can create doctors of “euery foole and peuish lad.” However, Hall is also aware that his text is apparently not entirely free of the blending of custom, folklore, magic, and orally transmitted lore that has characterised medical writing and practice in England for centuries. Lanfranc is not apart from that tradition but exists as an aspect of it, although the prestige associated with classical and early medieval medical authorities was most probably reinforced by the very persistence of “observation-based folk culture.”36 Hall deliberately appeals to “reason” in his readers, evoking that same judgment that has been applied by him to the handwritten books borrowed from colleagues, books that preserve the English text of Lanfranc of Milan.

English Manuscripts of Lanfranc of Milan’s Chirurgia parva There are six extant English manuscripts of the Chirurgia parva, revealing only a portion of the story of the ways in which this work was transmitted to an ever widening reading public in fourteenth- and ­fifteenth-century England. The material qualities of these witnesses also provide some insight into ways in which Lanfranc’s treatise – and, by consequence, his reputation and authority – was received and developed by the scribes, readers, copyists and practitioners of the later English Middle Ages. These agents did not simply read or copy the work: they chose to comment on, adapt, select, and, crucially, organise in ways that suggest that attitudes to structure, order and genre were equally in flux and interrogated in the later Middle Ages, prior to the establishment of the first printing presses.

12  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print It seems likely that circulation of the work in manuscripts copied in England owes much more to deliberation than to happenstance. Chirurgia parva is a learned tract produced by a highly skilled and reputable practitioner who was part of a professional class of medical men, and thus its persistence was dependent on a corresponding critical mass of equally well-educated, skilled, professional surgeons in England who, though highly skilled and trained, were “more comfortable in the vernacular than in Latin” (Keiser, 1998, p. 3645). The many and varied dietaries, leechbooks, regimens, remedy books and phlebotomies that are to be found in English medieval books were, for some practitioners of the medical arts, at least, insufficient to meet their professional needs; Keiser states that “although relatively few of these vernacular works have been edited, evidence from those which have and from studies of manuscripts attests that a rather large number of practitioners were availing themselves of the specialized knowledge and the technical craft necessary to address the demands of their society” (1998, p. 3645). 37 Implicit in Keiser’s description of the literary landscape of materia medica is the high level of discernment amongst audiences and particular attitudes towards different types of text. Though direct responses to a text’s quality are rarely overtly present, the documentary evidence presented by the surviving manuscripts and prints is substantial, and can help scholars to better understand general and shifting contemporary attitudes towards information and knowledge, how and from where it is received or seen to be derived, how it is organised and categorised, and for whom it is intended. However, Lanfranc’s Chirurgia parva in manuscript is subject to considerable variation with respect to how it is framed; in other words, its paratextual material is not of a standard type, a fact that points to considerable variety in contemporary attitudes to and receptions of the work. This is true even in instances where one witness may have acted as an exemplar for another. I begin with London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 397 dating from the middle of the fifteenth century, and which is an example of a witness where the transmission of the information to a coterie audience was of far greater concern than the prefacing of that information with a statement of universal appeal.38 The manuscript is a quarto of vellum, bound in ­nineteenth-century rough calf. It is an impressive volume, copied in a neat semi-current charter hand by the same scribe throughout, with initials, headings and paraphs in red (Moorat, 1962, p. 267). The volume contains the Anatomia of Lanfranc, beginning at f. 1r, along with a copy of Queen Isabella’s Book of Medicines (beginning at f. 68), a selection from the popular herbal the Circa Instans, a treatise on powders and pills, and some medical receipts. The abridged Chirurgia parva follows the Anatomia at f. 16r, and the first folios of the text (ff. 16r –18v) are taken up with a detailed table of contents, dividing the text into two by separating the surgery (the “lese”) from the antidotary (the “more”), and from there subdividing both books

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  13 into chapters. The surgical part is organised into two further sections, with twenty-seven and ten chapters respectively. Each of the two sections of the book is introduced by a rubric, introducing first Lanfranc’s “lese book” and after his larger treatise of surgery, plus an antidotary. The opening folios of the text are dominated by a clear, concise, and well-laid-out schema, apparently designed to facilitate an expert but busy reader searching for specific, specialist information. Of the six extant witnesses, the text preserved Wellcome 397 perhaps most closely aligns with the purpose and intended public of the 1565 edition. The volume is a dedicated space for the exclusive dissemination of medical, anatomical and surgical material, and has the quality of a volume prepared and organised for a professional reader. Indeed, the possibility remains that the work in manuscript, often created or intended for a specific reader, reached its wished-for audience, while Hall’s anxiety in part stems from the liberation of access that the printed book might entail. For although the work in manuscript lacks the insistent, prescriptive prefatory material in which Hall encloses the text, here Lanfranc’s work materially signifies the input of the end user of the volume: chapters and texts are clearly demarcated, and accompanying texts, such as those concerned with astrology, physiognomy, and lunary (and thus of the kind Hall would probably consider folkloric) find no place here. This seems to be closer to a textbook than might be the case for comparable works from the later medieval period, and the user requires little reminder that the information is profitable, intended to be carefully used. The prefatory statements are brief, appealing to an already converted, coterie, and well-informed readership: the “prologe” (f. 19r) instructs the reader but with an emphasis on technical matters. The effusive and lengthy paratextual material introduced by Hall cannot of course be anticipated in manuscript, but what we find in Wellcome 397 can be set against the print edition as a total contrast. It is addressed to a dear friend, Bernard, and in it Lanfranc aims to: […] rehersse bot short fewe & sad medecyinis nertheles for gret nede I ne hold hem not feble / but to hem þou myght fully trust for I set after the biddyng assayed cures and a short maner of curyng of woundes / postemes bylis cankers / festers & som curys of eyen and of Algebra a littil after that skyll taught me to werke and thorowe experience by long tyme by me confermyd. Trust somuche to þe solitle of thi witt / that by this fewe þou shalt haue þe name of a gret leche. For vnderstand that in yche werk þe leche shall haue a certyen end in his þouthe and vse þingis þt to hym helpyn to his ende (f. 19r). 39 The standard promise – that the information in the text will be responsible for the quality of future leech doctors – makes an appearance here;

14  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print however, the most emphatic of the statements is not a boast but an acknowledgement. The compiler realises that each surgeon or physician comes to a work with specific questions or solutions in mind: “in yche werk þe leche shall haue a certyen end in his þouthe and vse þingis þt to hym helpyn to his ende.” In other words, a good leech doctor is armed with certain knowledge, and it is anticipated that he will use the text as a reference work, consuming it piecemeal rather than whole, approaching it to search for specific items and information rather than as a reader concerned to progress from beginning to end. Indeed, in order to search for an answer in a specialised treatise such as this, prior knowledge is absolutely needful. Undoubtedly, the prefacing of the text with aids for such a reader, then, is deliberately undertaken, and it is likely that the volume was compiled on a commission of sorts. Moreover, the work does not claim to represent the apogee of collected knowledge; rather, it rehearses “bot short fewe & sad medecyinis.” A claim to contain the totality of knowledge on surgery would almost certainly have little effect on our discerning, silent, professional reader, who will have most certainly treated it as an “instrument of surgery” but only one, we must imagine, of many.40 Thus the knowledge (or so-called “lore”) transmitted in the book, and the book itself, become identified as a single entity: just one of the tools of the trade of a practising surgeon, and thereby unsuitable for the curious amateur. The manuscript volume containing the works of Lanfranc, among others, refuses a certain type of reader, but it achieves this in ways that are more subtle and nuanced than are the attempts by John Hall to regulate the information and the use thereof. Since the specialised techniques and materials required in the production of manuscripts rendered them prohibitively expensive for a vast number of potential readers, we might expect that the audience for such a compilation to be naturally limited41; nonetheless, the manuscript compiler sees the need to state that the information is specialised and suitable only for a readership that has reached a certain level. Similarly, although the table of contents might appear to render the work more navigable and thus open to a greater number of readers, its summary of the contents in fact reveals the levels of expertise that are required of the surgeon in order to unlock the “lore.” Where Hall sees the need to the field of learning by adding “[a] Table, as wel of the names of diseases and simples with their vertues, as also of all other termes of the arte opened” (emphasis mine), the compiler of Wellcome 397 invites an experienced reader. Moreover, Hall has to account for the possibility of untrained readers, however much he might try to repel them; Wellcome 397’s compiler most likely anticipated, in the first instance, a single reader; indeed that reader may even have been the complier himself. The circulation of the text in manuscript, an idea to which Hall responds with concern, is paradoxically likely to keep the text safer from

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  15 abusers of the art than will the printed version. Indeed, the manuscript version is not as freely available as we might imagine: Hall presumably has a copy, but when he borrowed other versions of it, he procured them, he says, from trusted practitioners of the art. The survival rate of a particular kind of manuscript volume gives us no indication of contemporary circulation rates for a work, but the passing of knowledge between practitioners had a material as well as an oral aspect based on apprenticeship, evidenced in this instance of book-borrowing, and the bequeathed copy of Guy de Chauliac from Thomas Vicary to the Guildhall. Thus, the safety of the text in manuscript may have been much more assured, since it circulated, and was sought after, by practitioners. Nonetheless, this speculation is contingent on one manuscript witness; others, and other versions of the text, were certainly part of the astonishing mix of writings available to copyists, compilers, and readers in the later English Middle Ages. Another of the mid-fifteenth century versions of the Chirurgia parva is preserved in Copenhagen, Royal Library New Collection, MS 314. Here, the prologue varies slightly, and is worth reproducing in full: Worchypfull frend Bernard I thynk to make a booke in the whiche i woold yef by the grace of god a full lernyng that falleth to the instrument of cirurgie ne i think nott in this werk to yef the but light fewe and assayed medicynes which though they be lyght and assayed neuerthelese hoold hem not foule but vpon them purpose the fully to trust forsothe I putt summarie after þin axinge in provyd medicines a schort maner of helyng of woundys appostemys vlceris cancrys and festrys and sum curys of iȝen … Take hede that in euery werke the leche oweth to sett a certeyn entent and vse thinges that wil help to his entent suthely in curing of woundis.42 This abbreviated copy of Lanfranc’s Chirurgia parva shows evidence of perhaps having been tailored at the request of a patron. Its two books, one on wounds and a second dealing with apostemes, have been combined to form a “summarie … a schort maner” to suit the specifications of the patron (“after þin axinge”). The statement on reading and use of the volume, however, is slightly variant and amounts to an instruction, “[t]ake hede that in euery werke the leche oweth to sett a certeyn entent and vse thinges that wil help to his entent suthely in curing of woundis,” that enjoins the reader to approach the work with a specific question or “entent” and to find therein the means of answering that question. For this compiler or translator, the most effective way to access the text is to interrogate it, and although this version lacks the rather sophisticated table of contents that can be found in Wellcome 397, its short format renders it accessible enough to even a busy surgical practitioner; indeed, it has the quality of a physician’s book (Taavitsainen, 1994, p. 17). The

16  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print volume also contains a plague tract attributed to one John Stanford but, as Taavitsainen notes, this is similar to John of Burgundy’s (ff. 1r –5v); several medical and culinary recipes, along with cures and remedies; a text known as Pictura urinarum (f. 6v); and an anathema (ff. 73r –75r).43 While the later manuscripts containing Lanfranc’s Chirurgia parva seem to evidence awareness on the part of the translator, compiler or reader that these works are important, specialised surgical manuals, intended for practitioners and not for general readers, the early witnesses are considerably less prescriptive in their instructions and in relation to their intended audience. The copy found in London, British Library, Harley MS 2381, a fourteenth-century witness, evidences far fewer direct instructions to the reader.44 In fact, the prologue seems to situate the text as one that actively instructs beginners, in contrast to later manuscripts: Here begynnyth the antidodarie of surgery of pety Lanfrance wich techith to make medcynes for all sorys & grevaunces þt longyth to be holyd by crafte of Curgery þe wich wt owte noumbre of tymes haue ben prevyd sothe / both of hym and of many other / the wich booke ys gete & compyled in vj chapiteris (f. 40r). The Harley text is open to readers coming to it to learn; the stated aim is to teach “to make medecynes for all sorys & grevaunces,” rendering the text universally accessible to those who want to learn. Unlike the examples we have already come across, here the text is not an instrument of surgery; it seems to offer an alternative, however, to the “crafte of Curgery,” whereby readers are invited to be educated on how to practice like a surgeon might. There is little evidence of the specialised reader or coterie public here, but what we do find is an active statement of educational purpose. These extant early manuscript versions may well exemplify the type of book about which Hall expresses concern. However, the professional ways in which manuscripts such as Wellcome 397 were produced might have assuaged his fears. Had he borrowed the manuscript that is now London, British Library, MS Royal 17.C.15 from one of his surgeon colleagues, and consulted the copy of the Chirurgia parva therein, his fears might have been exacerbated since this text has seemingly been passed through many pens and many filters. This fifteenth-century copy preserves the Chirurgia at ff. 117v–37v, and has a translator’s preface that reveals a potential non-professional appeal for Lanfranc, as well as a desire to speak to a patron and a non-Latinate audience. The prologue labels the text “a nobyll tretys off surgery afftyr the doctryn and techeing off the nobilman lanofrank,” and claims to have been “drawyn off latyn in to Inglysch be me, John Rayiner” (f. 117v).45 This translation has been undertaken “at the instans off my specyalt louer & frende John

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  17 Wyntyr,” the translator claims, “as well as my sympill reson & wytt will helpe & satisfy.” The work has been completed, then, at the request of a patron, but also, according to Rayiner, “for as much that euery man ys not expert to read the fysyhic surgery as it stant after scole masters in latyn.” The translator, the man that is named as “Rayiner,” appeals directly to “euery man,” and thus establishes two audiences for the text: the particular patron and the wider reading population, unschooled in Latin, and unable to access the information unless it is translated. Rayiner wishes to draw attention to the intention behind his translation and compilation: that every man – in particular the non-specialist – who so desires can now read Lanfranc’s surgery in English and benefit from the hitherto locked secrets and science contained therein. The unlocking, then, is the key to this translator’s preface; he is concerned with the veracity and correctness of the information only secondarily, and in this respect hands the text over to its readership to discern for themselves what is relevant, and to correct where necessary: Besechyng euery man that schall haue thys poure tretys in possissyon that ye geue hede to the intent off my wryting, but not to the simpill & rewid crafte in drawing not yyt to the rewdnes off my wrytyng, but rather I desyr your godness that ye reforme my sympylniss there as nedyth correccyon (f. 117v). The control over the correctness of the text is transferred onto an unknown audience and public; however, Rayiner places the judgement over and control of the text into the hands of the intended reader: Also my louer & frend I beseche the, off & hygh prouede honeste, that thou let not thys prosen & workes be had amongys […] folys wyth owt discrescyon, wher throw that my labre schuld be had in veyn and thorow ther neclygens in dysesing the pepill the nobyll craft off surgery schuld be had in derysuon (ff. 117v–18r). It is the role of the intended reader to ensure that the text is read and perhaps copied by only the most discerning of audiences, and to protect it from “folys wyth owt discrescyon” who may ultimately damage the reputation of “the nobyll craft off surgery.” For Rayiner, the responsibility for the correct application and interpretation of the information lies with the patron: he is a translator, not a surgeon. Appealing to the integrity of his friend and ideal reader allows him to at once advise on the correct dissemination of the text and to relinquish responsibility over how it is consumed. In the end, the impression is such that Rayiner tries to reach an educated reader with an amateur interest in surgery; someone who will most probably notice errors in the text and benignly, silently

18  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print correct them, but who will not necessarily endanger the life of a patient through blind acceptance of the information as fact. Certainly one discerning reader reasserts the authority of Lanfranc on this prologue by inscribing his name emphatically in the margin, and the attempted effacement of the name of the translator may have been carried out at a later stage. Otherwise, there is little evidence in this manuscript of readerly engagement with the text, but the contents of the manuscript: a calendar, an astrological lunary and various other medical and related texts, together point to a professional ownership and use of the volume.46 Much later, however, the book came into the hands of antiquarian collector John Theyer (1598–673) who, despite Rayiner’s fears, and given his penchant for “antique” books, had an interest in the volume probably because it was, by the 1600s, an old manuscript, with some professional decoration in the calendar section and amateurish sketches and watercolours throughout. The book finally found a home in the Royal library when Charles II purchased Theyer’s books, a collection comprising over 330 manuscripts, in 1678.47 The acquisition was the final significant group of manuscripts to be added to the Old Royal Library (Doyle, 2011, p. 81), and it included “a great number of useful mediaeval manuscripts.”48 Books containing translations of Lanfranc, whatever the quality of the text, continued to retain their professional appeal: as we have seen, Hall was able to source several copies amongst his fellow barber-surgeons. Books containing Lanfranc’s lesser surgery were collected and retained by physicians, doctors and surgeons into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One of the most fascinating manuscript copies from the fifteenth century is that found in British Library, MS Additional 10440, in which the prologue is comparable to other copies of the same date. The prologue offers the usual list of cures and of algebra49 a litel after þe resoun tauȝte me to worche and þurȝ experience by me of long tyme bestrengþid. I triste soþely so myche to þe subtilite of þin vndirstondynge þt by þese tewe with þis witt þu mayst come to a gret werk, and þurȝ þt þu shalt haue þe name of a greet leche. I cominde þe neþeles by godd and þi nobely þt þu take it to noone ydiotes, lest by þeyre vnkunnynge my werk noye to eny man. þt is ȝeuen to þee charitely to þe common profit (f. 18r). The integrity of the text is evidently of importance to the owner, scribe or patron of Additional 10440. The prologue has been corrected and revised in a second hand, in the margins; so “charitely” in the final line of the extract above is corrected to “charitably,” “bestrengþid” invites the comment “or confirmed,” and “vndirstondynge” carries the added suggestion “or witte.” Not only is the work corrected and amended by a second hand, but the scribe-compiler is keen to offer the text for benefit,

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  19 charitably and for “common profit.” In the right hands, the knowledge can benefit a great many people, much more than will ever have direct access to the material text. The prologue also conflates the different aspects of a “greet leche”: experience, reason, and proper understanding (or “witte”). MS Additional 10440 is a composite volume, in which part I runs ff. 1r –49v and is of paper; part II, from ff. 50r –57v is on vellum. 50 The binding is modern, but the manuscript’s parts were almost certainly acquired as booklets, and bound together by one Thomas Browne sometime after 1641, since he apparently signs the final folio of each. 51 At the end of part I, f. 49v, someone has written: “49 leues of þs booke Thomas Browne his booke & he bought it in 1641” and, where part II finishes, at f. 56r, is inscribed: “8 leues in þs booke Thomas Browne his booke & hee bought it in 1638”. Part one, acquired by Browne in 1641, preserves the Lanfranc text as well as a copy of The Fourthe Book of Anathomye of Gugleimo Saliceto of Piacenza (the same William Saliceto who, as it happens, was an instructor to Lanfranc of Milan), while the second, dated 1638 by Browne, has a treatise on the judgement of urines and some medical receipts. It is unclear whether this provenance points to ownership by Sir Thomas Browne, the well-known physician and a collector of old volumes, despite a remark by him in his Religio Medici implying that he was uncomfortable with the multiplicity of books, and wished instead “for the benefit of learning, to reduce it as it lay at first in a few and solid Authors; and to condemne to the fire those swarms and millions of Rhapsodies, begotten onely to distract and abuse the weaker judgements of Scholars, and to maintaine the Trade and Mystery of Typographers” (part I, section xxiv).52 Keynes notes that this position is rhetorical, evidenced in various accounts of his bibliographical interests and, most obviously, in the sale catalogue that was compiled for the disposal of his library and that of his son, Dr Edward Browne, following the death of his grandson, also named Thomas Browne (1968, p. 166).53 Furthermore, Keynes considers it remarkable that although so large a collection of books belonging to Sir Thomas Browne or to his son has been dispersed, so few can now be identified as having belonged to either of them … [I]t is clear, in fact, that Browne was not in the habit of putting his name in his books, so that the volumes which he loved and read cannot usually be distinguished from other copies (p. 165). It is possible here that Keynes refers to Browne’s collection of printed volumes and not directly to any manuscript books that may have been in his possession throughout his life: the statement referring to “other copies” seems to suggest as much. Browne did in fact inscribe some of

20  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print his books to indicate ownership (Keynes discovered two examples in his own collection), but the fact that he was not in the habit of this does not preclude his wanting to record acquisition. Though some owners signed quire ends and booklets in manuscripts, it might also be the case that Browne signed Additional 10440 when it was still in separate parts, and perhaps to indicate that, for him, they are in some respects different to his printed books. He finds common ground between two short manuscripts, enough to presumably have bound them together, and his act of inscription may be as much a record of book creation as of book ownership. Browne was indeed a keen bibliophile, and the sale catalogue lists a total of 2,377 volumes classified under headings and further subdivided according to size.54 The title page, reproduced in Keynes (1968, p. 167), reveals, unsurprisingly, that the library was well stocked with medical books: “[c]onsisting of many very Valuable and Uncommon Books, in most Faculties and Languages, Chiefly in Physick, Chirurgery, Chymistry, Divinity, Philology, History, And other Polite Parts of Learning.” The description suggests that the main bulk of Browne’s books concerned materia medica, and it is possible that he owned a copy of Lanfranc in manuscript, acquired around the time, or soon after, that he was preparing his Religio Medici for the press, finding himself a young, unattached doctor, gaining the practical experience necessary to advance his career, and, we may assume, building up his book collection. 55 The book, of course, may not have belonged to Sir Thomas Browne. It was a common name, and Keynes (1968, p. 166, no. 2) cautions against making assumptions: “There were many people of the same name, whose signatures have often been wrongly attributed to Sir Thomas.” A query to the British Library, has uncovered that the manuscript was acquired in April 1836 from Thomas Rodd, who had bought it (probably on behalf of the British Museum), at Sotheby’s sale of the library of the noted bibliophile Richard Heber. 56 This could indicate that the manuscript may have been offloaded by Browne – or indeed by Edward Browne – before the sale of the library in 1711, and found its way into the hands of avid collector Richard Heber from there; Heber’s books – all 150,000 of them – were sold by Sotheby’s in various auctions over the years 1834–37. Either way, the Chirurgia parva of Lanfranc was undoubtedly a text that was sought after, and considered to be useful and viable by the company of surgeons. The appetite of post-Reformation professional readers for older medical texts, even those in poor enough copies, owes more to interest in the text(s) than to impulses to preserve antiquarian material. That manuscripts were to an extent displaced by the printed book is certainly valid, and it is probably the case that Hall’s English version of the parva replaced manuscript versions for those who still used them. However, for many professional readers, such as those mentioned

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  21 by Hall: Chamber, Bacter, Hudie, Yates. and, much later, Browne, the manuscript probably coexisted happily on bookshelves dedicated to the reading material of the trade. That difference between the manuscript and the printed book is not entirely defined in Hall’s terms – in relation to corruption – and instead the ancestor of the printed book figures strongly in the life of that book. Indeed, Hall’s activities may even have regenerated interest in manuscripts of Lanfranc with the publication of his new version (especially since he writes so deliberately about consulting them, and the associated issues) and the manuscript book – ­seemingly a valid repository of information and learning for some time after its “displacement” – apparently held more than just antiquarian interest for these men.

The Professional Reader Whether the complaints, nuances and instructions registered in the English manuscripts of Lanfranc’s Chirurgia parva are all indebted to the Latin versions is, in a sense, irrelevant: all testify to, by virtue of their individual features, shifting attitudes towards knowledge, especially specialised knowledge, and its consumption and limits. These attitudes inform Hall’s statements and judgments preceding the text, and in the essays he asks his colleagues to write for the volume. Hall’s primary concern is to limit access to the information to those who are already possessed of enough knowledge to use it, that is, those qualified to understand the text. His chief argument in this respect is to cite, and rail against, so-called abusers of the “arte”: And alas, where as there is one in Englande, almoste throughout al the realme, that is indede a true minister of this arte, there are tenne abhominable abusers of the same. Where as there is one Chirurgien, that was apprentice to his arte, or one phisicien, that hath trauayled in the true studie […] there are tenne, that are presumptious smearers, smaterers, or abusers of the same: yea, Smythes, Cutlers, Carters, Coblars, Copers, Coriars of lether, Carpenters, and a great rable of women (sig. +iiir-v). The abusers of the “arte” are contrary to the true ministers of it, and the list denounced by Hall conjures up images of unclean, unprofessional industry, lacking in learning and decorum. For Hall, these are the “rusticall professors”: the new readers of old, unreliable texts, the very profile of the consumers of magic, folklore, and the knowledge of wise women. This corruption is tangible, and Hall counsels that it is by purification that counteraction will be effective. That purification must be twofold, relating to both the profession and to the knowledge it draws upon. For the former, Hall asks that legitimate surgeons must defend against abuse

22  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print that is driven by “filthy lucre” and a desire for fame; the very art of surgery must continue to improve and innovate in order to achieve this. Hall explains: “I meane that wee our selues myght growe to suche perfection, that the workes and knowledge of vs myghte apeare so immaculate, that by our iustnes, their falsehode may be sene or knowe, by our cleanes theyr fowlnes, by our knowledge their ignorance, by our certeyne and true vse: their abusion and vncerteyne aduentures” (sig.  +iiiir-v). This purification – professionalisation, even – is contingent on “knowledge,” and that knowledge needs to be of the highest standards. The second condition – the purification of the text and the establishment of a canon of knowledge – is of course linked to Hall’s project to recover Lanfranc for “the edification and building vp of good science” (sig. ¶iir). We have already looked in some detail at how Hall describes this process, but I feel it is necessary to return to it here in order to investigate in more detail the attitudes to knowledge and information implicitly and explicitly present in Hall’s words and in those of his colleagues. Hall is primarily a translator, but he has not merely translated Lanfranc: he has added materials, gathered, he says, “according to myne owne experience and the meaning of good authors, as well ye auncientes as the new writers” (sig. ¶iv). One of Hall’s colleagues and friends, and a co-contributor to the prefatory materials, William Cunningham, further expounds on Hall’s intentions and process in his salutations, immediately following the Epistle Dedicatorie; here, Cunningham identifies one of the key issues that informs Hall’s work and pervades the prefatory materials at different points and in various forms: … by trauelles of noble and ingenious persons, from age to age, haue sprong so many sondrie sciences, artes and professions, as we see at this daie. But for that in all times the numbre of these haue been most small, & the multitude infinite of those that folow ignorance: proudient nature, yet being fruteful, hath brought forth in this olde & feble age of the worlde, as well as in times past, diuine wittes: by whose laboures, the treasures of science and knowledge, vnto this present gotten, should be preserued and defended from perishing (sig. ¶iiiv). Cunningham articulates what Hall, in effect, has only hinted at in the prefatory material up to this point: that there are hierarchies of knowledge and information, and it is the role of the professionals (already evoked and called to action by Hall) to identify, preserve, and defend the “treasures of science and knowledge” that are at such risk of corruption and misrepresentation. He goes on to praise the efforts of Hall and his success in purging one aspect of the canon of texts on which the surgical profession relies. He thanks Hall on behalf of the “brotherhood” and continues thus:

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  23 For where as for want of good authors in your owne natiue tongue, chirurgerie haue not a little decaied: she is nowe againe by his painfull trauelles not a little restored And for as muche as in all studies it greatly doth profite to haue first briefe and compendious introductions: he hath translated a short isagoge of that noble Chirurgian Lanfrance of Millan … in whiche, whether Lanfrance oweth more to him for the restoring of his decayed worke, or he to Lanfrance for the immortall fame hereby obteinted: I can not easely iudge. But this I dare boldly affirme, that Lanfrance before being corrupted, and of small vse: is nowe by the laboured of my friende Iohn Halle, purged and made pure so that henceforth, I may rightly call it Halles Lanfrance (emphasis mine) (sig. ¶iiiv–*ir). For Cunningham, Hall has restored a key surgical instrument for the profession, one that will ensure that the profession thrives and improves sufficiently to work against the abusers and against corrupt and decayed information. This attitude – that correct, worthy and “good” science by “good authors” will ensure the excellence of the profession – is reiterated by Thomas Gale, master in surgery and another contributor to the preface, who argues that sound knowledge and learning uncovers ignorance in others, displaying the dominance of the professionals “vnto the vulgar people.” Gale, however, returns to the issue of the imprinted text and its unquantifiable potential to transmit knowledge to the public at large without censor: For the most part men doe know (specially those whiche are wise and discrete) that you haue not take vpon you this translation into the vulgar tongue to the end euery man thereby might me made an artiste: (whiche thing could not be brought to passe, if that you ment the desolation of the arte:) but that you do it only for this ende and purpose, that the tyrons and diligent studentes of the noble art, might haue some knowledge to lede them, as it weare by a light, vnto more perfection (sig. *iiv). Indeed, Hall’s intentions – to surgically remove the decay that has set in and infected an entire profession, and to prevent that decay from ­returning – are bolstered by the professional tone in his lengthy essay The Preface To The Reader. This preface acts as a bulwark, part of a long line of defences established from the opening pages of the 1565 edition, and the essay itself places further barriers in the path of the uninvited reader. This type of control falls short of a censorious claim over particular genres of text and types of information, but nonetheless discourages the reader from progressing by virtue of its sheer length and with the use of technical language and classical authority. The Preface is where the authority of the professional surgeons extends to encompass the text, a

24  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print situation that is established by Gale when he refers to “Hall’s Lanfrance,” made concrete in the Preface in Hall’s astonishing run-through medical textual history and his prescriptive instructions to students of surgery. One failing in the programme of recovery and purification, he acknowledges, is that Hall’s Lanfranc is now, essentially, public property: I am not ignorant, that some men will thinke, that this booke (being publyshed) wyll be an occasion for suche men to be the bolder to abuse the same science. But I knowe and am sure, that they shall not learne in this booke any thyng wherwith to hurte: neither haue I publyschd the same for them. And farther if any abuser of chirurergy reade this boke, he shall (I trust) so fynd himselfe rubbed on the galle that he shall be moued (if he haue any shame) to leaue his vice, rather then more to vse it. But what needed we to doubt to set foorth all seyence in englysche, yf by the lawes […] none myght vse the same, but suche as (beyng expert) are fyrst approved, and then lawfully admitted? Hall cannot wholly advocate censorship of the text that he has taken such pains to correct and make public, nor can he approve of laws that restrict the consumption of certain texts to experts. He stops short of denying freedom of information, but he has used specific devices in order to distract untrained readers from accessing and utilising the information. His dogged insistence on the correct type of reader in the Preface and his careful framing of the information in epistles from well-known colleagues and a narrative on the compilation of the book amounts to a painstaking contextualisation of the material, material that is to be understood as a “surgical instrument” that is reliable and properly mediated. For this book is not merely a surgical text: it is also an insight into how sixteenth century medical professionals regarded their core texts and teaching and, moreover, how they defined themselves. They are men of learning, honour and integrity, concerned to present a united professional front to the world; moreover, one of them, Hall, is the model of a new man: not only recovering an old work for a new audience, but doing so responsibly, limiting the meaning of the text and the scope of the appropriate audience. 57 It is Hall’s image, then, not Lanfranc’s, that appears on the frontispiece to the book: an engraving of Hall, allegedly in his thirty-fifth year, and dated 1564. Hall is presented as the originator, the person with whom authority rests and, in the climate of renewal in the mid-sixteenth century, as one of the chief authorities in terms of medical and surgical learning. The suggestion is that Hall’s name and reputation have been established, and the reader glimpses a future vision of Hall’s legacy as a canon-­forming custodian of good science, a self-styled author who ensures that his name is now inextricably linked with a the renowned Lanfranc.

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  25 There has been much debate about the false dichotomy which the apparent “break” between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance establishes, and for many historians of the English book, the break or the beginning was ushered in with the establishment of the early printing press in ­England: the 1470s saw the issue of the first book from ­Caxton’s press. The use of new technology to spread the written word is understandably taken as a natural catalyst between the old and the new; Gillespie (2006, p. 3) notes that “sixteenth-century volumes … look very different from their often-anonymous, fifteenth-century manuscript analogues: their ascribed title pages identify and laud their authors from the first.” This is of course a relevant point: as we have seen, Hall’s 1565 text of Lanfranc operates within a complex system of bibliographic codes, finding devices, and monitory words that differs greatly from the ­fi fteenth-century realisations of the text. But that difference masks the nuanced relationships that exist between the older and newer versions. Hall does not create a new version of an old text in a vacuum: he participates in a culture of textual transmission that is indebted to the manuscript and, far from denying it, chooses to engage with a still-common method of textual production and preservation. Hall’s near-­contemporaries, like John Theyer, and his descendants, like Thomas Browne, actively sought out manuscript texts to sit in libraries and complement, not to work against, the new printed book. The difference, then, is not entirely a simple matter evidenced, for example, in the physical debt owed by the new printed book to the centuries-old manuscript. As this volume progresses, we shall find evidence of the nuanced, complex and fruitful relationship between manuscript and print and the knowledge which now depends on both for survival. 58 Hall’s renewal of Lanfranc is an attempt to move away from what he believes to be variant and dangerous versions of the text that exist in unknown quantity. However, his author is medieval, and his regeneration depends in a very real way on the existence of the manuscript, and thus his relationship with this protean culture of handwritten transmission is fraught. In many respects, and quite unlike his early modern counterparts, he is reluctant to set himself against the past, as represented by the manuscript volume, since some of those volumes are owned by modern men of his profession and in whom he evidently has a great deal of trust. In other ways, he mistrusts the perceived freedom that the manuscript context affords to the information, and he fears the reader of old volumes filled with folklore who may happen upon his text and mistake it, or actively abuse it. The difference in this case is simply a case of old and new, or the printed book and the manuscript; rather, it is realised in a­ ttitudes towards information and how those attitudes are expressed and represented On the one hand is the new age, which is self-conscious, forward (and backward) looking, reformed and organised, concerned with the “enrichment of an English literary vernacular” (Gillespie, 2006, p. 8),

26  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print represented by Hall and influenced by humanist ideals. For these men of learning, and of limits, a university text requires a certain mind, a particular class of reader, and responsible use of knowledge. The perception of the old attitude to learning and information, realised in Hall’s tacit condemnations of the scribal culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries where every man is an author, compiler, patron, and reader, reveals early modern anxieties about the spread, proper deployment, and veracity of learning. Readers were at once faced with older concepts and ideas, circulating still in old books and sometimes repackaged in print, and new theories and life-altering discoveries, peeling off the printing presses almost exactly alongside Hall’s books, but outside of England: Copernicus, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs, and Vesalius, On the Structure of the Human Body, both published in 1543.59 The “scientific revolution,” though indebted to older and classical knowledge, was driven by new theories and knowledge, generated by scholars who were, significantly, professionals, and not mere curious polymaths; this new knowledge was potentially explosive unless contained within limits, by readers of judgment.60 Thus the manuscript, for Hall, is both the locus for authority and the source of anxiety about that authority, and we can look to his attitudes to discern an early modern love-hate relationship both with the learning of the recent past and the manner in which it was transmitted. Hall is engaged not just in a project to professionalise his discipline but, as he sees it, to translate knowledge, in the fullest sense of that term. As we have seen, he describes his work with Lanfranc as “new translating,” a phrase which asks the reader to align Hall to recent efforts to bring knowledge to England in the English language, reframing innovations in technology and science that were taking place in continental Europe but that were also responding to the need for accuracy in, for example, navigation. Thomas Digges, who we meet again in Chapter 4 (below), translated parts of Copernican theory for an English public in 1576; his Defence of Heliocentrism was part of the almanac A Prognostication Everlasting of Right Good Effect.61 The control and stability offered by the printed book is frequently offset by the potential to reach a diverse and diversely able public, while the appeal of the manuscript – painstaking and expensive to reproduce – experiences a shift rather than a total displacement, ensuring its continued appeal and its persistence on the shelves of the libraries of men of knowledge and taste.

Notes 1 STC 15192; USTC 506379. Marshe was prolific printer who has a keen eye for the market and developed relationships with certain authors. He began work as a printer in 1554 at the sign of the Prince’s Arms (also King’s Arms) in Fleet Street, and was an original member of the new Stationer’s Company. He was taken into the Livery in 1562 and was a Warden in 1575 and 1581 (E. Gordon Duff, A Century of the English Book Trade: Short Notices of

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  27 All Printers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011], p. 100). In the same year as Hall’s Lanfranc was issued, 1565, he printed John Stow’s Summarie of English Chronicles (STC 23319). Marshe also worked closely with the soldier-poet Thomas Churchyard, for which see Matthew Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, & Ego (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016). 2 John Hall was a resident of Maidstone, Kent. He was an author and a surgeon, with some connection to the Wyatt family, and in 1554 he was briefly imprisoned briefly for his role in their rebellion. Little is known of his early life or education, but he was married twice and had two children, probably with his first wife. On his death his estate passed to his wife Anne, save his Latin books which were left to his brother, Thomas, a medical student at Oxford; for further details see Rivkah Zim, “Hall, John (1529/30–1568/9),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), Oxford University Press, 2004: https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ul.ie/10.1093/ref:odnb/11967 [accessed 30 June 2018]. 3 Corporis effigies quam vides graphice pictam / Hauli est, sic pictor fingere tibi velit: / Ac modo si quæris vultum dignoscere verum, / Hos lege, hij vere explicuere animum (sig. +iv). 4 George Keiser, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, volume 10: Works of Science and Information, ed A.E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998), p. 3645. Lanfranc was educated in Bologna but it was in Milan that he rose to prominence, attracting many patients from the ranks of the wealthy and powerful. He became involved, however, in the political quarrel between the Pope and the Emperor, leading to his enforced emigration from Milan to Provence; Erwin Huizenga, “Unintended Signatures: Middle Dutch Translations of Surgical Works,” in Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe, eds Michèle Goyens, Pieter de Leemamns and An Smets (Leuven: Leuven UP, 2008), pp. 415–48 (p. 437). For a biography of Lanfranc see Tabanelli, Mario, La chirurgia italiana nell’alto medioevo, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1965). 5 See also Nancy G. Sirasi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990), p. 166. 6 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana, 1997), p. 117. Porter notes that Lanfranc was greatly esteemed by his successors, Henri de Mondeville (c. 1260–320) and Guy de Chauliac (1298–368). 7 Annika Asplund, A Middle English Version of Lanfrank’s Chirurgia Parva: The Surgical Part (Stockholm University: Stockholm Theses in English, 1970), p. 4. 8 Theodore R. Beck, The Cutting Edge: Early History of the Surgeons of London (London: Lund Humphries, 1974), p. 185, 194. Beck disputes 1529 as a year of birth for Hall, since he would only have been twenty when Solomon was produced (p. 195); however, he says that the year 1535, as suggested by the frontispiece, is also wrong, saying he must have been “considerably older” (p. 194). 9 According to Huizenga (2008, p. 425) the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries “witnessed a preference for shorter texts that gave as concisely as possible the essence of what was important for the user or reader,” in contrast to the preference for encyclopedic works that characterizes the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; Erwin Huizenga, “Unintended Signatures: Middle Dutch Translations of Surgical Works,” in Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe, eds M. Goyens, P. de Leemamns and A. Smets (Leuven: Leuven UP, 2008), pp. 415–48.

28  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print 10 On the French manuscripts of the Chirurgia parva see Claude de Tovar, “Les versions françaises de la Chirurgia parva de Lanfranc de Milan: Étude de la tradition manuscrite”, Revue d’Histoire des Textes 12–13 (1982–83): 195–262. For the German tradition see Kurt Ruh et al. (eds), Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, vol. V (Berlin, 1985), and for Middle Dutch manuscripts see Huizenga (2008, pp. 441–46) as well as S. Scholle, Lanfrancs Chirurgia Parva in mittelniederfränkischer Übertragung (Altdeutsche Lanfranc-Übersetzungen II. I (Diss. Univ. of Würzburg, 1978). Huizenga notes that the two extant Middle Dutch manuscripts show that “source texts were adapted, supplemented or stripped according to the individual needs and skills of the translator, editor or scribe” (p. 446). 11 Beck suggests that the forcefulness of Vicary prevented the appearance of books on surgery and anatomy in this period. Vicary was made Master of the Barbers’ Company in 1530, and of the newly-amalgamated Barber-­Surgeons in 1541, 1548, and 1557 respectively. In 1530 was also appointed Serjeant-­ Surgeon by Henry VIII, a position he held until his death in 1561 or 1562; Furdell notes that Henry appointed him to the position after Vicary had cured the king’s sore leg (Elizabeth Lane Furdell, The Royal Doctors, 1 ­ 485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (New York: Rochester UP, 2001), p. 33. In the period immediately after Vicary’s death books by Hall, Gale and others were published, and there was no doubt that he had “powers to hinder or prevent the issue of surgical treatises and intended his own book to be a standard text-book for the Company” (p. 200). However, there was evidently a culture of controlled book-­exchange amongst surgeons, and Vicary himself bequeathed a book – a text of Chauliac – to the Company of Barber-Surgeons in his will: “[t]o Barber Surgeon’s Hall, one booke called Guido (Guy de Chauliac)” (p. 203). Vicary himself published The Anatomie of the Body of Man in 1548, which was the first printed English anatomy (for an edition of which see Furnivall and Furnivall, 1888; STC 24713). 12 See ISTC ig00558000 for a full bibliographical record. A digital facsimile is available on the website of the Biblioteca de Andalucía: www.­ bibliotecavirtualdeandalucia.es/catalogo/catalogo_imagenes/grupo. cmd?path=10059 [accessed 30 June 2018]. 13 USTC 435495. 14 On the Middle Dutch translation of Lanfranc’s Chirurgia magna see J.  ­Reynaert, “Over medische kennis in de late Middeleeuwen. De Middelnederlandse vertaling van Lanfrancs Chirurgia magna,” Millenium 13 (1999): 21–30 and Erwin Huizenga and J. Reynaert, “De Middelnederlandse vertalingen van de Chirurgia magna van Lanfranc van Milaan. Een vergelijkende editie van de preliminaire hoofdstukken,” Verslagen en Mededelingen van de Koninkijke Akademie voor Nederlandse Taal-en Letterkunde (2002): 229–369. 15 USTC 669510, 669509, 670112. 16 USTC 670113. 17 USTC 645407; 645408; 645409. 18 USTC 656282; 656281; 645400; 64470. 19 USTC 67012. Brunfels also translated the Chirurgia magna or the Wundartznei printed at Frankfurt also by Egenolff in 1560 and 1566 (USTC 707429, 707338). A later German version, translated by Michael Schrick, was issued in Frankfurt from the press of Peter Kopf/Johannes aus Wetter Saur in 1594 (USTC 661732). 20 USTC 71232; 71233. 21 USTC 59479.

Professional Text from Manuscript to Print  29 22 USTC 333369. 23 On some of the techniques used to sell books in the mid seventeenth-century see Capp (2014, pp. 209–10). 24 MED 1(a), “to bring the body back to health” or to “restore [an organ] to its natural place”. 25 Thomas Gale (1507–87) had been a war-surgeon, serving at the 1544 campaign resulting in the capture of Boulogne by Henry where he witnessed, as well as awful conditions, the practice of surgery by untrained men with horrific results. He returned to London after the war and became a wellknow writer and teacher, continuing to rail against the practices of unprofessional healers. Elizabeth I appointed him as her Serjeant-Surgeon (Beck, 1974, pp. 182–83). The Enchiridon of Chirurgery (also known as Certaine workes of chirurgerie or the Institution of a chirurgion; STC 11529; USTC 506133) was printed at London by Rowland Hall in 1563/4, appended to which was his text on battlefield injuries, called An Excellent Treatise on Wounds made with Gunneshot; he also translated Galen into English. He became master of the Barber-Surgeons in 1561 (Furdell, 2001, p. 85). 26 STC 12631. 27 STC 12632; USTC 506377. For an edition see Russell A Fraser, The Court of Virtue (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). According to Beck, The Court of Virtue is “an indication of the style of poetry which was written in Elizabethan times covering a vast range of subjects and moralizing on religion, portents, costume, astrology, music and poetry and magic” (1974: 194). It includes reprints of some of his earlier biblical paraphrases, alongside A Poesis in Forme of a Visyon (against necromancy and witchcraft), first published in 1563. Hall dedicated his book to Thomas Cole, archdeacon of Essex (formerly master of Maidstone School, 1549–52?), a radical protestant preacher. Hall’s name appears in an acrostic at sig. A2 r, and other acrostics name twelve people involved in local government and commerce at Maidstone, establishing a social context for Hall. Hall’s verse and its place in middle-class Elizabethan culture (Zim, ODNB). 28 Around this time John Stow recorded names of readers who loaned to him manuscripts of medieval texts in the book that is now London, British ­Library, Additional 29729, showing that the kind of book exchange in which Hall was involved was quite common in the city in the mid sixteenth century. I thank Margaret Connolly for her notes on this matter. 29 Hall probably refers here to Dr John Chamber, physician to the King and a particular favourite of his, who was Fellow and Warden of Merton College Oxford where he was admitted Doctor of Physic 29 October 1531, appointed Dean of St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, Canon of Windsor, Archdeacon of Bedford, Prebendary of Comb and Harnham in Salisbury Cathedral, Treasurer of Wells Cathedral and held benefices in Somerset and Yorkshire. He was one of the physicians who attended Jane Seymour at the birth of Edward VI and he also attended Anne Boleyn in her confinement. In the well-known painting by Hans Holbein the Younger of Henry VIII and the Barber-Surgeons, Chamber is on the King’s right with Butts next to him, while Vicary is on the King’s left receiving the document which the King hands to him while looking straight ahead (Beck, 1974, p. 197). Furnell calls the painting a “fanciful cartoon” in which Henry hands the charter to Vicary “while appropriate imagined witnesses look on” (2001, p. 33). A copy of the painting is now at the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London, dated 1541.

30  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print 30 STC 21153; the text is dedicated to Henry VIII’s fifth wife Katherine Howard. See Chapter 5 (below) for a discussion of similar texts. 31 Huizenga (2008, p. 417) notes that the sustained interest that medieval surgeons displayed in books relating to medicine and surgery, despite the ‘manual’ nature of their work, relates to their continual efforts to have their profession recognized as a ‘science’. This possibly in part explains Hall’s insistence on sourcing the correct volumes and versions from fellow guild-members. 32 Outside of Italy, surgery was rarely included in the university curriculum, and in cities without a university, like London, the guild-structure dominated, based on a system of apprenticeship. In London the Fellowship of Surgeons existed in 1386/9 and that of the Barbers from 1376 (Nutton, 1995, p. 163). 33 Vivian Nutton, “Medicine in Medieval Western Europe, 1000–1500,” in The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to AD 1800, eds L.I. Conrad, M. Neve, V. Nutton, R. Porter, and A. Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), pp. 139–205 (p. 162). 3 4 Reginald Pecock, prologue to The Donet of Cristen Religioun, in Wogan-­ Browne et al. (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280 –1520 (Exeter: Exeter UP, 1999), p. 100. The instability of the English language also caused authors to worry about the integrity of their work; Chaucer reflects on the “linguistic fluidity” of English in Troilus (V.1793–96): “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”; Wogan-Browne et al., pp. 11–12. 35 The prologue to Guy de Chauliac’s Inventarie of Cyrurgie from Paris, Bibliothèque National MS anglais 25, while not overtly concerned with copying, cautiously adheres to the Latin source, which may be read as “a concern to render the text carefully as specialized knowledge”; the prologue, stresses that the author has compiled information, adding nothing of his own (“[n]e of myn owne witt I putte noght thereto”, while asking “if ther be oght therein unperfit, doutouse, or over mykel and derk, I submyt to youre correccioun, and I praye that forgevenesse be graunted to my litil pore connynge”. The work is addressed to “my lordes leches of Mountpyler, of Boloyne, of Parise, of Ayyoun, and nameliche to the Popes clerkes” (Wogan-Browne et  al., 1999, pp. 61–63). 36 Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 2010), p. 298. 37 In recent years more scholarly editions have become available, for instance, Fransisco Alonso Almeida, ed, A Middle English Medical Remedy Book, Middle English Texts 50 (Universitätsverlag C. Winter, Heidelberg: ­M iddle English Texts, 2015), and M. Teresa Tavormina, Uroscopy in Middle ­English: A Guide to the Text and Manuscripts, Studies in Medieval & Renaissance History, 3rd series 11 (2014): 1–154; see also the important collection of sources in Faith Wallis, ed, Medieval Medicine: A Reader (Toronto: ­Toronto UP, 2010). 38 Moorat (1962, I, p. 267) dates the MS to the mid-fifteenth century, and Keiser (1998, p. 3830) is in agreement, noting that the margins of the MS have been cropped in rebinding: there is evidence that there are eight leaves wanting at the beginning of the volume, along with one after ff. 14 and 49, two following f. 28, and ten after f. 49. The original foliation is still visible, and the MS has been re-foliated in pencil; it measures 240 × 160mm; S.A.J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library, I, MSS. Written Before 1650

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45

46 47

A.D (London: The Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1962), I, p. 267. ­Asplund (1970, p. 5) notes that the MS was acquired from the Phillips Collection in 1909, and the library stamp of Thomas Phillips – a lion rampant – is drawn on ink on the flyleaf. Part of the text of Lanfranc found here has been edited by Annika Asplund, A Middle English Version of Lanfranc’s Chirurgia Parva: The Surgical Part (Stockholm University: Stockholm Theses in English, 1970). Huizenga (2008, p. 441) notes that Bernard, the friend to whom Lanfranc dedicates the text, also appears in the Middle Dutch translations in manuscript. No further information about him is supplied in the manuscript versions. The primary meaning of instrument as found in the MED is “a device operated by hand, a tool, an implement, a utensil”; n. 1(a); a secondary meaning refers to the “means by which something is done or effected; what is used for the accomplishment of something”, n. 4. (a). See below for further discussion. On this matter see Joanne Fillippone Overty, “The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300–1483,” Book History 11 (2008): 1–32. From Irma Taavitsainen, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist X: Manuscripts in Scandinavian Libraries (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), p. 15. Manuscripts in the New Royal Collection were procured post-1790, and do not include the 20,000 or so volumes amassed by King Frederick III in the second half of the seventeenth century (pp. xiv–xv). See also the description in George Stephens, “Anecdota Litteraria: Catalogue of the ­English Manuscripts in the Great National Library, Copenhagen,” The Retrospective Review 8 (1845): 407–16. Taavitsainen notes that the MS has a signature, “Frances Steuard,” at ff. 17v and 76v (1994, p. 17), but she does not specify its date. The copy of Lanfranc’s “Little Surgery” in Harley MS 2381 runs from ff. 40r –47r. The volume itself is of paper, with ff. ii + 116 + ii, in a British Museum binding dating from 1880. It measures 205 × 140mm, with a text space of 160 × 111.5mm. There is one date and some provenance marks: f.1r is inscribed: “5 die Novembris A.D. 1723,” and the same folio also has a signature, ‘Tensyaun,’ in a late-fourteenth century hand. Throughout there are pen trials, at f. 22v by John Hignell, 1646, and f. 84v, “Edward Roult, his hand”. The MS is copied in a single hand throughout. The name “Rayiner” in the MS has been tampered with; evidentially someone has attempted to make the name into “Wynter”. The MS is on parchment, with ff. i + 138 + iii, in a British Museum binding dating from 1757. It measures 159 × 140mm. The MS is composite, in two parts. The first folio, 1r–v, is a pastedown from another manuscript. At ff. 3r –8v is a richly-­ decorated kalendarium; at f. 10r is an amateur painting of a “ffryer” dressed in brown robes and holding flask; he is accompanied by a young boy or a page, who carries a red bag. Part II begins at f. 10r, and is in one hand, with a text space of 150 × 110mm. A note concerning the book, by John Theyer and dated 18 July 1603, is written into f. 9r, whilst an earlier note in Latin on this folio is dated 1585. On this MS see Cian O’Mahony, “Off the XIJ Synys”: An Edition and Contextual Analysis of a Fifteenth-Century Zodiacal Lunary (Diss. NUI Cork, 2008). I have been unable to find any records of a medical practitioner named Wyntyr. See Kathleen Doyle, “The Old Royal Library: ‘A greate many noble manuscripts yet remaining,’ in Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination,

32  Professional Text from Manuscript to Print

48

49 50

51 52 53

54

55

56 57

58 59 60 61

eds Scot McKendrick, John Lowden and Kathleen Doyle (London: British Library, 2011), pp. 67–89. Another Middle English copy of Lanfranc’s work is preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge MS R.14.41 (913), and consists of various parts, but only Parts V and VI concern Lanfranc. The MS is written both on paper and on vellum, in many hands. The size of the leaves is approx. 200 × 140mm. In part VIa we find “A lasse boke of Maister Lanfrance of Meleyne in surgery,” and in part VIb the antidotary. Part VI is from the fifteenth century, and is written by the same scribe (Asplund, 1970, p. 6). Doyle, 2011, p. 81, quoting Julius P. Gilson, “Introduction,” in George F. Warner and Julius P. Gilson, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King’ s Collections, 4 vols (London: British Museum, 1921), pp. xi–xxxii (p. xxvi). For a catalogue of the Royal manuscripts in the British Library see www.bl.uk/collection-guides/royal-manuscripts [accessed 30 June 2018]. algebra: the surgical treatment of fractures and dislocations, MED n. There are ff. i + 57 + i in total. Part I measures 195 × 113mm with a text space of 145 × 75mm; it is ruled, with thirty-eight lines per page, and is in one hand, apart from the correcting hand mentioned above, and the hand on f. 17v. Part II measures 160 × 135mm, with a text space of 140 × 110mm, and has thirty-one lines per page. The volume was rebound at the British Library, 16 January 1981. Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), p. 166. The title page of the sale catalogue (1710/11) shows that some of the books were added by Dr Edward Browne, though relatively few have dates after 1682, the year of Thomas’ death, suggesting that the greater part of the collection was formed by Thomas himself (Keynes, p. 165). Edward had been president of the College of Physicians. The sale of books from the Browne estate generated huge interest: Sir Hans Sloane’s personal copy of the catalogue still survives, now held in the British Library; Sloane apparently sent buyers to work on his behalf. The sale, held on 8, 9 and 10 January 1711, was also attended by Jonathan Swift. Jeremiah S. Finch, “Sir Hans Sloane’s Printed Books”, The Library 4th ser. (1941): 67–72 (102). Browne had taken his M.D. matriculation at Oxford in July 1637. He had studied medicine on the Continent, most notably at Leiden. British Library, email to the author (13 May 2011). According to Alexandra Gillespie, the invocation of the author was “a ready-made way to read and ‘limit’ the meaning of a text”; Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), pp. 3–4. Gillespie (2006, p. 9) informs her work with the theory, after Umberto Eco (1986), that the early modern was a “bricolage” between the old and the new. Jeremiah S. Finch, Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor’s Life of Science and Faith (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), p. 9. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998). STC 435.

2 Courtesy and the Book

Curtayse he was lowlye and sarvysable And karuede bifore his Fader atte the table.1

This chapter explores the contexts in which a fifteenth-century verse manual of courtesy, the Boke of Nurture, was copied and read, and the connections between its advice and other concerns which apparently were valuable to various kinds of late-medieval readers. It investigates the various contexts in which the Boke of Nurture is extant in manuscript: these range from volumes that reflect what we may describe as the aspirational tendencies of a household to books that are more practical and that co-locate the Boke of Nurture with other kinds of utilitarian text. I also examine here the adaptation into prose of the Boke of Nurture for the consumer of the early printed book, in which it is known the Book of Kervynge, versions of which circulated in manuscript as well. The Boke of Nurture itself also merits some discussion as both an instructional and literary work, since it responds to and reflects aspects of fifteenth-century literary texts while providing the reader with specific instruction with respect to terms of service, hierarchy and procedure at table, carving and preparation for dining. Taken together, these different histories of the circulation of a single work to do with courtesy point to a varied and shifting readership for this and for similar works, and to different attitudes with respect to the work, how it is preserved and copied, and the kinds of texts with which it is extant in manuscript.

Royal 17.D.15, the Boke of Nurture and The Canterbury Tales London, British Library, MS Royal 17.D.15 is one such manuscript context for the Boke, and it will be familiar to many readers since it is a manuscript that also preserves a text of The Canterbury Tales. 2 However, it is an imperfect text of Chaucer’s work: it has lost its opening leaf, meaning that the beginning of the General Prologue is missing.3 It opens then at f. 1r (see Figure 2.1) with the concluding lines of the Knight’s portrait and the beginning of the portrait of the Squire. The

34  Courtesy and the Book

Figure 2.1  L  ondon, British Library, MS Royal 17.D.15, f. 1r. © The British Library Board.

tongue-in-cheek portrait of Chaucer’s Squire is closely followed, as we might expect, by the more positive and admiring vignette of the Yeoman, and the reader is visually alerted in this manuscript to the changes and shifts in the narrative by way of marginal notes which indicate when the portrait of the next pilgrim is about to begin. Although we can only guess at how attractive and impressive the opening leaf of this copy of The Canterbury Tales might have looked, based on the material evidence that we can read in the rest of the volume, it is likely to have been of a high quality. An initial response might be that the book is relatively modest: it is a folio paper manuscript, now gilt-edged, in quires of twelve, with pages frame-ruled in ink, and the

Courtesy and the Book  35 copying has been carried out by two scribes.4 However, several of its features indicate that there may have been a careful programme of production at work. The book demonstrates evidence of considerable attention to detail: it has running headers, with marginal notations outside of the text space to help the reader to navigate the text, each highlighted further by a paraph in red. From f. 12r (the second quire) onwards the volume is more elaborately decorated, each tale being numbered in red in the upper margin, exactly where the running titles had been in the first quire. Also, in the second quire and extending into the rest of the manuscript, each tale has a rubricated title, and the borders feature some fronding in red. Initials are in blue and either three or four lines deep, on red ground with elementary champs occurring at the beginning of tales; elsewhere small red initials and paraphs mark smaller textual divisions; additionally, the initial letter of each line is tricked in red. 5 What readers of this manuscript will encounter is a not uncommon – if annoying – phenomenon: many handwritten books, by virtue of having circulated for long periods of time unbound or in wrappers, are missing their front leaves or initial quire, and this manuscript, like many others, also has damaged final folios (285r –301v).6 But the absence of the first leaf alters the sense of the book and demands a shift in our perception of the material artefact. Not least, it raises questions that will be tangentially relevant here about beginnings and endings, and there are other facts to be considered before a more complete picture of the book can emerge, chief among them that while the text of The Canterbury Tales ends at f. 301, the book does not. Bound with the incomplete manuscript of The Canterbury Tales is a second manuscript, this one also on paper but from a different stock, beginning at f. 302. This second manuscript is – or at one time was – obviously discrete, and it still remains materially distinct. Between the first and second MSS, or between ff. 301 and 302, is now a modern paper leaf, on which is inscribed a note in the hand of Sir Frederick Madden; it reads as follows: “A Printed Tract of three leaves ascribed to the press of Machlinia and relating to the Treaty of 1475 between Louis XI of France and Edward IV (see the Archaeologia vol. xxxii, p. 325) was formerly in this volume here, but was transferred to the Library of Printed Books by Order of Committee 11 May 1850. FM.” The manuscript is in part a product of different levels of damage, interaction and decision-making. There was once a textual and material boundary of a different kind between the two halves of this now unified manuscript: a printed text, The Promisse of Matrimonie, was removed from the book due to library policy to separate manuscript and print material.7 The three printed leaves (pressmark IB 55451) were removed in 1850 when part two of the manuscript was moved from the front to the back of the book, and the volume was rebound at the British Museum in a red leather binding, gold-stamped “G R II 1757” with the royal arms (Seymour, 1997, p. 135).8

36  Courtesy and the Book What is now the second half of British Library Royal 17.D.15 is a polyglot manuscript, opening with a political dialogue called the Somnium Vigilantis, in which the narrative is in Latin and the debate in English and, in part, French; this runs to f. 310 v.9 This work is usually attributed to Sir John Fortescue and may be dated by topical references, giving a terminus a quo of 1459.10 Beginning at f. 311v is a prose tract, The Declaration of Sir John Fortescue, opening with the rubric: “The declaration made by John Fortescue, knyght, vpon certayn wrytynges sent oute of Scotteland ayenst the kinges title of his realme of Englond”; the ensuing text is a debate, in prose, between Fortescue and a ‘learned man’ who acts as a respondent; both Fortescue and the respondent are clearly named, and their responses given textura headings, so that the debate can easily be followed by readers. The text ends at f. 326v, and can be dated after October 1471 (Manly and Rickert, 1940, I, p. 476).11 This is followed, with a change of hand at f. 327v, in the unique copy of The Recovery of the Throne by Edward IV (or The Balett off the Kynge, as in the explicit here, f. 332v). This text is a narrative poem in forty-six rhyme royal stanzas, and it gives an account of the return of Edward IV, his victory at the Battle of Barnet, along with an account of the defeat of the Bastard of Fauconberg’s attack on London.12 The final text in part two of the manuscript begins at f. 333r: a copy of John Russell’s verse text the Boke of Nurture, which ends at f. 348v.13 We can say with certainty that the manuscript was rebound (and the order of the component parts reversed) at the British Museum in 1850, but we cannot discount the possibility that the parts were kept together, perhaps in a loose wrapper or in an earlier binding, from a relatively early stage. Sutton and Visser-Fuchs suggest that the copy of The Canterbury Tales and part two of the manuscript all emanated from the same shop: that of the stationer John Multon in Paternoster Row, ­London (1995, pp. 109–10); according to their assessment, all four items in part two of the MS and The Canterbury Tales are copied on the same paper, but The Canterbury Tales was copied by Multon himself. Indeed, the printed pamphlet, dated 1483, may have been associated with the manuscript from quite early on, making sense alongside, in particular, the (now) second part of the book. The contents of the printed pamphlet were copied by John Vale into what is now British Library MS Add. 48031A; Vale was a close associate of John Multon and it seems that Vale was a customer of Multon’s for both exemplars and ready-made volumes (Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, 1995, p. 108). It seems likely, then, that the pamphlet and the texts in the second part of the manuscript, all dealing with recent history and politics, might have been linked from quite early on, acting as an exemplar of the kind that Multon would lend, hire or sell to customers with tastes similar to John Vale or to his associate, Sir Thomas Cook.14

Courtesy and the Book  37 The outer leaf of each part of Royal 17.D.15 is now missing, which suggests that, if the various parts were kept together, they may have been loosely stored, maybe preserved in a wrapper of some kind, perhaps intended for binding at a later stage.15 The manuscript was certainly bound together as a single volume, with the printed text (which is an early print, from 1483), before 29 July 1678, when the whole volume is recorded as item seventy-nine in Charles Theyer’s library catalogue, and since several of Charles’ books were owned by his grandfather, the antiquarian collector John Theyer, it is also likely that he was responsible for that stage of binding (Seymour, 1997, p. 138).16 MS Royal 17.D.15 is a kind of record of decisions that were motivated by factors relating to librarianship and matters such as cataloguing, categorisation, and preservation. But it is important to acknowledge that a sense of the literary canon had developed in such a way by the mid-nineteenth century to privilege copies of the works of Chaucer in a multi-text manuscript. That privilege takes on a physical reality in the symbolic movement of The Canterbury Tales to the beginning of the manuscript. When the two parts of the manuscript were brought together, perhaps by Theyer in the seventeenth century or maybe earlier, there may have been a very different sense of the importance of each half, and in which order each should appear; but the connections between texts are arguably less obvious now that the book has been re-ordered. Theyer, or an earlier owner or compiler, may have believed that the two separate manuscripts were connected in some way. The connections highlighted by the marriage of the two manuscript halves are both imaginative and concrete: an example of the latter is the insertion of the aforementioned tract that related to the 1475 Treaty of Picquigny between Louis XI of France and Edward IV.17 The inclusion of the printed tract creates a link to The Balett off the Kynge, which also refers to one of Edward IV’s most successful exploits, that being the recovery of the throne for the Yorkists at the Battle of Barnet, 1471. These associations – possibly first made by the stationer John Multon or by early owners, or the person who commissioned the volume from Multon’s copy-shop – were likely understood and retained by Theyer. The now-second part of the manuscript functions like a manual on advice to princes or, at least, to statesmen: the texts, taken together, testify to a concern with philosophical debate, governance, remembrance, retraction and – if we consider the now-excised printed tract – different versions of historical narratives. Its performativity relates to things royal and political at the highest levels, and the collocation of this manuscript with a handsome copy of The Canterbury Tales may simply reveal a selection process that is concerned with suitable – and suitably bound – reading material. The text that at first does not dovetail fully with those others is the final one in the second manuscript: a version of John Russell’s Boke of Nurture: its apparent lack of literary merit and its concern with courtesy, behaviour, and service do not immediately have a natural and obvious place in the perceived overall identity of Royal 17.D.15.

38  Courtesy and the Book

The Boke of Nurture The Boke of Nurture and the closely associated Boke of Kervynge (discussed below) are normally classified as instructional treatises. Keiser refers to them as “household books,” a term that he uses to cover “a wide variety of documents that describe the duties and responsibilities of the officers of a household, normally the household of a member of the nobility.”18 In particular, Keiser notes that these works are “conscious and systematic attempts to define membership of the household, their duties and privileges, and the general rules of the establishment” (1998, p. 3681, quoting Mertes, 1988, n.p.). However, Russell’s Boke of Nurture in particular can also be described as a book of courtesy, a term that “was actually used in the Middle Ages” and which refers mostly to “a number of poems whose aim was to teach manners to young people and uneducated adults.”19 Louis comments that such books should be distinguished from the advice given by parents to children and from prose manuals of chivalry, which are less specific, as well as from household books, which he says are more specific instructionally. Importantly, he also advises that they not be considered as tangential to the books of “gentlemanly refinement” popular in early modern Europe, like those of Castiglione and Elyot (1993, p. 3002). 20 Moreover, Louis notes that treatises of this category mostly display very little evidence of systems of ordinance and organisation (1993, p. 3002). Evidently Louis regards the courtesy book as a genre of text that is concerned with the performance of nobility, suggesting a general definition based on the type of instruction offered by these books. Following Nicholls (1985) he states that courtesy books, motivated as such by the ideals of courtly society (implied in the etymology of the word ‘courtesy’), are more concerned with the “importance of outward gestures and regard for order and hierarchy, rather than inward understanding or attitudes,” and thus reveal more about the management of a noble or aristocratic household than anything else (1993, p. 3002). Indeed, the popularity of conduct literature cannot automatically be taken to signal an interest in social climbing, as noted by Lindenbaum: even the courtesy books that belonged to the “merchant elite, in which promotion in the world is often an explicit goal, address personal discipline and integration into society rather than raw aspiration.”21 Such books enact a concern with display and outward forms of behaviour that reaffirm one’s place in the world rather than offering great advancement. That reaffirmation works for the aristocracy as well as the serving classes, fixing identities and “ensuring security and predictability in world that violates these principles at every turn” (Lindenbaum, 1999, p. 305). The prevalence and popularity of conduct literature of all kinds in the fifteenth century, in particular in London, can be linked to an increased concern and engagement with

Courtesy and the Book  39 regulation and conduct at all levels of society and with respect not just to behaviour but also to spirituality, business, and civic matters ­(Lindenbaum, 1999, pp. 304–05). However, courtesy books are manifestly concerned with education and instruction and were, as Firth Green notes, “written for princes as well as their social inferiors.”22 Hammond concurs with this view, stating that such books were intended in part for the education of servants but also for young squires and gentlemen, as well as for adults who may have been unsure of the behaviour expected of them in certain situations (2005, p. 103). Even the young sons of the royal court and of aristocratic and noble houses required education, mentoring, and training, and although the literary recipient of Russell’s advice – his delinquent young man – is to be read as a member of the lower echelons of society, we should not imagine that the text is necessarily written for someone just like him, a member of the aspiring middle class. Richard Firth Green warns against such “one-sided” assumptions, citing the Babees Book, which was written for children of “bloode Royall,” and making the point that Russell’s text must have been aimed at a courtly audience […] the Boke was written by a man who, as chamber usher to Duke Humphrey, was almost certainly […] required to put his experience of household etiquette to use by supervising the upbringing of young gentlemen in his master’s familia (1980, pp. 82–83). It is perhaps worth asking, then, when we come to examine the manuscript contexts for the Boke of Nurture, whether we are to read the preservation of the work with certain co-texts and within certain contexts as statements of identification with a particular group or collective social milieu, or whether the text is intended to enact a kind of subjectivity, personal identity or ambition relating to its collector/compiler. Indeed, the former seems to make the most convincing case since it must be taken into account that readers of the Boke would likely have been members of the gentrified classes; in other words, we ought not to read the figure of the placeless young man literally as the ideal reader or beneficiary of this text. Moreover, it is likely that the intended audience of the Boke may in fact address the young sons of the gentry or aristocracy who were pages in large households and sometimes at court; they would have acted in a position of servitude that in fact bestowed quite an important rank. Or, at least, the work was intended – perhaps like Lydgate’s Stans Puer ad Mensam – to appeal to a courtly audience (Firth Green, 1980, p. 82). Indeed, Firth Green notes that the social standing of the servant was always influenced by the prestige of his master, referring to the instruction in the Boke that a messenger of the king should always be received one degree higher than his actual rank. Thus, a knight may be welcomed as

40  Courtesy and the Book a baron, a squire, a knight and so on (1980, p. 25), revealing the complexities not just of social conventions in the upper echelons of society, but also the elevated status of some men in the service of royalty and nobility. 23 The author or compiler to whom the Boke of Nurture is attributed is one John Russell, fl. c. 1477, who presents himself as a servant in the household of the brother to Henry V, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1391–1447), 24 where he was an usher in chamber and a marshall in the hall. 25 We cannot be certain whether John Russell was the author of the poem: he may be a fictional persona or he may have simply compiled a prologue and appended it to a pre-existing work. Indeed, at one point in the work Russell refers to his having tested this treatise in his youth (l. 1213), and there seems no reason to doubt that he was indeed in the service of Humphrey. It might be argued that the voice is authentic and, despite the inclusion of a fictionalised preface and context for the work, the persona of Russell at least is authoritative and convincing, and he peppers his text with details of the experiences of a lifetime. The Boke was composed sometime in the fifteenth century, possibly after the death of Humphrey in 1447, and in its fullest form is a poem of 1250 variable-length lines in rhyming couplets; although Russell’s verse is clearly irregular and obviously limited, it demonstrates a desire to reframe ordinary instruction and align it with other types of contemporary instructional verse. 26 It uses the same fictional structure as the popular Anglo-Norman Walter of Henley which, as well as the Seneschausy, were likely models for this work: both of them extend advice on the duties and responsibilities of household personnel as well as detailed practical information (Keiser, 1999, p. 484). 27 Despite some uncertainties around the authorship of the work, it remains a fascinating exercise in instructional literature whereby very little is left to chance or to the reader’s agency in the matter of instruction. However, as part of this process of fairly strict instruction, the reader’s imagination is actively cultivated: Russell offers extremely detailed, sensual and evocative insights into cultural and domestic spaces and practices. The duties and services included are details on the role of the chamberlain, the usher and the marshal; instructions on how to carve and wrap bread and lay the table, and how to make trenchers; and there are descriptions of wines, meats, fruits, side dishes, sweets and of the elaborate sugar subtleties – feasts, literally, fit for a king. Also included are the tables of precedence: who should take priority at the table and where to seat guests depending on rank and gender. 28 Russell’s Boke of Nurture is extant in five medieval manuscripts, all of which are datable to the middle or end of the fifteenth century. The manuscripts are variable in terms of the amount of text and the portions of the text that they preserve. The copies extant in London, British Library, MS Harley 4011 and in Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 8009 are

Courtesy and the Book  41 the only ones to attribute the work to Russell. 29 However, each of the five copies includes the literary prologue to the text (summarized below); that prologue reveals more about Russell’s blended approach to instruction which seems to mingle straightforward instruction with insights into the world of the noble household, and which asks us to reconsider the kind of readership courted by the text. Russell presents his work as a retrospective of sorts, gathering together a lifetime of knowledge accumulated over his time in the service of the Duke. However, Russell seems interested not just in straightforward instruction, creating instead a fictional frame for his text, perhaps in an attempt to comment on the information and instruction that he imparts. Russell allows his experience, values, and learning to interact with this fictional frame, meaning that the reader is asked to receive practical information in a literary context. The result is that the text is complex rather than simple: it is a fond record of tradition as well as a mingling of the quotidian with the imaginative with literary references to chanson d’aventure and romance and, by extension, courtly life and attitudes.30 His prologue takes the form of a fictionalised encounter with a young yeoman whom the author meets wandering in a wood in the month of May; the persona of the speaker harmonizes the voice of empathy with that of authority and balances his own humble beginnings with the knowledge, respect and seniority that came with his eventual position in the household of Duke Humphrey. Significantly where we might expect to meet, in a typical chanson d’aventure, a speaker with no authority, 31 we find instead an assured and confident voice, dispensing advice and truths. Russell opens his prologue as follows: An vsshere y Am / ye my beholde / to a prynce of highe degre, Þat enioyethe to enforme & teche / alle þo thatt wille thrive & thee, Of suche thynges as here-aftur shalle be shewed by my dligence To them þat nought Can / wit-owt gret experience (ll. 3–6).32 Russell’s authorial voice has a duality to it, here manifest in the servile first line, stating that he is an usher “to a prynce of highe degre,” and the second, more authoritative statement, expressing the attitude of a philanthropic educator: “Þat enioyethe to enforme & teche / alle þo thatt wille thrive & thee.” This construct is somewhat complicated by the sense that the speaker, always a servant but now also a teacher, an authority by virtue of his years in service, now continues to serve. Now, it seems, Russell (or his speaker) is compelled by the moral impulse or compulsion to pass on his learning and his experience: Therefore yf any man þat mete withe, þat for fawt of necligence, y wylle hym enforme & teche, for hurtynge of my Conscience,

42  Courtesy and the Book To teche vertew and connynge / is baren & fulle vnable. Þer-fore he þat no good can / ne to noon eille be agreable. he shalle neuer y-thryve / þerfore take to hym a babulle (ll. 7–12). The speaker’s sense of duty now directs that he share what he has acquired and learned over long years in a noble household. From his perspective, his knowledge and acquired experience has the power to be redemptive: he can offer not just “connynge” but also, with it, “vertew,” without which the hopeless man will never thrive. Our speaker encounters a ready-made audience whilst wandering in the forest on a May morning. He first meets the forester and – ever dutifully – asks of him permission to stroll in his land. He then spies a man with a bow, attempting to stalk a herd of deer: y saw where walked / a semely yonge man, þat sklendur was & leene; his bowe he toke in hand toward þe deere to stalke; y prayed hym his shote to leue / & softely with me to walke. Þis yonge man was glad / & louyd with me to talke, he prayed þat he myht withe me goo / in to som herne or halke (ll. 20–24). This youth apparently is a man on the margins, and we are left with the overriding impression that Russell’s intervention has the effect of rescuing the man from a life of crime and outlawry. The youngster is almost certainly a would-be poacher; the very act of unlawfully being in the forest with a bow and arrow made a person liable to prosecution, and the normal punishment for poaching was a fine or a spell of imprisonment (Ginsberg, 1992, no. 4–5).33 Indeed, it would seem that the young man is the occupant of a liminal space, both socially and physically, and lacks a firm identity, place and status: a “would-be gentleman usher [who] begins as an outcast, wishing himself out of the world because he has no one to serve” (Lindenbaum, 1999, p. 305). The narrator happens upon this figure at precisely the moment he is about to take his first shot and easily persuades the would-be outlaw or poacher to talk with him a while. By staying his hand, the narrator has potentially changed for the better the course of this young man’s life and, determined that his experience, learning, and example have a redemptive influence, begins to question him: “Þis yonge man y frayned / with hoom þat he wonned þan” (l. 25). The narrator’s initial question to the speaker reveals contemporary concerns with identity and the performance of identity based on one’s place within an extremely strict hierarchy. If the deer-stalking outlaw stereotype is at first reminiscent of a burly outlaw, like the Robin Hood figure of the popular ballads,34 or perhaps even of Chaucer’s tough and masculine Yeoman, that similarity is unravelled and undermined as we read, to such

Courtesy and the Book  43 an extent that the young man begins to more closely resemble the kind of servant in part embodied by Chaucer’s squire.35 At first the youngster is defiantly rebellious, and his response might well be what the physically intimidating Yeoman of the General Prologue might articulate as his personal philosophy: “Sir, ye serue my-self / & els noon oþer man (l. 26).” However, this confident and perhaps dangerous assertion is undermined by a well-placed and kindly question posed by the avuncular Russell: “is þy gouernaunce good?” (l. 27). It emerges that Russell’s experience has many aspects, articulated in various ways in his sometimes awkwardly expressed but nonetheless carefully deliberated prologue. His gentle probing reveals that the self-governance of the young man is not constructive, nor effective; hence his “wanhope” (l. 29), or despair, has driven him to attempt to commit a crime that will at once afford him and deprive him of a status. His problems here all converge upon one aspect of his existence: the fact that he lacks a place in society, and the message, from Russell is that serving oneself is not sufficient in order to exist in a world where place and rank – not name and individual identity – matter. Russell cannot advocate self-governance, particularly not from his perspective, and in the prologue to a text in which place, in every sense, matters. The distress experienced and expressed by the youth seems to stem from his lack of direction, and his quest has been not a bid for independence, but one for dependence; he seeks the safety and relative anonymity of service: In certayn, sir / y haue y-sought / Ferre & nere many a wilsom way to gete mete a mastir; & for y cowd nouht / euery man seid me nay, y cowd no good, ne noon y shewde / where euer y ede day by day but wantoun & nyce, recheles & lewde / as Iangelynge as a Iay (ll. 33–36). His present state can be linked directly to his lack of knowledge and experience: he is “wantoun & nyce, recheles & lewde”: naïve, uncouth, heedless, imprudent, and foolhardy, lacking, importantly, in civility, manners, and instruction. The forest, traditionally a permissive locus in literature in which normative rules of behaviour can be abandoned, or at least re-imagined, here stands for the state and the potential of the youngster: undisciplined, but capable of being tamed and ordered, a fact underlined by the presence of a kindly forester and a herd of deer that are at once wild but controlled36. Russell apparently places the nature of the development of civility into the hands of the subject: he offers him a choice – within limits, of course – of position: “wiltow be a seruaunde, plowhman, or a ­laborere, / Courtyour or a clark, Marchaund, or masoun, or an artificere, / Chamburlayn, or buttilere, pantere or karvere?” (ll. 38–40) Predictably, the young man expresses an eagerness to enter into service in a large household as a butler, chamberlain, panter or carver.

44  Courtesy and the Book Russell’s treatise seems to aim for a redemptive effect, since we witness the civilising of the young man and his rescue from an almost-certain life of crime by instructing him in the ways of service: how to wait at table, how to carve and, significantly, how to behave appropriately in front of superiors. Instead of working against the ruling classes, a scenario that threatened for the young man as he raised his bow to kill deer, he is now is encouraged to work for them, learning how to serve, behave and respect. The opening lines of the prologue’s verse proudly declare Russell’s position and rank, but the tone of the treatise would indicate that the acquisition of a position and a purpose can offer opportunities to even the most desperate of young men. For while the text properly affirms the rigid structure of late-medieval society, closing with a redaction of the order of service for “euery state aftir þeire degre” (l. 1042), the overarching message of Russell seems to be this: that one’s state can be augmented to quite a significant extent through hard work, good service and perseverance. Russell, albeit now compelled to leave his service and his position due to “croked age” (l. 1217), says that his treatise is tried and tested and that he “enioyed þese maters” (l. 1216) when he was young and lusty. It seems that the work has the desired effect, bestowing “gentille lernynge” (l. 1225) on the young man, whose outlook has now been reformed. That gentility, conferred upon Russell by virtue of his years of service, is now made known in his poem and, though the information relates primarily to the service of others, in its in-depth knowledge and detail of high living, somehow invites the reader to regard Russell as a participant in that way of life. Indeed, his dissemination of instruction encourages us to imagine a line of proud butlers, panters, and chamberlains (“thy self with other þat shalle þe succede, / whiche þus boke of nurture shalle note, lerne & ouer rede” [ll. 1227–28]); Russell sees his influence and standard persisting alongside the great families of England, creating a royalty of servers. For his part, his delight in his own years of service is manifest: “[s]om tyme seruaunde with duke vmfrey, duc of Glowcetur in dede” (l. 1230). Humphrey was his “prynce pereles” (l. 1231), and we must, by this association, conclude that Russell is at the pinnacle of his profession. As noted by Furnivall, Russell was “anxious to train up worthy successors in the art and mystery of managing a well-appointed household. A man evidently who knew his work in every detail, and did it all with pride; not boastful, though upholding his office against rebellious cooks, putting them down with imperial dignity” (1868, p. cv). As such, he achieved a position of great authority in the employ of Duke Humphrey, articulated by him towards the close of his treatise: Now good son, y haue shewed the, & brought þe in vre, to know þe Curtesie of court, & these þow may take in cure, In pantry, botery, or cellere, & in kervynge a-fore a sovereyne demewre,

Courtesy and the Book  45 A sewer, or a mershalle: in þes science, y suppose ye byn swere. Which in my dayes y lernyd withe a prynce fulle royalle, with whom vschere in chambur was y, & mershalle also in halle, vnto whom alle þese officeres foreseid, þey euer entende shalle, Evir to fulfille my commaundement when þat y to þem calle: For we may allow & dissalow, oure office is þe cheeff In cellere & spicery, & the Cooke, be he loothe or leeff (ll. 1173–82). Russell’s envoy dedicates the book to “alle yonge gentilmen, þat lust to lerne or entende” (l. 1236) and contains the usual topoi asking those with more experience to “correcte þat is amysse, þere as y fawte or offende” (l. 1238). He once claims the text as his own and distances himself from it, asserting in the envoy that neither he nor the “forewryter” were responsible for the “making” of the text (l. 1243). Russell, however, seems to closely align himself with those “yonge gentlimen” who benefited from the patronage of men like Duke Humphrey and who may have carved out interesting roles for themselves in the context of the noble household. It has been suggested that groups of household servants, who may otherwise have been unengaged in pedagogic ­duties – ­physicians, cooks, astrologers – contributed to the intellectual life of the royal court (Firth Green, 1980, p. 89), so it seems reasonable that servants of ­Russell’s standing may have been involved in literary practices even in noble households, and this perhaps was cultivated by the Duke himself. Significantly, Russell recycles the work of another writer who benefited from Humphrey’s patronage: Lydgate’s translation of the Stans Puer under the heading “Symple Condicions” in his Boke, ll. 277–304; indeed perhaps, the culture of book-collecting and love of literature inculcated by Humphrey influenced his entire household, and John Russell too discovered ways in which to participate in that culture. 37

The Boke of Kervynge: Manuscript and Print The information contained in the Boke of Nurture was at some point evidently adapted into the prose tract The Boke of Kervynge, which survives in three manuscripts and which was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1508 and 1513.38 It is perhaps likely that Russell adapted an existing prose text into a verse version, but it seems more plausible that the reverse occurred; Keiser is in agreement, stating that the compilation “is an abbreviated prose version of [the] Boke of Nurture, into which such other information as the proper foods to serve in liturgical seasons has been interpolated” (1998, p. 3682). Significantly, even though the printed text is in prose, it preserves traces of the rhymes used in Russell’s work.39 Furnivall was certain that de Worde had abstracted in prose Russell’s version, “chopping off his lines’ tails, – adding also bits here,

46  Courtesy and the Book leaving out others there,” though he acknowledges that both writers may have copied a common original (1868, p. viii).40 In any case, both sets of texts are clearly related, but the Kervynge as a printed text must have reached a wider and less heterogeneous set of readers. Let us deal first with those printed versions, issued by de Worde in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. The effect of the truncation of the verse version of the Boke of Nurture is that the instructional and imperative aspects of the text are foregrounded, at the expense of the kindly and personal tone achieved by Russell’s style of mentoring. Nicholls (1985, p. 15) notes that it is “highly probable that the lists of ‘termes’ employed by carvers which begin The Boke of Kervynge … and the general tendency of Russell to introduce technical language into his Book of Nurture indicate an attempt to raise the novice courtier’s level of refinement.” The two texts – related yet discrete – may be intended to appeal to different audiences; or, at least, the printed version, The Boke of Kervynge, may represent a democratisation of knowledge and instruction that hitherto had been transmitted orally or in manuscripts that exposed the social standing or attitudes of the household or family to which they belonged41. Albeit the nature of the instruction remains fundamentally the same, the tone of The Book of Keruynge is less intimate, and perhaps anticipating a wider audience in print, it lacks the sense that the reader is privy to a kind of knowledge that is exclusive, emerging from personal experience. Perhaps motivated by a desire to appeal to a broad-spectrum set of readers, the Keruynge dispenses with the literary framework and presents instead a generic, universal set of rules and instructions. The printed versions (1508, 1513) each run to just twenty-four pages; both are in quarto, with just two quires of twelve, so they are slim volumes. Both editions feature a woodcut on the title page, depicting a noble family or possibly a royal gathering (there is perhaps a king seated centrally) consisting of ladies and gentlemen who are served and entertained by a jester at table.42 The title-page to the 1508 edition is not quite as elaborate, featuring a simple running title (“Here begynneth the boke of keruynge”) and lacking the decorative banners and scrolls that are found in the 1513 version.43 Both editions feature the device of Wynkyn de Worde underneath the colophon.44 Materially the prints reveal little about their intended function, audience and probable use, and even the prologue is quite brief and pithy: “Here begynneth the boke of keruynge and sewynge, and all the feestes in the yere for the seruyce of a prynce or ony other estate as ye shall fynde eche offyce the seruyce accordynge in this boke folowynge”; the woodcut, however, is sufficiently generic to imply and attract a host of interested readers. The ensuing text is concise, elaborating only when necessary to the full development of the instruction; for example, at the beginning of the section listing the order of estates, the text has the explanatory note: “The Marshall and the Vssher muste knowe all the

Courtesy and the Book  47 estates of the chyrche and the hyghe estate of a kynge with the blode royall” (sig. B5v). Significantly, The Boke of Keruynge was issued twice by De Worde roughly contemporary with his printing of works that are also concerned with instruction and with correct social behaviour. One example is Dame Juliana Berners’ Boke of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms (or the Book of St Albans) of 1496, to which de Worde added a new section on “fysshynge with an angle” (Bennett, 1969, I, p. 112), and which he issued again as a quarto in 1532.45 He also printed The Boke of Huntynge (1518–21) and the Treatise of Hunting (?1530) (Bennett, 1969, I, p. 245; Nicholls, 1985, p. 139).46 De Worde evidently identified a public appetite for works of this genre, as had Caxton before him; his edition of the verse text The Book of Curtesye was issued in 1477–78 (Duff, 2009, p. 15, no. 53).47 De Worde even revisited Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, reprinting it in quarto in 1492.48 However, while the majority of the works mentioned appealed directly to an aristocratic audience with an interest in such noble pursuits as hawking and hunting, and in courtesy and appropriate behaviour, The Boke of Keruynge may have had a broader popular appeal since it relates at once to the lords and masters of great houses and perhaps also to those in their service, or to the younger members of a family. Bennett makes the point that the survival rates for such texts is low, but that given their small size and the fact that they were practically very useful and were most probably frequently read, consulted, and thumbed over, they were less likely to have endured (1969, I, p. 113). His observations are also relevant in terms of the likely readership of texts like the Kervynge in print. De Worde issued many of these texts (including the Boke of Kervynge) in quarto format, perhaps anticipating an audience not wanting to spend much money on volumes that were essentially intended for consultation; by contrast, the first edition of his Book of St Albans was printed as a folio (Bennett, 1969, I, p. 245) and at least two of the copies were printed on vellum, probably intended for wealthy patrons.49 Indeed, Keiser notes that de Worde’s rapid reprinting of the text (the St Alban’s Schoolmaster Printer had first issued it in 1486) attests to “an audience eager for access to works of practical writings” (1999, p. 470). 50 However, de Worde himself, explaining his inclusion of the treatise on fishing within a work that is more suitable for “gentyll & noble men” and not those “ydle men” who may otherwise encounter it had it been printed alone as a “plaunfet” (Keiser, 1999, p. 470), seems to identify an audience for these works that is variously diverse, which he serves by offering these texts to publics in different and differently priced formats (Keiser, 1999, pp. 470–71). It is thus difficult to imagine one kind of audience for the Kervynge in print: it is more complex, I suggest, both as a material document and as a record of the attitudes to place, status and instruction of the later-medieval and early modern period.

48  Courtesy and the Book Courtesy books and guides to behaviour were held in high regard, consistent with their high survival rate in manuscripts, their frequent occurrence in the household miscellanies of gentlemen, and evidence of their importance to the members of certain trade guilds (Nicholls, 1985, p. 140).51 By the time the Boke of Kervynge was printed, the audience for such texts was expanding and diversifying, especially with the increase of the mercantile and landholding classes and their well-recognised desire for self-improvement.52 Indeed, de Worde must have identified an appetite for texts relating to courtesy and as Nicholls notes, “though it is generally fallacious to make much of ‘upward social mobility’ in the fifteenth century (or earlier), it is at least true that the mercantile class became more powerful during this period, and property gradually began to replace inherited nobility as the primary indicator of power” (1985, p. 140). If nobility could be purchased with land, then it could also be acquired by learning, and there is no doubt about the importance and wide appeal of practical books for gentlemen of the early sixteenth century, despite survival rates that suggest that early English printers gave limited attention to practical books. 53 But works that educate readers about behaviour and noble culture and that are frequently printed by the likes of Caxton and de Worde do not always respond to investigations of their materiality in the same way as a manuscript. Equally, however, the nature of the manuscripts that preserve the Boke of Kervynge cannot be generalised: they contextualise the treatise in very particular ways, revealing more than the printed editions about its significance and audience but only in very specific cultural moments and social contexts. Two of the manuscripts are held at the library of the Society of Antiquaries, London, where they have the shelfmarks 282 and 287, respectively; the third is National Library of Wales ­Peniarth 394D (Hengwrt 92) (discussed below). MS 287 is a manuscript that is dated c. 1500 and initially it seems to conform to what Willetts calls a collection of “miscellaneous treatises” (2000, p. 151), though we can find a unity of purpose in those treatises taken together. 54 The volume opens with a copy of Walter of Henley’s tract on husbandry (ff. 1–20v), here attributed, as in National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 394D and British Library, MS Sloane 686, to Robert Grosseteste; this is paired with an abridgement of Palladius on the planting and grafting of trees. 55 Following this is a text entitled A Noble Boke off Cookery, which divides into three parts: “Festes ryalle” (ff. 20 v–34v), detailing the food served at such events as the coronation of Henry V at Westminster (1413), the “stallacoun” of Lord Neville, Archbishop of York (1465), and the feast held by the Earl of Warwick for the king, among others – “The Kalendar off Cookry” (ff. 34v–40v) and “the Makynge off Cookry” (ff. 40v–99r). 56 The “Kalendar” is an index, and the recipe titles are bracketed and numbered in the same hand that has foliated the MS. The Boke of Keruynge, here called “keruynge and seruis,” begins at

Courtesy and the Book  49 f. 104r and is described by Willetts as being “close to the text printed by  … de Worde” (2000, p. 152); the text ends at f. 126v, closing the volume (Figure 2.2). The size of the text space varies at the beginning of the manuscript but begins to become more uniform, and more narrow, suggesting that some of the wide margins may have been intended for annotation or decoration; as it stands, decoration is meagre, with incipits and explicits in rubric and some initial letters tinted in red. There are also some red initials throughout as well as simple paraphs for textual division and, from f. 21r, some crude ruling. A first reading of the volume might give the impression that it was produced as a useful miscellany, with the intention that all texts relating to the running of a house are stored together in

Figure 2.2  London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 287, f. 105r. © Society of Antiquaries of London.

50  Courtesy and the Book a single repository; indeed, the stock of texts preserved here  – a husbandry, a text on planting and grafting, a series of royal and ecclesiastical historical menus, a cookery, and a text on service – could indicate that the volume’s primary function is to instruct in a very particular context. It is also possible that the book held symbolic value for the family to which it belonged or the household in which it was kept. Materially it is clean and free from the common features of household books or miscellanies, such as staining, pen trials and ephemera like calculations, lists and records of births and deaths; aside from the alphabet which is copied onto one of the flyleaves, and some later recipes added into blank parts of one or two folios, the book bears few common signs of wear and tear. Certainly, some household books that survive from the later medieval period are scruffy and lack organisational strategies and unity, but others are more deliberately and carefully produced and finished, suggesting that volumes like this one were not all intended to be consulted in the same way; indeed, Boffey notes that household books preserving useful texts vary greatly in terms of quality of production, noting that such manuscripts “range from the scrappily amateur to the professionally finished,” like the royal or aristocratic ordinances such as the Liber Niger.57 Perhaps, then, our book is not meant for regular consultation, not acting as a scrapbook of various texts that dictate how things are done – to which, we might imagine, contemporary and later hands might add information on how to do things better – but rather as a record of the lifestyle, values, expectations and standards of a family or a household to the wider world.58 Reimagining Society of Antiquaries MS 287 in this way introduces the possibility that such books were not always created to be read and used, but that they may have been commissioned or acquired as exemplary records of aspirations and connections. The idea that the volume can signify in ways that are not directly to do with instruction and learning is borne out by the second Society of Antiquaries manuscript – MS 282 – which is a nineteenth-century copy of MS 287. 59 MS 282 (­Figure 2.3) was created by Clarence Hopper, in the middle of the nineteenth century, using MS 287 as an exemplar. Hopper copied the treatise on husbandry by Walter of Henley, attributing it in the same way to Robert Grosseteste; and he copied the Boke of Kervynge, the final treatise in MS 282. Between the two, he copied a version of “The Trentale of St Gregory,” and included loose in the MS is a letter from Hopper to Octavius Morgan reporting the discovery of a second version of the same poem.60 The most intriguing aspect of this act of copying is that Hopper does not merely transcribe the text, but he also emulates the materiality of the older manuscript. The book was apparently bound after copying, indicated by the presence of blank white flyleaves separating different texts and the inclusion of catchwords. Text is copied on one side of the page only, in a neat cursive script, with decoration that is materially

Courtesy and the Book  51

Figure 2.3  L  ondon, Society of Antiquaries, MS 282, f. 33r. © Society of Antiquaries of London.

reminiscent of that found in MS 287: calligraphic initials appear throughout in red, blue and green, some inked and some painted. In places the mise-en-page echoes that of MS 287, in particular the table of contents to item one. As such, it is not the text, but the impression created by the way in which the text is presented, that is the most important effect of the copying of parts of MS 287 into MS 282. For Hopper, the clear motive behind his material act of mimicry is the preservation not just of the more interesting texts contained in MS 287 but the preservation of the way in which they were presented by their compilers and, in turn,

52  Courtesy and the Book how that spoke to their performance of taste, ambitions and identity. In Hopper’s care in inking and painting initials, mimicking decorative features such as fronding and emulating the layout of the instructional texts is a sense of duty to the way the text looks; and he finds this care in his exemplar. Hopper is ultimately concerned with the preservation of all aspects of the texts he chooses, and integral to the meaning of the text, for him, is evidently the way it signifies materially. In a strange way, MS 282 reveals more about MS 287 than we might expect: a nineteenth-century antiquarian found and expressed the sense of the manuscript stretched beyond the instruction that is certainly found therein.61 Was MS 282 intended to merely replicate an antiquarian book or was it supposed to circulate within a family, as its exemplar would have done up to four centuries earlier, as a kind of document that added value to its library? It would appear that the copyist wanted what we might now refer to as a facsimile; the material refashioning of MS 287 evidences, I argue, a relationship not just with the texts but also with their condition and the manner in which they are materially transmitted, a fact that might indicate that the book was relevant to or meaningful for n ­ ineteenth-century households or readers. The third manuscript of The Boke of Keruynge, National Library of Wales Peniarth 394D (olim Hengwrt 92), is certainly closely related to Society of Antiquaries MS 287, containing ­Walter of Henley’s Husbandry and the fragment on planting and grafting, a copy of the Forme of Cury (which is not found in Society of Antiquaries MS 287), The Good Book of Kervynge and Servis, a second treatise of culinary recipes and a text on the characteristics of ingredients for medicines.62 The Peniarth MS also contains a text recommending war against France.63 It may well have provided the exemplar for MS 287, since it is dated to 1485 by Keiser (1998, p. 3895) and was most likely produced earlier than the Society of Antiquaries manuscript.64 Salter notes that “annotations concerning a dispute about ownership confirm that some of its texts formed one book from the sixteenth century,” so it is likely that the practical treatises on husbandry and carving and the cookery recipes were associated from c. 1590 (2013, p. 140). Although the medieval manuscripts of the Boke of Kervynge privilege what we now classify as instructional texts, they manifest what may have been keen interest not in the mere mechanics of instruction but in the appropriate material presentation of a system of knowledge relating to lifestyle, manners and tastes. Many of the less materially appealing manuscripts that survive from the later Middle Ages – those that are commonly referred to as commonplace books or miscellanies – p ­ resent texts in a seemingly haphazard way, some of them instructional, some scientific, some devotional, but all copied in many cases in an unprofessional manner and with a concern to save space, making full use of the available space for writing and containing little or no decorative features. The evidence that we find here in the contexts of the Boke

Courtesy and the Book  53 of Kervynge demonstrates that what we now describe and define as instructional texts may have had a cultural significance when gathered together and presented in a particular fashion. The manuscripts invite the reader to enjoy the texts, to appreciate the standards of service, dining and entertaining enjoyed by a family, and to admire their sense of themselves. Just as John Russell and his young wayward pupil are redeemed and elevated by the acquisition of a particular kind of knowledge, so their status could have been confirmed by their apparent advocacy of particular sets of standards. These texts and manuscripts, then, are political, and their existence and material qualities make statements about their owners, whereas, as noted above, the printed texts of the Boke of Kervynge likely circulated in a more widespread way, reaching readers interested not only in performativity but in professional learning.

The Boke of Nurture: Manuscripts The five late-medieval manuscripts of the Boke of Nurture demonstrate that the work may have been understood in multiple contexts and in relation to various kinds of texts: literary, devotional, political, economic, and didactic. However, it is likely that these contexts affirmed and reflected the aristocratic provenance of the Boke. Indeed, as Keiser observes, three of the five extant manuscripts preserve other works that were produced under aristocratic patronage (1999, p. 485).65 One such is London, British Library MS Harley 4011, which contains a copy of John Lydgate’s Lyf of our Lady (commissioned by Duke Humphrey’s brother King Henry V).66 It is an impressive and attractive volume, most probably professionally produced and commissioned.67 The book has a leaf missing at the beginning, and it now opens with a series of texts by Lydgate, including an extract, in the second column of what is now f. 1r, of his translation of Stans Puer ad Mensam; this runs to f. 2ra and includes, as mentioned, the envoy “to Humfray late Duke of Glowceter, whome God assoyle.” That is followed by a text called “The desolacyon of Rome made by Lydgate in Balade wise,” which ends at f. 2vb; in the same column, in a different hand, is a text called “A Devovte oryson to þe holy sacrament”. At f. 3r, the manuscript switches to single column and contains a text called the Craft of Dying, ending imperfectly at f. 20v. This is followed by a copy of Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, which opens at f. 21r, with the rubric “This boke … was compyled by John Lydgate, monk of Bury at the excitatioun and steryng of oure worshipfull prince Harry the fifth in the honore, glorie and worshipp of the birth of the moste glorious maaiden, wiffe and moder of oure lord Ihesu Criste, chapitrid and markyd after this tabulle.” There is evidence of an annotating hand using black ink in the manuscript, and it has apparently been read through by a corrector who used a red pen, pencil, or brush, underlining important words and touched up the capitals (Figure 2.4).

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Figure 2.4  L  ondon, British Library, MS Harley 4011, f. 71r. © The British ­Library Board.

Following this, MS Harley 4011 preserves one of the best extant copies of the first version of the anonymously authored Libelle of English Policy, which in this manuscript has marginal notations in red representing a sophisticated system of glosses in Latin and English.68 The verse text’s rhymed endings are also bracketed in red, and the initial letter of each folio, as with the Life of our Lady, is elaborately decorated with red ink and tinted frondings. There is also some underlining and titling in rubric throughout; the text ends imperfectly at f. 137v. This is followed by a verse calendar of saint’s days (ff. 138r –142v); an extract from Lydgate’s Dietary (ff. 143r–v), which also has its rhymed verse endings bracketed, this time in black ink, and the text has initial

Courtesy and the Book  55 letters, two lines deep, inked in blue; and a copy of the Legenda Aurea (ff. 144r –163r). Immediately prior to the copy of the Boke of Nurture, which closes the manuscript (ff. 71r –189r; see figure x), there is a text on the age of the world (f. 164r) and a verse text on kingship in English and Latin (ff. 164v–165v). The volume is a repository of texts that seems to constitute suitable reading for the upper classes or for those with mercantile concerns since, as Meale observes, the intention of the Libelle in particular is to influence decisions made during the kingship of Henry VI with respect to English Calais as a centre of trade (1995, p. 212). Despite the fact that, according to Holmes the text can be associated with Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, “who was hailed by the poet for his routing of the Burgundian forces at the siege of Calais” (1926, pp. 207–11, 215; qtd. in Meale, 1995, p. 214), the concerns in the text are mercantile rather than martial, and it seems likely that “social and political groupings other than those centring on the court provided the occasion for the Libelle’s composition, and for its eventual dissemination (Meale, 1995, p. 214).69 The links in Harley 4011 between the Libelle and Russell’s text are compelling; the inclusion of some texts by Lydgate seems to cement a set of concrete associations between Russell and Lydgate, both of whom were in the service of Humphrey. However, as a volume it is more than the sum of its parts. It is performative, reflecting a particular set of values that are not necessarily courtly but that are socially and politically informed and organised. Indeed, the texts that are brought together here seem to enact concerns with respectability and correct and proper behaviour, whether socially or in private moments; political affairs and matters of national and economic significance; governance, kingship and regulation; and with living and eating well and appropriate devotional practices.70 The book may exemplify the ethos of an entire household, preserving it so that it can be passed on to younger generations, mingling informative texts with those that are literary or that “serve devotional or recreational purposes” in ways that seem to respond or speak to the specific needs of a family, household or group.71 Materially, the manuscript seems to have been designed to showcase the value of the texts: the margins are wide, the decoration elaborate, and the production overall to a high standard. This is the only manuscript that mentions Russell, and the association with Duke Humphrey would perhaps cultivate a sense of the value of a text written by his steward, and the careful pairing with texts by another charge of Humphrey’s, John Lydgate, might invite readers to consider the virtues of governance, proper and good counsel, and appropriate ‘nurture.’ But do other manuscripts of the Boke of Nurture confirm the sense that the Boke was for some a real reflection of practice and a performance of collective identity? Another fascinating context for the Boke is London, British Library, MS Sloane 2027, which dates from the third

56  Courtesy and the Book quarter of the fifteenth century.72 The initial folios have suffered some damage, but display some care in decoration, with some painted figures, fronds and ornate initials. Overall, the manuscript gives the impression of having been neatly and carefully copied, in an anglicana hand.73 The manuscript contains five items, beginning (ff. 1r –36v) with a copy of the De re Militari of Vegetius, which ends imperfectly at chapter 24.74 Chapter division is clearly indicated with headings and marginal notation, initial letters in red, normally three lines deep, and black and red paraphs. The De re militari is followed by the Boke of Nurture, which begins at f. 37r (see Figure 2.5); the Boke’s opening is signalled by a painted red and green-tinted initial letter with fronding, and it retains its verse structure here, with rhymed ends bracketed; additionally the verse is copied into stanzas of four lines, each stanza divided from the other by red lines. The Boke preserved here ends imperfectly with the section on the Marshall. Following the Boke is a copy of the Governance of Kings and Princes (or the librum Aristotiles ad Alexandrum magnum as it is referred to in the explicit), which materially links with the preceding text: not only is it copied in the same hand but it has the same kind of decorated initial, and its seven-line stanzas are laid out in the same manner as in the Boke of Nurture. The text runs from f. 53r to f. 92r. The final two items in the manuscript are a copy of Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle and an imperfect copy of the prose Brut. Although this volume might appear to be a collection of instructional and historiographical texts, I contend that it unifies the different textual genres using material strategies as well as methods that are not immediately discernible. The Governance of Princes, in particular, presented as an epistle containing advice from Aristotle to the emperor Alexander, sits well with the advisory tone of the Boke of Nurture; both are also in ways expressions of aspiration and ambition and, taken with the historical and chronicle texts also located in the manuscripts, attest perhaps to a patron with the desire to be possessed of a certain type of knowledge. That knowledge is sophisticated, scholarly, and associated with manners, courtesy, and good breeding; those imaginative links between texts that might not be obvious to the modern reader have the potential to signify to a contemporary owner and, perhaps, to work to improve that owner. Indeed, the Governance and the Boke of Nurture both have envoys that ask readers to correct  and reform the text should they find something wrong; the Governance asks that readers “Make no deffence / butt wyth lowlyhede / Pray hym refforme / wher he seyth neede” (f. 92v). It is tempting to imagine the texts themselves, far from requiring correction, influencing and improving the people who encountered them. These volumes, replete with historical, devotional and political texts in both verse and prose, perhaps challenge our sense of the natural context for the courtesy book and, importantly, our sense of contemporary attitudes towards the Boke of Nurture and similar and related texts.

Courtesy and the Book  57

Figure 2.5  L  ondon, British Library, MS Sloane 2027, f. 37r. © The British Library Board.

We need not doubt their functionality, but we perhaps need to reassess tendencies to dismiss them as one-dimensional or unrelated to other kinds of medieval literature. One of the remaining manuscripts of the Boke probably situates it in a context with which many scholars will be familiar and comfortable: the so-called miscellany manuscript of the kind which seems to foreground the facile provision of information, frequently in the form of medical texts and astrological tables and diagrams. A fifteenth-century paper manuscript, British Library MS

58  Courtesy and the Book Sloane 1315, is considerably smaller and less impressive in appearance than the books discussed above. Its Boke of Nurture begins at f. 2r and ends imperfectly at f. 15r, soon after the beginning of the part on the chamberlain.75 The remainder of the manuscript is comprised of a calendar; an index list to find medicines; some astrological and lunar tables, with notes on the moon and the twelve signs; a treatise on (un)lucky days; a Galenic treatise on bloodletting; a treatise on children born under different signs; a destinary; a verse lunary, “The Thyrrty Days of the Mone”; prognostications on Christmas Day; “A Generall Rewle for to yeue Medycyns”; a copy of the Agnus Castus; and a large collection of charms and medicines, some magical. This book would, in many ways, appear to provide a more logical context for an instructional text since the majority of its items provide relatively straightforward astrological instruction, medical advice and information on dates in an easily retrievable format. However, the inclusion of a large collection of mainly magical and fanciful recipes gives this book a different quality. Some of the recipes are for love potions; for example, “To make a woman love the” (f. 91v), but others verge on the fantastic, like the spell at f. 91v to “make a lofe of bredde to dawnce in an oven or on a tabull”; their presence somehow alters the nature of the book and, thereby, the other texts as if by magic. What we are faced with here, in British Library, MS Sloane 1315, is a material context for the Boke of Nurture that should make sense; however, since the volume contains some unusual and unusable texts, it perhaps served many different functions. The imaginative, fun, and surreal spells, coupled with prognostications and lunaries and texts on lucky days, potentially gives the book a fictive and imaginative framework within which these texts can operate as narratives to be enjoyed first rather than accessed for the purposes of education or the retrieval of information. British Library, MS Sloane 1315 certainly modifies perspectives on the contexts for the Boke of Nurture. Here, it seems to be presented as an arcane work with an old-world appeal, especially evident in its co-location with texts that are presented as instructional but which in fact are fantastic and fictional. Of the surviving manuscripts, 1315 interrupts what appears to be a pattern for the copying and location of the Boke. Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 8009 (Mun.A.6.31), from the second half of the fifteenth century, returns the Boke to a now-­familiar home amongst historical, political and devotional writings.76 It is a manuscript that is “often associated with a noble household” (Foster, 2012, p. 30), and it has been linked also with female ownership.77 This volume contains fourteen treatises in verse and prose, written by several scribes; the Boke of Nurture occupies ff. 336r –355v, and was copied by hand eight; the title of the Boke occupies f. 336r, which is otherwise blank, as is the verso; the text proper begins

Courtesy and the Book  59 at 337r.78 The manuscript contains several saints’ lives in verse and in prose (including the Life of Saint Dorothy and the Life of St Anne); the unique copy of the romance work Torrent of Portyngale; some prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary; a copy of Bevis of Hampton; Ipomydon; and an account of the meeting of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and the Emperor ­Frederick III at Trier, 1473.79 Chetham’s 8009 is comprised of twelve booklets, the majority of which contain one text; there is no continuous programme of decoration but several of the manuscript’s titles are ornamented with dog-toothing, strap-work, and other flourishes (McClean, 2009, p. 5). According to McClean, though a definitive timeline for the manuscript is not known and the fourteen texts that Chetham’s 2009 preserves are diverse in genre, scribal hand, and decoration, each represents a fifteenth-century production, and the manuscript “exhibits a codicological, scribal cohesion at its core” (2009, p. 7).80 Indeed, many of the twelve booklets may have emerged from the same workshop, and Meale argues that Ipomadon, John Russell’s Boke and the Duke and the Emperor were “bound or kept together soon after being copied,” finding a “deliberate arrangement both of the available material and of those items which were added to the core of booklets apparently obtained from the same place”.81 As a volume it is both unique in terms of its preservation of a particular range of texts and typical of the genre of household book (McClean, 2009, p.  13). Like the Sloane manuscript, this volume combines texts that are useful and practical as well as performatively referencing the identity of the household with texts that are devotional texts reflecting the “pervading preoccupations of late medieval piety” as well as texts that incorporate “a comprehensive spectrum of late-Middle English family romance motifs” (McClean, 2009, pp. 13–14). McClean also suggests that readings of particular texts side by side can produce greater meaning: the co-location of the Liber Catonis with Russell’s text can stress the importance of education, while the “assumptions of status portrayed in the Book of the Duke and the Emperor and Russell’s Book are questioned when Ipomadon reveals the potentially false nature of outward display” (2009, p. 31).82 It has been suggested that the volume was the household volume for a member of the London mercantile community, someone who perhaps wished to mark out his family as significant and as engaged in particular kinds of reading in the context of an emerging urban ­fifteenth-century political, cultural and economic elite; as noted by Wade, the manuscript “provides a witness to a particular milieu of vernacular literary consumption […] and to its according horizons of literary knowledge” (2013, p. 257).83 But the volume may have also supplied practical reading and exempla for younger members of the household; McLean notes that together, the Liber Catonis and Russell’s text “meaningfully construct a composite portrait of the way in which education is a means to good living – through good work and activity” (2009, p. 72).

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Conclusion The production of meaning with respect to texts that are co-located is especially relevant to and problematic in the case of British Library, Royal 17.D.15. John Theyer, the antiquarian book collector, may have been responsible for binding together the two halves of what now forms Royal 17.D.15, but the binding originally occurred in a different order, so that the end of the Boke of Nurture dovetailed with the beginning of The Canterbury Tales, separated only by a printed text that must have acted as a sort of threshold between the two. As we have seen, Theyer could have acquired the various parts of what is now Royal 17.D.15 loosely bound, so there may have been some historical recognition that there were synergies and connections between the parts, connections that might have more to do with the texts themselves than the possibility that they originated in a single shop. We may reasonably assume that the first leaf of The Canterbury Tales manuscript was already missing when the manuscript was bound; this is likely because had it been present prior to binding, it would have been protected, enclosed in the middle of the manuscript, and therefore less likely to have been lost or damaged. So what Theyer possessed was The Canterbury Tales without the first leaf; his copy began with the end of the portrait of the Knight and the beginning of those of the Squire and Yeoman. Based on the evidence of the other surviving manuscripts, and the potential for material and imaginative links with literature of different types, relating to status, nation, history, and devotion, it is reasonable to assume that Theyer’s attitude to the text was no different. Perhaps he saw it as a narrative rather than a text primarily concerned to instruct, or as a way of indicating to a public his attitudes towards living, dining, and behaviour. Perhaps Theyer and others made imaginative links between the parts of the manuscript by linking them based on intimate knowledge of the texts, finding links between the Squire of The Canterbury Tales (who is described in similar terms to the would-be server addressed and outlined by Russell in his Boke, and perhaps also the Yeoman, whom Chaucer believes to be a forester but whom we are arguably encouraged to read as an outlaw) who echoes the almost-renegade young man who is redeemed and converted by Russell’s kindly instruction and mentoring. That these texts are married in this way to produce a volume perhaps reflects in some way what might be referred to as the “juxtaposition of the various courtly attributes of Chaucer’s squire” who can “Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtreye and write” (l. 95), which leads Firth Green to wonder whether literacy was just one aspect of appropriate courtly, genteel behaviour (1980, p. 73). Courtly living and behaviour involved a whole range of attitudes, behaviour, and knowledge, and the ways in which we have seen the Boke of Nurture circulate in the fifteenth century seem to confirm this. So the making of Royal 17.D.15 was perhaps

Courtesy and the Book  61 not incidental: this act of physical and imaginative textual marriage reveals something of contemporary attitudes towards what we classify as instructional treatises, attitudes that are uncovered only with some attention to their material survival and condition, and by interrogating their relationship to their co-texts. Furnivall, an in an early attempt to theorise these compelling texts, certainly recognised their potential to function beyond the instructional; in his 1868 edition, he notes that the Boke of Nurture “contains … a complete Manual for the Valet, Butler, Footman, Carver, Taster, Dinner-arranger, Hippocras-maker, Usher and Marshal of the Noblemen, of … the mid-fourteenth century”; it also, however, offers glimpses into the life of the “Good Duke”, permitting the reader a kind of covert access to his life. We watch him rise and dress, go to the Chapel and meals, entertain at feasts in the Hall, then undress and retire to rest; we hear how his head was combed with an ivory comb, his stomacher warmed, his petycote put on … how his bath was made, his table laid, his guests arranged, his viands carved … Bills of fare for flesh and fish days are laid before us; admired Sotiltees or Devices are described; and he who cares to do so may fancy for himself the Duke and all his brilliant circle feasting in the Hall (pp. vi–vii). Like John Theyer and others, who may have recognised that Chaucer’s Squire, for all of his irritating vanities, exemplified the model behaviour advocated in Russell’s tract, and who perhaps saw traces of the stout Yeoman in the young wayward man, Furnivall found creativity, and the potential to thrill and delight, in our Boke of Nurture: an appeal to the “fancy” of the reader in the manner of instruction that we find there. In its manuscripts we find that the contexts for instructional writing transcend the everyday and the mundane.

Notes 1 From the portrait of the Squire, General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, BL MS Royal 17.D.15, f. 1r. 2 For information on part one of the manuscript see the entry in Mooney, Linne, Simon Horobin and Estelle Stubbs, Late Medieval English Scribes database: www.medievalscribes.com [accessed 30 June 2018]. A detailed description may also be found in Daniel W. Mosser, A Digital Catalogue of the pre-1500 Manuscripts and Incunables of The Canterbury Tales (second edition) www.mossercatalogue.net/record.php?recID=Ry1 [accessed 30 June 2018]. 3 J.M. Manley and E. Rickert, The Text of The Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 2 vols (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1940), describe the manuscript as having been “mutilated” (I, p. 476). 4 The text-space measures 205 × 135mm. There is a hand change at f. 167r in the middle of The Clerk’s Tale, but similar decorative work persists

62  Courtesy and the Book throughout. M.C. Seymour (1997, p. 138) notes that hand two is that of the stationer John Multon (d. 1475); A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts, vol II: The Canterbury Tales (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997). A third hand c. 1500 adds twenty-seven lines of Sir Thopas, f. 241, in double column on blank space left for the tales’ ending. Seymour also points out that both hands are mixed, and the dialect is East Midlands. The Late Medieval English Scribes database has the dialect of scribe one as West Midlands and notes that scribe two is the so-called Hammond Scribe, a scribe associated with John Multon and who almost certainly worked in his shop; see Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, “The Provenance of the Manuscript: The Lives and Archive of Sir Thomas Cook and his Man of Affairs, John Vale,” in The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John Vale’s Book, eds M.L. Kekewich et al. (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing for Richard III & Yorkist History Trust, 1995), pp. 72–126 (p. 109). They note that Hand A runs from ff. 1v–166v and the Hammond, Hand B, from ff. 167v–301v. For more on the Hammond scribe see Mooney et al. (2011); Mooney (2000); Horobin (1999); Boffey and Thompson (1989); Doyle (1959); and Hammond (1929–30). 5 The copy of The Canterbury Tales ends at f. 301v. Seymour (1997, p. 138) notes that this manuscript is Group D in sequence “with disturbed links before and after the Squire’s Tale and lacking the short form of the Merchant’s end-link and the Franklin’s head-line”; A Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts, vol II: The Canterbury Tales (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1997). 6 Since the manuscript was part of the collection of John Theyer that was purchased for the Old Royal Library by Charles II c. 1678, it may have been damaged in the fire at Ashburnham House, 1731, or in the rescue mission (the books were saved as a result of being thrown out of the upstairs window into the courtyard below; Doyle, 2011, pp. 81, 84). 7 The Promisse of Matrimonie (STC 9176; USTC 50090) is a folio pamphlet of eight pages that was printed in London by William de Machlinia in 1483. The copy that is available on EEBO is the unique copy that is held at the British Library and which was excised from MS Royal 17.D.15. The pamphlet contains a handwritten note supplying corresponding information to that found in the MS, stating that it was removed from the Royal MS on 11 May 1850. The Promisse is an anti-French propaganda tract that was possibly printed to coincide with the opening of parliament on 20 January 1483. It includes the terms of the treaty of Picquigny agreed between Louis XI and Edward IV, 29 August 1475, as well as terms of the treaty of ­A rras (1482). On The Promisse, which was written by Louis XI of France for the dauphin to Edward IV see Henry Ellis, “XXV.—Copy of an Historical Document, printed by Machlinia, dated in 1475: communicated in a Letter to the President, from Sir Henry Ellis, Secretary,” Archaeologia 32 (1846): 325–31. See also E. Gordon Duff, Printing in England in the Fifteenth Century: E.  ­Gordon Duff’s Bibliography with Supplementary Descriptions, Chronologies, and a Census of Copies by Lotte Hellinga (London: The ­Bibliographical Society, 2009), pp. 97–98, no. 351. 8 Seymour also notes watermarks for part one of the manuscript: a tête-deboeuf (ff. 1–272; armoires deux pals, ff. 273–84; cisseaux, ff. 285–301, which correspond to Briquet 15054, 2064 and 3697, dated 1441–45, 1464, and 1458–63, respectively). The Royal library was transferred to the British Museum at Montagu House in 1757 (Doyle, 2011, p. 84), and the manuscript had been owned by John Theyer (see Chapter 1) whose books were acquired for the collection by Charles II. For a catalogue of the Royal manuscripts in the British Library see www.bl.uk/collection-guides/royal-­manuscripts [­accessed 30 June 2018].

Courtesy and the Book  63 9 The Somnium is a Lancastrian polemic dating from 1459–60 that aims to “prevent any weakening on Henry VI’s part in the newly-adopted policy of extreme measures against the Yorkist leaders”; See J.P. Gilson, “A Defence of the Proscription of the Yorkists in 1459,” English Historical Review 26.103 (1911): 512–25, and Christopher Cannon, “Malory’s Crime: Chivalric Identity and the Evil Will,” in Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed D. Aers (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 159–84 (in particular pp. 165ff). Gilson notes that the copy in Royal 17.D.15 is imperfect, stating that it is missing its opening leaf and that it has been in places “corrupted by a bad copyist” (p. 512); he also provides an edition of the text (pp. 514–25). 10 Manley and Rickert, 1940, I, p. 476, and Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 153, who argues notes that the Somnium was propaganda produced by the retinue of Margaret of Anjou, of which Fortescue was a member. See also S.B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1936, repr. 2013), p. 334, no. 14 (and passim). Gilson reckoned that Sir John Fortescue may have been the author if the Somnium since “it is difficult to point out any other Lancastrian pamphleteer more likely to have been employed on this occasion”, but acknowledges that this argument is compromised by the nature of the second text in the MS by Fortescue: a recantation of his Lancastrian writings (1911, p. 513). 11 On Fortescue see Anthony Gross, The Dissolution of the Lancastrian Kingship: Sir John Fortescue and the Crisis of Monarchy in Fifteenth-Century England (Stamford: Paul Watkins Medieval Studies, 1996). 12 See R.H. Robbins, “Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions,” section XIII of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English vol. 5, ed A.E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1975), pp. 1484–85, 1694–95; Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards, A New Index of Middle English Verse (London: British Library, 2005) no. 2808. For an edition see T. Wright, Political Poems and Songs from the Accession of Edward III to that of Richard III, 2 vols (London: Rolls Series, 1859–61), II, pp. lxvii, 271. 13 NIMEV 1514; DIMEV 2556. 14 Sutton and Visser-Fuchs argue that Multon’s output “contained a large number of English texts and translations” and that he was probably responding to demand from Londoners with limited French and Latin. Multon may have exchanged texts and exemplars with Vale, and Royal 17.D.15 may well represent the kind of anthology or collection that would have appealed to readers and copyists like him. 15 Outer leaves of booklets or volumes that are damaged, stained or missing may suggest that the booklet or volume circulated independently for a period prior to being allied to or bound with other fascicles; see Pamela Robinson, “The ‘Booklet’: A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manuscripts,” Codicologica 5 (1980): 46–69. 16 Theyer had inherited a valuable library of manuscripts from his grandmother’s brother, Richard Hart, last prior of Llanthony Secunda, Gloucestershire, and his literary activities were well known, culminating in 1643 when in Oxford, serving in the king’s army, he presented to Charles in the gardens of Merton College a copy of his Aerio mastix, or, A vindication of the apostolicall and generally received government of the church of Christ by bishops (1643). On Theyer’s death his collection of 800 manuscripts on which his reputation was almost exclusively founded passed to his grandson Charles Theyer (b. 1651). After the collection had passed to

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17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

the London bookseller Robert Scott, a partial catalogue was prepared by William Beveridge, later bishop of St Asaph, and William Jane in 1678 (now London, British Library, MS Royal Appendix 70). Royal 17.D.15 was acquired by Charles II in 1685 and, along with 311 others purchased from Theyer’s library, it formed part of the Royal Library which was lodged with the British Museum in 1753 (Seymour, 1997, p. 138). Theyer’s was the final large collection to be lodged in the Royal Library. See also Charlotte FellSmith, “Theyer, John (bap. 1598, d. 1673),” rev. Robert J. Haines, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) www. oxforddnb.com/view/­article/27178 [accessed 30 June 2018]; Doyle, 2011; and chapter 1 above. There are several marks of provenance in the manuscript, noted on the Late Medieval English Scribes database: “Edward Hale” (f. 97); “­A nthony Ferre” (f. 148v); “John Burgh” (f. 332); “Thomas Yarburgh” (f. 338); and “Thomas Are” (f. 166) (accessed 30 June 2018). The treaty was a result of Edward’s pact with Charles of Burgundy and his subsequent invasion of France, whereupon Louis offered a peace agreement. The treaty provided for a seven-year truce and an entente cordiale between the two countries, as well as the betrothal of the princess Elizabeth to Charles, son of Louis. George Keiser, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, volume 10: Works of Science and Information, ed A.E. Hartung (New ­Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998), p. 3681. See Cameron Louis, “Proverbs, Precepts, and Monitory Pieces,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, volume 9 (XXII), ed A.E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993), p. 3002. Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528); and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book named the Governour (1531), which was dedicated to Henry VIII and designed to impart the wisdom and moral philosophy necessary to good governance. Sheila Lindenbaum, “London Texts and Literate Practice,” in The ­C ambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed D. Wallace (­Cambridge: ­Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 284–309 (p. 305). Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1980), p. 76. This instruction is retained in the closely-related Boke of Kervynge (discussed below): “Also a Marshall muste take hede yf the kynge sende to your souerayne ony message and yf he send a knyght receyue hym as a baron. And yf he sende a squyre receyue hym as a knyght/ and yf he sende you a yoman receyue hym as a squyer/ and yf he sende you a grome rececue hym as a ­yoman” (sig. B6v). See G. L. Harriss, “Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (1390–1447),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn May 2011: www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14155 [accessed 30 June 2018]. Humphrey also commissioned works such as Palladius’ De re rustica “not simply as a humanistic exercise”; rather it was intended for “practical use … evident from the apparatus in the dedication copy, of around 1440–45” (George Keiser, “Practical Books for the Gentleman,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. III, eds Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 470–94 (p. 484). Russell would have held the position of a less important chamber servant (Firth Green, 1980, p. 68). According to Peter Hammond (Food and Feast in Medieval England [Stroud: Sutton, 1993; repr. 2005] p. 174, no. 5) the butler and pantler were interchangeable in the fifteenth century; the pantler would originally have laid and cut the bread, and later he and the butler would have set the table.

Courtesy and the Book  65 26 Much like Lydgate, and in particular his Stans Puer ad Mensam and his “Tretise for Lauandres,” Russell sets instruction in a literary framework. The treatise for laundresses is a “short, aphoristic poem on having one’s clothes cleaned,” of which Lady Sybille Boys was patroness; see Anthony Bale, “A Norfolk Gentlewoman and Lydgatian Patronage: Lady Sibylle Boys and her Cultural Environment,” Medium Aevum 78.2 (2009): 394–413 (261, 264, 268ff). For Lydgate see H.N. MacCracken (ed), The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, part II (London: EETS 192, 1934), pp. 723–24 (“Lauandres”); 739–47 (Stans Puer). George Shuffleton (ed), Stans Puer ad Mensam (TEAMS Middle English Texts) http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/­shuffelton-codexashmole-61-stans-puer-ad-mensam-introduction [accessed 30 June 2018]. Although many critics have regarded Lydgate’s treatise on laundresses, in particular, as strictly didactic, Bale finds new interest in the poem as an artefact of patronage and a wide range of cultural practices. Bale notes that the ‘Tretise’ “takes the dominant form of princely or aristocratic writing – advice and counsel – and rewrites it for a non-princely cultural environment,” arguing that the verse ought to be taken seriously “at least as an artefact, which existed at a fundamental level of cultural engagement, if not as an eloquent lyric” (2009, p. 270). 27 On Walter of Henley’s Book of husbandry see Keiser (1998, pp. 3689, 3902). This work is also preserved in the three extant manuscripts of the Boke of Kervynge: Society of Antiquaries MSS 282 and 287, and National Library of Wales MS Peniarth 394D (Hengwrt 92), and it was printed by de Worde c. 1508 (STC 25007). The treatise dates from the late thirteenth century and was roughly contemporary with the Seneschaucy, a text on the responsibilities of the steward and the officers of a manor (Keiser, 1999, p. 473). See also D. Oschinsky (ed), Walter of Henley and Other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). 28 For an excellent discussion of the conditions of service in royal and noble households in the later Middle Ages see Firth Green (1980, pp. 13–37). 29 The version extant in Chetham 8009 says that the speaker is “John Russell, in London dwellynge” (l. 959) (Katherine M. McClean, Engaging the Manuscript: New Editions and Reading the ‘Whole Book’ in Chetham’s Library MS 8009 [Diss. University of York, 2009], p. 63), while the Harley version is the only one to mention Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. 30 In chanson d’aventure the narrator usually goes for a walk or for a ride, and eavesdrops on a solitary young woman. According to Thomas G. Duncan, “the poet rides out (riding marks his aristocratic status) to seek pleasure in a pastoral landscape where he comes upon a girl, often a shepherdess under a tree or in a sweet arbour, lamenting lost love. Usually he offers to comfort her, and usually his offer is accepted,” Medieval English Lyrics, 1200–1400 (London: Penguin, 1995), p. xxii. On this genre see also J­ udith M.  ­Davidoff, Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English (Fairleigh: ­Dickinson UP, 1988). 31 Anne Middleton, “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, ed David Lawton (Suffolk: Brewer, 1982), pp. 101–23 (pp. 114–15). 32 I quote throughout from Furnivall’s (1868) edition of the Boke of Nurture, which he edited from the version extant in London, British Library, MS 4011; The Babees Book, EETS OS 32 (1868), pp. civ–cxiii, pp. 115–239 (repr. Greenwood, 1969). Russell’s prologue is reminiscent of the opening scene in the fourteenth-century dream vision/debate poem The Parlement of the Thre Ages; in this text the speaker himself seems to be a poacher: “Als I went to the wodde my werdes to dreghe, / Into the schawes myselfe a schotte

66  Courtesy and the Book

33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40 41

42

me to gete / At ane hert or ane hynde, happen as it myghte (ll. 3–5). Here, however, the speaker falls asleep and witnesses in his dream a debate about social abuses. Rooney notes that the poem “extends the applications of the courtly formula to the common people, using the ordinary poacher to reduce the social status of the hunter figure to a level with which a non-courtly audience could more readily sympathise”; Anne Rooney, Hunting in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), p. 106. I am grateful to Julia Boffey for alerting me to the similarities between the texts. For an edition and commentary see Warren Ginsberg, The Parlement of the Thre Ages, Teams Middle English Texts (Rochester: Medieval Institute Publications/ TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1992) http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/ ginsberg-parlement-of-the-thre-ages [accessed 30 June 2018]. On poaching and poachers in literature, and specifically the hunter/poacher in The Parlement, Ginsberg cites Peck (1972), Scattergood (1983) and Waldron (1972). See Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (eds), Robin Hood and other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications/TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1997). It is worth noting that Chaucer’s yeoman of The Friar’s Tale, encountered by a Summoner in the greenwood, closely resembles a huntsman (ll. 1381–83) (Saunders, 1993, p. 157). See Corinne J. Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), which examines the forest as a literary landscape as well as an historical reality, and as a space that is associated with, among other things, exile and hunting. Saunders observes that Middle English romance permits multiple readings of the forest space, a space in which “the ambiguities of human nature become apparent” (p. 132). See also Rooney (1993). Humphrey’s library was the most important fifteenth-century secular library in England, bearing comparison to those of the French aristocracy; knowledge of his inventory is limited, however, to his bequests to Oxford University (Firth Green, 1980, p. 8). A list of manuscripts owned by Humphrey has been compiled by David Rundle: https://bonaelitterae.wordpress.com/ david-rundles-research-projects/the-library-of-humfrey-duke-of-gloucester/ [accessed 30 June 2018]. See also Alessandra Petrina, Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-Century England (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 174ff; and Susanne Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390–1447) and the Italian Humanists (Leiden: Brill Studies in Intellectual History, 2001). STC 3289, 3290; USTC 500989, 501232; see Keiser, 1998, pp. 2682, 3895. The Boke of Kervynge was also reprinted in 1560 and c. 1570 for Abraham Veale (STC 3289–3291.5), leading Keiser to speculate that other lost editions must have been issued in the intervening time (1999, p. 491). See also H.S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, 1475–1557, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), I, p. 244. For example: “than serue ye forth the table manerly, þr euery man may speke your curtesy” (1508; A4r). It is not clear whether Furnivall knew about the manuscript versions of the Book of Kervynge; he mentions “The Termes of a Kerver,” stating that it is “common in MSS” (1868, p. viii, no. 2), but he offers no references. On the audiences and readers of practical texts of instruction see Keiser (1999, pp. 470–94). He notes that courtesy material and related texts in manuscript “reached the readership to which they were directed, that is, the English landholding classes and those responsible to them” (p. 472). The woodcut also features another table of guests who seem to be of lower status just visible at the front of the image; it is clearly appropriate for the

Courtesy and the Book  67

43 4 4 45 46

47

48

49

50

text since it depicts feasting, hierarchy and service; see Elisabeth Salter, Popular Reading in English, c.1400–1600 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013), pp. 154–55. See also Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480–1535 (London: The Bibliographical Society/Oxford University Press, 1935), no. 1111, plate 105. The same woodcut was used for printed romances. Furnivall also prints the Boke of Keruynge (1868, pp. 265–86) from de Worde’s 1508 edition and includes Skeat’s note on the similarities between the 1508 and 1513 editions (pp. cxxi–cxxiii). In the 1508 edition the colophon reads: “Emprynted by Wynkyn de Worde at London in Flete Strete at the sygne of the Sunne. The yere of our lorde M.CCCCC.VIII”. STC 3309, 3309.1. See also Duff (2009, p. 16, no. 57). STC 3317; 3318. The Boke of Huntynge seems to have been extracted from the relevant section of The Book of St Albans which de Worde printed in quarto as a shorter pamphlet-style edition. See Eloise Pafort, “Notes on the Wynkyn de Worde Editions of the Boke of St. Albans and its Separates,” Studies in Bibliography 5 (1953): 43–52, and the work of Rachel Hands, in particular “Juliana Berners and The Boke of St Albans,” The Review of English Studies 18.72 (1967), pp. 373–86; and English Hunting and Hawking in The Boke of St Albans, Oxford English Monographs (London: Oxford UP, 1975). On hunting manuals see Anne Rooney, “The Middle English Hunting Manuals,” in Hunting in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 7–20. The Boke was first printed in 1486 by the socalled “Schoolmaster-Printer” of St Albans, and is considered to have four distinct sections on hawking, hunting, and two on heraldry. It is noted by Blades that de Worde probably added the treatise on fishing, considering it suitable for what he intended to be a gentleman’s vade mecum; Dame Juliana Berners, The Boke of Saint Albans, introd. William Blades (London: Elliot Stock 1881), p. 7. STC 3303. The author of the Book of Curtesye advises the young addressee to read both Chaucer and Lydgate as part of his “social education”; Lerer notes that Caxton later looks back to the assessments of both poets in the Book for the “aesthetic criteria and social functions of vernacular and authorial writing, and his editions were calibrated to conform to its precepts”; Seth Lerer, “William Caxton,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed D. Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 720– 38 (pp. 725–26). Lerer also suggests that Caxton included the Curtesye in a Sammelband also containing works by Lydgate and Chaucer, arguing that the courtesy text supplied “the critical instruction for their understanding” (p. 727). Caxton seems to have closely followed “established manuscript tradition of producing works or groups of works that would then be brought together for a patron or buyer” (p. 726). For an edition of The Book of Curtesye see F.J. Furnivall, Caxton’s Book of Curtesye (London: EETS ES 3, 1868). See Duff (2009, p. 15, no. 54) and Bennett (1969, I, p. 245). This edition (STC 3304) by de Worde, printed as a quarto using Caxton’s type no. 6, is extant now in only one fragment, preserved at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Bod-inc B.481). Keiser (1999, p. 488). Keiser states that production costs for the volume would have been high, and speculates that the inclusion of a Tudor emblem in the volume, considered with Henry VII’s well-known interest in hawking and hunting, may have meant that de Worde had a royal commission for the work. STC 3308.

68  Courtesy and the Book 51 See Keiser (1999, p. 472) who asserts that by the mid-fifteenth century “the landholding classes of England and those responsible to them had a long tradition of literacy and book-owning – and indeed of relying on didactic treatises for guidance”. 52 On gentry reading and self-improvement see Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014); and George R. Keiser (1999, pp. 470–94). 53 Keiser, 1999, p. 489. Keiser himself challenges this view, stating that it is likely that the record is misleading and that factors such as poor survival rates for pamphlets; large gaps in print runs and the lack of intervening editions; and the survival at times of only a few leaves from editions ought to make us wary of making assumptions based on what is extant (1999, p. 489). He cites The boke of cookery as an example: printed by Pynson in 1500 and reprinted by de Worde in 1510, only one copy of the Pynson edition and one leaf of de Worde’s survive (1999, p. 490). 54 Neil R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969–2002), II, p. 309; and Pamela Willetts, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Society of Antiquaries of London (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer for The Society of Antiquaries of London, 2000), p. 151. The MS is of paper, with ff. viii + 126, and is a large octavo (207 × 147mm), with contemporary stamped leather binding in brown, which Willetts suggests is most probably Canterbury (p. 152). There is a binding strip at the front that comes from a calendar, written in an English hand, s.xiiiin, showing January and February (Ker, 1969, II, p. 309). Additionally, there is a pressmark in red “C.11 ”, at ff. vr and 104r. The MS bears a provenance note, in a sixteenth-­century hand, at f. ivv, that reads: “Iohannes Frodsham me tenet teste Edwardus Broster de Bosley” (Cheshire); and another, “Mrs Jane Broster of Bossley” at f. vir. The name “Leonard Parrett” occurs at f. viiv, while the inscription “Thurston? alen est verus possessor huius libri” can be found at f. 63v. In addition, a nineteenth-century note at f. viv reads: “Cost 2£ 12s. 6d” (Willetts, 2000: 152). There is a note, at f. vv, entitled “An Alphabet to this Book,” in a ­seventeenth-century hand, which deciphers the script for later readers. 55 The text is attributed to Grosseteste in the table of chapters, but the treatise is in fact a late-medieval modification of a thirteenth-century treatise on estate management attributed to the Dominican prior Walter of Henley (c. 1286). It is frequently paired in MSS with the tract on planting, grafting and growing by Godfridus Super Palladium and by the Craft of Grafting by Nicholas Bollard (Keiser, 1998, p. 3689). On the links between these two manuscripts see Salter (2013, pp. 147 ff). 56 See Keiser (1998, pp. 3680, 3890, no. 397). This text was also printed by Richard Pynson as The Boke of Cookery (London: 1500; STC 3297); notes that it was the first cookery to be printed in England (1998, p. 3680). Keiser (1998, p. 3890) also notes a second edition in 1510, consisting of one leaf only. See Duff (2009, p. 14, no. 52). 57 Julia Boffey, “Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 24 and Definitions of the ‘Household Book,” in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, eds A.S.G. Edwards, V. Gillespie and R. Hanna (London: The British Library Studies in the History of the Book, 2000), pp. 125–34 (pp. 126, 127). 58 Some miscellaneous recipes are copied into the space immediately following the cookery and preceding the treatise on carving; one is a cure for toothache, f. 103r, that is dated “Cadiz, 29 April 1548”. 59 The manuscript is a folio ledger-style book, of blue paper, ruled in red, with ff. iii + 53; it has a half leather brown binding with marbled boards. The MS

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60 61

62

63

64

65

66 67

was owned by Octavius Morgan, FSA, and was presented to the Society of Antiquaries in 1894 after the death of Henry Salisbury Milman, director of the Society and the nephew of Morgan (Willetts, 2000, p. 150). The inside board bears the bookplate of the Society, and f. ii has the name “Octavius Morgan” in a cursive script, possibly in his holograph. (NIMEV 83; DIMEV 134). Although the “Trentale” does not occur in MS 287, a version is found in MS Peniarth 394D. The royal charter that was granted to the Society of Antiquaries in 1761 enabled it to receive bequests; this was significant, according to Willetts, since many later acquisitions, like MS 282, were endowments (2000, p. xii). Acquisitions after 1816 reflected the interests of Fellows, with some purchases linked to Society policy, and since funds for purchases were limited, bequests and gifts, mostly from Fellows, formed the majority of new acquisitions (Willetts, 2000, p. xiv). The bequest from Milman shows that the volume was not originally intended for the library of the Society of Antiquaries; from Octavius Morgan it passed to his nephew Henry S. Milman, and only upon his death in 1894 did it become part of the Society’s holdings. C. William Marx, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XIV: Manuscripts in the National Library of Wales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), p. xxv. Keiser (2004, p. 241) suggests that the same scribe made duplicate copies of the Boke, which are now extant in Society of Antiquaries 287 and National Library of Wales, Peniarth 394, which might indicate that there was in existence a centre or shop to which those seeking technical texts might turn to procure them. On the Forme of Cury see Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler (eds), Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century (London: EETS SS 8, 1985) and Ruth Carroll, “Vague Language in the Forme of Cury,” in Instructional Writing in English: Studies in Honour of Risto Hiltunen, eds Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), pp. 55–82. For listings of manuscripts and further reading see Keiser (1998, pp. 3679, 3887). For a description of this manuscript and a discussion of its practical bent see Elisabeth Salter, “Practical Texts: Husbandry and Carving,” in Popular Reading in English, c. 1400–1600 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2013), pp. 137–76, in particular pp. 139–46. Four leaves and a fragment of an English treatise recommending war against France; no date is given. It begins imperfectly; pp. 9–10 form a very small fragment (the top corner of the leaf) of the treatise and only letters survive (Marx, 1999, p. 59). Salter (2013, pp. 152–54) argues that the Peniarth manuscript provides the copy-text for the 1513 edition of the Boke by Wynkyn de Worde, finding a “close similarity between these two texts” as well as evidence of the ways in which “page layout and decoration may be preserved across manuscript and printed texts” (p. 152). Keiser also notes that London, British Library, MS Sloane 2027 contains Secrees of the old philosoffres, a rime royal version of the Secretum secretorum begun by Lydgate and completed by Benedict Burgh for King Henry VI, as well as the prose translation of Vegetius’ De re militari made for Thomas, tenth Lord Berkeley, in 1408; in addition he notes the celebration of the return to the throne of Edward IV central to the second part of Royal 17.D.15. Furnivall uses this manuscript as his base text for his 1868 edition of the Boke. The MS is a paper production, with ff. iii + 189 + iii, with marbled endpapers and pastedown. The book is in both double and single column format and has been pricked and ruled for copying; it measures 265 × 180mm, has

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68

69 70

71

72

73 74

a text space of 210 × 130mm, and is nicely decorated, with rubrics and explicits in scrolls throughout, and some rubricated initial letters and paraphs. It is noted that the manuscript is in two hands, by scribes showing similar linguistic features, and that it can be localised to Suffolk (LALME, vol. 1. 113, LP 8371). There are some provenance marks: at f. 2vb, following the version of Lydgate’s “Desolation of Rome”, is the inscription “Quod Willimus Woodeward” enclosed in a scroll; and the scribal? name “W. Grauell” (ff. 119r). Carol M. Meale, “The Libelle of Englyshe Polyce and Mercantile Literary Culture in Late-Medieval London,” in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, eds J. Boffey and P. King (London, 1995), pp. ­181–227 (pp.  208–09). Meale notes that there are two versions or editions of the Libelle: the first was written between 1436 and 1438 as a response to the Franco-Burgundian alliance ratified by the Treaty of Arras and the second, comprising a changed envoy and some updated references was likely composed between December 1437 and June 1441 (1995, pp. 206–07). There are in total nineteen extant manuscripts of the Libelle for which see F.  ­Taylor, “Some Manuscripts on the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye”, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 34 (1940): 376–417 and Meale (1995, p. 219ff). See also John Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (­L ondon: Blandford, 1971); and John Scattergood, “The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: The Nation and Its Place”, in Occasions for Writing: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Politics and Society (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), pp. 163–84. The text also mentions the retaliatory raid carried out in Flanders by Humphrey duke of Gloucester in 1436, accusing the Flemish of cowardice and questioning their moral standing (ll. 290–305; Meale, 1995, p. 209). Meale (1995, p. 214) argues that the primary audience for the text is unlikely to have been courtly or made up of the marital elite since the concerns of the poem are overwhelmingly mercantile. It seems that the composition of the text was “encouraged by mercantile patronage” (1995, p. 216) and the tone of the envoys to both editions is suggestive of attempts to influence political decision-making (1995, pp. 210–11). Indeed Meale further notes that the extant manuscripts bear little evidence that they circulated in courtly circles or amongst those involved in governance (1995, p. 219). See Boffey (2000, p. 127). She notes that similar family collections, including Robert Thornton’s two manuscripts (Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 and London, British Library, MS Additional 31042), or manuscripts that served religious communities, such as Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.9.38, from Glastonbury, frequently feature a blend of practical and literary/devotional material. Sloane 2027 is a paper manuscript, with ff. iii + 188 + iv, with marbled pastedowns and endpapers, and is in the binding of the British Museum Sloane collection. It measures 295 × 200mm, and the book has a text space that varies but that generally measures 210 × 150 mm. A full description of the MS can be found on the Manuscripts of the West Midlands page: www.dhi. ac.uk/mwm/browse?type=ms&id=82 [accessed 30 June 2018]. Some signatures occur throughout: “Wylliam Brandon of Knoll in the counte of Noriyke” and “John Proucter” (f. 95r); and “John Osborn 1546” is found at f. 97v. This military manual shares certain characteristics with Boke of Nurture: as mentioned above it has an aristocratic pedigree, and it contains detailed training and instruction on the “selection and preparation of warriors; officers and their responsibilities; movements and strategies of armies; and

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75

76

77

78

79

80 81

82

engines of war” (Keiser, 1999, p. 485). Aristocratic and royal interest in Vegetius, according to Keiser, is apparent in two other texts derived from it: Knyghthode and bataile, presented to Henry VI, had a revised dedication to Edward IV in two copies; and Caxton’s Boke of fayttes of armes and of chyualrye has a colophon stating that the translation and printing were commissioned by Henry VII, but intended for a wide audience (1999, p. 486). This MS measure 205 × 145mm. It has ff. i + 153 + iii, with marbled endpapers, and is in the binding of the Sloane collection, British Museum. The first few leaves of the manuscript have been trimmed, and there has been some damage to f. 1r; some fragments have been pasted onto an endpaper. The name “?Gyllerde” occurs on the same folio, and there are some notes in what appears to be a sixteenth-century hand, now mainly illegible. This is a large paper codex, with ff. iii + 372+ iii, measuring 267 × 190mm, dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, possibly written in London after 1473 (Ker, III, p. 364). It is frame ruled in pencil, and the binding is twentieth century. The manuscript has been digitised by the John Rylands University Library and may be viewed online at: https://luna. manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Chetham%27s+MS+Mun.A. 6.31&search=SUBMIT&QuickSearchA=QuickSearchA&sort=­reference_­ number%2Cimage_sequence_number%2Cparent_work_title%2Cdate_ created&pgs=50&res=1&cic=Man4MedievalVC%7E4%7E4 [accessed 30 June 2018]. For a detailed codicological description see Katherine McClean, Engaging the Manuscript: New Editions and Reading the ‘Whole Book’ in Chetham’s Library MS 8009 (Diss. University of York, 2009). See also Katherine McClean, “The Book of the Duke and Emperor: A New Edition and Interpretations within the Manuscript Context of MS Manchester, Chetham’s Library 8009 (Mun.A.6.31),” Fifteenth-Century Studies 38 (2013): 97–121; and Jordi Sánchez-Martí, “The Middle English Ipomedon in their Manuscript Context,” Manuscripta 49 (2005): 69–94. For which see Purdie, Rhiannon, “Sexing the Manuscript: The Case for Female Ownership of MS Chetham 8009,” Neophilologus 82 (1998): 139–48; Purdie, however, acknowledges that many of the texts may have been used in a family context. The manuscript is copied in at least ten scribal hands, for discussion of which see McClean (2009), pp. 5–6. There is one main scribe, hand five, which is responsible for copying in five of the twelve booklets. McLean (2009) edits this version of the Boke of Nurture (or the Book of Carving and Nurture in this MS) in her unpublished PhD dissertation (pp. 143–65). See also G.A. Lester, The Index of Middle English Prose Handlist II: A Handlist of Manuscripts containing Middle English Prose in the John Rylands University Library Manchester and Chetham’’s Library, Manchester (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 86–89. Several of the texts, including John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, were copied on the same paper stocks as three of the texts copied by Scribe 5, the manuscript’s main copyist (McClean, 2009, p. 7). See Carol M. Meale, “The Middle English Romance of Ipomedon: A Late Medieval ‘Mirror’ for Princes and Merchants,” in Reading Medieval Studies 10 (1984): 136–79 (143); and Carol M. Meale, “The Social and Literary Contexts of a Late Medieval Manuscript: A Study of British Library MS Harley 2252 and its Owner, John Colyns,” 2 vols (Diss. University of York, 1984), p. 300. See also James Wade, “Romance, Affect, and Ethical Thinking in a ­Fifteenth-Century Household Book: Chetham’’s Library, MS 8009,” New Medieval Literatures 15 (2013): 255–83, who reads the MS for its “affective

72  Courtesy and the Book potential,” arguing that the particular combinations of romance texts preserved therein shape the affective and ethical relations of the texts, and “prompt ethical thinking through felt responses” (p. 256, 258). 83 McClean (2009, p. 16) cites Lindenbaum who observes that manuscripts like Chetham’s 8009 helped to distinguish their owners and readers as “an urban aristocracy” (1999, p. 301). James Wade has also suggested that the book was professionally produced for a mercantile or gentry family, catering to their diverse educational, devotional and entertainment needs (“Introduction”, Sir Torrent of Portingale, TEAMS Middle English Texts, 2017: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/wade-sir-torrent-of-portingale-­ introduction [accessed 30 June 2018]).

3 Texts and Textuality Recording the Written Word1

An enemy ended my life, deprived me of my physical strength; then he dipped me in water and drew me out again, and put me in the sun where I soon shed all my hair. After that, the knife’s sharp edge bit into me and all my blemishes were scraped away; fingers folded me and the bird’s feather often moved over my brown surface, sprinkling meaningful marks; it swallowed more wood-dye (part of the stream) and again travelled over me leaving black tracks. Then a man bound me, he stretched skin over me and adorned me with gold; thus I am enriched by the wondrous work of smiths, wound about with shining metal. Now my clasp and my red dye and these glorious adornments bring fame far and wide to the Protector of Men, and not to the pains of hell. If only the sons of men would make use of me they would be the safer and the more victorious, their hearts would be bolder, their minds more at ease, their thoughts wiser; and they would have more friends, companions and kinsmen (courageous, honourable, trusty, kind) who would gladly increase their honour and prosperity, and heap benefits upon them, ever holding them most dear. Ask what I am called, of such use to men. My name is famous, of service to me and sacred in itself (Riddle 26)2

Some of the earliest manuscripts in English preserve texts that demonstrate a striking and evocative awareness of the materiality of the written word. The above riddle, one of the many formal and distinctively Anglo-Saxon treatments of everyday objects and processes, features a speaking object that is transformed into a glorious illuminated Bible. The opening of the riddle, which describes the slaughter of the calf, is not afforded any great detail by the poet; by contrast we participate fully in the labour-intensive process associated with the production of

74  Texts and Textuality vellum, described in visceral detail with emphasis on the physical effort. The preparation of the skin is written to appeal fully to the senses, while in the riddle the slaughter of the animal is glossed over, and the vellum ultimately is treated gently, being subjected to “wondrous work” as it is prepared to receive the sacred words. The tone of the riddle shifts here: the energetic industry is replaced by a slow care, perhaps evocative of the time-consuming and detailed work of copying and decorating books and documents. The vellum responds to this, being transformed by the “dye of wisdom”: it is carefully folded by fingers, marked on with the ink that is applied by the “bird’s feather,” and carefully protected with boards: “a man bound me, / he stretched skin over me and adorned me / with gold.” The speaking object begins to articulate in other ways: the process involving the plunging of the skin into water is reminiscent of a baptismal rebirth, and the rather harsh process, whereby the vellum is, quite literally, pulled, scraped and stretched into shape, transforms the speaker from one who is abused to one who is honoured, materially, with “shining metal … clasp, and red dye.” There is now pride evident in the voice of one who will be the instrument by which to “bring fame far and wide / to the Protector of Men.” The power of the written, materially adorned word is literally inscribed in this riddle and the reader, encountering the words set down in the now-famous Exeter Book, may well have appreciated the investment that was the production of a book and, more pertinently, the production of the various materials that comprised the physical book. 3 Each monastery that existed in England in the Anglo-Saxon period probably had its own scriptorium, and “especially during the seventh and eighth centuries … produced a steady stream of books” (Crossley-­ Holland, 1979, p. 114). However, the monks working in the scriptorium did not merely copy: they decorated and adorned the books inside and out with, as Crossley-Holland expresses it, a “grand, controlled passion; the vellum pages, glowing with solid mineral colours, red lead, bluish green … bright yellow … and pink, blue, purple, brown and gold, are works of art of the very highest order” (1979, p. 114). The reader is of course implicitly involved in this process that enables texts to come into being; indeed, the reader is a crucial aspect of this cycle. Even as the riddle materially appeals to the reader, its textual challenge is invested with importance by its preservation on the vellum that it seeks to personify. Much of the literature of the English Middle Ages manifests an awareness of the physicality of the carriers of texts, words, and images: another well-known Anglo-Saxon riddle, also found in the Exeter Book, asks us to imagine a book-moth as a reader ingesting the vellum and parchment.4 Similarly, the literary envoy, occurring with more frequency in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, imagines some the complexities of

Texts and Textuality  75 how readers encounter the written word. They are also concerned with the potential effect of that encounter as they direct their volumes, epistles and other texts effectively to come to life, and to deliver their message without ambiguity and imploring that any errors are corrected or, at least, overlooked. They also reference the act of physically producing the text: perhaps most particularly, the words spoken, through a short poem, apparently by Geoffrey Chaucer to an amanuensis named Adam evoke the laborious procedures that accompany the production of a text that is written down by hand.5 Although, as Gillespie argues, the reference made to the Chaucerian texts Troilus and Boece need not refer to specific acts of copying (2008, p. 280), the poem is highly evocative of the physicality of certain stages of physical textual production. These examples may lead us to conclude that authors and readers were thinking about all stages of production, aware of the technology that was used to produce the materials that carried the text and the technology that (re) produced that text; indeed much of the literature of the Middle Ages carries signs that the language of writing, ink-making, binding, illumination, and parchment-making was current and was recognisable even to the common reader. It was familiar enough, in some cases, even to signify and operate symbolically: one pertinent example occurs in the Middle English dream-poem Pearl, in which the speaker describes the vision that he experiences of his lost daughter, now in heaven, but also his dreamer’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. In particular there is a visually-­evocative section in which are described the twelve gemstones that are set into the tiered foundations of the golden city, among them emeralds, rubies, and topaz. The city itself rises above these tiers; it …stod abof ful sware, As longe as brode as hyhe ful fayre. Pe stretez of golde as glasse al bare, Pe wal of jasper þat glent as glayre. The wonez withinne enurned ware Wyth alle kynnes perré that moht repayre (1023–28).6 The wall of jasper is shining or lustrous, and the poet uses the word “glayre,” a terms that specifically refers to the clarified white of an egg, a substance that was commonly used in the illumination of manuscripts as a binding medium that gave artists the rich colours that are still so vibrant, as well as to lay substances such as gold leaf.7 This very deliberate, metaphoric use of the word suggests that it may have been understood in the context of the construction and decoration of books. It likely remained unglossed for the medieval reader, who may well have related the word to the egg white used to bind the colours used in manuscripts.8 Moreover, the context for the use of the term is relevant – in the poet’s description of the shining, glittering New Jerusalem – not least

76  Texts and Textuality since there are several references in this section of Pearl to the words of the Book of Revelation of St John. The poet makes careful reference throughout this section to the text of John’s gospel, emphasising that his vision accords with the words of the apostle, but calling to mind, too, the value and worth of his words, inscribed: “As John þise stones in writ con nemme, / I knew þe name after his tale” (997–99).9 Here, John’s words are imaginatively linked to the precious stones that illustrate the splendour of the heavenly city; the text of the gospel, mediated by the Pearl-poet, is as valuable and glorious as the jaspers, emeralds and rubies that are so abundant. In the end, the reader cannot help but imagine that the words of John in this part of the poem are illuminated by the poet: in the first instance they are interpreted and reconceptualised, but they are also imaginatively located in the luxuriant manuscripts of the Bible that – literally – decorate, and at once are enriched by, the scriptures. The city, as Field (1986, p. 9) notes, possesses the “essential qualities” of joy and purity, but also of light and, when read together with the use of the term “glair” the entire scene seems to direct the mind of the reader to the illuminated manuscript. Specifically it evokes the rich natural landscapes and the architectural complexities and layers that were so skillfully rendered in the historiated initials, roundels and illustrations of the most magnificent medieval manuscripts: the proper contexts for the word of God. This is achieved by the references to the written word, the verbal painting of the scene and the vibrant colours implied by the various gemstones – the deep reds, brilliant blues and sparkling greens, and indeed the gold leaf – that were the basis of the illumination of the medieval book. The gemstones also imply a rich context: perhaps the kind of binding that embeds precious stones, providing a fitting protection and visual preface for the words.10 Indeed, it has been suggested that the Pearl poet may be indebted to and may have been inspired by the tradition of illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts that are “notable for their quantity and quality in England for two centuries preceding the poem” (1986, p. 7).11 If we take a wider perspective and consider the unique manuscript that preserves Pearl, as well as Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, then we may be reminded of the colourful, imaginative but amateurish illustrations that feature the dreamer stretching his hands across to his lost daughter and towards the heavenly city.12 Perhaps the Pearl-poet or artist indulged in a fantasy of text illustration and/or book-production that he could not repeat in actuality, imagining a context as glorious and more lasting for his words as those that were circulated in high-grade manuscripts.13 His apparent knowledge of the techniques involved, and his interest in illustration and illumination evident in the poem (if not in the manuscript containing the poem), are appealing in the context of the present work.14 The illustrations that accompany Pearl, found on a bifolium preceding the poem (ff. 37r –38v),

Texts and Textuality  77 are indeed distinctive but their quality is poor and they seem to be the work of an artist of limited technical ability. There seems to be scholarly consensus that the artwork was added soon after the writing of the manuscript and probably at the instruction of the owner (Andrew and Waldron, 2011, pp. 2–4).15 Considerations of quality aside, the decision was taken at some point to enrich and colour the text in its material context, but the work of the Pearl-poet is also imbued with the language and the reality of the production of books in their totality. It is tempting to imagine the artist/scribe responding to the poet’s rich words while attempting to provide a meaningful material context for his poem. As imagined in Riddle 26, the production of a manuscript in the later Middle Ages was time-consuming and labour-intensive, whether or not the result was a high-grade manuscript, and it is worth reminding ourselves of that process.16 First, membrane or parchment had to be transformed from the skin of sheep or calves (vellum) into a substance that was ready to be used by the scribe and artist (Thomson, p. 75). Importantly, these methods persisted throughout the medieval period, and Thomson notes that the parchment produced in the fifteenth century was almost as good as twelfth-century examples, and was still used despite the increased availability of paper (p. 77). In order to be prepared for writing, the skin was washed in lime and water to remove the hair, scraped to remove any remaining matter, stretched and then dried out on a special frame. The writing surface was prepared by rubbing chalk or pumice onto the parchment.17 That surface then had to be dampened, stretched, and pinned, a time-consuming task given the unwieldy nature of the material. Framing and ruling was done with lead until the twelfth century, but thereafter it was carried out with a substance that looks like crayon, and sometimes in red or other colours in the fifteenth century in particular (Thomson, 2008, p. 80). Writing and copying was, for formally produced volumes, slow and labour-intensive; if an error was made on parchment or vellum, that error had to be corrected by scraping the offending letter or word using a scalpel blade, and the area had to be burnished, dusted with gum sandarac, and brushed with a soft brush.18 The producers of manuscripts frequently made their own ink, usually using either carbon or iron gall to make black ink, though, certainly by the fourteenth century, ink was available for purchase in the larger urban centres.19 Medieval scribes and illuminators also mixed their own paints, using pure pigments ground down to a fine powder, normally mixed with glair as a binding medium. Glair was made from “beaten egg whites with the addition of water, or, alternatively, gum arabic or some form of resin diluted in water” and took several forms depending on the tempering of certain pigments (Morgan, 2008, pp. 88–89). Some illustrators also used watercolours, which were usually made by mixing distilled water with pigment, sometimes combined with small amounts of binding agents to give the colour more permanency. Perhaps the most

78  Texts and Textuality striking aspect of the production and decoration of the medieval manuscript was illumination: the laying of gold or silver onto the large decorative initials or into the illustrations to add complexity, and light, to the page. Gilding was done with either gold or silver leaf or with a paint of powdered gold/silver mixed with gum arabic; once applied, the gold or silver leaf had to be burnished, usually using the tooth of a boar or dog (Morgan, 2008, pp. 91–92). 20 Some medieval illuminators also used gold or silver water, which had the appearance of real gold and silver leaf but which was less expensive to make. The skills and processes described above were used throughout Europe in the medieval period, and the instructional detail survives in the form of individual recipes and collections found in manuscripts of different types. Recently Clarke (2016) has identified 1,500 such recipes extant in Middle English, while Michael Johnston and I have thus far noted 150 manuscripts of English provenance containing codicological texts in French, Latin and Middle English from c. 1300–1500. 21 While our figures are preliminary and based largely on collections that have been already extensively catalogued, our initial investigations, alongside those of Clarke, show that recipes for ink, paint and other materials are extant across manuscripts containing all of the major textual genres from the later medieval period, although for the most part they can to be said to occur in volumes that were assembled in domestic contexts. Their existence in some manuscripts seems to not always make sense: Nigel Morgan for instance writes that it is “difficult to understand why descriptions of techniques of manuscript illumination” are found in manuscripts like London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 or the Ludlow manuscript (London, British Library, MS Harley 273), both compilations of devotional material (in Thomson et al., 2008, p. 91). It is likely that the prevalence of these instrustions indicate that the widespread copying and preservation of codicological recipes is directly related to book production that was increasingly non-centralised and domestic, undoubtedly a feature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Britain. As recent studies have shown, there was a movement towards a more widespread and popular production of books in informal or amateur contexts in the later Middle Ages, signalled in part by the proliferation of “miscellany” manuscripts, household books and personal notebooks books in England at this time. 22 Carol Meale observes that the fifteenth century in particular “witnessed the growth in importance of the amateur scribe,” noting that such individuals were amateur only in relation to their lack of informal involvement as producers within the commercial manuscript book trade. 23 Practices associated with the creation of documents and books and the copying of texts, then, are increasingly associated with non-­professionals: in other words, people became compilers and scribes of their own books, taking responsibility in some instances for the fabrication of writing materials.

Texts and Textuality  79

The Crafte of Lymnynge of Bokys24 Collections of short recipes, such as the fifteenth-century The Crafte of Lymnynge of Bokys, may have been designed to appeal not to trade or guild readers but rather to those non-professionals, providing them with the necessary knowledge to create their own decorated texts and appealing to a creative imagination. This kind of collection opens up specialised information to a lay audience, collocating information that is related and that brings together the discrete elements of manuscript and document production in one location. Some aspects of the tasks carried out by the various agents – scribe, artist or limner – are brought together here, and surviving tracts like The Crafte say something about the nature of the anticipated reader since their instructions are careful and fundamental. The Crafte, then, might best be described as a manual containing instructions on illumination and decoration, as well as the fabrication of ink and other substances, alongside recipes on metalwork and the dyeing of cloth and leather, and its recipes occur in different forms and combinations in several manuscripts and contexts. 25 In its fullest form it is extant in just one manuscript: National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn II.i (olim Porkington 10), compiled between 1460 and 1500, in which The Crafte occupies ff. 33r –52v. 26 The manuscript is probably best known for its preservation of several important pieces of medieval literature, in particular the romance Syr Gawayne and the Carle of Carleyle (NIMEV 1888)27, one of the “Earth upon Earth” poems (NIMEV 704), and a text called “The Complaint of a Hare” (NIMEV 559). It also has a version of Nicholas of Bollard’s text on planting and grafting and some calendar material, as well as a table of eclipses for the period 1462–1481 (Halliwell, 1855, pp. vi–vii) (Figure 3.1). 28 Marx notes that the initial quire (ff. 1–10) is made up mostly of scientific texts, and that it may have been added to the manuscript as an “afterthought” (1999, p. 26). Huws has described the physical makeup of the manuscript, identifying the hands of sixteen scribes therein (1996), and more recently Johnston (2014, p. 3) observes that the manuscript’s “plain, unadorned appearance and copying by numerous scribes […] suggests production within the informal milieu of a household,” probably in the home of a provincial gentry landowner. 29 At first the work seems to fit well with Halliwell’s description: as an early editor, he found it to be comprised of “minute receipts” (1855, p. vi) and lacking in unity, but the tract is better understood as a cohesive and well-ordered collection, borne out by the short prologue that sets out the purpose of the treatise in its entirety: Here begynnyth the crafte of lymnynge of bokys; who so kane wysely considere the nature of his colours, and kyndely make his

80  Texts and Textuality

Figure 3.1  National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn II.i, f. 33r. ©The National Library of Wales.

commixtions with naturalle propoporcions, and mentalle indagacions connectynge fro dyvers recepcions by resone of theyre naturys, he schalle make curius colourys, etc (p. 88)30 This prologue not only indicates that the tract was intended to be read holistically but also announces its intention to provide not just technical instruction but an insight into the more imaginative aspects of book copying and decoration. Moreover, as we continue to read, it becomes apparent that The Crafte appeals to an invested – but not necessarily professional – set of readers. The beginning of the text is a series of shorter instructions on the tempering, or mixing, of various substances to make ink for writing and flourishing; an example is this instruction to make vermillion (red ink): To temper vermelon to wryte therewith, grynde vermelon on a stone with newe gleyere, and put a lytel of þe ʒolke thereto, and so wryte þerwyth. And if thou wylt temper it to florysche with bokes, take and grynde hit smalle, and temper hyt with gome water (p. 88). 31

Texts and Textuality  81 This short piece seems to occupy a space somewhere between professionalism and a comparative lack of knowledge, assuming some level of familiarity with the technical aspects of mixing colour, yet explaining the processes in an accessible manner. In line with the rest of the tract, it calls to mind Meale’s amateur: someone skilled and practiced, perhaps, but not formally involved in the production of books. However, as an instructional text it displays a very strong sense of the kind of relationship that the medieval reader had with the physical written word. Even the most humble and ordinary technical writings like these are layered with complexity, evoking the richly decorated texts that persisted in some contexts in this period. Of course, the text inscribed here relates in the most basic way to the message it carries, and the message demands that the reader is familiar with many aspects of the production of books and the semantics of the creation of the material text. So The Crafte of Lymnynge of Bokys expects its reader and potential user to be possessed of a certain technological knowledge and equipped with the tools that relate not just to copying and decoration but those that enable the grinding of pigments, the mixing of gums, glues, and colours, and the distillation of water. In other words, it requires a certain level of experience and access to resources in order for it to be effective. There are instructions for making “cyse,” or size, which is an adhesive base for gilding, 32 to “gyld onburned gold on bokes,” which offers an intriguing alternative to the main instruction: Take chalke and a lytell safferon and gleyre and grynd hem togyder a longe tyme on a stone […] and then put hit into an horne, and if hit be nede alay hit with water, and so worke therewith […] or thys wyse: take the scrapynge of ymages þat bene olde (p. 89). The recycling of older materials, some of which must have been too precious and expensive to waste, must at times have contributed to the creation of new images and decorative features, and the instruction to use scrapings and parts of “ymages that bene olde” offers us a glimpse into the ways in which book producers recycled or reused older manuscripts. This apparently occurred not only in obvious ways, such as the use of single leaves or scraps of parchment or vellum in the reinforcement of binding; these written instructions suggest that parts of the book’s surface, such as gold leaf or coloured pigments, were incorporated into newer productions in ways that are not always discernible. These instructions are both didactic and evocative, offering the reader an imaginative experience by inscribing the illuminated or decorated medieval book as an item that is desirable but also achievable, and appealing to readerly familiarity with such books. Elsewhere in the tract can be found recipes for making “[g]rene for bokes” using a rotten apple, “vertgrece”33 and saffron, which creates a “goode grene for all maner

82  Texts and Textuality thynges” (pp. 91–92); also, a recipe for “brasyle to florysche letters or to rewle with bokes” (p. 92). 34 The Crafte also contains instructions for the complex, two-handed process of gilding and illuminating that ask the reader to first make glair and to lay it on the letter, and whan thy letter ys fully dry, take the tothe of a bore or of an hogge, and take vp the golde with a pyncelle in thy lyfte honde, and ley hit on the letter, and let thy lyfte hande go byfore [thy ryʒte], and with thy ryʒte hond do rubbe on thy golde with the tothe, and þu schalt see fayere letterys (p. 94). The mention of “fayere letterys” appeals to a visual sensibility, much in the same way as the illuminated and decorated manuscript page. Even as the step-by-step process is described – the flourishing with green, the red ruling and tinting, and the gold lettering – the whole page in its colourful totality is held up as a possibility for the reader rather than something unattainable. The visual evocation of the page has a basis in reality, and it might be said that the reader must be able to visualise a fairly high-grade manuscript page in order to fully appreciate the materiality of what is outlined. Indeed, as the text proceeds readers are invited to imagine the whole book; one section turns to dyeing, describing how to “dy grene threde” (p. 96), to dye silk and to make red and blue leather, to “make lynen clothe ʒalow” (p. 97). Each of these steps points to the potential for extending the production of the book into the process of binding, or the creation of looser leather covers for books, interesting since we normally think of binding as an entirely separate process in this period, carried out by a trained specialist. There are also indications that some non-standard ways of writing might have occasionally been called for; there are recipes to “wryte in stele” and to “gyld in iron or stele” (p. 102); and another fascinating instruction for “scripture”: grynde crystal on a marbul stone to small pouder, and temper hit with the whyght of an egge, and wryght þerwith what þu wolte, and let hit dry, and than rubbe þeron with golde, syluer, or coper, and hit schal apere in scrypture (p. 102). The recipe above refers to the manner in which an inscription might be fashioned on leather, metal or a surface other than paper. This seems to be a process that adds a raised layer of text that is less permanent than engraving, but that nonetheless signposts one of the ways in which words were used decoratively, their messages and significance uncovered and emphasised by the use of gold, silver, and copper. The Crafte of Lymnymge of Bokys anticipates readers that will have different interests, or readers with an interest in fabricating and

Texts and Textuality  83 decorating an entire book, and it covers many aspects that may relate to bespoke manuscript production, even supplying instructions that relate to non-standard or unusual elements of books. Indeed, the intricacy of the text, involving descriptions of how to deal with the most skilled and most detailed aspects of book production and decoration and, also, projects such as those involving binding materials like leather and metal, complicates conclusions about the likely audience for such a text. As we have seen with Pearl, at least some of the technical language associated with book production had crossed over into literary milieux and thus may have been more widely known and recognised. Of course it is likely that this was a trade text, or that it emerged from a trade context, and indeed the urban book trade had organised itself early in the fifteenth century so that it may have been involved in the production and circulation of instructional material, in particular treatises that reference a range of specialist activities. According to Christianson, by 1403, at least in London, the previously discrete guilds of manuscript artists and scribes had come together in a more organised, more formal way, in line with the concurrent developments in the attempted regulation of the book trade.35 In the 1350s, the urban guilds of the text writers and limners were first discernible, and by 1373 the scriveners had formed their own trade organizations. 36 These trades all merged as one umbrella guild; in fact, the 1403 ordinance that facilitated the merger between the guilds of the limners and text writers was “the result of a petition by those ‘of the trades of writers of text-letter, lymenours, and other folks of London who are wont to bind and sell books’” (Christianson, 1989, p. 102n.). In those early years of the fourteenth century, the number of book artisans37 recorded as operating in London was under ten, but this number began to increase exponentially throughout the century and by 1390 there were thirty-four documented artisans. By 1409 there were forty-four; and in the fifteenth century, the numbers of book artisans recorded as working in London varied between thirty-five and fifty (Christianson, 1990, p. 14). However, in 1500–09, the number dropped to twenty-eight, and in 1510–19 to twelve; these figures would suggest, then, that the period of greatest commercial activity in making and selling manuscript books ran almost precisely for a century, the 1390s–1490s; as Christianson notes, “once the printing press had arrived and wholesale trade from abroad was encouraged, the number of book artisans began to decline by the early sixteenth century” (1989, p. 89). Undoubtedly, there was a professional class of book artisans operating in reasonably large numbers in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century London. The formation of the guild must have given its members a great sense of corporate identity and brotherhood, and the guild members also seemed to have clustered in a specific geographical place, occupying the area around St Paul’s Cathedral, specifically to the north, north-west

84  Texts and Textuality and east, in those areas that would later become the locus for printing enterprises and bookselling (Christianson, 1989, p. 89). Of course, outside of London, the book trade flourished well before the fifteenth century near the universities, but the “congregation of trade members within a very small part of the City [of London] would seem to suggest a parallel concentration of professional and personal associations within the group” (Christianson, 1989, p. 90). According to Christianson: The world of books and their makers was undoubtedly a small one, but it was not thereby necessarily simple or unimportant. The makers of books occupied – in a sense both figurative and literal – a place of central importance in the manuscript culture of late medieval London (1989, p. 99). In this respect, the sense of connectivity discernible in the Crafte is borne out by the conditions under which the professional, formal trade guilds, at least, operated in reality. However, these closely connected artisans do not necessarily indicate a ready-made or obvious audience for our text. It is not a given that the trade guilds would have had their trade secrets committed to paper for the benefit of its members, although it remains a possibility that an individual member of the guild would have seen the value in the dissemination of such instruction, especially in the context of the growth in interest in scientific and instructional texts of all kinds, written in or translated into English, in the later part of the fourteenth century and consistently throughout the 1400s. The Crafte appears to be a production that demands a certain level of interest or expertise; but equally this professionalism could point to its origin within the trade, where the tools called for (shells, marble, pens and pencils, teeth etc), coupled with the elaborate nature of some of the instructions that relate to the whole book: gilding, ruling, flourishing, colouring, making inks, and writing on other surfaces, could indicate a text that had its origins in the world of the urban, formalised book trade. However, it is just as likely that this concern with the production of the whole book was designed to appeal to the lay community who, from the fifteenth century onwards, increasingly made their own books and documents. Indeed, Clarke (2016, p. xxv) agrees that while craft recipes most likely “originated in a professional milieu,” most of the manuscripts consulted for his edition were “copied not for professional use, but out of general interest for amateurs, and even on occasion for practical use by some of those amateurs.” There are various reasons why more people engaged in personal book-making, and sometimes groups of like-minded people engaged in these activities. Lollards, or those with Lollard sympathies, for instance, who wanted access to devotional material and the Bible or extracts from the Bible in English, may have wanted to compile their own books, 38 and this seems very likely to have

Texts and Textuality  85 happened in the context of the regulation of books and the book-trade in the form of the Constitutions of Archbishop Arundel of 1409 and official moves to suppress them and their writings. Indeed, and as Hudson notes, Lollard texts persisted in great numbers: “more copies of the Wycliffite Bible [survive] than of any other medieval work in English, more copies of the standard sermon cycle than of any other single version of Piers Plowman, and nearly twice as many as of Troilus and Criseyde” (Hudson, 1989, p. 137). Certainly, and especially as the fifteenth century progressed, readers were not just requesting that their books were specifically tailored to their own tastes and needs, but were fabricating their own books; we need only look to the late-medieval English miscellanies and notebooks that are and were so prolific and interestingly varied, put together by their owners for personal use or to serve a household or a small community of readers, to find evidence of these impulses to collect, gather, create and personalise. According to Meale extended personal manuscript compilation was a late-flowering medieval phenomenon. Compiled by their owners, such manuscripts were made possible by a growth in literacy among the middle class, coupled with a rise in the desire for recreational, informative and religious reading matter to be combined in one handy volume at minimal cost.39 As already noted, the materials necessary to do this were becoming increasingly widely available; ink was available for purchase, while paper, more widely available in the fifteenth century, in particular, “revolutionized the traditional way of producing books and offered to scribes an additional writing surface to choose from” (Da Rold, 2011, p. 22). Paper had been used for administrative purposes in fourteenth-­century ­England and was, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, already widely used for the copying of texts in London and elsewhere (Da Rold, 2011, pp. 24, 25).40 Medieval consumers had a greater selection of goods available to them thanks to increased commercial importation, and they frequently engaged in domestic, do-it-yourself manufacture of goods of all types. There is a proliferation of recipes, herbals, and manuals extant from the later medieval period that demonstrate how to mend, create, and make medicines, foodstuffs, tools, and wines, as well as the substances that were used to create books and related materials. Texts similar to The Crafte of Lymnynge of Bokys were finding their way into the hands of those readers and book-owners wishing to turn their hands to scribal and artistic work. I suggest that this work anticipates an audience that is experienced but amateur, and its occurrence in the Brogyntyn MS seems to points to its likely context in a household, the members of which wanted to produce their own books and therefore required a certain level of guidance.

86  Texts and Textuality

John Colyns’ Book An incomplete version of the Crafte is preserved in London, British Library, MS Harley 2252, better known as the personal book of the ­sixteenth-century London mercer and bookseller John Colyns.41 Colyns apparently organised his volume around two romances: Ipomydon and the stanzaic Morte Arthur, which are the only items in the book that were not copied either by Colyns himself or under his supervision; instead these romances were produced 1460 and 1480 as booklets in the same workshop (Meale, 1981, p. 83).42 He fashioned a volume that is intensely personal, using these two imported texts as a sort of core, building the rest of the volume around them, and very clearly indicating that the volume is his “Boke” (Meale, 2009, p. 65). Meale describes the books as indicative of the “literary and professional interests of a middle-class reader at the beginning of the sixteenth century” (Meale, 1981, p. 82), and it might be said to resemble a commonplace book, since it locates Colyns records of reading and list-making alongside romance and other works that he found and useful.43 The book inhabits an interesting space: it is indebted to formal, workshop-produced material for its core, but its substance is a homemade book, one that, moreover, Colyns is keen to present as the result of his personal endeavours (Figure 3.2). And indeed his handwriting is discernable in the book, since Colyns himself copied The Crafte into the manuscripts, using red ink in parts to trick and flourish the text.44 Although many of the recipes are quite similar to those extant in the Brogyntyn MS, discussed above, The Crafte of Lymmyng is made distinctive and exhibits the careful engagement of the copyist in a number of ways (see fig. 7). The prologue opens by invoking St James, and then moves into a prologue that details the contents, promising instructions to “temper al thy colors to lymme with bokes”; to “make a syse to cowche gold or syluer”; to “make all maner of colowrs bothe lyghte and sadde”; to make all kinds of ink; and many other crafts that are “nedefull for a lymnouer to haue” (f. 142r). The work is carefully copied and, in places, corrected by Colyns, and it has clear headings that would facilitate consultation. It opens with instructions on how to draw the outline of a letter, or to prepare a drawing or “vignette” that is to be coloured and/or illuminated: “Fyrste thow shalte haue a plumbet of leade and drawe thy letters, and after þi wynnettes, & thyne imagery” (f. 142r). Essentially the work guides the reader through the process of putting together a page, more or less in the order that a reader might encounter text on a page. Despite what seems to be Colyns’ distinctive organisation and embellishment of the work, in the main the content is comparable to that extant in MS Brogyntyn II.i: we find, in Colyns’ book, similar instructions on various methods for making the adhesive known as “size”, as well

Texts and Textuality  87

Figure 3.2  L  ondon, British Library, MS Harley 2252, f. 142r. © The British Library Board.

as recipes for making glair (including an instruction to “saue hyt from evyll smelling,” f. 143r), alongside recipes for tempering vermillion, and “grene for vinettes” (f. 143r) which, like the Brogyntyn text, calls for the use of a rotten apple. However, Colyns seems to select recipes and methods that are not overly technical and that may have been implemented using substances and items found in the well-stocked kitchen of a large household: for instance, there is a recipe for a substance to prepare the surface of parchment for writing that is simple, achievable, and very concise. The reader is asked to

88  Texts and Textuality sawe hyt thynne on þi boke and rubbe hyt over with thy hande and write then, and when all ys drye, with a | wollyn clothe so þu may gete hyt owte of þi parchment, and þi writyng noþer the worse (ff. 144v–145r). We can readily imagine that Colyns attempted some of the recipes, perhaps in particular those that demand very little skill and effort, but which will have effective application, such as the text that advises “to make vermylon to werke with … yf þu wylte floryshe with vermylon thy letters” (f. 145r). It is possible that Colyns intended to finish his manuscript with decoration, since space has been allowed throughout for decorative features and illumination, even in those sections not copied by Colyns himself; at f. 54r, the copy of Ipomydon, for instance, has guide letters still visible for three-line initials throughout, and the margins are wide enough to facilitate decoration and/or illumination, perhaps in the form of a border.45 The stanzaic Morte Arthur has guide letters two and three lines in depth though perhaps occuring with less frequency than in Ipomydon; moreover, in this part of the manuscript the margins are wider and more suited to decorative borders, fronding and other types of ornamentation (except perhaps for f. 120v where the scribe has allowed a margin of only 20mm on the left hand side, presumably in error).46 From f. 130v of the Morte, someone (perhaps even Colyns himself) has tricked in red the initial letter and some of the ascenders in each line; this continues to the end of the text, f. 133v, where the explicit is also tinted, as is the rubric indicating Colyns’ ownership. There are further indications in other parts of the manuscript that its scribe-owner had an interest in the appearance of texts and in the overall look of the volume. There is an attempt at some amateurish decoration of letters and red tricking at the beginning of the material by Skelton,47 this decorative scheme finishes at f. 137r and resumes again at ff. 139r –140v. Colyns also uses red tinting, particularly on initials, from ff. 2v–6r. Additionally, he appears to allow space for decorative initials in his own copying, at f. 9v for example, where there is space either for a miniature or decorative initial (six lines deep), occurring again at f. 12r. At f. 15r there appears to be a three-line space allowed for a miniature or a letter. Importantly, though the volume is the product of copying “in a mix of purposefulness and haphazardness,” Colyns may have approached this project holistically, planning to ultimately give it a sense of cohesion using a planned decorative scheme. This sense of a whole book is perhaps also indicated by the deliberate placement of the marks of ownership that occur at ff. 1v and 166r (Meale, 2009, pp. 65–67) that effectively frame the volume. The inclusion of elements of The Crafte speaks most emphatically to Colyns’ identity as a bookseller; Meale makes the point that Colyns

Texts and Textuality  89 tended to copy “materials that had a direct bearing on his life,” (2009, p.  65) and it seems clear that, as a mercer, he was familiar with the culture and connected with the worlds of book production and book exchange. In reality he seems to have had connections and regular interaction with that world: he stood (unsuccessfully) for the Clerkship of the Mercers’ Company in 1516, a position that, Meale speculates, would have required a high level of written literacy (2009, p. 74). It would also have required interest in the physical appearance of texts and in neat handwriting. Colyns perhaps was not terribly well-qualified for the position; Meale notes that he writes in what is, for the sixteenth century, “slightly old-fashioned, rounded, cursive book hand, and still makes extensive use of thorn” (2009, p. 71). However, his interest in hand-copied books and his immersion in the world of commercial book selling, to which he contributed as a seller of “[p]rynted bokes and other small tryfylles” (Meale, 2009, p. 78) locates Colyns in a vital moment in the history of manuscripts and printed books: he evidently maintains a retrospective or perhaps practical interest in older, skill-intensive, and artisanal methods of textual production, but is also invested in, and contributes to, the burgeoning world of print. As a member of the book trade, Colyns was well-placed to come by items that interested him, and it is tempting to read his careful inclusion of The Crafte in his personal book as evidence of a special type of engagement with those instructions that evoke, but that also make real, the manuscript book.

Humphrey Newton and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Lat. Misc. C. 66 A comparable, if arguably more elaborate, example of the interest in materiality amongst amateur book-producers can be found in the manuscript that is part-commonplace book, part-cartulary, owned and compiled by Humphrey Newton (1466–1536), now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford where it is MS Lat. Misc. C. 66.48 Hanna notes that dating the volume, which is a fifteenth-century production emanating from north-east Cheshire, is problematic because of Newton’s longevity and because the book, as a “homemade” miscellany, is “a codicological nightmare” (2000, p. 279).49 Hanna concludes that the book was “compiled over a period of about half a century and that this compilation probably represents two separate campaigns […] Lat. Misc. c. 66 may reflect the binding together (possibly at a comparatively modern date) of two quite separate manuscripts (one of them composite) responding to very different impulses” (2000, p. 281). Newton’s volume is somewhat later in date than that of Colyns, but it is nonetheless reflective of a particular growth in the production of this type of manuscript in the 1400s and 1500s; however, not many of these survive from the period (Youngs, 2008, p. 179). Youngs identifies the main characteristics that can be

90  Texts and Textuality generally applied to the books produced by men of means in these centuries, and shows how Humphrey Newton’s volume is a typical example, noting its “miscellaneous and idiosyncratic content”, noting that there is no particular theme as may be found in poetry anthologies or devotional collections; it is a work compiled for personal consumption, reflecting the writer’s interest, amusements, and practical needs […] the book would not have been planned from start to finish, but would be an incremental, unsystematic accumulation, drawn together over time and adapting to the compiler’s state (2008, p. 180). For Youngs there is very little evidence to suggest that the volume was planned; instead it seems to have come together in an accretive manner, perhaps extending across a good proportion of Newton’s lifetime. However, in the same way that we can find evidence of the planning that comes with intentionality or forethought in Harley 2252, it seems clear that Newton thought about book production in its fullest sense, and we can find evidence of this in his interest in the materiality of the text. Youngs returns to the point that the men creating these books were invested in literary culture and were “familiar with the writing process,”50 arguing that “the commonplace book is largely the work of a specific stratum of society […] it is the book of small landholders, merchants and professionals” like Colyns, Robert Reynes of Acle, Norfolk, and Richard Hill of London (2008, p. 180). 51 As a landowner Newton would have needed to preserve records, accounts and perhaps also texts that related to the management of a large estate, but the production of his book was also influenced by “fashion and convention” in that a “significant number of items he copied were ones favoured by other miscellany makers […] pithy poems and extracts were universally appealing, and some short lists appear so frequently in commonplace books that they became standard entries: lists of kings, or fifteenth-century battles, and the lists of towns and knight’s fees in England” (Youngs, 2008, p. 182). We also find in Newton’s volume variants of those texts and items related to book production which may alter our sense of the complexion and the function of such books within the large fifteenth-century household, and which also perhaps complicate our thinking about how these volumes operate in a print-landscape, where books are increasingly affordable, more varied, and now more accessible and relevant to readers like Newton.52 Essentially, Newton’s interest in materiality had a textual as well as a physical dimension. In the first instance, between Newton’s poems and prophecies (ff. 95–103) and then again following the prophecies at f. 104v, can be found what Hanna describes a “a series of calligraphic exercises,” which effectively are pattern-book decorative capitals in two alphabetic series (2000, p. 284). This letterbook was apparently copied

Texts and Textuality  91 from a pattern book designed for a scribe or calligrapher, or perhaps even an illuminator (Youngs, 2008, p. 187). Indeed Newton displays an interest in calligraphic letter forms throughout his manuscript: he draws several inhabited initials, and he copies letters directly from his letterbook; his own hand features long headstrokes and elaborate ascenders throughout; and, importantly, he appears to practice some of the calligraphic letters in the section that contains his treatise on ink-making and colour (Youngs, 2008, p. 187). He was also a prolific doodler and amateur artist: one example can be found at the beginning of an alliterative poem, where the initial ‘O’ has been “enlarged and adorned with page-length decoration […] [i]nside the letter is St Veronica holding her vernicle; foliage descends towards the foot of the page. 53 It is a clear image and one executed with care: Christ’s face and halo are visible on the outstretched cloth held by Veronica (Youngs, 2008, p. 188). 54 Despite quite strong indications of Newton’s interest in the art of the manuscript book, in particular in calligraphic letter-forms that very frequently benefit from decoration and colour, Hanna finds that the recipes, found in the final quire, “offer advice on matters strangely foreign to the actual book, for bookcrafts and colours” (p. 285). It is normal that Newton would have a letterbook, since that would prove useful for the texts like draft legal documents that follow it in the book Youngs (2000, p. 284). Certainly, Humphrey Newton’s manuscript is in parts relatively plain and unadorned; there are very few instances of ruled lines and coloured inks, and some pages are “as rough and messy as notes can get” (Youngs, 2008, p. 186); we might expect this, however, from a volume that is at once a commonplace book, a miscellany of literary texts and a cartulary. Nonetheless, Newton was an experimenter in decorative style, especially in that section of his manuscript that can be described as his “literary miscellany” and that demonstrates a more careful copying project and page layout incorporating margins, ruled lines, and neater handwriting (Youngs, 2008, p. 186). And, though this book, similar to that of John Colyns, does not demonstrate much actual use of colour beyond some red tinting, there certainly is space and potential for colouring in the manuscript, and Newton has preserved some instructions for the making of different paints, inks and washes that may well have been used to adorn his drawings (which are, for the most part, sketches in outline) and his letter pattern-book). 55 His recipes for ink and colour, called his “Book of scrifure to ley all maner enkis,” are fairly basic instructions for black and red inks, which he may have used to complete parts of the commonplace book (Youngs, 2008, p. 189). This section also includes more complicated recipes that indicate a more sophisticated agenda for book-decoration, of the kind that we have already seen in Brogyntyn II.1 and Harley 2252: recipes for gold and silver inks, for size “to ley on a boke” and “to cauch gold”; recipes for gold water; and instructions to “temper the colors of alummyng” (ff. 123r, 124–28; Youngs, 2008,

92  Texts and Textuality p. 189). Neither Colyns nor Newton produced what Youngs refers to as a “polished anthology,” yet both men in different ways indicate a strong concern in the material look of their manuscripts. Possibly they were in possession of other books or booklets – or printed volumes – that they intended to embellish or decorate, and it seems likely that Newton in particular was keen to practice the skills that he might require to produce or personalise another volume. In a time when printed volumes were more widely available, these men retained a fascination with the arts of the book and also, significantly, with the texts and words associated with those skills.

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.45 The “miscellany or multi-text” manuscript (Connolly and Radulescu, 2015, p. 1) is quite a specific locus for texts associated with book-­ production, typical of the ways in which texts circulated in “radically decentralized conditions” in the pre-print landscape. 56 The occurrence of codicological recipes in these contexts is a kind of scaffolding of that system, but because multi-text or composite manuscripts are very often personal to readers like Newton, they imply quite a narrow audience or readership and a limited usage. However, households like that of Newton frequently owned miscellanies, which seem to be among the common contexts for material of this kind. The gentrified owners of MSS Brogyntyn II.i and Harley 2252 seem to be very much part of an expanding sector of society interested in the arts of the book, and other material contexts might open up our sense of the complexion of the more general readership audience for such texts and augment the ways in which we think about the character and appeal of texts that are circulated in miscellany manuscripts. The collection of recipes found in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.14.45, for example, may broaden our sense of how these texts operated in the late-medieval world, and also may ask us to reconsider to what extent texts in miscellanies are indicative of wider reading cultures.57 R.14.45 preserves a long sequence of recipes and short instructions that may be described as relating to manuscript production. This text in many ways exemplifies not just the various ways in which inks and colours were used outside of book-making in the later Middle Ages, but the continued need for the various components for book- and document-creation even as print slowly began to become more widespread. This well-organised work, comprising just over forty recipes, is copied with headings for individual pieces, with the scribe being generous with space so that it is legible and accessible (on average there are two recipes per leaf), and perhaps inviting the comments and annotations of future readers; it makes up a sizeable proportion of this scientific/alchemical manuscript (ff. 45–64v). It opens with a recipe for ink “of Lombardie,” a recipe for iron-gall ink that is “gode […] and fyne

Texts and Textuality  93 forto write with”; another recipe delivers, when followed, “rosyne colour […] for lymynorys”; like the instruction for ink, this has a very specific purpose. With respect to both of these recipes the function clearly stated, perhaps needful in a manuscript that contains instructions on diverse matters: making ink and coloured washes and so on for use across different trades and crafts, and not just for use only by those who wish to make books or documents. The inclusion of a recipe to make for a strong blue ink, not for writing or decorating this time but that might be used to “merke with wolle sakkes”, bears this out; yet another describes how the reader might make “cole”, or charcoal, “þat seruyþ for peyntours”. Others describe how to dye leather and how to make “rede skynneȝ, of perchemyne or of velyme whoþir þat þey be whiche þat servyn for patyne makers [shoemakers] or for sadeles”. What makes this collection slightly different, then, from those that have already been discussed, is that it has a broader appeal, finding different ways in which to use those materials and substances that we would also, or normally, associate with codicology and the production of books and documents, but also bringing us back to basics. Particularly noteworthy in this respect are the recipes, one of each, for the making of parchment and vellum: Forto make parchmyne gode and fine. Take þe a schepis skynne and caste hit inne lyme and water and late hit ligge .ix. dayes þerinne, þanne take hit vp and streyne hit abrode on a harowe made for þe nonys, þanne take suche a fleyssyng knyf as þis parchmeyneres vse and chaufe awey þe flesshe on þe flesshe side, and euermore loke þat þou have pouder of chalk inne þi handys forto casten on þe skyn so þat hit mowe allewey rennen adoune beforne þe knyfe, þan set houte þyn skynne on þe harowe forto drye, þanne whanne hit is drye, shave hit eftesonys on þe flesche syde vntil hit be al smothe, and þanne take þy knyfe and kit hit of and rolle hit togeders (f. 56v). The instructions seem relatively straightforward, and they apparently speak non-professional readers who may be interested in the fabrication of parchment. The recipe offers a detailed, step-by-step guide, and it could be undertaken in a good-sized domestic kitchen. The instruction even calls for the reader to make use of a fleshing-knife such as might be used by “parchmeyneres,” perhaps anticipating a reader who is untrained and unused to the process of parchment making, or at least familiar with the theory only. 58 The recipe for vellum depends for some of instruction on the recipe for parchment: Take þe a kalves skynne and do þerwith inne þe same maner as þou dedist wiþ þi schepis skynne, save for þe here þat is on þe kalves skynne ye nedis most schave hit on bothe sydys and a schepis skynne schal be schaven but on þe flesshe syde (f. 56v).

94  Texts and Textuality These specific recipes carefully instruct on not only the fabrication of vellum and parchment but they indicate the differences in working with and preparing the surface of two different materials. Coupled with the recipes for the dyeing of leather and for ink and colours, and, later in the text, those for azure and vermillion, and red and white lead, they afford us a real insight into the complexity of the material medieval book: the labour-intensive and expensive process of preparing the skins alone demands a scientific attention to detail coupled with hard work and patience. The scribe who copied this text, onto a parchment folio as it happens, may have appreciated the relationship between the words he was charged with writing and the materials that he happened to be using. A wider concern relating to these codicological recipes that are contained within a collection that recognises and articulates the different uses that these materials might have, commercially and domestically, is that they cannot easily be divorced from their wider context: an alchemical manuscript. It is tempting to make the link between alchemy and alchemical processes and the idea of a more ordinary transformation: that the skin of an animal and materials like iron gall, egg white, and glue can combine to create a book, which in itself has a transformative effect on the reader. However, it is more likely that the recipes are located in a volume like Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.45 because they are, first and foremost, practical, and if we for a moment set aside our sense of them as literary or as important for literary discourses and textual production, we can appreciate that some compilers thought of them differently and, perhaps, as related to the world of commerce, trade and agriculture in very material ways but also relating to domestic, everyday science and experimentation because of, say, common ingredients and methods. Many manuscripts extant from the late medieval period in England contain similar texts copied onto flyleaves and blank spaces, or embedded into longer tracts and, like R.14.45, constitute unusual contexts, and many recipes for inks, limning, and other bookish crafts remain unrecorded or unnoticed because of the manner in which they are preserved. At times the contexts may be surprising: for example, one of the best-known manuscript repositories of Middle English verse contains a very few instructions for decoration. London, British Library, MS Harley 2253 preserves nine recipes in a blank space at the end of quire five in a hand that is, Ker notes, not much later than that of the main scribe59; the recipes are for azure and to lay silver and gold foil, as well as a recipe for making “grass green” colour, and they occur at ff. 52va–b.60 As Susanna Fein notes, these recipes occur at the beginning of the Ludlow scribe’s portion of MS Harley 2253 (booklet 3, quire 5) and the booklet, consisting of just one quire of four leaves, originally ended with a column and a half of blank space into which a later person (scribe C) added the recipes.61 According to Fein, this hand may

Texts and Textuality  95 be that of the first user or reader of the manuscript (after the Ludlow scribe, that is) and it may have been someone who wished to retain these instructions; Fein also notes that this may be the same person who “added the decorative initial W appearing on the last folio of MS Harley 2253 (fol. 140v)”. This may be an important context for codicological recipes, and an instance of a scribe and later owner making full use of the blank spaces in a verse manuscript to transmit texts, perhaps even putting them to use; since they seem to interrupt an otherwise literary context, they may very well be copied to facilitate appropriate material embellishment if not in Harley 2253, which does not offer much space, in another context.

Arnold’s Chronicle and Codicological Recipes in Print In a manuscript context the occurrence of such texts expands any sense of the conditions under which many manuscripts were produced, suggesting that some book-owners were thinking about and planning for their next book project, or intending to augment, decorate or refresh books that already populated their libraries. When we encounter such texts in print, however, they demand that we think about them differently. One instance of a recipe for ink occurs in Arnold’s Chronicle (1502), also known as The Customs of London, which was reissued in 1520 and again in 1811.62 Although the first edition does not bear a printer’s device or a date, it is believed to have been produced by the Antwerp printer, Adraien van Berghen. The man who compiled the volume, Richard Arnold, was a merchant trading with the Low Countries and his publication seems to be the kind of compilation that the London booksellers, in the early days of print, issued in order to attract the custom of commonplacers, perhaps even the likes of Newton and Colyns: essentially, it is a printed commonplace book.63 The brief prologue probably best describes the Chronicle: In this boke is conteined ye names of the baylyfs Custose mayers and sherefs of ye cyte of London from the tyme of kynge Richard the fyrst & also the artycles of ye Chartour & lybartyes of the same Cyte And of the chartour and lybartyes of England with other dyuers maters good and necessary for euery cyteȝen to vnderstond and knowe. Whiche ben shewed in chapyters aftyr the fourme of this kalendyr folowynge (sig. A.iir). Its contents vary between a short London chronicle that begins the volume (that includes a list of London mayors and the charter of the city) and short documents relating to land tenure, forms for the “making of indebtors,” and instructions for making different materials such as soap and vinegar, alongside other useful lists and registers. It also includes

96  Texts and Textuality copies of letters, including some papal bulls, lists of parish churches, ballads, template letters and oaths, and a treatise on the four elements and the four seasons. There is also a section on practical matters, such as opinions on prices, recipes for different pickles and sauces, measurements and, at the end of a quire (sig. Qiiir), a recipe for making ink (see fig. 8) (Figure 3.3). Arnold’s Chronicle appears to invite copying, and its contents are in many ways reminiscent of the volume put together by John Colyns. The combination of lists, short pieces, and templates offer perfect items for the eager compiler of books, and the recipe for ink seems to both facilitate the reader and to act as an invitation to dip into the book and take what they will. Indeed, Herman notes that this publication formed the basis of two other London chronicles: one is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS

Figure 3.3  Arnold’s Chronicle (1502) sig. Qiii. © The British Library Board.

Texts and Textuality  97 Tanner 2, copied anonymously, and the other is the chronicle of Charles Wriothesley; indeed, Boffey reckons that the work looks like a “compilation made for a local audience of fellow Londoners, put together from documents readily to hand, whether among Richard Arnold’s own papers, or circulating in London, or available for consultation in libraries such as that of the Guildhall” (2013, p. 12). Whatever the circumstances of its compilation, Arnold’s Chronicle supplies both material that readers will find interesting enough to copy into their own books, and also a recipe for the ink that the reader will need in order to make this possible. In the early years of the printing press in England there was a manner of co-operation between the new form of the book and the old: they existed in a symbiotic relationship, one informing and facilitating the creation of the other, the printed book gleaning material still from manuscript in the early days of the fifteenth century, and the printed volume enabling the creation of the manuscript book. This situation continues well into the sixteenth century: printed books that appear throughout the 1500s evidence an imaginative and practical relationship with the manuscript book, often containing instructions and guidance relating to the production of manuscript books and handwritten documents, the renewal of older, worn handwritten pages or books, and the recycling of material such as paint and gold-leaf from illuminated and decorated books. The anonymously-authored The Art of Limming was first printed in 1573 in London by Thomas Purfoote, “the assigne of Richard Tottill”.64 Comprised of just eleven leaves this short treatise is designed to appeal to the gentrified reader, perhaps responding to an upswing in gentrified interest in heraldry in the sixteenth century. Correspondingly, the title page positions the book and its contents as “verye meete and necessary to be knowne to all such all gentlemen, and other persons as doe delight in limming, painting or in tricking of armes in their colours, and therefore a woorke very meete to be adioyning to the bookes of armes”. The Art of Limming has as its main focus the arts of book-decoration or colouration, specifically mentioning those readers who wish to trick, or tint, their own heraldic devices; indeed, the treatise self-advertises as a companion to (“adioyning”) a book of arms. The preface, however, also indicates that the treatise holds interest for those interested in compiling their own books, advising on the mixing of colours and metals “to write or to limme withall vppon velym, parchment or paper, and how to lay them vppon the worke which thou intendest to make”. The treatise also has a compelling retrospective quality, however; not only does it facilitate the creation of new books in the old style, but it acknowledges the practice of renewing and regeneration of older books and aspects of manuscript books that may have been more susceptible to the ravages of time. One recipe contains instructions on how to “renew olde and worne letters” with a distillation of water and white wine; the reader must then “wet handsomly the old letters with a little cotten or

98  Texts and Textuality a smal pencel, & they will shene fresh & new againe, in such wise, as you may easily reade them” (sig. C.iir). This recipe not only preserves a simple and archaic method by which to renew and regenerate older text but also exhibits a concern to preserve the manuscripts themselves that are responsible for the transmission of this information. But even as the printed text facilitates the renewal of the text in manuscript it also acknowledges its frailty and ephemerality. However, that transience and lack of permanence is not merely a function of the manuscript book, since The Art of Limming and related texts also seem to implicitly associate the fading of letters with the disappearance of older texts and, by extension, ancient knowledge. However, this threat is also an opportunity: the press can preserve texts and books that may be at risk of being lost or damaged, and the preservation or transmission of the Art of Limming is itself a case in point in this regard, since it was most likely a descendant, at least in part, of texts like those discussed in this chapter. Even as the text offers ways in which to look after older books, it and its arcane knowledge or lore, is rescued and preserved by virtue of this new technology. The Art of Limming and similar works are certainly layered with complexity, imbued with especial significance according to their various contexts, but significantly they foreground many of the practical aspects of book cultures, book exchange, and book production – in both manuscript and print – in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, offering insights into the material and intellectual co-dependency and symbiosis of the book in both forms. There have been some shifts in consciousness, but these are arguably realised in practical terms; the treatise closes, for example, with a word-list detailing the substances mentioned in the work and stating that these are “for the moste parte to bee solde at the Apothecaries,” pointing to a landscape in which, arguably, there are fewer artisans of the book, but there is increased interest amongst amateurs and thus more demand for the materials and ingredients, which are readily available locally. Pertinently, we find little distinction between the manuscript and the printed book in these treatises. The manuscript book is inferred, of course, and seems to have a particular hold on the imagination for book-consumers and book-producers in the century after the first printing press opened in England. The Art, printed in a second edition almost exactly a century after this event, distinguishes only between vellum, parchment, and paper, not between books that are mass- and hand-produced, and there is every possibility that some printed books, by 1573, are now also considered older volumes. In other words, the relationship between the manuscript and printed book, in these specific treatises that detail work that can relate to both, is revealed to be very close indeed, even as the sixteenth century draws to a close. The publication in 1606 of The Art of Drawing With the Pen, and Limming in Water Colovrs by Henry Peacham, anticipates also a likely

Texts and Textuality  99 audience of genteel readers.65 Its title pages declares that the volume has been “[p]ublished, For the behoofe of all young Gentlmen, or any els that are desirous for to become practicioners in this excellent, and most ingenious Art”. Peacham’s work claims to represent what has been “exactlie then heretofore tavght and enlarged with true manner of Painting vpon glasse, the order of making your furnace, Annealing, &c.,” but it also includes an epistle to the reader, in which he professes to share with those readers, whom he addresses as “gentlemen,” a “few principles of mine art”; that art, he says, he was born with, and he has not ever used “the benefit of any instructor saue mine owne practise and experience”. The arts of painting and drawing, he says, are among “those things of accomplement required in a Scholler or Gentleman”. The first book of Peacham’s volume, in fifteen chapters, is devoted to drawing and sketching, covering matters such as draping, shadowing and foreshortening, and including a short history of art and some illustrations. The second book, beginning at p. 46, concerns the “directions … moste necessary for drawing with the pen … [and] the right mingling and ordering of your colors”. Here, the treatise offers very practical advice on materials and tools, advising the reader to gather mussel shells in which to keep colours, and to choose pencils judging by “their fastness in the quils, and their sharp points,” advising the reader that they can be purchased “one after another for eight or ten pence a dozen at the Apothecaries” (p. 47). The ensuing sections concern the making of glues (pp. 47–49), and for gilding and laying gold and silver (pp. 49–51); also there is included a section on “all sorts of Reds, and their Tempering” (pp. 52–53), followed by similar instructions for greens, whites, blues and yellows. Chapter 9 has recipes for inks, beginning with those for black ink. The treatise closes with instructions on the engraving and staining of glass, including prescriptions on how to make a brick oven in which to “anneal” the glass (p. 67), perhaps allowing us to connect aspects to the text to heraldic designs for the home. Peacham’s treatise can perhaps be understood in the context of his life and other printed works. He was a writer and an illustrator, a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge, and probably most famous for his influential courtesy book The Complete Gentleman (1622), which was inspired by his own continental tour, and which offers a “wide range of topics with humour and sagacity”.66 Earlier, in 1612, he produced the emblem book Minerva Britannia, or, A Garden on Heroical Devices (STC 19511) and, in the same year, his Graphice, or The Most Auncient and Excellent Art of Drawing and Limming Disposed into Three Bookes (STC 19507), reprinted in 1634.67 The latter, dedicated to Sir Edmund Ashfield, appears to be an enlarged version of the 1606 treatise, with additional notes on “landtskip” drawing and a theoretical section on vision and the eye. The chapters on colour begin with an etymology of colour terms, and the volume an additional part on the mixing of specific colours according

100  Texts and Textuality to necessity (for example, “[a] grassy of yealowish greene”, p. 92) and on the methods of the famous Roman limner Hippolito Donato (p. 95). The second book begins with instructions on how to portray and express concepts like eternity and hope, and the months of the year in statues and “Publike Monuments” (p. 105). The third book is a discourse on the blazoning of arms (p. 139). On the evidence discernible from the work of Henry Peacham, the association between limning or gilding and the production and writing of the manuscript book in its entirety has diminished in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Limning, laterally represented as a bookcraft and part of the technology that was involved in the production of the whole page, has become localised with treatises on art, drawing, shading and tinting. It is a sideways move that speaks more, perhaps, to the diminishment of commercial interest in hand-crafted books and the recycling of those book-arts which have a visual, and perhaps more universal, appeal. Indeed there is an argument for reading the 1606 treatise as a retrospective, even fond look at the methods involved in the making of the manuscript book and, at once, as a regeneration of the more viable of those for a seventeenth-century public. This perspective on elements of the past being translated for the future perhaps finds its most tangible expression in the volume’s dedication to Sir Robert Cotton. Peacham claims that the dedication is inspired by Cotton’s love of the arts; he professes that Cotton will appreciate the necessity to instruct in painting or drawing, at a time when such skills are “rare … amongst vs … when scarse England can affoord vs a perfect penman or good cutter” (The Epistle Dedicatory). This is the salient message of the Epistle: Cotton, as a patron of the arts, will realise the potential value and impact of this text, but Cotton’s reputation as an antiquarian and a voracious collector and salvager of manuscripts, in particular, must have been in Pecham’s mind as he composed his Epistle, as must the necessity of preserving now-dated book arts that evidently still have interest for men of taste. Indeed, by the time that John Bate’s Mysteries of Nature and Art appears in 1634, a large volume divided into several parts, limning and colouring is very definitely now associated with scientific endeavours, being located in a technical compendium that treats of mechanics, chemistry, metallurgy and astronomy, among other subjects, and being in the main concerned with drawing and water colours (including techniques that relate to ‘washing’ with watercolour), and the mixing of colours.68 The seventeenth century apparently, then, witnessed a shift in consciousness with regard to writing about book production. Literacy levels were on the rise, education was available to more and more people, and writing was increasingly a more democratic endeavour; the printing press had continued, too, to produce cheaper books that were frequently illustrated using wood- and coppercuts, and sometimes came off the press pre-rubricated, thus they did not often require decoration by hand.

Texts and Textuality  101 And those who wanted to make their own books could do so without having to fashion their materials or, indeed, make their own ink: the local apothecary could provide relatively cheap tools and accessories. The arts of the book, then, were again becoming increasingly professionalised, where they had experienced a brief period, relatively speaking, of widespread, general interest. In addition, parchment and vellum were apparently still widely used, but were now produced by specialists for a commercial market and for the production of documents, and less so for private use. These materials were now packaged and sold in very specific ways, as an advertisement from 1616, entitled The Orthographiall Declaration demonstrates; it contains what its title-page describes as A Briefe Aduertisement of two new Inventions, called, Lineage and Fortage, Whereby writing-Paper and Parchment, are decently rules and inlines, for to ingrosse or write vpon, after a more dextrous and beneficiall manner, than is done or performed by the ordinary way of Hand-ruling, with Plummet, Ruler, or Brasse-Pen … Paper, Parchment, and Writing-Bookes thus Forted and Inlined are sold in the Kings Bench in Southwarke.69 Still commercially viable but now mass produced, parchment is prepared by being ruled and, frequently, by being bound into the form of a writing-book for the convenience of the customer.70 It is also used, of course, along with vellum, for official purposes, and towards the close of the seventeenth-century it is taxed: an act of parliament, June 1694, declared that “there shall be throughout England, Wales and Town of Berwick upon Tweed, collected and paid to their Majesties for four Years, for what shall be written or ingrossed upon Vellum, Parchment or Paper” at the courts of Westminster in order to fund the wars against France (An Exact Table of Fees of all the Courts at Westminster, 1694; STC E3706). The levies imposed include those on documents such as marriage licences, indentures and leases. However, manuscripts were still being made, and the world of print did not lead to the death of the handwritten book. Ink and other materials, as well text, were part of the fabric of the English household and the codicological recipes, treatises and works that survive in manuscript and in print testify not only to a widening of textual cultures but a vibrant literary landscape in which printed texts and manuscript were used together rather than independently from each other.

Notes 1 A condensed version of this chapter was published as “Instruction and Inspiration: Fifteenth-Century Codicological Recipes,” The Provocative Fifteenth Century, Vol. 2, ed Andrea Denny-Brown, Exemplaria 30.1 (2018): 20–34.

102  Texts and Textuality 2 Kevin Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book Riddles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 47. See also Bernard Muir (ed), The Exeter DVD: The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (book and DVD) with programming and design by Nick Kennedy (Exeter: Exeter UP, 2006). On the Old English riddles see D. Bitterli, Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009). 3 The Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3510) is one of the four surviving miscellanies of Old English verse, copied by a single scribe in the final quarter of the tenth century, comprising 131 folios (Crossley-Holland, 1976, p. 9). 4 Riddle 47. On this see Nicholas Jacobs, “The Old English ‘Bookmoth’ Riddle Reconsidered,” Notes & Queries 36 (1988): 290–92; and Fred Robinson, “Artful Ambiguities in the Old English ‘Book-Moth’ Riddle,” in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed L.E. Nicholson and D.W. Frese (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1975), pp. 355–62. 5 Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn, in Benson (1987, p. 650). On the poem see and Julia Boffey 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; and on the association between the Adam addressed by Chaucer and the professional London scrivener Adam Pinkhurst see Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–138; Alexandra Gillespie, “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam,” The Chaucer Review 42.3 (2008): 269–83; Jane Roberts, “On Giving Scribe B a Name and a Clutch of London Manuscripts from c. 1400,” Medium Ævum 80.2 (2011): 247–70; Simon Horobin, “Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales,” The Chaucer Review 44.4 (2010): 351–67; Lawrence Warner, “Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve and Pinkhurst,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 55–100; A.S.G. Edwards, “Chaucer and ‘Adam Scriveyn,” Medium Ævum 81.1 (2012): 135; and Margaret Connolly, “What John Shirley said about Adam: Authorship and Attribution in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20,” in The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript: Text Collections from a European Perspective, ed Karen Pratt et al. (Göttingen: V&R, 2017), pp. 81–101. 6 All references to the text of Pearl are derived from Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds, The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (5th edition; Exeter: Exeter UP, 2011), pp. 53–110. 7 Glair was also used in bookbinding and other work such as plastering. “glair, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.­oedcom/view/ Entry/78672 [accessed 14 November 2018]. 8 Glair was used for the colours in the manuscripts such as that containing the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D. IV), among other manuscripts throughout the medieval period. It was the most commonly-used binding medium for manuscript illumination; see Michelle P. Brown, Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms (London: The J. Paul Getty Museum/British Library, 1994), p. 22. 9 It has been demonstrated by Rosalind Field (“The Heavenly Jerusalem in Pearl,” Modern Language Review 81 [1986]: 7–17 [7]) that the Pearl-poet’s approach to the Heavenly Jerusalem differs significantly from the description found in the account in John’s gospel but at other points he remains so close to his source as to almost engage in an act of paraphrase (p. 8); Field reads this closeness to the text of John as an attempt to assure the reader of

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the authenticity of the vision and to allow John’s voice to enter the text as an authority (p. 9). At line 837 the Pearl-maiden is described as reading the words of John’s gospel not from a scroll but from a “boke with leuez ful sware” – a book with square leaves – perhaps further indication that the poet wishes us to conceptualize the physicality and indeed the technology of the medieval book as we read the work. I am grateful to Prof. Julia Boffey for pointing this out; she suggests that it may support further the notion that the poet acknowledges the close relationship between words and texts, and material form. See, for example, David McKitterick, et al., eds, The Trinity Apocalypse (Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.16.2), The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture (London: The British Library, 2005). London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x. Field (1986, p. 14) suggests that the gemstones and jewels so evocatively described are not subject to natural decay; thus they may stand for permanence. On the manuscript see A.S.G. Edwards, “The Manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x,” in A Companion to the “Gawain” Poet, eds Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 197–219. The illustrations throughout the manuscript detail episodes from each of the four poems, and on these see Maidie Hilmo, “Did the Scribe Draw the Miniatures in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x (The Pearl-Gawain Manuscript)?,” JEBS 20 (2016): 111–36, which examines some of the missed details of the drawings that are now covered by paint, arguing that the scribe was responsible for the underdrawings. Andrew and Waldron surmise that the volume is “not particularly impressive” but is one of the very few illustrated English manuscripts from the period, leading some scholars to speculate that it may be a copy of a de luxe manuscript. It is copied throughout in the hand of one scribe, and the persistence of errors may suggest that it is not a holograph (2011, p. 1). See also Edwards (1997, p. 213, 218). As Rodney M. Thomson points out, “even the humblest books were relatively expensive items” (p. 75); “Parchment and Paper, Ruling and Ink,” pp. 75–84, in Rodney M. Thomson, Nigel Morgan, Michael Gullick, and Nicholas Hadgraft, “Technology of Production of the Manuscript Book,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 2: 1100–400, eds N.J. Morgan and R.M. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), pp. 75–109. See Rodney M. Thomson, Nigel Morgan, Michael Gullick, and Nicholas Hadgraft, “Technology of Production of the Manuscript Book,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 2: 1100–1400, eds N.J. Morgan and R.M. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), pp. 75–109, in particular two of its sections: Nigel Morgan, “Illumination—Pigments, Drawing and Gilding,” pp. 84–95; and Rodney M. Thomson, “Parchment and Paper, Ruling and Ink,” pp. 75–84. Thomas Hoccleve, poet and scribe of the Privy Seal, has a famous complaint respecting the physical strain that copying and writing imposed; in his long poem The Regiment of Princes he moans that writing not only negatively impacts the stomach, back and eyes of the scribe, but that in fact “it smertith him ful sore / In every veyne and place of his body” (ll. 1025–26). See Charles R. Blyth (ed), The Regiment of Princes, TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1999, http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/blyth-hoccleve-regimentof-princes [accessed 30 June 2018]. Orietta Da Rold, “Materials,” in The Production of Books in England, 1350– 1500, eds A. Gillespie and D. Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), pp.

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12–33 (p. 14). Da Rold also notes that numerous recipes survive for ink; also that ink can usually be grouped into two main types: “the carbon-based inks and the iron-gall based inks. Both classes include gum arabic as a fixative; additional ingredients could be charcoal, wine, vinegar, vitriol and ferrous sulphate (copperas)” (2011, p. 14). See also Thomson (2008, p. 82). For a more detailed description of these processes see Thomson (2008, p. 91 ff). The key work for these recipes is Mark Clarke, ed, The Crafte of Lymming and the Manner of Steynyng: Middle English Recipes for Painters, Stainers, Scribes and Illuminators, EETS OS 347. (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 2016). In it Clarke identifies and prints “127 individual texts taken from ninety manuscripts; these contain over 1,500 individual recipes, the majority previously unpublished” (p. xxiii). For a very useful discussion of these terms see Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu, “Introduction,” in Insular Books: Vernacular Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP/The British Academy, 2015), pp. 1–29. See also the other essays in their edited volume for analysis of miscellanies and non-centralised book production. “Amateur Book Production and the Miscellany in Late Medieval East Anglia: Tanner 407 and Beinecke 365,” in Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain, eds Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (Oxford: Oxford UP/The British Academy, 2015), pp. 157–73. These amateurs were also distinct from the numerous professional text-writers, many of whom were members of the Scriveners Company of London, who participated in the copying of literary manuscripts as well as acting as clerks, for royal or civic government, livery companies, or their wealthy masters. See Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs, Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425 (York: York Medieval Press, 2013), and Linne R. Mooney, “Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medieval London,” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, eds M. Connolly and L.R. Mooney (York: York Medieval Press/Boydell and Brewer, 2008), pp. 183–204. The noun limning is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as referring to the “illuminating of manuscripts” or “painting, formerly in water-­ colour or distemper”. Its earliest recorded usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is in the text under discussion here. See “limning, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oedcom/view/­ Entry/108510 [accessed 14 November 2018]. The Middle English Dictionary (online version) defines it in the same way. Clarke (2016, p. xxiv) defines it as “painting on a small scale, using aqueous media on parchment or paper used for book illumination, armorial designs, pedigrees, and other display texts.” The material contained in the text seems to have been dispersed in different ways in the later Middle Ages. See Mark Clarke, The Art of All Colours: Mediaeval Recipe Books for Painters and Illuminators (London: Archetype Publications, 2001), and his 2016 edition for EETS. See also Laurel Braswell, “Utilitarian and Scientific Prose,” in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed A.S.G. Edwards (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984), pp. 337–88. I am currently collaborating with Michael Johnston of Purdue University to compile a comprehensive handlist of codicological recipes. Clarke (2016) notes that the version extant in Brogyntyn II.i has a close similarity to that found in New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, MS

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27 28

29 30

31

R486.M43 1450, and to London, British Library, MS Sloane 2584. The MS was produced between 1460 and 1500, possibly in the West Midlands (Cheshire or Shropshire); the treatise occupies ff. 33r –52v (Keiser, 1998, p. 3897, 3684). It is part of the Porkington, or Brogyntyn, manuscript collection that was placed on deposit at the National Library of Wales in 1934 and 1938, and eventually in 1945 Lord Harlech donated many of the deposited manuscripts to the Library; in 1993 the Library purchased the remaining manuscripts (C. William Marx, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XIV: Manuscripts in the National Library of Wales [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999], p. xv). The name Porkington (Brogyntyn in Welsh) is that of a village in Shropshire where Lord Harlech held an estate; see Arvo Kurvinen, “MS Porkington 10: Description with Extracts,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 54 (1953): 33–67 (34). For a description of the MS and a transcription of the text, see J.O. Halliwell, Early English Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (­L ondon: The Wharton Club, 1855), pp. v–vii, 72–91. See also Kurvinen (1953, pp. 34–38) and for a detailed description Gisela ­Guddat-Figge, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances (Munich: ­Wilhelm Fink, 1976), pp. 73–78. In what may be the monogram of the scribe or compiler, the name “H. Hattun” is written into a scroll at f. 52v, though Michael Johnston suggests that this name may relate to an early reader; see his Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014), p. 2. The manuscript may be read online at www.library.wales/discover/digital-gallery/manuscripts/the-middleages/a-middle-­english-miscellany/ [accessed 30 June 2018]. See Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications/TEAMS Middle English Texts, 1995). See also NIMEV 1888. The MS also contains a version of The Life of St Katherine (ff. 91r –129r), The Siege of Jerusalem (ff. 157v–184r), as well as a version of the “J.B. Group” that was used in the compilation of The Boke of St Albans (1438; STC 3308); for this see the work of Rachel Hands, English Hunting and Hawking in ‘The Boke of St Albans’, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford UP, 1975), and “Juliana Berners and The Boke of St Albans”, Review of English Studies ns 18 (1967): 373–86. The MS has also received some attention as an important repository of romances; see Carol M. Meale, “‘gode men / Wiues maydnes and alle men’: Romance and Its Audiences,” in Readings in Medieval Romance, ed C.M. Meale (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 209–26, p. 220, who suggests that, like Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole 61 and Cambridge University Library Ff.2.38 the Brogyntyn MS may have been a “household” book or had a mercantile readership; each volumes combines romance with devotional, didactic and practical material. Huws has suggested moreover that the book is the product of a team of scribes engaged in “concurrent activity,” which may have centered on a household or community (“MS Porkington 10 and its Scribes,” in Romance Reading on the Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills, eds Jennifer Fellows, Rosalind Field, Gillian Rogers and Judith Weiss [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996], pp. 188–207). See Clarke (2016, p. lvx and pp. 88–102). References to and quotations from the Brogyntyn version of The Crafte are taken from Clarke (2016, pp. 88–102.) Clarke edits with the very similar version found in New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, MS R.486.M.43 1450. Vermillion is “cinnabar or red crystalline mercuric sulphide … much valued on account of its brilliant scarlet colour, and largely used as a pigment, and

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33

34 35

36 37

38

39

40

41

largely used as a pigment or in the manufacture of red sealing-wax”; “vermilion, n. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www. oedcom/view/Entry/222574 [accessed 14 November 2018]. Size is a “glutinous or viscid wash applied to paper, parchment, etc., to provide a suitable ground for gilding, painting, or other work” and is now obsolete. “size, n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www. oedcom/view/Entry/180588 [accessed 14 November 2018]. A green or greenish blue substance obtained artificially by the action of dilute acetic acid on thin plates of copper (or a green rust naturally forming on copper and brass), and much used as a pigment, in dyeing, the arts, and medicine; basic acetate of copper. “verdigris, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oedcom/view/Entry/222437 [accessed 14 November 2018]. “Brasyle” is brazil, or the reddish dye obtained from brazilwood. “Brazil, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, [accessed 14 November 2018]. C. Paul Christianson, “Evidence for the Study of London’s Late Medieval Manuscript-Book Trade,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, eds J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), pp. 87–108 (p. 87). Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, “Introduction,” in The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), p. 6. This category included stationers, bookbinders, text writers and manuscript artists; C. Paul Christianson, A Directory of London Stationers and Book Artisans, 1300–1500 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1990), p. 14. Stationer, however, “became the predominant tag for all book craftsmen after 1440s, after the time when the ‘Mistery of Stationers’ became the prevailing name for the common craft names” (Christianson, 1989, p. 88). See also C. Paul Christianson, “The Rise of London’s Book-Trade”, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. III: ­1400–1557, eds L. Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 128–47. Carolyn P. Colette and Harold Garrett-Goodyear (eds), The Later Middle Ages: A Sourcebook (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 192–93. For a more detailed discussion of Lollards and their attitudes to textual transmission, see Anne Hudson, “Lollard Book Production,” in Griffiths and Pearsall, 1989, pp. 163–99. “London, British Library, Harley MS 2252, John Colyns’ “Boke”: Structure and Content,” in English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1500, vol. 15: Tudor Manuscripts, 1485–1603, ed A.S.G. Edwards (London: The British Library, 2009), pp. 65–122 (p. 65). Da Rold notes that the scribe and poet Thomas Hoccleve was a regular customer of William Surcestre and Walter Lucy, haberdashers in London, where he bought paper, ink, wax and parchment (2011, p. 24). The copyist John Shirley’s three main collections, dating from the 1420s to the 1450s, were all paper productions. Moreover substances that were combined to produce pigment were available pre-prepared from stationers and apothecaries from as early as 1200, possibly in response to the growth in specialized, more commercial book production (Brown, 1994, p. 98). “The Compiler at Work: John Colyns and BL MS Harley 2252,” in Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed D. Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1981), pp. 82–103 (p. 84). For further discussion of John Colyns see Carol M. Meale, “The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye and Mercantile Literary Culture

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43

4 4

45 46 47 48

49

50

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in Late-Medieval London”, in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, eds J. Boffey and P. King, Westfield Publications in Medieval Studies (­London, 1995), pp. 181–228, in particular p. 203 and following. On the version of the work extant here see Clarke (2016), pp. xxiv, lxxvi, 73–83 (edition). In total the MS preserves fifty-four recipes (Clarke, 2016, p. lxxvi). Ipomydon occupies two quires (ff. 54–85), and the Morte has three plus an additional five bifolia (ff. 86–133); the book also contains several vernacular poems by Skelton, including Colyn Cloute and Speke, Parrot, a number of political and courtly lyrics, and an Annals of London (Meale, 1981, p. 83). On commonplace books see Schurink (2010, pp. 453–54), who complicates more traditional theories of the early modern commonplace book-reader as either “recreational” or “pragmatic,” suggesting that the variety of types of material that are in evidence requires a more nuanced perspective on the history of reading, one that involves too the reader as a producer of meaning; Fred Schurink, “Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 453–69. The quire in which The Crafte of Lymmyng is preserved alternates between single and double-column copying. The Crafte can be found at ff.  ­142ra–146vb. Colyns has used red ink tinting for some capitals and ascenders at f. 141r for his Ezekiel prophecies, and again some way into the text of the Crafte at f. 142v; these features continue to the end of the text. The margins in this part of the volume measure approximately 45mm along the bottom and 47mm at the right hand side. Generally, the margin width here on the right hand side is 73mm, and measures 55mm on the bottom of each folio. f. 133v onwards. On this MS see R.H. Robbins, “The Poems of Humfrey Newton, Esquire, 1466–1536,” PMLA 65.2 (1950): 249–81; Ralph Hanna, “Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. C. 66,” Medium Ævum 69.2 (2000): 279–91; and Deborah Youngs, Humphrey Newton (1466–1536): An Early Tudor Gentleman (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008). A ­selection of images from this manuscript may be viewed at: www.bodley. ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/medieval/mss/lat/misc/c/066.htm [accessed 30 June 2018]. Hanna notes that the MS is written entirely, excepting two quires, on paper folio fold (his quire three is paper in quarto, and five is in membrane). It is in a nineteenth-century binding (2000, pp. 279–80). See his pp. 280–81 for a detailed discussion of the manuscript’s foliation and watermarks. Some women were of course involved in textual cultures and participated in the authorship of texts, increasingly in the fifteenth century; see “Women Authors and Women’s Literacy in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 159–82, and Chapter 5 (below). Robert Reynes copied, along with instructions for making glue and for tempering, a recipe for ink into his own commonplace book, Tanner MS 407; as a scribe he was most likely familiar with the process, and his recipe includes fairly precise measurements of quantity, and an interesting indication of time-measure that recommends the recitation of one of the penitential psalms, Miserere mei, Deus (psalm 50; Collette & Garrett-Goodyear, 2011, p. 195). On Reynes see Cameron Louis (ed), The Commonplace Book of Robert Reynes of Acle: an Edition of Tanner MS 407 (New York: ­Garland, 1980), and Meale (2015). For the recipes in MS Tanner 407 see Clarke

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54

55

56 57

58

59 60 61

62

(2016, p. xciv). For a comparable case, the book of Humfrey Welles, see Deborah Youngs, “Entertainment Networks, Reading Communities, and the Early Tudor Anthology: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 813,” in Connolly and Radulescu eds (2015), pp. 231–46. London booksellers were apparently now more sensitive to the market and began to produce accordingly, for example, informative lists and records in cheaper booklet form (Youngs, 2008, p. 182). St Veronica was commonly associated with indulgences so this illustration may have had particular significance for Newton. See the Roberts Hours, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii.6.2 (available at https://cudl.lib.cam. ac.uk/view/MS-II-00006-00002/1 [accessed 30 June 2018]) for another ­example of an illustration of St Veronica. I am grateful to Margaret ­Connolly for this information. Newton seemed fond of sketching, and the illustrations in Lat. Misc. c. 66 include the faces of young men and ladies, and also of a monk, as well as some birds and animals (ff. 92–93, 95v); he also drew an astrologer holding a sphere, and a skeleton. For Youngs these are “not merely idle doodles, but attempts to prove his artistic skill … [h]e was a keen, but not a naturally gifted artist” (2008, p. 188). Newton mainly uses red ink, either for rubrics, to underline proper nouns or for emphasis. He also uses it in some drawings, for example, that of the Sacred Heart, which “was given greater impact for being coloured in red” (Youngs, 2008, p. 189). Alexandra Gillespie, “Are The Canterbury Tales a Book?,” Exemplaria 30.1: 66–83 (69). The manuscript is s.xiii–s.xv and is of parchment, comprising iv + 192 + i leaves, and contains in the main alchemical texts and recipes. See Linne R. Mooney, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XI: Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College Cambridge (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 46–49. For the recipes in this MS see further Clarke (2016) pp. ­lxviii–lxix, 122–39. As Clarke notes the MS contains forty-four r­ ecipes for inks, ­manufacture of parchment and vellum, and other substances ­including wax and soap (p. lxviii). The instructions for making parchment and vellum are reproduced in G.S. Ivy, “The Bibliography of the Manuscript Book,” in The English Library Before 1700, eds F. Wormwald and C.E. Wright (London: Athlone, 1958), pp. 32–65 (p. 35). Neil R. Ker, introd., Facsimile of British Museum MS Harley 2253 (Oxford: Early English Text Society 255, 1965), p. x. See Clarke (2016), pp. lxxvi, 229–31. Susanna Fein, ed, “Introduction,” in The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volume 1 (TEAMS Middle English Texts, 2015) http://d.lib.­ rochester.edu/teams/text/fein-harley2253-volume-1-Introduction [accessed 30 June 2018]. STC 782, USTC 410041. A copy is held at the British Library, London, where it has the shelfmark 21.a.10. It was reprinted in 1525 by Peter Treveris of London (STC 783, USTC 501818), who extends the mayoral list to include Henry VIII’s eleventh regnal year (1519–20), and the title of the volume was changed to The Customs of London when it was printed by Francis Douce in 1811. The work has been discussed most recently by Julia Boffey in Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475–1530 (London: British Library, 2012), pp. 11–17. See also Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). Estimates based on print runs from this period would lead us to expect that c. 600

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64 65

66

67 68 69 70

copies of a work like Arnold’s would have been in circulation after its first printing, and double that after 1525 (Boffey, 2013, p. 16). Arnold (d. c. 1521) made his living chiefly by through trade with Flanders. In a record of his having acted as executor of a will in 1473, he is named as a haberdasher, someone who would have been involved in importation and vending. In 1488 he was imprisoned in Flanders, accused of spying, and his chronicle includes an undated royal pardon clearing him of charges of treason; see Peter C. Herman, “Arnold, Richard, (d. c. 1521),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, 2004) [accessed 30 June 2018]. STC 24252; USTC 507583. The work went through five editions, also being printed in 1581, 1583, 1588 and 1596. STC 19500; this volume, authored by Henry Peacham (1576–1643) had a second edition in the following year, 1607. It was printed by Richard Braddock, for William Jones, to be sold at his shop at the “signe of the Gun, neere Holborn Conduit”. STC 19504. For Peacham’s biography see John Horden, “Peacham, Henry (b. 1578, d. in or after 1644)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ul.ie/10.1093/ref:odnb/21667 [accessed 30 June 2018]. Printed by “W.S.” for John Browne, to be sold at his shop in St. Dunstan’s Churchyard in Fleet Street. There are also several pages that deal with wood engraving, and the illustration on the frontispiece is by one “G. Gifford”; STC 1577. The volume was printed in a second edition in 1635. STC 6455.5. See Jonathan Gibson (2010, p. 209) who refers to these volumes as paper books, noting that they were in common use in the Tudor period, becoming increasingly popular in the following centuries. Paper books “in smaller formats could be carried around by their owners, bits of text being added on the hoof” (210); “Casting off Blanks: Hidden Structures in Early Modern Paper Books,” in Material Readings in Early Modern Culture: Texts and Scribal Practices, eds J. Daybell and P. Hinds (Basingstoke: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2010), pp. 208–28.

4 Reading the Future Almanacs and Astrology

In his seminal work Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800, Bernard Capp asserts that texts on astrology, taking those texts as an indicator of widespread astrological practice, were not common in the later medieval period and in the early Renaissance, stating that the extent of astrological practice in late mediaeval and early Tudor England is uncertain, but it was probably very limited No major works on the subject were published during the first half of the sixteenth century … [a] nobleman might consult a foreign astrologer, but the dearth of simple vernacular guides to the subject makes it unlikely that there were many practitioners in the countryside to serve ordinary people. For most of the population, astrology was probably no more than a set of customs and beliefs based on moonlore, eclipses, and phenomena such as the rising and setting of the Dog Star, handed down verbally from one generation to the next (1979, p. 19). According to Capp, the revival of interest in astrology and the publication of texts in English occurred from the 1550s onwards with the “renaissance of mathematics” coinciding with the fact that England’s chief mathematicians, such as Thomas Allen, John Dee, and Leonard Digges, were also practising astrologers. Dee in particular enjoyed favour at the court of Elizabeth I who gave him “the name of hyr Philosopher.”1 However, other scholars have recognised that the pre-1550 landscape of vernacular works on astrology, astronomy, and prognostication was rather different and definitely more dynamic than has been suggested by Capp; in fact, works on lunar astrology, prognostication, divination, judicial astrology and astronomy circulated widely in manuscript form in England and were especially widely read and widely copied throughout the fifteenth century. 2 Moreover, relevant texts in Latin and in translation from Latin, Arabic and Greek were also variously abridged and copied from the mid-1300s onwards. Of course, the persistence and prevalence of texts related to astrology and prognostication does not always

Reading the Future  111 indicate that practice was widespread, but they must certainly attest to interest in the influence of the heavens and the nature of that influence, and its relevance for everyday life of the common reader. Capp’s assertion that English works on astrology were not common in the period to 1550 is, then, inaccurate, but it can be understood in part by considering the material conditions in which such texts persisted. While his assessment seems to be based on the lack of major “published” works, he also notices the “dearth of simple vernacular guides to the subject” (1979, p. 19), apparently indicating a lull in the production or existence of texts that are suitable for an audience who wish to purchase printed works from 1475 onwards. The actual landscape, consisting of multiple texts, in English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman, and other vernaculars, however, is complicated by the ways in which those texts were transmitted. Treatises on astrology, astronomy and related matters are to be found preserved in an astonishing range of late medieval manuscripts from devotional to medical compilations, to household miscellanies, to literary and scholastic volumes; indeed, the texts themselves evidence great variance in terms of form, sophistication and the likely profile of the reading audience. All told it is a challenging task to map the progress and the features of this type of instructional material in England in manuscript because both the texts and material carriers manifest surprising variety of subject, standard, form and context; this chapter aims to give a sense of some examples of the reading material available to late medieval readers in manuscript, as well as examining what was increasingly a standardized form in early print: the almanac. This variety in genre, content, and form is in fact well articulated by Capp himself. Astrology, he notes, was “the most systematic attempt to explain natural phenomena according to rigorous scientific laws until the modern scientific revolution” (1979, p. 15). It was commonly seen as the practical arm of astronomy and extending even into the seventeenth century they were seen as the same science; certainly astrology, throughout the medieval period, “lay at the heart of medieval science, its ramifications leading to medicine, physiology, botany and mettalurgy” (1979, p. 16). It divided into natural and judicial, the former being concerned with the general character of planetary influences, whereas judicial astrology attempted to interpret these influences in order to make predictions and dispense advice (1979, p. 16). Within those astrological systems, a person’s destiny could be determined by drawing up his/her nativity; ‘elections’ could also benefit a client, enabling them to choose the most propitious moment for undertaking any action. Astrologers also claimed to assist clients with horary questions; these usually related to personal issues, such as indicating the best time to marry or to undergo specific types of medical treatment (1979, p. 16). There were also related matters to do with predicting the future and advising on behaviour and action such as the influence that the complexions had

112  Reading the Future on humans; physiognomy and chiromancy; lunar astrology and lunar prognostication; geomancy; aspects of alchemy; and prognostications relating to Christmas Day and New Year’s Day and canicular days. Perhaps because of variability in its quality and form there perhaps exists a perception that later medieval English astrology does not manifest a strong textual tradition or involve a central, influential treatise; what it does exhibit, however, is a range of textual realities of different levels sophistication that reached (or, at least, were intended to reach) readers right across the social spectrum. This variety also anticipated audiences that would have different requirements and interests. As Keiser points out, this spread of knowledge related to natural philosophy “concerning the nature and structure of the universe” alongside the teachings of “technical astronomers concerning the celestial bodies and their influence on terrestrial life was being made accessible to readers in the vernacular in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.”3 In other words, tracts that were scholastic as well as more popularly relevant were in circulation simultaneously, often being copied side by side in the same manuscripts. Astrology and astronomy provided frameworks for understanding a multitude of earthly phenomena and circumstances and human experience: illness, weather, ill-fortune, human appearance, preferences and character; therefore they found multiple applications as well as a home in various tracts and treatises that may not seem immediately obvious as a natural context for such information. For example, short texts on astronomy and astrology, and related concerns, circulated as part of longer texts like medical tracts: Keiser notes that Henry ­Daniel’s Dome of Urines (Liber uricrisarum) “contains matters relevant to the computus, specifically information concerning calculation of leap years, Sunday letters, and concurrents” (1998, p. 3611). Similarly, long advisory manuals and encyclopaedic works such as the Secretum Secretorum and the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, translated by John Trevisa, contained sections that were cosmological, astrological and astronomical; such works also frequently incorporated prognosticary material concerned with physiognomy, palmistry and lunar prediction (1998, p. 3611).4 There are cosmological components in the South English Legendary, a fourteenth-century work, and indeed the cosmology from this work circulated discretely, extant in nine Middle English manuscripts. It contains information on the structure of the universe, the planets, elements and on the seasons and weather (Keiser, 1998, p. 3611). Because of this at times unexpected textual landscape, and due to the persistence of texts on cosmology, astrology, and astronomy in different material contexts and in both verse and prose, it is difficult to offer either a full account of or an accurate perspective on the reception of and attitudes to such texts in the later medieval period. Keiser is in agreement with this view, noting that the sense of how widespread an

Reading the Future  113 audience for such works may have been is still unclear; however, he theorises that the “extensive circulation” of a treatise such as The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy which, he says, “contains a large body of theoretical and practical information” is indicative of a complex audience, and certainly one that was comprised of more than just “clerkly readers” (1998, p. 3611). In fact, it is examples like the Middle English Wise Book, the material reality of which exposes the different contexts in which it was read, that challenges the views of Capp and others that works astrology were not common, or commonly read, in late medieval England. The prevalence enjoyed by the Wise Book in later Medieval English reading cultures, and in cultures of book production, must further challenge any assertion that instructional literature relating to astrology were not being copied or read. 5 Moreover, the possibility remains that the Wise Book was most likely a vernacular composition, thus altering the view that most texts were translated and imported, and Thomas’ statement, that “prognostications in circulation during the early sixteenth century were … largely of foreign origin,” has been challenged by scholars like Laurel Braswell-Means (1992, p. 368). Ultimately, literature relating to astronomy and astrology were most likely composed in the vernacular, or at the very least compiled from treatises that had been, at some stage in their dissemination, translated out of a foreign language. As Voigts notes, material must have been “compiled or Englished, or both compiled and Englished from the reign of Richard II (1377) until the Tudor monarchs”; the emergence of vernacular English writing, therefore, coincided with the emergence of the English vernacular.6

The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy was without doubt one of the most widely circulated treatises of its kind in later medieval England.7 Preserved in thirty-four late medieval manuscripts that manifest significant formal, material and generic variety, it provides a framework for understanding the structure of the universe and the influence of the planets and other heavenly bodies on human existence, behaviour and, in some versions, appearance.8 It is extant in a fuller form as well as in abridged versions in medical handbooks and miscellanies, volumes of popular science and pseudo-science, mathematical and legal texts, devotional material, compilations of other ‘useful’ texts and treatises; however, it also co-existed with historical, literary and philosophical works such as the B-Text of Piers Plowman and Mum and the Soothsegger (both extant in Cambridge University Library MS Ll.4.14) and a copy of the prose Brut (in Cambridge University Library MS Ee.4.31). In most of its surviving witnesses the prologue to the Wise Book gives the reader a sense of the structure of the text and, though many manuscripts do

114  Reading the Future not textually distinguish between chapters or sections, what we find is a rudimentary list of contents: Firste this boke tellith how many heuenys ther been, afturward he pronounsith & declarith of þe course & of þe gouernaile of the planetis, aftirward of þe signys & of the sterris of the firmament, aftirward of þe elementis & of þe compleccionys & þe manerys of man (Griffin, 2013, p. 3).9 The contents, disclosed in this informal ordinatio, and featuring what might be described as the discrete sections, conform to the normal structure of the work which in its fullest form comprises: an enumeration of the heavens, planets, signs of zodiac, and months; a description of signs of zodiac and associated Biblical event or figure; a debate on predestination and free will; an enumeration of twelve spheres and eleven heavens, the four elements and complexions; a description of the properties of the earth; the artificial and natural day; a basic computus; details of planetary reign; the hours and influence of the seven planets; and a nativity section (with physiognomy in recension B). Many of the manuscript witnesses acknowledge this ordinatio by using physical markers in the form of paraphs, decorated initials or marginal annotations to indicate where sections begin and end and some, like the version found in ­Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 189, feature headings to demarcate discrete sections. However, many of the divisions and changes in focus are textually indicated: phrases such as “now it is to wite” or “now y shall declare” introduce new concepts while simultaneously linking sections, perhaps also ensuring that a copyist will know to feature a visual marker in the manuscript.10 It is clear that, although the Wise Book’s distinct sections may have been suitable for copying and reading in abridged form or as extracts, there was awareness amongst scribes and compilers that the text made sense holistically. Effectively it is comprised of elements of what are now regarded as specific medieval instructional and scientific genres: physiognomy, astrology, astronomy, prognosticary, computus, nativity, and lunary, as well as more philosophical elements, such as the debate section. But it is undoubtedly recognizable as a discrete text, and it circulated mostly as such despite the increasingly autonomous practices of scribes, compilers and patrons who, when assembling and planning books and texts, were becoming more selective. The Wise Book has a structure that leads readers from macro- to microcosm, proceeding logically despite the different components of scientific and philosophical information that it transmits. Moreover, rather than encountering a collection of diverse theories, cobbled together from various other texts and consequently lacking in order, the reader finds a sophisticated work that has a logical schema, and the effect is such that it can be read both as an

Reading the Future  115 introduction to complex concepts regarding the workings of the universe for the amateur reader, and as a handy summary of key ideas for the professional. However, it is almost certainly this blend of information, indebted to distinct traditions and genres, that has led to both difficulties in classifying the text and to modern misconceptions regarding the prevalence of astrological and astronomical texts in the later English Middle Ages. Scholarship has evidently struggled to classify the text precisely because of its intermingling of genres.11 These challenges in terms of classification are understandable, since the Book, in keeping with other works that are utilitarian in scope and nature, was most likely compiled from various sources, but attempts to pigeonhole the text for a modern audience have the effect of generalizing its contemporary importance and reality.12 For as much as the text displays great variance in how it was treated by scribes, compilers, patrons and readers, being embedded into longer tracts, abridged, amended and excerpted, its material witnesses also display considerable variance, from which we can infer that the Book reached wide audiences and a wide demographic. There is no single type of context for the Wise Book and because of this we cannot speak about a singular audience or certain type of reader. This material sense of an extremely wide readership is in step with theories about the expansion of the reading audience in the later Middle Ages; in particular, Malcolm Parkes, writing about the rise of literacy and the subsequent marketplace for vernacular literature, concluded that there were “three types of medieval reader: the professional, the cultivated, and the pragmatic.”13 Similarly, Braswell (Means), referring specifically to lunaries (which works frequently co-exist in manuscripts alongside the Wise Book) finds from textual evidence and references to lunary lore in other works that they attracted readers from “all three estates – Clerus, Miles, and Cultor.”14 Helpfully, the work of Linne Mooney has approached this issue by first looking at the different types of books in which scientific and utilitarian texts are preserved, and by then examining them for evidence of contemporary and/or early modern use.15 Commentators have generally reached similar conclusions: that texts of science and instruction in manuscript in the vernacular were indeed finding a wide and diverse audience and were enjoying popularity and sustained dispersal throughout the later Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Moreover, the context in which they are presented to a public is paramount to an understanding of the manner in which they were received, and the material contexts for the Wise Book overwhelmingly suggest that the text permeated all levels of literate, and sometimes non-literate, society. The variance that is evident in the work, and in particular in the computus section, likely responds to concerns about the levels of literacy and the reading competence of its audience, an audience which will be comprised of people – both male and female – with dissimilar abilities.

116  Reading the Future The computus most often assisted readers in calculation, sometimes of dates -- in particular the date of Easter -- or in the measurement of time; here the instructions advise audiences on how to determine the reign of a planet which, according to the text, is an hour, so it is reasonable to assume that this section of the text would have been especially practical and useful. On the one hand, the instructions are pitched at that element of the audience with some level of expertise in the calculation of time. They will either have access to, or sufficient expertise in, the use of an astrolabe, such as the intended audience of the Wise Book contained in Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.10.21 and British Library, MS Egerton 2433, who are instructed to “be holde an astrolabe” in order to measure an hour. The instruction indicates that certain members of the audience will have “access to manuscript material, literacy [and] at least some basic knowledge of mathematics and astronomy”; they may even possess the “parchment and paper volvelles” that act as substitutes for the astrolabe (Braswell (Means), 1992, p. 602). This implied learned audience, then, is engaged alongside an audience lacking in either skills or resources, or in some cases, both; as Braswell (Means) puts it, “many texts addressed in the first instance to a more learned audience reflect a self-conscious recognition” of the difficulties that the absence of ­resources – either written material or linguistic capability – might pose (1992, p. 602). The instruction provided here displays consciousness of a public that is varied in ability and experience and thus the solutions provided are suitably accessible. In several of its manuscript versions, the Wise Book advises that a good redere & a devowte schold rede twyes þe seven psalmys & þe letanye; and þerfore Y seie as by rewle þat it failith not as by estymacioun, & for as myche as euery man may not haue þe astrolabour, therefore þer is siche a mysure ychose and yputte þat men may lightly knowe þe howris of þe planetis (from London, British Library, MS Sloane 2453, f. 4v; see Griffin, 2013, p. 13).16 This formulaic construction addresses an audience that is literate, able to read Latin well, and that has recourse to the appropriate, written devotional materials to do so. Moreover, this element of the intended audience is well educated and widely read – and because of this, able to make use of this alternative method for the calculation of time – but still would probably have had neither the cause nor the means to purchase or use an astrolabe. However, the text, in most of its versions, also makes provisions for the less well-educated and perhaps illiterate members of an audience by providing a second method by which to measure time.17 These instructions confirm not only that the Wise Book was intended to circulate widely throughout later medieval English reading circles, but that in fact it did; moreover, its instructions were amended and edited

Reading the Future  117 in order to suit different audiences. The second instruction to measure time reads as follows: And if þou be vnkonnyng of þe astrolabour sette þe space as myche as thou wilt goo two myles in wynter tyme, or ellis in þe somer tyme sette thy space of three myle, or as long tyme as þou maist seie two noctornys of þy sawter. & so may þe space bitwene an houre and an oþer verily be knowe (from Sloane 2453, f. 6r; Griffin, 2013, p. 19). Directed at audiences who perhaps cannot read, this section advises them to measure an hour by walking three miles in summer (and two miles in winter, when weather conditions are expected to be more challenging). The passage itself is subject to some variation; for instance, the scribe of London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library, MS 564 was evidently concerned with the level of disposable income of his readers: But summe philosophoris puttiþ þe space of and hour as while a foot-man schulde goon a pas in somer three myle or sumdel lesse, and in wyntir two mile or a litil lesse. And for it is costelew ech man to haue an astirlabre, or ellis eche man be not vndirstondynge and kunnynge þeron. Therfore þe philosophoris by estymacioun setten siche certeyn diffinicioun and þe space of an hour as it is aforn-­ rehersid (ff. 48va–b; Griffin, 2013, p. 54). The evidence discernable from the extant witnesses to the Wise Book confirm that the work indeed reached audiences that were as socially, professionally and educationally varied as the internal instructions imply. It therefore cannot be said to have any one intellectual context any more than it can be described as materially uniform, precisely because of the different levels of instruction, and the different components of scientific and philosophical thought and learning evident within the text. Peter Brown, editing a fragmentary text which is actually a condensed version of the Wise Book but which he calls The Seven Planets, describes that text as having a simplicity that is “more apparent than real”.18 Indeed, one of the most remarkable achievements of the Book is that it actively allows for an audience with various levels of education: on the one hand, it is assumed that part of its audience will have no prior knowledge of the cosmos, or the zodiacal system; thus the tract begins by outlining and naming basic structures and concepts: the seven planets, and the days of the week for which they are named; the ten heavens and eleven orders of angels; the twelve signs of the zodiac and the months in which they reign. Simultaneously, it appeals to those with a background knowledge of philosophical issues (such as providence and free will); the computus and Latin scholarship; a professional interest in astronomical/ astrological theory and of ways in which this is relevant to everyday

118  Reading the Future activities, or, significantly, practical experience in the use of astronomical instruments. Indeed, the nature of the text is such that it can be regarded either as a short introduction for the amateur or beginner or, for those with some experience and knowledge, a summary. This duality of function may, in no small part, account for sustained contemporary interest in the Book, and for its impressive circulation history, from the late fourteenth through to the sixteenth century. However, despite a manuscript tradition that testifies to a wide circulation and likely popularity, the Wise Book failed to reach an audience as a printed text. As we might expect, the later manuscripts of the text display evidence that the Wise Book, post-1500, was increasingly copied into volumes that were products of individual scribe-compilers involved in fabricating their own homemade compilations and selecting and demarcating texts that were of interest or use to themselves, or, perhaps, choosing to copy texts that were perhaps not accessible in print. One example might be the scribe-compiler of the Wise Book manuscript London, British Library, Egerton 2433, an early sixteenth-century paper manuscript in small quarto, which is written in a single hand by someone who calls himself “Ypocrase Brunfyld” (f. 5r).19 Indeed, this “Brunfyld”, who we must assume was a physician of sorts through his insistence on linking his name with that of Hippocrates, copies texts of the kind that were useful to his craft, such as a Galenic plague tract, a bloodletting treatise, a translation of the Circa Instans which is a popular medical herbal, a regimen of health and several medical recipes, as well as the Wise Book and the frequently collocated Book of Destinary. In many respects, this early sixteenth-century volume, written in the hand of the person who most likely used and accessed it, is a monument of the sorts to the kinds of texts that were being eschewed by the new printers: texts that, for whatever reason, were not deemed suitable for dissemination in this relatively new medium. But these texts were still obviously seen as relevant and useful, particularly so to the various medical practitioners (most likely those lacking the benefit of formal education), and they could be compiled and copied into compact, slim and portable volumes for easy reference. Where the early manuscripts of the Wise Book, some of which are discussed below, bear evidence of different levels of intellectual engagement with the text, with a comparatively high proportion of those early manuscripts having decorated and visually interesting texts, the later manuscript tradition seems to exemplify interest mainly at the level of the text, with impulses to preservation, emulation and sometimes abridgement taking precedence over the appearance and, sometimes, accessibility of the text. This does not necessarily mean that the work would not have been used or read in any profound way in the later tradition; rather, I contend that it was subject to different kinds of interaction in its early and later life, and

Reading the Future  119 that its later manuscripts actually display a kind of uniformity that is absent from the earlier fifteenth-century witnesses. Yet the early- to mid-fifteenth-century copies of the Wise Book arguably have their own kind of uniformity: a discernible desire to indicate the value of the words copied on the page by having them decorated, often to quite a high standard. Readers would have thus first experienced the words in the context of the contribution that they make to the overall visual schema of the page. London, British Library, MS Sloane 965 is a high-grade manuscript that can be dated to c. 1449 from the calendar that it preserves at ff. 9r –21v. 20 It has been suggested that the manuscript was a deluxe vade mecum for a physician (Braswell (Means), 1993, p. 21), and the character of the contents of the manuscript, along with its small size, ideal for portability, supports this. The manuscript opens with a full-page zodiac man at f. 2r, and the texts have a medical focus or, at least, are useful to medical practitioners: there is a copy of the Chirurgia magna of Guy de Chauliac at ff. 24r –106v; a witness to John of Burgundy’s plague tract (ff. 132r –143r)21; and a version of the Wise Book (ff. 143v–178r). 22 There are also tracts on bloodletting, human diseases and medical astrology, as well as on cupping and, as mentioned, a calendar from 1449 to 1517. It is copied in a single hand of neat anglicana formata with some features of secretary (Figure 4.1). The most striking feature of the book, however, is the obvious attention to detail, and this finds expression both in the copying and organisation of the texts, and the volume’s delicate decorative scheme. This scheme dominates the manuscript to the extent that even the crudely drawn zodiac man at f. 2r is rendered more attractive by the addition of attractive labelling in gold and blue. The entire manuscript is decorated to some extent: there are tiny ornate initials scattered through pages of text, some red, some blue and some in still-luminous eye-catching gold; these measure no more than 3 or 4mm in parts. Elsewhere, the manuscript has very finely drawn, ornate initials, typically two lines deep and measuring just under a centimetre. These (for example, on f. 159v) are of gold with red and blue penwork, along with fronding, sometimes also in gold. Several of the folios have a series of alternate gold and red or blue minature initials and some very handsome gold and blue paraphs (for instance, at ff. 119v–120r). There are also some fully illustrated pages, such as f. 43r, occurring in the middle of Guy de Chauliac’s Chirurgia magna which has a handsome decorated border with gilding both on the border and on the decorative initial 23; and indeed the particular investment in the decoration of the Chirurgia is most striking in this volume. The Chirurgia is evidently the manuscript’s anchor text, strongly indicating that the book was intended to be a working manual of informative texts. Chauliac’s famous surgery is prefaced by a table of contents, designed to help the reader better navigate the text (ff. 24r–v); this features the same miniature initials and paraphs, as well as some rubrication, that we find

120  Reading the Future

Figure 4.1  L  ondon, British Library, MS Sloane 965, f. 25r. ©The British Library Board.

elsewhere in the manuscript, indicating perhaps that the same artist was responsible for the decorative scheme. The first page of the text proper is one of the most visually impressive pages in the volume (f. 25r; see fig. 9), replete with a decorative border, gilding and a very intricate decorative initial. Elsewhere throughout the text we find the same pattern of decoration that, together with the mise-en-page and the script, gives a visual and very splendid unity to the discrete texts: effectively, it makes what might otherwise be a collection of separate tracts or booklets into a book. But we might also say that in MS Sloane 965, utilitarian texts like the Wise Book are somehow infused with importance by virtue of the expensive and time-consuming decoration in this manuscript. Other than the Zodiac Man and the calendar, there are no medical illustrations or astronomical/astrological diagrams. The decoration may of course serve a practical purpose, in a book with no page numbers or indices,

Reading the Future  121 introducing in some cases breaks or new texts, or to focus the eye of the reader at specific points, encouraging natural pauses in the reading process. Certainly later manuscripts of the Wise Book were less likely to be professionally produced as people increasingly compiled homemade commonplace books and manuals. But the level of professional production invested in a manuscript that is clearly comprised of useful texts, and so less likely to be formally displayed, is compelling: this is not a mere medical notebook but rather the product of a decision to enrich a particular set of works in ways that may be more closely associated with literary manuscripts and books of hours. There is something complex and difficult to theorize in the sharp contrast between the rich decorative scheme of f. 25r and the presence of the word “vtilitate” in gothic script in the fourth line (see fig. 9); it seems to indelibly inscribe the purpose of the tract, if not the book. But the prominent and meaningful word and the striking decoration, taken together, seem to point to a certain inscribed desire to celebrate the practical text, and the value of utility and practical knowledge, in this manuscript at least.

Wise Book Manuscripts and the Introduction of Print Wise Book manuscripts at the threshold of the arrival of the printing press in England somehow cling to traditional hand production and painstaking decoration, even when those volumes are not always professionally produced. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 1220, a parchment manuscript of the third quarter of the fifteenth century, with the Wise Book and its frequent companion The Book of Destinary as its only texts, has been carefully and richly decorated, probably by an amateur artist, but in ways that suggest a profound engagement with the text and, indeed, a pronounced concern with directing the attention of the reader to certain aspects of the text. There are impressive full-­ folio illustrations of the planets and their children (ff. 25v, 29r –32v), and throughout the Wise Book’s opening section the artist has featured miniature roundels depicting each sign of the twelve signs and the four elements.24 But it is the Wise Book’s debate section (f. 6r in this manuscript) that boasts perhaps the most interesting illustration in the volume: the two philosophers mentioned in the text are depicted in dialogue, with the text of the debate flowing between them. The philosophers are captured in the act of disputation; both are depicted seated, one wearing a crimson cap and purple robes trimmed with white, the other also in purple robes but with a hood and cap of crimson. Each man has a raised hand and a pointing finger, indicating their individual, separate parts of the debate on the page; their bodies lean into their words, as if to lend weight to their individual arguments. This visual representation of the textual debate indicates that the artist – who was also, perhaps, the scribe – identified the parts of the text that were of most importance to

122  Reading the Future him, or of potential relevance to his audience, and chose to demarcate the philosopher’s debate in a way that demonstrates real, meaningful engagement with the words on the page; and, perhaps, to communicate that engagement to other readers of the book. The artwork brings the debate to life, and readers are encouraged to think of it perhaps as still fresh and relevant. Later manuscripts evidence a move away from decorative schemes of any kind. London, University College, MS Anglia 6 is a manuscript dating from 1450–75 (Keiser, 1998, p. 3766) and it contains a version of recension B of the Wise Book. The manuscript is most likely a copy of another, earlier recension B manuscript: New York, Columbia University, MS Plimpton 260, which can be dated to c. 1420. 25 This manuscript most probably provided the exemplar for Anglia 6; both manuscripts have been described as “closely-related” and as preserving an “extraordinarily rich repository of Middle English popular scientific texts” (Acker and Amino, 1994, p. 141). Anglia contains each of the items contained in the Plimpton manuscript, albeit in a slightly different order, and it lacks the table of auspicious and unlucky days found at the end of the Plimpton manuscript (though Anglia is wanting leaves at the end so the table may well have once been there). According to Acker and Amino, Some early-fifteenth century English reader thought enough of these texts to have them collected in the elegantly written, decorated and handy format represented by [Plimpton]; a later medieval reader thought the whole collection merited copying, albeit in the more pedestrian format and cursive script of [Anglia] (1994, p. 142). In addition to the Wise Book, Plimpton 260 contains The Book of Physiognomy, The Golden Table of Pythagoras, The Boke of Pawmestry and The Book of Destinary, forming a volume of texts that are, broadly speaking, prognosticary: one of the most typical contexts for the Wise Book. 26 Is the later manuscript an example of this impulse to preserve without embellishment a set of texts that are, by the late fifteenth century, at risk of being lost or simply not as widely available as they once were or, perhaps, unavailable for purchase from England’s new printers? Other later Wise Book manuscripts certainly privilege content and preservation over appearance, such as London, British Library, Sloane 1317, a seventeenth-century witness. This is a compilation in which the scribe-compiler divides his pages in a rough manner into two or three sections in which to copy shorter pieces (pieces that, though suitable for commonplacing and certainly still useful, were probably not widely favoured by printers), and copying in an untidy cursive hand that was presumably not intended for reading by eyes other than his own. 27 Indeed, there is now a marked contrast in this manuscript caused by the visual

Reading the Future  123 impact of the fragment of Latin text on parchment, written in neat double columns, that has been used to reinforce the volume’s binding on the inside cover board, and the crude appearance of the manuscript itself: the hastily punctuated cursive script; the distinctive but unskilled scribal manicules that appear throughout; and the scribal decoration, such as the rubrication of initials and some blue fronding and tinting. Overall, the untidy appearance of the manuscript which suggests that it may have functioned as a sort of notebook, clustering texts that are similar in theme and focus (the version of the Wise Book extant here is heavily abridged, and the volume privileges shorter, note-type texts), 28 contributes to the impression that later readers respond to the Wise Book in new ways, and perhaps as part of a culture that is now concerned with commonplacing and with recording short snippets of text for posterity.

Printed Almanacs The Wise Book continued to be copied into the Jacobean and Caroline periods, but fewer later copies survive and those that are extant, as we have seen, tend to be abridged and/or hurriedly copied in untrained hands. Based on the extant manuscript copies, the zenith of the popularity of the text was in the period 1400–75, with the number of extant full versions in manuscript tailing off post-1475. One of the reasons for diminishing interest in the Wise Book may have been the increased availability of the almanac, examples of which were produced by the Continental printers in the later fifteenth century and imported into England. Indeed, given the “number of surviving almanacs in manuscript and early print, it is clear that an almanac had become a necessary possession for hundreds, and by the end of the sixteenth century, thousands of Englishmen, not only for physicians, barbers, and surgeons, but also for merchants, churchmen, craftsmen and … farmers.”29 Printed almanacs did not appear in England until the very end of the fifteenth century and even then they were not commonly printed in England, nor were they composed by Englishmen, until 1507 and the appearance of William Red’s Amanach ephemerides, printed by Richard Pynson et al.30 Certainly by the later Middle Ages in England the almanac had become a familiar feature of certain manuscript traditions, anticipated to some extent by the calendars that were constructed and calculated by John Somer and Nicholas of Lynn, 31 and by the calendars that were familiar to sections of the medieval reading audience (and, indeed, those who could not read) by virtue of their frequent inclusion in psalters and books of hours. 32 The calendars of the likes of John Somer and Nicholas of Lynn “prepared the way for printed almanacks” and they contained many of the features that would appear in almanacs, such as information on eclipses, zodiac and vein men (Mooney, 1997, p. 16). Crucially, however,  the calendars of Somer and Lynn indicate a demonstrable move toward

124  Reading the Future the “simplified, illustrated renderings of information such as was to be the hallmark of the early printed almanacks” (Mooney, 1997, p. 16). It would be inaccurate to imply that the transition was simple and that interest in the Wise Book was replaced by an appetite for the almanac in print; however, there is a definite shift in the landscape, involving the increased production of almanacs, and their comparatively accessible information and organizational structures, that may have seen almanacs appealing to a wider audience. In other words, the variety and novelty of the printed version may have satisfied the demand that was in part fulfilled by the Wise Book in manuscript, and we may say that the Wise Book and similar works served as precursors of sorts to the almanac. The material covered by the Wise Book replicates much of the information that readers would find helpfully gathered and organised in the newly printed almanacs. But the Wise Book, which is structured and logical, but which is frequently impacted by scribal intervention, presents its information in prose and in ways that are closer to literary narrative styles than to the more visual, scientific tendencies of calendar material in manuscript; Mooney notes that both Somer’s and Lynn’s calendars “show a tendency to render their information in tables and diagrams rather than in prose text” (1997 p. 16). Essentially, our text falls between the cracks in the “movement toward separation of the scholarly or scientific from the common or folkloric” (Mooney, 1997, p. 21), finding neither a popular audience keen to buy new, cheap copies of older texts nor a place in the canon of scholarly medieval texts experiencing renewal and revival with the advent of the new technology. Moreover, new scientific discoveries were changing the ways in which astronomical knowledge was understood and applied; the Wise Book seems increasingly irrelevant and arcane in a time when new scientific discoveries and methods for calculation with greater accuracy were impacting on the kinds of works in which printers were inclined to invest.33 By contrast, the printed almanac flourished in early modern England and across Europe. Rather like the Wise Book which appeals to wide and sometimes illiterate audiences in some of its sections, some of the earliest almanacs in English as well as those printed in England transmit their information in ways that are almost exclusively visual. This is a practice that may have been carried over from and directly influenced by some calendars in manuscript; for example, Mooney notes that in a copy of John Somer’s calendar, found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 238, which is a folding pocket example, the prognostication tables are rendered in illustrated symbols so that the user need not even be able to read to learn that there would be scarcity of honey or wheat in a given year (1997, p. 13). A comparative example in print is the Perfyte Pronostycacion Perpetuall (see fig. 10) an almanac for fifteen years which was compiled semi-anonymously by someone with the initials “J.A.” and printed exclusively by Robert Wyer “dwellynge at

Reading the Future  125 the Sygne of S. John Euanglyste besyde Charynge Crosse … ad imprimendum solum”, in 1556.34 This slim almanac, printed in blackletter in octavo, not only finds ways to express an interest in reaching users and consumers at all levels of society and with different levels of literacy but also discovers ways in which to actually reach them. This intention is announced on the title page, on which the work is described as “[v]eray easy to be vnderstande, of the Reader. Yea, and also for them whiche knoweth not a letter on the Booke”. An indication is also given of the intended or anticipated audience: … husbandmen, of the Countrey, to knowe and vnderstande the yeares, that shall be plentiuous and in great habunadance of Foodes. And the yeres the whiche shall be greyous, and in scasyite with other sygnes conteyned herin. Perhaps in keeping with the appeal to a more rural audience than the usual urban customer, the almanac is striking in its simplicity. It contains only one table, setting out the date of Easter, indicating leap years, and providing the golden numbers and dominical letters for the fifteen years to 1570, and this is the only technical aspect of the volume that has the potential to cause the reader some difficulty. 35 This table is followed by a short “Preface to the Reader,” compiled again by “J.A.,” designed so that the reader can “the more easely vnderstande the hoole effect of this pronostycacion,” which further explains the complier’s intentions. It is the “gentle reader,” that is addressed directly, and the compiler reiterates his already-stated desire to reach unlettered audiences with his carefully illustrated volume: […] I haue take a lytell payne in this pronostycacion, to this entent that I as well would haue the Ignoraunt people, that is not skylled on the Booke, for to perceyue and haue some vnderstandynge howe the yeare doth go aboute, as well as the learned men, to the entent that they shall perceyue the yeares, the whiche / Shall be plenteous, and in great habundaunce of goodes. And agayne also for to perceyue the yeares the whiche are greuous, and in scasitt of al maner corne. And of the deth of men women and chydlren, of Tempestes of wyndes, of dyuers deseases … As ye shall se more playnly apeare, in this present Booke (sig. A2v –A3r). The tone of the preface turns on the word “planyly” which feeds into the express aim the publication, stated both on the title page and in the preface to the reader, that the almanac has been tailored for less-able readers: those “Ignoraunt people … not skylled on the Booke,” who will be nonetheless visually literate to quite a sophisticated level. 36 However, customers that are “learned” and perhaps wish to avail of a handy and

126  Reading the Future accessible vade mecum that is relevant for fifteen years can access the almanac just as effectively. Moreover, there is an assumption that the audience will be comprised mainly of farmers or, at the higher level, perhaps the managers of estates: those with a vested interest, at least, in predictions on the weather and the success or failure of crops, or the health of animals and the impact of political events on the economy (Figure 4.2). Almanacs began to be produced in England, as Kassell notes, in “significant numbers from the 1550s” to such an extent that they had “soon become a staple of the book trade.”37 As well as being widely sold, they were highly regulated, in part because of the “economic worth of the trade, in part because of concerns to control the potentially seditious content of their accompanying prognostications.” In 1559, the royal

Figure 4.2  A Perfyte Pronostycacion Perpetuall (1556) sig. Bi. © The British Library Board.

Reading the Future  127 injunctions that controlled the press were extended to the printing of prognostications (Kassell, 2011, p. 439). Nevertheless, large numbers of almanacs and prognostications were printed, even though “the practice of pairing almanacs – which contained calendars and other useful ­information – with prognostications was not commonplace until around 1540” (Kassell, 2011, p. 438). The Perfyte Pronostycacion Perpetuall is an example of the marriage of a relatively basic calendar with fixed information and a set of less reliable and relatively crude prognostications for several years, rendered in the form of illustrations. Despite this it is evident, in a competitive market for such works, one in which printers strove to occupy a space, that tailoring almanacs to suit a niche audience was a valuable and effective marketing ploy. Wyer’s almanac would not directly appeal to the same audience as, for instance, the Prognostication everlasting (1556) compiled by Leonard Digges, a volume that was copiously illustrated but a “more substantial work”; Kassell notes that Digges, in the framework of a regular almanac, “instructed his readers in how to calculate astronomical positions and introduced them to Copernican cosmology” (2011, p. 438). Effectively, the Perfyte Pronostycacion Perpetuall demands quite a sophisticated level of visual literacy from its readers, requiring an ability to decode signs and symbols in order to unlock the text’s meaning. The prognostications are perpetual, organised around and determined by the day on which New Year falls in a given year. So when New Year’s Day falls on Sunday, there are eleven predictions, or “Sygnes”: readers can expect a “Wynter temperate, enclyned to heat”, and a “Haruest Indyfferente”. A literate family member could outline the layout of the almanac for an illiterate user, but the images remain quite difficult to decode; however, they are repeated throughout for the seven days of the week so that the set of eleven images become more familiar and more legible with reasonably regular use. The volume is nonetheless easily negotiable: once a reader remains aware that there are eleven signs per entry, and knows the days of the week, the schema might be followed without much trouble. The information is not confined to weather predictions or notes about the anticipated harvest, or the production of honey: readers will learn about marriages, wars, trade and ships, kings, the health of animals, felonies, morality in humans, and illness, but the statements, in particular those relating to politics and rule, remain general and uncontroversial: “Truse is taken”; “Newes of Kynges.”38 By contrast, Digges’ Prognostication everlasting (fig. 11), which is an almanac for London, is a more complex production that requires a different kind of reading by what the compiler calls “all men of vnderstanding” (sig. A1r).39 Ostensibly, it offers information of exactly the kind we find in the illustrated volume printed by Robert Wyer, claiming to contain “plaine, brief, pleasaunt, chosen rules to iudge the weather by the Sunne, Moone, Starres, Comets, Rainebow, Thunder, Cloudes, with

128  Reading the Future other extraordinary tokens, not omitting the Aspects of Planets, with a briefe iudgement for euer, of Plenty, Lacke, Sicknes, Death, ­Warres &c., opening also many naturall causes worthy to bee knowen.” The term “plaine” reminds us of that used in the preface to the Wyer’s almanac and although it claims to be clear and brief, and promises a pleasant reading experience, this production demands from the reader more input and effort. As Capp puts it, the Prognostication Everlasting “contained some comparable material [to the Perfyte Pronostycacion] but it was a much more ambitious work” (1979, p. 31), and indeed it is more formally constructed and presented: there is an epistle dedicatory to the Earl of Lincoln, Edward Fines, in which Thomas Digges acknowledges the favour bestowed on his late father by Fines, and offers him a corrected and enlarged version of one of his father’s books as a “testymony of a gratefull mynde” (sig. A2r).40 There is also a lengthy preface to the reader, which states that the almanac has been undertaken to “auoyde … the yerely care, trauayles, and paynes of other, with the confusions, repugnances, and manifolde errors, partly by negligence, and oft through ignorance committed.” Digges has also appended “diuerse profitable collections” to his “Prognostication generall, for euer to take effect,” undoubtedly in an effort to make the volume more attractive to book purchasers. Crucially we are afforded some sense in this preface of the saturated marketplace and the competition for readers, sales and, increasingly, reputation, in terms of almanacs and prognosticary works; Digges states that if readers should compare his calculations to those found in other almanacs, then they must assume that those publications are incorrect, or calculated for other locations (“[i]f any yearely practises in like matters agree not with my calculation, bee assured they are false, or at the leaste for other Eleuations or Meridians supputated, and therefore little serving thy purpose” [sig. A2v]). Insofar as the Wyer almanac of 1556 anticipates an ill-educated, predominantly rural audience, or expects that a significant portion of the readership will utilise the illustrations to navigate the volume and absorb the information, Digges appeals to a very different kind of reader: one who is educated, informed, and, perhaps, part of the new class of professionals. These readers are likely to expect quality and, increasingly, to question  – and compare – the information that they find in printed works. The almanac’s front matter establishes the credentials of both the original compiler and the now-­ corrector and weaves further authority into the work by referring to books that have been consulted and theories that are apparently flawed; also included is a semi-Latinate second preface, Against the Reprouers of Astronomie, and Sciences Mathematicall, that quotes Guido Bonatus, the thirteenth-century philosopher and astrologer, in order to support the almanac and its contents, and that preface concludes by stating that the work is tendered to “the furtheraunce of good learninges profitable to a common wealth” (sig. C3v). Specifically, Thomas Digges also

Reading the Future  129 provides a “large-scale exposition and defence” of the Copernican system, which he had first included in his reworking of his father’s almanac in 1576 (Capp, 1979, p. 191); this essay occurs at sig. Mir-v. The books consulted are an effective way of establishing authority, particularly since one of those mentioned happens to be the work of Leonard Digges himself. He mentions his own extremely successful work on measurements and surveying in his preface to the reader: an other booke is also already come to thy hands, entitled Teconicon, a treasure vnto ye Masons, Carpenters, Landmeaters, correcting their old errors wrongfully reckoned of them as infallible groundes, teaching faythfully, sufficiently, and very briefly, the true mesuration of all maner lande, timber, stone, bord, glasse, &c (sig. A2v). The work referred to here is an example of Digges’ successful venture in tailoring his publications to appeal to a certain section of the reading public.41 His Tectonicon, a production described on its title page as “shewynge the exacte measurynge, and speady reckenynge, all maner lande, squared tymber, stone … most conducive for surueyers, landemeaters, ioyners, carpenters, and masons,” went through several editions between its first appearance in 1556, and 1647, and was taken up by several London printers, evidently regarded by them as a sound investment.42 It was no doubt also intended to appeal to the well-informed reader, as reassurance in terms of the veracity of the almanac’s claims, figures, and information, and as a testament to the compiler (Figure 4.3). The contents of the Prognostication Everlasting are set out in ­detail: they include the judgement of the weather by the heavenly bodies, and by meteorological signs; the signs and causes of meteorological occurrences, such as storms and rainbows, and astronomical events, like eclipses; the aspects of the moon in the twelve signs, and advice on bloodletting and other activities. There are tables, such as we have already encountered, for the dominical letter and the golden number, and on the age of the moon, and tables to tell tides and sunrise and sunset. The almanac also contains a calendar and lists of the main fairs and markets throughout England; Digges’s almanac of 1556 was the first to include what quickly became a standard feature (Capp, 1979, p. 30).43 Measurement and calculation, however, remain strong defining features of Digges’ compilation; Capp notes that from the time of Digges many almanacs “set out figures giving the sizes and distances of the heavenly bodies. Digges’ figures, stating that the earth was 15,750 miles from the moon, and 280,734 miles from the firmament, were probably as staggering to the ‘common sort’ as he supposed” (1979, pp. 196–97).44 Digges and some of the other compilers of almanacs also apparently endeavoured to extend their potential audiences not only by eventually including listings of fairs on a national, and then a local, level, but by

130  Reading the Future

Figure 4.3  Title page; Leonard Digges, A Prognostication Euerlasting (1585). © The British Library Board.

offering readers news of innovations in technology, describing the latest scientific instruments and naming the London craftsmen who supplied them (Capp, 1979, p.  200). They also brought versions of these new tools into the home: since “[p]rovincial readers had … little chance of obtaining the expensive instruments of the kind made in London. To a limited extent, however, their needs were met by almanacs providing cut-out figures of quadrants and astrolabes, needing only to be threaded and pasted to a board, and accompanied by detailed instructions on their use. Leonard Digges’ Prognostication contained descriptions of how to make and use a simple dial, quadrant and square” (Capp, 1979,

Reading the Future  131 pp. 200–01). The 1585 edition contains a diagram of a compass (sig. G4v), with instructions for use; a quadrant (sig. C4v) that can be used by adding a plummet and a line; and a pattern for making a clock (sig. B1r), with the following instructions: This Instrument must be made in a playne fine mettall plate, a foot or more square. Then it is pleasaunt for the houre of the day and night, eyther to bee fixed about your house, or moueable if yee lyst, by a needle to bee placed where and when yee wyll (sig. B1r). It is easy to imagine a tool like this, the assembly and use of which is explained in clear terms for the reader, having an extremely practical place in a Tudor household. Indeed, the instruction encourages readers to think about the materiality of timekeeping and the everyday application of potentially complex knowledge; in other words, the knowledge can transcend the book and become part of the household in a very physical, material sense. Indeed, a reasonably accurate timekeeping device may have been necessary in order to benefit fully from the almanac itself. This compelling piece of instruction also practically illustrates the real fact that almanacs were ephemeral and were indeed not always expected to endure or to be retained, not even by their compilers and authors. Of course almanacs frequently self-advertised as ‘everlasting,’ ‘perpetual,’ or in similar terms, but since they were often subject to, and certainly invited, the intervention of readers in quite aggressive ways, their survival rates are quite poor: indeed, a small fraction of what was actually printed survives, many of those survivals are damaged, are extant as fragments, or exist now as part of other works, in the bindings (­Kassell, 2011, p. 431). As Kassell also notes, almanacs were “ephemeral, discarded in December, used to light a fire or tossed down the privy” (2011, p. 431). It seems also likely that their ephemeral nature may have been related to the physical realities of their use or the application of the information and instructions.45 The Prognostication Everlasting certainly contained “some serious astronomical and mathematical data,” and it also attracted some serious readers: for instance, a copy was part of the library of Sir Walter Raleigh (Capp, 1979, p. 31). However, based on the everyday, practical and easily accessed and interpreted data and instruction, it certainly managed to also have a more populist appeal, all the while informed and prefaced by a more serious relation to the key scientific, astronomical questions and debates of the day. The almanac seemingly appealed to different kinds of readers who, in turn, accessed it differently and with various levels of intensity, seasonally and probably fairly regularly. Certainly some families must have factored the purchase of the almanac into an annual household budget, seeing it perhaps as an investment that would benefit a family in a variety of ways.46 Capp estimates that by the 1620s,

132  Reading the Future the sale figures for annual almanacs outstripped those of any other kind of book and that, by the 1660s “sales averaged around 400,000 copies annually, a figure which suggests that roughly one family in three bought an almanac each year” (1979, p. 23). The almanac quickly became standardised and predictable, not just in terms of its contents but also in the sense of its regularity, appearing for sale at a particular time of year. By virtue of their regular publication, and the inclusion of ­author-portraits, the almanac-compilers became well known, respected and trusted, as presumably did their works,47 and the regular features of the almanac entered public discourse quite early on: Shakespeare, for example, found ways to weave his thoughts on the possibility that such works might be dangerous into Love’s Labour’s Lost. The playwright was, it seems, less interested in their potential to be politically subversive (which, in any case, seems to have been a later development that came to fruition during the Civil War years) than in their tendencies to be predictable and, thus, theoretically, repeatable. Love’s Labour’s Lost has the following exchange between Rosaline and Katherine; Berowne has sent Rosaline a letter in which he attempts to praise her. The princess remarks that she is “beautous as ink – a good conclusion,” prompting the following exchange: Katherine: Fair as a text B in a copy-book. Rosaline: ‘Ware pencils, o! Let me not die you debtor, My red dominical, my golden letter. O, that your face were not so full of O’s! (V.ii.42–45).48 The dominical letter is of course a reference to one of the common conventions of printed almanacs that were exploding onto the cheap print market, and it is usually glossed as a reference to Katherine’s ruddy complexion; however, it may also reference the ephemeral, easily copied, and easily mimicked nature of some current knowledge in print, from which readers glean the same information, just as they might learn to copy a “B” in exactly the same way from a copybook. Shakespeare may wish to register a disquiet with the apparent democracy of print: the almanac proffered supposedly reliable ‘facts,’ in a format that was produced by the printing presses with, at first, very little surveillance. Shakespeare’s sometime collaborator Thomas Middleton also published a satire on the genre, The Owl’s Almanac (1618).49 The ubiquity of the almanac in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and their increasing standardization and regulation, and ephemeral nature as publications, paradoxically means that they are rather scarce today. Richard Allestree who, with Lilly, was one of the seventeenth century’s most notable compilers of the almanac, issued A New Almanack and Progostication, for the yeere … 1639, suitable for “the whole Ile of Great Brittain”, and printed by T. Cotes, for the company

Reading the Future  133 of Stationers; a rare copy is held at the British Library. 50 A printed auction notice pasted inside the binding records that the volume is a small octavo, in blackletter, partly in red. The title page is a woodcut with the arms of the Stationer’s Company at the foot and six zodiacal signs on each side. The notice describes the almanac as “a very fine copy in the original vellum, with tie, enclosed in a Morocco folder, by Rivière”.51 The notice records that, apart from two sets of Latin verses signed, respectively, “H.B” and “R.W” at the back of the title page, but that the remaining preliminary material is of the usual nature, with the addition of ‘A true definition of naturall Astrologie by the Author’. Each month of the Calendar is allotted two pages facing each other; the first contains the full Calendar and the second a skeleton English and Roman calendar with a large blank central space for notes. The last pages contains a tide table. All this All thus occupies 16 leaves, A-B8, and is followed by sheet C, also eight leaves, containing, with a separate title: … An Appendix … Wherein you may observe a briefe Chronology of yeares: A Description of all the Eclipses of the Sun and Moone … Astronomicall Calculations: some Physicall Notes, and notes of Husbandry, and Gardening, with a Chronography of the 4. quarters of this yeare … By Richard Allestree … London. Printed by I. L. for the Company of Stationers, 1639. The notice also states that this version of Allestree’s almanac is “extremely rare” and in “a remarkable state of preservation”. So Allestree’s almanac of 1639 is at once usual and very scarce, in one way a standard representative of a portion of Allestree’s annual output but also unique as a survival. It demands that we reflect on the volume both as a work produced in bulk and one used by a particular individual (Kassell, 2011, p. 432), in this case a person who has had occasion to meet with the secretary to the Earl of Arundel, “Mr Fleurmon” (sig. A5r). There is some evidence that this volume may have been used as a diary of sorts; the annotating hand has used the blank pages, specifically those interleaved with the calendar, to keep neat notes about visitors and events in the year of his master. These notes are not extensive, and seem to mainly record meetings or events; for instance, the blank page facing the calendar for March records a note, as follows: “The Commissioners intend to be Yorkshrye ye 9th of March.” What they do indicate is that almanacs were sometimes used as places of record and because of that fact they were not always liable to be discarded at the year’s close. Thomas Byng, Master of Clare College Cambridge, used the calendar of his 1587 almanac to preserve notes and records. Kassell notes that, in so doing, Byng was “following an annual routine typical of many of his countrymen, artisans and esquires alike … [h]e preserved these records;

134  Reading the Future others discarded theirs, after first transferring their notes into histories of their lives” (2011, p. 36). Many almanacs became, as noted, waste paper, but it is not always evident when this occurred: perhaps many were kept by their owners for a lifetime and discarded by later librarians or householders. Indeed, Allestree registers an assumption that some of his readers will retain their almanacs, at least for purposes of comparison or to enable them to access information that may not form part of the next year’s publication; including a section on “[p]hysicke and the foure humours in mans Body,” which indicates that he will not repeat material: You have knowne in part in my Almanacks before written my mind for Phlebotomy and purging, with brief Elections for Physicke: therefore I will say little of it now, we need not always write one and the same thing (sig. C5v; emphasis mine). This insight from one of the seventeenth-century’s foremost producers of almanacs reveals that it is not just Shakespeare and his colleagues who expressed disquiet with respect to the repeatability of the form, but in fact that some authors recognised the potential for the publication to be stale, repetitive, and overly predictable. Allestree perhaps also hoped that his work would be retained by readers, and not simply discarded at the end of each year. Indeed, we can imagine some publications at least maintaining a firm place on the bookshelves of a house for quite a long time. The series of five almanacs in octavo, held at the British Library, from the year 1598, bound together in the original vellum cover with leather ties, is a good example of how these kinds of volumes might contain the type of information that is both specific to the particular year, and sections that could be consulted over and over again. The almanac and prognostication of Thomas Buckminster, printed by Richard Watkins and James Roberts, 52 contains details of moveable feasts and eclipses, notes on when marriages may be solemnized that year, as well as a calendar for 159853; but it intersperses material that is applicable annually, such as information on the best times to purge, let blood and bathe; instructions on when to sow and harvest particular plants and trees; and verses on the occupations of the months, such as the following, for April: The land that is stubberne or in tilling tough, With Barley this moneth may be sowe well enough; Your Garden with good seedes let now be well fraught, And sowe Hempe and Flaxe, els all will be naught (sig. C2v). Buckminster’s work is bound with volumes from the same year, including one by Gabriel Frend that contains similar, perpetually relevant

Reading the Future  135 information alongside more specific detail for 1598. The set of five volumes was certainly bound contemporaneously, probably for convenience and ease of comparison; but this very act exemplifies the point that although almanacs had moved towards some kind of standard format by the end of the sixteenth century, readers also recognised that each publication offered perhaps conflicting but also differently-useful information. Moreover, there are several blank flyleaves at the beginning and the end of the bumper almanac, which would suggest that the owner wished to have the space make his own notes and observations (although he never did). Bosanquet comments that the printing of the Buckminster, in particular, appears to be better than most editions, stating that “ephemeral documents were not produced with the same care as books of a more solid character, and the Almanack, being a work of constant reference, useless after the year for which it was compiled, was quickly destroyed” (1935, p. v). I contend that these examples demonstrate that alongside seasonal detail, many such publications show evidence of privileging information that could be annually consulted. These almanacs seem to tread the line between the simpler prognostications that sometimes include visuals and the more complex, scientific publications that appealed to readers with an interest in measurement, mathematics and figures. They were also fairly affordable, costing 2d. or 3d. (Bosanquet, 1935, p. vii).54 Some readers seem to have wanted to gather as many as possible of the published almanacs for a single year and bind them together, enclosing them in durable vellum or loose leather bindings, sometimes with leather ties. The fat volume of octavo volumes for 1627 preserved in the British Library has a neat vellum cover with evidence that leather ties, similar to those on the Buckminster, once existed (there are eyelets on the front and back cover, and the inside binding at the back still has the leather attachment for one of the laces). The spine has “A.L.N. 1627” clearly rendered in ink, in what appears to be a seventeenth-century hand: this legend would have most certainly made the book locatable on a shelf. These almanacs were bound, then, either once acquired or soon after the year ended, for posterity and preservation, perhaps for professional reasons, or in a significant year in which a child was born, for example. This volume, beginning with Allestree’s “New Almanack and Prognostication” and contains also those of Daniel Browne (a “well-willer to the Mathematickes”), William Dade, Joseph Chamberlain, William Jones, John(?) Neve, John Rudston, Phillip Ranger, John White, John Woodhouse, Arthur Sofford, John Vaux, G. Hawkins, William Hewlett, Samuel Perkins, and Abraham Grammar, all printed by the Stationer’s Company. It also preserves Cambridge volumes “by the printers to the Vniversitie” and calculated by W. Strot, Edward Pond, W. Frost, Jonathan Dove, Thomas Lakes, Fr. Waters, and Peregrine Rivers.

136  Reading the Future

Conclusion The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy and the information it purveys is not directly succeeded by the almanacs: at a basic level, it favours the comprehension of the universe as a system and places only secondary emphasis on prognostication and on reading the future. But when we are faced with such a variety of publications, their sophisticated layout and readily navigable contents, and even taking into consideration their varied sophistication, the Wise Book seems prosaic, unwieldy and redundant, its format old fashioned and its methods less than accurate. The slick instruments and ways of knowing time, distance and planetary reign are apparently more reliable and infinitely more accessible than the instructions supplied in manuscript, and in a variable form, in the Wise Book. Even its instruction, in some of its manuscripts, to use an astrolabe to check the time seems beyond the scope of most readers, and the almanacs offer something more immediately realistic with their cut-out, do-it-yourself clocks and other devices. The instructions cited above, that are of course relevant to a particular time and extremely revealing in a late medieval context, simply do not compete with the immediacy and proclaimed accuracy of the almanac. Printers and compilers may have quickly apprehended the levels of work involved in updating the Wise Book and rendering it more attractive to a discerning, modern audience. Indeed, it seems to fall between two stools; alongside the emergence of the almanac are the publications that laud and extol the new astrology, influenced by the discoveries of the late 1400s and early 1500s and the theories of Tycho Brahe, Copernicus and Galileo, and moving away from a theocentric view of the universe. Publications, like that of the celebrity almanac-compiler William Lilly, 55 contribute to and reflect the increasing distinction of theory and science from everyday practice and application; his Anima Astrologia, or A Guide for Astrologers (1676) is specifically positioned to appeal and be relevant for “all Students” and “the Sons of Art.”56 This is not a volume written with the general reader in mind, and this fact is indicated visually on the title page, on which ­Lilly’s portrait is flanked by those of fellow mathematicians and astrologers Jerome Cardan and Guido Bonatus. The argument proclaims that “[t]o Cardan & to Guido much is Due – / But in one Lilly wee behold them Two”, and indeed the volume purports to be a version of the considerations of the famous Guido “[f]aithfully rendered into English”, along with the “Choicest Aphorism’s of Cardan’s Seaven Segments.” The volume was licensed on 29 April 1675 by Roger L’Estrange. 57 Almanacs and astrology were of course now deployed as political tools; Lilly’s Christian Astrology, published in 1647, is not only the “first major astrological textbook in the English language” (Curry) but also a platform for publically declaring the author’s Puritan and republican

Reading the Future  137 views. His publication of a specialised work, it is noted, was a deliberate act and very much “part of the demotic-democratic programme he shared with other astrologers on the side of parliament and the army … to make astrology and physic available to as many people as possible in the vernacular” (Curry). On the one hand, astrology is more specialised, but the turn is towards enabling and facilitating wider access to the theoretical and mathematical details that are not always found in the almanacs. Almanacs, however, did not diminish in popularity; rather, they flourished alongside the development of interest in astrology and related scientific advances in England which happened more slowly than it did on the Continent (Capp, 1979, p. 274). Their heyday was the Elizabethan and Stuart period, however, and a current of scepticism was always present: Capp notes that this had become the dominant view among the educated classes by 1700 (1979, p. 276), a trend that eventually led to the turn away from astrology by the scientific community. By now the Wise Book was most definitely an obsolete, archaic text, but it still made an appearance in the libraries of some of the most famous collectors and leaders in the scientific communities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the likes of John Dee, Samuel Pepys, and Hans Sloane. Its place in the history of English astrology has been understated since it shows evidence of a wide readership for and interest in basic astrological principles and astronomical learning in English well before the appearance of Lilly’s works and the less didactic but ubiquitous almanac.

Notes 1 Dee has also been described as the queen’s “magus,” a kind of magician-­ philosopher; see William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 8, 12. 2 See, for example, Laurel Braswell (Means), “Popular Lunary Astrology in the Late Middle Ages,” University of Ottawa Quarterly 48 (1978): 187–94; and the essays in Lister M. Matheson, (ed), Popular and Practical Science in of Medieval England, Medieval Texts and Studies 11 (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994). 3 A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, volume 10: Works of Science and Information, ed A.E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998), p. 3611. 4 For example the Secretum secretorum had contents that were “sufficiently varied to have interested readers in many different modes, and in very varied fields of intellectual activity”; Mahmoud Manzalaoui (ed), Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, EETS OS 276 (1977), p. xix. One common interpolation was a physiognomy, which in turn was copied and circulated as a separate text; Laurel Braswell (Means), “Utilitarian and Scientific Prose,” in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed A.S.G. Edwards (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984), pp. 337–88 (p. 340). In addition, Roger Bacon’s recension of the Secretum ended with the expanded physiognomy section (Manzalaoui, 1977, p. xxi).

138  Reading the Future 5 See Laurel Braswell (Means), “Electionary, Lunary, Destinary, and Questionary: Towards Defining Categories of Middle English Prognostic Material,” Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 367–403 (pp. 367–68), which refers to Thomas (1978, pp. 338–39) and Wedel (1920, p. 90). 6 Linda E. Voigts, “Editing Middle English Texts: Needs and Issues,” in Editing Texts in the History of Science and Medicine: Papers Given at the Seventeenth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 6–7 November 1981, ed T.H. Levere (New York: Garland, 1982), pp. 39–68 (p. 40). 7 See Carrie Griffin, The Middle English Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy: A Parallel-Text Edition, Middle English Texts 47 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013); and Carrie Griffin, The Middle English Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy: Instruction, Publics, and Manuscripts (Diss. NUI Cork, 2006). 8 A complete listing of the manuscripts of the Wise Book can be found in Griffin (2013, pp. xvi–xxxvi); of the thirty-four, thirty belong to recension A of the text, which closes with a set of nativities for the days of the week; the three manuscripts of recension B conclude with nativities and physiognomy for the seven planets. The thirty-fourth MS – London, British Library, Sloane 1315 – is a hybrid fragment of the concluding sections of recensions A and B. 9 Quotations given are from recension A of the edited text (Griffin, 2013). 10 On binomials in the Wise Book see Hans Sauer and Birgit Schwan, “Heaven and Earth, Good and Bad, Answered and Said: A Survey of English Binomials and Multinomials (Part 1),” Studia Linguistica 134 (2017): 83–96. 11 Krochalis and Peters (referring to a recension B text) call it a “handy compendium … of astronomical, astrological and characterological information”; Jeanne Krochalis and Edward Peters, The World of Piers Plowman (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1975), p. xvi. Keiser classifies it alongside works such as The Exafrenon and The Equatorie of the Planets, noting that it combines theoretical and practical information (1998, p. 3611). Acker and Amino refer to the text as “an introduction to astrology and related matters”; Paul Acker and E. Amino, “The Book of Palmistry,” in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed L.M. Matheson (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), pp. 141–83 (p. 142). More recently it has been described as an “astrological enyclopaedia” representing “the lower end of the scale of compilations in prose [that] imitate the more learned type”; Irma Taavitsainen, “Transferring classical discourse conventions into the vernacular,” in Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, eds I. Taavitsainen and P. Pahta (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), pp. 37–72 (p. 61). 12 Taavitsainen (2004, p. 61) argues that the Wise Book consists of “various prognosticatory tracts and may have been copied from different sources”. 13 “The Literacy of the Laity,” in Scripts, Scribes and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon, 1991), pp. 275–97 (p. 275). 14 “Popular Lunar Astrology in the Late Middle Ages,” University of Ottawa Quarterly 48 (1978): 187–94 (p. 190). Elsewhere the same author asserts that works of science and information, compared to devotional materials, “suggest a larger cross-section of society, both lay and religious, both courtly and bourgeois” (1984, p. 337). 15 Linne R. Mooney, “Manuscript Evidence for the Use of Medieval English Scientific and Utilitarian Material,” in Interstices: Studies in late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A.G. Rigg, eds R.F. Green and L.R. Mooney (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2004), pp. 184–202. Mooney argues

Reading the Future  139

16

17

18

19

20

21 22

23

for three types of manuscript, in general, in which scientific and utilitarian texts survive: the unbound quire, the collection of scientific and related texts, and in the miscellany or commonplace book (pp. 185–86). While computational material, such as we read here, began to be widely circulated in the fifteenth century, there was “an overall concession to popularisation,” with references to “tables and charts … for the most part strictly avoided”. Instead, formulae, mnemonic devices and such are “spelled out in ordinary layman’s terms” (Braswell [Means], 1992, p. 622). This formula clearly makes provision for those readers who did not have access to, or the ability to use, an astrolabe; instead, everyday activities are used as devices to enable fairly accurate calculation, “since one hour is … approximately the time required to read aloud, twice, the seven penitential psalms … with the litany” (Braswell [Means], 1992, p. 619, no. 81). This alternative method to the use of an astrolabe enables one to measure time “lightly”; in other words, it is accessible, and simple to use. This second formula is absent from the three manuscripts that preserve recension B of the Wise Book: Cambridge University Library MS Ll.4.14, University College London MS Anglia 6, and New York, Columbia University, MS Plimpton 260. Peter Brown, “The Seven Planets,” in Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, ed Lister M. Matheson (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), pp. 3–21 (p. 3). This text is preserved in London, British Library, MS Sloane 1315 (also a Book of Nurture manuscript; see Chapter 2) and is a fragment of the Wise Book that blends recension A and B endings. It is edited by Brown (1994, pp. 3–21, as The Seven Planets) and by Griffin (2013, pp. 58–60; see also p. xxxvi and passim). The scribe-compiler also signs the manuscript at f. 1r, f. 41r and at other stages throughout, varying his monogram to “Brunfylld”, “par Brunfylld” (ff. 4r, 9r) or “quod Brunfylld” (ff. 15r, 18r), usually at the end of recto folios. The volume has ff. iii + 54 + i, and is written in an unpracticed hand with some unprofessional rubrication throughout, though space has been allocated for large, perhaps decorative, initials. Apart from a series of ­crudely-rendered jordans that are labelled in a scribal hand, at ff. 19v–22r, there are no other illustrative features. The volume has been trimmed to fit a ­nineteenth-century binding, resulting in the loss of some text and scribal marginalia. See further Carrie Griffin and Mary O’Connell, “Writing Textual Materiality: Charles Clark, his Books, and his Bookplate Poem,” in Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality, eds G. Allen, C. Griffin and M. O’Connell (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 75–88 (p. 80 ff). Sloane 965 is a composite of parchment and paper, containing iii + 182 + ii folios and measuring 120 × 80mm. It is ruled, with nineteen lines per page. Several names appear throughout: the name “John Skeffingham” in a s. xvi hand can be found at f. 10r; “Abell Collyer” in a s. xviii hand at f. 3r (Braswell [Means], 1993, pp. 20–21). For further discussion see Griffin (2013, pp. xxii–xxiii). For John of Burgundy see Keiser (1998), pp. 3662, 3856–57; and for de Chauliac see Keiser (1998, pp. 3646–48, 3831–32). The text of the Wise Book breaks off at f. 147r with a scribal note: “Seke the remenaunt here after at the begynnyng with this signe ”. In the bottom margin a seventeenth-century hand had inscribed: “The continuation of this treatise will be found at the 18th leaf forward”. The text resumes at the signe de renvoie on f. 163r. A selection of images from this manuscript, including images of f. 43r and f. 25r, can be viewed on the British Library’s website at: www.bl.uk/catalogues/

140  Reading the Future

24 25

26

27

28

29 30

31

32 33 34 35

illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=1246&CollID=9&NStart=965 [accessed 30 June 2018]. See Coghill (1986, p. 176), Griffin (2013, p. xl), Rawcliffe (1995, p. 84), Saxl and Meier (1953, II, XCL), who all reproduce images from this manuscript. Keiser, 1998, p. 3767; Plimpton 260 is a vellum manuscript of i + 130 + v folios, measuring 130 × 90mm (with a text space of 80 × 52mm), is ruled with twenty lines per page; it is in quires of eight and is divided into four parts. It is written in a gothic book hand with some decorative initials and diagrams that are tinted in red, blue and gold. The front board is missing, but the volume was once clasped Acker describes it as a “compact-sized” codex that contains “a wide range of prognostications”; Paul Acker, “A Middle English Prognostication by Winds in Columbia University, Plimpton MS 260,” JEBS 8 (2005): 261–67 (p. 262). Based on my estimates, approximately thirty manuscripts of the thirty-four extant Wise Book manuscripts contain material that can be described as “prognosticary”, that is, lunaries, tracts on perilous days, weather prophecies, dreambooks, onomastic treatises, chiromancy, palmistry; three manuscripts contain calendar material; and twenty-three contains texts concerned with cosmology, astronomy and astrology. The taxonomies used here follow those in Keiser (1998). London, British Library MS Sloane 1317 is a paper quarto with i + 152 folios and which measures 212 × 140mm. There are some notes of provenance in the MS: a note referring to “Wyllyam Thomson … his wyff and twa chyldrene” of Caterpole in Lancashire, in a seventeenth-century hand (f. 75v), and a seventeenth-century note on the feoffment of land to William Andrews of Essex (f. 18r). The manuscript contains several works, including short Latin notes on the drawing up of legal documents and wills and short medical recipes, a text on ophthalmology, several astrological texts, and a short form of the Book of Aristotle; see Griffin (2013, p. xxiii). Linne R. Mooney, “English Almanacks from Script to Print,” in Texts and Their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society, eds J. Scattergood and J. Boffey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), pp. 11–25 (p. 29). Mooney, 1997, p. 17. Red’s almanac is entitled in full: Amanach ephemerides in anno M. d. vii in latitudo Oxonia ad annos futuros M. d. xix (­London: R. Pynson, A. Rouen, R. Mace, 1507). A copy is now held at the British Library with the shelfmark C.20.a.33 (STC 504). The almanac is in Latin, but it has a short set of instructions in English, sig. A1v, relating to the use of the tables of conjunctions and oppositions that follow. The colophon, “per Wylhelmuh Red” occurs at the end of this section, sig. A7r. On Lynn and Somer see Linne R. Mooney, The Kalendarium of John Somer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), and Cornelius O’Boyle, “Astrology and Medicine in Later Medieval England: The Calendars of John Somer and Nicholas of Lynn,” Sudhoffs Archiv 89.1 (2005): 1–22. See Mooney (1997, pp. 11 and following), whose work I summarize here, for a fuller discussion of the relationship between secular and religious calendars and the development of the almanac. On scientific advances and the impact on the almanac see Marjorie Nicolson, “English Almanacs and the ‘New Astronomy’,” Annals of Science 4.1 (1939): 1–33, in particular p. 9 and following. The copy of this volume is held at the British Library, shelfmark 717.a.46 (STC 406.3; USTC 505349). A golden number was assigned to each year in sequence to indicate the year’s position in a nineteen-year Metonic cycle; they were used, among

Reading the Future  141

36

37

38 39

40

41

42

other things, to help calculate the date of Easter. The dominical letters are A-G, assigned to days in a cycle of seven, with the letter A always set against 1 January; they were aids for finding the day of the week of a given calendar date. A common year is assigned a single dominical letter, indicating which letter is Sunday (from Latin dominica). Leap years are given two dominical letters: one for 1 January – 28 February, and a second for the rest of the year. Some books contained prefaces that asked that they be read to the illiterate. For instance, a volume entitled A perfite platform of a hoppe garden (1574; STC 21865, USTC 507852), compiled by Reginald Scot, claimed to appeal to all ‘readers’ no matter their ability: “I desire of the learned, pacience in reading, of the unlearned diligence in hearing …”; cited in Natasha Glaisyer “Popular Didactic Literature,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, volume I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed J Raymond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 510–19 (p. 515). Lauren Kassell, “Almanacs and Prognostications,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed J. Raymond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 431–42 (p. 438). Kassell notes that official numbers for almanac production and purchase do not survive until the Restoration (p. 438). See also Capp (1979, p. 31) who describes the illustrations as “crude” and of “sickly cattle, sinking ships, and corpses”. I refer here to the copy of the Prognostication everlasting in the British Library with the shelfmark C.107.bb.36. This is the edition from 1585 (STC 435.53), printed by Thomas Marshe of London, and published by Digges but “[l]ately corrected and augmented by Thomas Digges, his son” (sig. A1). Just after the initial flyleaves a manuscript fragment of the Latin Vulgate is bound with the almanac. It is a vellum strip and the text is written in double column, with red and blue tinted initials, rubrication, and heavy glossing. But there were several editions; according to Capp the first edition appeared in 1553 (1979, p. 31), and the work went through several editions and was taken up by several printers: it was issued by Thomas Marshe of London in 1564, 1567, 1574, 1576 (corrected by Thomas Digges), 1578, 1584, and 1585. It was also printed by Thomas Gemini in London in 1555 and 1556 (STC 435.35, 435.39). Further editions corrected and augmented by Thomas were printed by Thomas Orwin in 1592 (STC 435.55) and by his widow in 1596 (STC 435.57); also by Felix Kingston in 1605 (STC 435.59). Thomas Gemini also printed Digges’s Almanacke and Prognostication in 1556 (STC 435.37) and in 1571 Andro Hart of Edinburgh printed his Generall Prognostication forever (STC 435.61). Thomas Digges probably sought to appeal to Fines, who was a captain general of the navy, by specifically correcting “certayne errors touchyng matters of Nauygation” and adding information, rendered in English, to be used by seamen to avoid the loss of more vessels. Capp notes that both Leonard and Thomas were “in the vanguard of the movement to harness mathematics to navigation” (1979, p. 202). Thomas was a reportedly one of the Earl of Leicester’s circle of favourites (Capp, 1979, p. 180). Digges had also produced a work entitled Stratiocios, which he described as an “Arithmeticall Militare Treatise” specifically compiled to be of use to soldiers and military men; this was printed in London by Henrie Bynneman in 1579 (STC 6848). The Tectonicon was first printed in 1556 (STC 6849.5) by John Daye for Thomas Gemini, Blackfriars and again in 1562 (STC 6850); the work was printed several times by Felix Kingston (1599 [STC 6851.2], 1605, 1614,

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43 4 4 45

46

47 48 49 50 51 52

53

54

1625, 1626, 1630, 1634, 1637, 1647). It was also printed by Thomas Orwin (1592; STC 6851) and by Thomas Marsh (1570; STC 6850.5). Digges initially included a listing of fair days for Kent only (Capp, 1979, p. 34). Capp notes that as the medieval tables of “Alfraganus (on which these figures were based) were replaced in almanacs by those of Tycho and other modern astronomers, the size of the universe expanded rapidly” (1979, p. 198). These devices and features were common: Allestree (1639) for instance has a similar set of instructions, here for an “[i]nstrument … to get the hourse of the day throughout the yeare forever … being cut out as it is printed, and pasted upon a smooth square little board”. The device was used with the sun to cast shadows and is accompanied by detailed instructions and an example (sig. C6r-v). Prices of books, even of copies of the same book, were subject to variation. However, some research has been conducted into prices paid. David ­McKitterick has found that John Buxton (b. 1608), a member of the south Norfolk local gentry who came into residence at Gray’s Inn in 1626, paid eightpence for an alamanc by Gallen (the pseudonym for the printer Thomas Langley) in 1638. Apparently the Gallen cost more than most almanacs since at another time “Buxton bought an unnamed alamanac for sixpence, bound, and six stitched almanacs for a shilling” (1997, p. 211, no. 68). See David McKitterick, “‘Ovid with a Littleton’: The Cost of English Books in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 11.2 (1997): 184–234. According to Capp, the features of William Lilly, whose almanac was published annually, with an author-portrait, for forty years, would have been “the best known of anyone in England after the king” (1979, p. 23). Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed H.R. Woudhuysen (Surrey: The Arden ­Shakespeare, 1998). See Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), pp. 1271–302. British Library C.194.a.337; STC 407.22. This copy preserves a leather tie and a flap that would have acted as a kind of envelope, protecting the volume and ensuring that it would not have suffered damage when transported. London, British Library, C.194.a.872.2; the volume bears the ex libris of ­Eustace F. Bosanquet, who produced a facsimile of the almanac for The Shakespeare Association in 1935; An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year 1598, made by Thomas Buckminster (Oxford: Oxford UP, for the Shakespeare Association, 1935). According to Bosanquet, Richard Watkins and James Roberts were the beneficiaries of a patent, granted in 1571 and renewed in 1578 and 1588 that authorized them to be the sole producers of almanacs and prognostications (which needed to be controlled by the Elizabethan authorities). When Watkins died in 1603 the patent was issued to the Company of Stationers (1935, p. vi). The almanac and prognostication contains ­twenty-four leaves, and is divided into two parts, with the prognostication (with its own title-page, but printed in black only), beginning at sig. B1. The almanac also notes in red on the calendar the birthday of Elizabeth, 7 September, and her accession day, 17 November, as well as a “Revell,” 14 July, which commemorates the Kenilworth visit to Leicester, 1575 (Bosanquet, 1935, p. xii). The same author notes that the volumes may have been priced at 2d. in L ­ ondon and at 3d. elsewhere, a price that included the cost of carriage to fairs. Watkins and Roberts also produced sextodecimos of one sheet of sixteen leaves

Reading the Future  143 containing just the almanac, at 1d. and broadside or sheet almanacs for display (1935, p. vi–vii); presumably these latter were less expensive. 55 William Lilly (1602–81) was the “most abused as well as the most celebrated astrologer of the seventeenth century” (Capp, 1979, p. 57). Lilly was born in Leicestershire, educated in the grammar school at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, but was prevented from entering university by his father’s poverty. He married a wealthy widow who died in 1627, leaving him the sum of £1000. In 1632 he paid a wise man, John Evans, for a course of instruction in judicial astrology. His first almanac, Merlinus Anglicus Junior, sold out the first edition within a week; he began to produce an annual almanac entitled Merlini Anglici Ephemeris, from 1647 until his death. Because the royal monopoly of the Company of Stationers had broken down at the beginning of the Civil War, unlicensed publications began to appear. Lilly capitalised on this: by 1649 he was selling 30,000 almanacs a year and they began to be translated into Dutch, Swedish, German and Danish. See Patrick Curry, “Lilly, William (1602–681),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ul.ie/10.1093/ref:odnb/16661 [accessed 30 June 2018]. 56 The work was printed in London by “B. Harris at the Stationers Arms in Sweethings Rents near the Royal-Exchange”. 57 L’Estrange, a staunch Royalist, was granted a warrant to seize seditious books or pamphlets in 1662, Surveyor of the Imprimery, 1663 and, later, Licenser of the Press until the lapse of the Licencing of the Press Act in 1679.

5 Instructing and Constructing Women

This final chapter aims to interrogate on some of the ways in which instructional works in both manuscripts and printed books were designed to appeal specifically to female readers and, crucially, how in this they might construct particular versions of or express a set of ideas about femininity. One of the main ways in which early modern women, in particular, participated in literate culture was in the compilation of household manuscript books of recipes, receipts and other instructional texts,1 and I begin this discussion with a manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1477, part of which displays evidence of having had a female owner and/or compiler. The volume is a large composite manuscript, comprising at least twelve originally distinct manuscripts copied at dates ranging from the late fourteenth to the seventeenth century. The various parts were most likely bound together between boards at quite a late stage, since there is considerable staining of and some damage to the outer leaves of each distinct section. 2 This composition yields a complex artefact of different parts, with the manuscripts that are earlier in date forming the first part of the volume; indeed, it is possible that these later medieval foliated manuscripts were sewn together as a discrete unit before eventually being allied with the paper manuscripts from later periods. The manuscript’s constituent parts, however, demonstrate some unity, or at least evidence that connections were made between the various parts by its compiler: it is comprised mainly of medical, lunary, prognosticary, and herbal tracts, and of medical notes, receipts, and other miscellaneous notes in later hands. Signatures that occur throughout the volume indicate that its sections passed through various hands, but many of these reveal male owners or copyists: one “Wyllyam Gynnes” owned part three of the manuscript in the fifteenth century and he wrote his name on the first folio; this part contains medical, astrological/astronomical, herbal, and prognosticary texts, as well as an illustrated text on the analysis of urine. 3 Later provenance marks include the signatures of “G. Martyn” (p. 51) and “R. Saltere” (p. 195).4 However, there is also evidence that indicates a female influence on two of the volume’s sections, which sections are linked by a name as well as by an organisational scheme. Parts six and seven are long paper

Instructing and Constructing Women  145 sections consisting of many and various texts, some incomplete, with frequent interspersed blank pages, suggesting that they were compiled in an accretive way over time. Part six, marked page one, begins with a cookery book; it is written in several sixteenth-century hands and incorporates a good deal of scrap paper and ephemera, including a short letter preserved as pp. 55–56 which is written from a daughter to her mother, one Dorothy of Kingston, likely the same women referred to in the manuscript as Dorothy Lewkenore. The leaf that is numbered pp. 70–71, which closes part six, is damaged, but on p. 71 it is still possible to read part of the ownership inscription which identifies the owner as one Dorothy Lewkenore, and which is dated 1576. 5 Part six has two main hands: a more formal cursive, which has copied the Booke of Cookerye; and a second less practised hand, which annotates the recipes and notes, and which seems identical to a hand that recurs throughout part seven. Indeed, the two sections seem to be concerned broadly with household management, domestic economy, and healing: part seven opens with a series of medical receipts, the first of which is described as “[a]n excellent medicins & vsage for ye plague, vsed at Redding w[ith] great good successe […] July 1 1603” (f. 43r). On the verso are several receipts, annotated in the same untrained hand that occurs in part six, including a note in the left-hand margin that reads “Mrs Roggers her Stills.”6 A section opening Notes out of the Flowre of Physicke,7 which is copied in double column is followed by another text entitled Matters of Houshold Proffit, which seems to comprise notes taken from a work referred to in the manuscript as 1000 Notable Things.8 This is followed by a work called Herbs and Other Things, which consists of an A–Z index referring to 1000 Notable Things.9 Yet another index follows, one which seems to explain the compilation: “A Table to find out the Medicines and Conceipts both in the great and litle booke here conioyned; the letter G noting the great booke ye Letter D noting the lesse booke, with the page of each.” This section concludes with Matters of Cookerye and some Physicke, including some names of recipes, alongside references to books; and Memorable Medicines. The deliberate deployment of user aids in this volume would suggest that it was intended for regular consultation, and perhaps even was subject to frequent updating and revision. Moreover, Dorothy’s collocation of material relating to medicine and cookery may be taken as evidence of the “confidence with which she assumed authority in both areas” (Field, 2007, p. 53).10 Scholarship on early modern women’s literary practices now encourages approaches that include consideration of manuscript material: household books, letter, diaries and other sites of reading and text-­ making, in assessments of the contribution of women to “the life of the Renaissance book.”11 It has also placed greater emphasis on collaborative or multiple authorship, recasting the domestic space as one

146  Instructing and Constructing Women in which “social production” might occur and in which we are at once more keenly aware of writing as an “embodied act.”12 Moreover, a significant aspect of the recovery of women’s participation in literary practice involves an extension of the “concept of textual creation to include the production of meaning inherent in acts of reading and reception” (Smith, 2012, p. 3). These sensitivities to evidence of female participation in literate culture underpin this chapter, and in particular the focus on Dorothy Lewkenore as it begins. Her humble inscription might be reimagined as an emphatic statement of feminine authority, if not authorship, and her book seen as a site of specific responses that produce meaning and evidence a wide network and shared practice. The sophisticated system of finding aids at work suggests that the volume had a very practical function and that it needed to be navigable and accessible, it being a resource regularly returned and added to by Dorothy and others, being read and used according to need; but it also anticipates future readers, perhaps most especially in the presence of those finding aids and the attention to thematic concerns. Dorothy’s books testify to the particular responsibilities and roles that the mistress of a household was expected to fulfil, as well as to the centrality of reading and literate practice to these roles.13 Scholars now also increasingly regard the home not necessarily as a place of disempowerment and confinement but a place of work, business and social networks and patronage,14 and Dorothy’s book is testament to her central, authoritative role in that economic and domestic space. The information and authority gleaned from printed works was supplemented and augmented by that which was exchanged between women, evidenced by the names of other women that crop up in her section on Matters of Household Proffit, in particular. These women may have formed their own networks that enabled not just exchange and validation but perhaps also friendship, alongside what may be seen as a kind of assumed authority around instructing and teaching each other; indeed, the emphasis on collaboration and empiricism, as noted by Catherine Field, leads to a “textual space that enabled women’s positive expression of self” (2007, p. 50). We can compare Ashmole 1477 to the household book given to Anne D’Ewes by her mother Mary Granville, which preserves similar medical and household receipts as well as a recipe for ink, leading Wall to note that the “materials of writing could be, it seems, conceptualized as part of early modern household production.”15 Dorothy wrote, copied and compiled not just for her own benefit, but also for posterity, and in some way perhaps to document her place and role in the world; her inscription of ownership and “authorship” constructs her as a conscious and visible participant in early modern manuscript and print culture, with a strong sense of selfhood (discernible not just in the presence of her inscribed name but in her preservation of a letter in the manuscript, addressed specifically to her, probably sent by a son).

Instructing and Constructing Women  147 This chapter, then, examines texts in manuscript and print that invited or implied primarily a female readership and investigates some of the ways in which women participated in, are involved in, and respond to literary and didactic cultures. It considers, too, how book cultures in both manuscript and print differentiated female discourse communities. Importantly, it takes a broad view on women’s writing, in line with recent revaluations of what that might constitute in order to reach a more accurate understanding of the place of women in production and reception.16 The focus here is on secular works; we might naturally think of women readers in relation to works of spirituality and devotion, which works frequently anticipated a feminine readership, and often devotional texts were addressed in particular to female readers, and not just dedicated to them to invoke their patronage.17 It has long been established that women had access to and consumed other kinds of texts and forms of knowledge.18 However, anything that can be described as a “tradition” of other types of writing, specifically instructional literature, associated with female authors or readers, is undermined by the fragmentary nature of the textual evidence, yet it is certain that there was a culture of “communal instruction” that consisted of groups of women or “female textual communities” (Hellwarth, 2002, p. 15). Moreover, Barratt notes that there is a “lamentable dearth of Middle English women writers,” and she also draws attention to a statistical study of the direct involvement of women in publication in print,” demonstrating that between 1475 and 1640 “their output constitutes a mere 1.2 per cent.”19 These statistics show the involvement of women in actual literary production to be quite low even into the seventeenth century. It must be noted, however, that the status of the author, and thus the nature of authorship, has been “historically variable.”20 Summit argues that it is possible to speak about women authors – or indeed about authorship more generally – of the medieval period but not using modern definitions of an author and indicating the need to account for “the range of women’s authorial activities” (2003, p. 91, 92). Women may not have been nearly as prolific as men (based on the evidence that survives) in terms of direct authorship, but they achieved often fairly high levels of literacy in the vernacular (Summit, 2003, p. 93) and they were certainly active participants in literary cultures if not as authors and producers, as readers, patrons, addressees, and figures of cultural influence; indeed, Maureen Bell exhorts us to consider not just women readers and authors but to “also consider ‘woman’ as subject-matter for and in print.”21 Women who did not “compose texts in their own hands nonetheless had a variety of means at their disposal to register their creative influence on textual culture” and that what investigations of women’s writing reveal is “a range of literate forms and practices that existed outside the schools and their models of auctoritas” (Summit, 2003, p. 93). As patrons and owners of books, and commissioners and compilers of texts, laywomen

148  Instructing and Constructing Women were especially active in the Middle Ages and in the later medieval period in particular, increasingly the owners and readers of texts and books, both devotional and secular. Works addressed to women and/or commissioned by them challenge modern assumptions that “production is necessarily active and primary, and consumption contrastingly passive and secondary” (Summit, 2003, p. 104). 22 One of the main ways in which we can discern levels of interest in and ownership of books amongst laywomen is in testaments; however, as observed by Carol M. Meale, the evidence contained in those documents relates to books that were bequests by women, and not always to books that were owned by them. In her words, it is scarcely surprising that religious books, and in particular those associated directly with acts of worship, predominate amongst bequests made by both women and men. One explanation for this predominance may be the more lavish scale of production of service books… compared with copies of vernacular texts; in other words motives of piety and materialism may have combined to single out books of hours, missals and the like for special mention (1993, p. 130). It is also noteworthy that devotional volumes were more suited to remembrance and commemoration than might be volumes of romances or didactic/utilitarian texts; because of these factors, then, these bequests “do not necessarily give a complete account of the books [women] owned, or of their literary interests” (1993, p. 131). 23 However, over-reliance on testaments as evidence for book ownership and reading activity is problematic: wills and testaments were made only by women of certain status, but they were not limited in terms of what they could receive as bequests. 24 Nonetheless, while wives could not make wills without the consent of their husband, widows were free to do so, and contrary to popular belief, the majority of medieval women actually outlived their husbands (Hanawalt, 2003, pp. 58, 60). It is entirely possible, likely even, that literate women of the later Middle Ages and early modern period possessed texts and books that perhaps were not regarded as particularly suitable as bequests, but that would have been more practically useful, and materially less ornate, than a book of hours or a psalter may have been. In other words, women must have participated in and had access to a written culture other than that associated with devotion and spiritualty, sometimes on their own terms, and “independent from the male authority by which it was sanctioned” (Meale, 1993, p. 1). It is tempting to imagine that Joan Buckland, who in her will of 1462 not only bequeathed four service books, a psalter, and a missal “with Syuler claspes” but who also left a small sum of money to her “[s]kryvener at London” (Meale, 1993, p. 132), may have commissioned the production or copying of

Instructing and Constructing Women  149 books and texts that were of interest to her; these may have included household manuals and instructional texts of various kinds. 25 And though we can be certain that women instigated the production of devotional material and psalters (Meale, 1993, p. 137), it is less certain what role women played in the production, transmission and reception or reading of texts that were didactic in the secular realm since, as we have seen in previous chapters, the provenance marks that are found, in particular, in late medieval household miscellanies and books that may have served female readers frequently relate to men. Indeed, the question of the level of literacy of late medieval women is complex: as Monica Green has demonstrated that women such as Margery Kempe and Chaucer’s fictional Wife of Bath who could neither read nor write cannot be “explicitly termed illiterate,” since they benefit from and participate in an oral literary culture that is less easily defined but that certainly existed alongside clerical written cultures. 26 Both Margery Kempe and Dame Alisoun of Bath, for example, had texts read to them, and this model of transmission is not too far removed from the dialogic situation anticipated by many early and early modern instructional and didactic texts. This model, where locatable in literature, life writing, and other kinds of text, is characteristic of a culture in which ordinary laypeople had to navigate and discover knowledge, sometimes in ways that were non-linear and complex. 27 Moreover, recent work demonstrates that scholars are now challenging the rather narrow traditional historical models of literacy and are more interested in multiple literacies and exploring the multiple ways in which texts, cultures, and ideas can be transmitted and received (Hellwarth, 2002, p. 14). 28 Dorothy Lewkenore’s book shows that women were actively reading particular kinds of instructional material in the early modern period, but where else can we find women in the history of this kind of literature and in its material contexts? I consider how women from the later medieval period across the early modern are constructed and instructed in such writings, often in tension with a written culture that was almost always patriarchal, to such an extent that “written texts both carried and created ‘authority’ and it was a tacit assumption that ‘authority,’ and therefore authorship, were incompatible with femininity” (Barratt, 1992, p.  5). 29 In fact, Boffey advocates a useful and productive approach to finding evidence of feminine participation in literary cultures by calling for “some investigation of the different senses in which ‘writing women’ might have existed in the period, especially in relation to texts like lyrics, often narrated in the female voice, whose authorship is so notoriously hard to identify”30; indeed, the same strictures may be said to apply to “reading women.” This chapter takes her prescient observation as a starting point, but slightly tweaks its focus to consider how women are “written,” and indeed written for, in didactic and instructional works

150  Instructing and Constructing Women of various genres: advice literature, works on women’s health, and early modern works which either appeal to women or in which they are instructed.31

How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter is a verse text concerned with behaviour that is “one of the few conduct poems written in Middle English to be directed specifically at a woman, and one of the earliest in Europe to speak to female readers below the highest ranks of the aristocracy and outside the nunneries”;32 indeed, it is a good example of one of the ways in which instruction and literature synergised. It has also been suggested that the work was constructed in order to appeal not to women from the gentrified or mercantile classes but to girls who worked for a living: offering glimpses into what has been called a “youth subculture” of “spirited and daring girls who left their villages and went to work in towns, who lived together in cheap lodgings, drank in alehouses, told jokes in church… who led risky, unconventional and adventurous lives,”33 although Harris has noted that didactic literature of this kind is usually intended for “those of an age to begin schooling, or to enter service or apprenticeship – about seven – and seems to extend, with only slight differentiation among poems, until the age to consider marriage or economic independence.”34 The work, which runs to over 200 lines of mostly rhyming couplets, offers advice to an unnamed daughter on topics such as proper behaviour when church-going, appropriate Christian deeds, and good household management from the perspective of a mother but mediated by another narrative presence. It is now extant in five late medieval manuscripts (discussed more fully below), and a version of it survives also in print. Bornstein has argued that the author may well have been a woman, or a man who “effectively assumed the persona of a woman,”35 while Mustanoja reckons that the author “was likely a male cleric on account of the text’s insistence on female subordination” (1948, p. 126). It is most likely that the author was male, but The Good Wife is certainly more complex than simple around authorial and narrative voice. The poem’s opening is reminiscent of the romance and ballad traditions36 and implies perhaps an imaginative and deliberate link with an oral tradition: Lyst and lythe a lytell space, I schall you telle a prety cace: How the gode wyf taught hyr doughter To mend her lyf and make her better” (ll. 1–4). 37 It is the “I” persona that here complicates our sense of who is speaking since s/he mimics the traditional oral narrator or travelling entertainer,

Instructing and Constructing Women  151 but also calls attention to the presence of another voice, and in that respect attaching an identity to the “I” persona is difficult; it seems fairly clear that the speech that follows is reported, and the “I” figure is likely a male narrator. This is only confirmed by the establishment of the good wife and her daughter as in some way “other,” or as entities separate from the narrator and presumably the occupants of a space that is at some historical or temporal remove from him. Thus the narrator does not adopt a persona but rather is figured as a passive reporter of the wife’s attitudes, introducing and reporting the advice that is spoken by the wife to the daughter while at once remaining outside of it, while the audience is urged to listen.38 That stated, there is no doubt that the principal narrative voice in the text is constructed as female and, as might be expected, the work is almost wholly dominated by the wife’s words. The implied audience is female, represented by the unresponsive, passive figure of the daughter, with whom we are in part encouraged to identify. Indeed, Shuffleton points out that the text cannot reasonably be identified as a dialogue “in any meaningful sense” since it deploys the “fictional device of a parent speaking to a child.” Nonetheless, we as readers are drawn into the world of the text by two strong imperative voices: that of the narrator, urging us in the four-line prologue to listen and attend a while, and that of the wife, whose first words are to her daughter, but also, by implication, to us: “Doughter, and thou wylle be a wyfe, / Wysely to wyrch in all thy lyfe” (ll. 5–6). Beginning the poem with the word “[d]oughter,” the narrator achieves something distinctive: he encourages the audience, now aligned with the daughter-figure, to fully engage with the words of the wife, while simultaneously distancing himself from the wife’s words and attitudes, acting merely as a mouthpiece for her and offering no commentary on her attitudes or advice. 39 The first encounter that a reader or listener will have with this text is via the gendered address to a female recipient, but that recipient is silent, and the persona of the wife is problematized. It is tempting to imagine, then, that audiences engaged with the work in ways other than in sympathy with the daughter who mutely receives the advice of a worldly and older authority figure. In other words, it is likely that the work appealed to audiences other than that represented by the daughter, even though it is natural that we would conceive of the intended audience as consisting of those in need of advice: younger women who, like the daughter in this text, might require guidance in anticipation of becoming married women and stepping into the role of mistress of a household in due course. The advice vacillates between practical, proverbial short axioms that may be almost universally applicable, such as the exhortation: “[g]ladly loke thou pay thy tythes” (l. 11), and what are presented as more gentle and perhaps personal suggestions: “When thou arte in the chyrch, my chyld, / Loke that thou be bothe meke and

152  Instructing and Constructing Women mylde” (ll. 19–20). We are asked to imagine a silent recipient who is youthful and inexperienced and, consequently constitutes an immature audience for the text; indeed, Riddy has suggested that the intended recipients were not the daughters of merchants but young women working in bourgeois households (1996, p. 76).40 Even though the work “exploits the association of mothers and domesticity in order to create a specifically bourgeois version of the domestic” (Riddy, p. 76), the work is problematic because of the uncertainty surrounding the gender of its author. Summit (2003, p. 95) argues that “anonymous female-voiced texts demonstrate that, in the Middle Ages, the indeterminacy of authorial gender was not seen as a problem to be definitively solved – rather, it was part of a sophisticated literary genre” and certainly The Good Wife complicates any straightforward judgment as to the gender identity of its originator. At times, the tone of the poem, along with its implied and overt attitude towards women, is judgmental, and despite the manifestation of a maternal female speaker it is likely that even contemporary readers would have been unable to ignore patriarchal and at time misogynistic attitudes expressed through the medium of instruction. In this respect, the poem transcends one set of functions, in which it operates as a didactic work designed for young women, or as a handbook for mothers in the education of their daughters, and can be seen to be directed at or intended for notice by secular women more generally, or intended to be read as a critique of how women might behave without this advice. Shuffleton points out that the advice contained in the poem centres on the “two ideals of thrift and honour,” extending to consider “gentle speech, envy, subservience and conduct with men,” topics that also occupy, for instance, Geoffroy de la Tour Landry in the treatise that he writes for his daughters.41 And without question, The Good Wife devotes much space to the doling out of advice regarding, for example, Christian duties: the daughter is advised to “…bydde thi bedys [beads] aboven all thing” (l. 21) and to always pay tithes and offerings (ll. 10–11). She is urged to be courteous, especially with respect to offers of marriage (ll. 27–29), and to maintain her modesty and chastity in her dealings with suitors or potential husbands by avoiding oneto-one encounters and the possibility for sinful behaviour: “Syt not by hym, ne stand thou nought / In sych place ther synne mey be wroght” (ll. 31–32). When she does eventually marry, the addressee must be consistently “fayre of semblant” (l. 45) and gentle with her words to her husband; she must be meek and not coarse in her speech, and she should avoid raucous laughter and staring or gaping. The ideal daughter – and indeed wife – must also be thrifty (“Ne go thou not to no merket / To sell thi thryft” [ll. 67–68]) and should practice temperance; the speaker advises that taverns should be avoided, but if faced with “ale or wyne” the young woman must “Take not to myche, and leve be tyme / For mesure therinne, it is no herme, / And drounke to be, it is thi schame”

Instructing and Constructing Women  153 (ll. 74–76). In fact, the female addressee is better advised to “byde… at home” (l. 81), remaining within the confines of her domestic context; importantly, however, she is also confined within the text where she remains silent, submissive and colourless. The Good Wife presents us with a situation in which one female voice is dominant, insistent on being heard, while the woman who is the recipient of the advice is silenced and robbed of any voice or self. Indeed, silence is overtly connected to obedience in this text, and verbal transgression by the woman will result in and of itself in loose talk and gossip: Loke thou chyd no wordys bolde To myssey nother yonge ne olde For and thou any chyder be, Thy neyghbors wyll speke thee vylony (ll. 107–11). The lack of questioning, the format privileging an imperative tone, and the exhortation to silence both inside and without the home, suggest (in line with Mustanoja’s reading) that the author of the text is male or, more properly, that the perspectives and attitudes expressed in the text are patriarchal. For underlying the poem and, in some cases, making its presence felt directly in the poem’s lines, are characteristic of the patriarchal point of view that is so commonly in evidence in the misogynistic literature of the medieval period. Silence is, of course, a feminine virtue in the Middle Ages, and it is particularly a feature of the ideal daughter.42 Of course these ideas persist in the early modern period where in misogynistic literature the ideal woman is silent and submissive, and loquaciousness has associations with sexual promiscuity. This attitude manifests itself in the poem in implicit and explicit ways. The author, through the persona of the “wife,” explicitly demands obedience, silence, submission, and chastity from the woman of the house and expects her to be an exemplary Christian; this is relatively unproblematic given the genre of writing into which The Good Wife falls. Mustanoja also notes that the poem is one of the comparatively few poems from the later medieval period that is marked by neither adoration nor slander, finding instead that the text “simply gives us an idea of what was considered a model of a middle-class woman,” having “a sincere feeling and a sympathetic outlook” (1948, p. 5). I contend that the poem reveals an implicit misogynistic attitude, however, and that this can be discovered in the comments occurring at certain intervals in the text that are placed into the mouth of the mother by the author and that refer to the general character of women. For instance, the daughter is counselled to avoid attending sporting meets such as “wrastlyng” and “coke schetyng” (ll. 77–78) for fear of being identified as a woman of dubious morals. The tone of similar poems, as noted by Harris (1992, p. 127), is

154  Instructing and Constructing Women moralistic as much as it is pious, and the language used by the author to inculcate moralistic behaviour is ardent and unambiguous; the woman that dares to socialize at these sporting events does so “[a]s it were a strumpet other a gyglote, / Or as woman that lyst to dote” (ll. 79–80). Later in the text the young woman is told to remain in the home and to oversee the home and the household staff appropriately, but before imparting advice on how this might best be managed, the author quips that “[w]omen that be of yvell fame / Be ye not togeder in name” (ll. 131–32). These brief but specific comments on the perceived weaknesses and tendencies of women, coupled with the assumption in the text that women will behave in particular ways both in public and in private (the imperative “[w]ith synne ne fremde make no jangelyng” implies that, ordinarily, there would be a natural impulse to noise and chatter), might be said to reveal an instructive masculine voice, one that is not always sympathetic to women or, at least, one that seeks to pass judgment on particular classes of women and acceptable social behaviour. On the other hand, there is a long and pronounced section that attests to the generally lascivious and untrustworthy character of men. The daughter is instructed to be mindful of the number of men with whom she becomes acquainted, ensuring all the while that “thorow no vylony thi hert fond” (l. 92). Indeed, not all men who speak nicely are to be trusted and women are especially vulnerable to them: For gode women with gyftys Men ther honour fro them lyftys, Those that thei were all trew, As any stele that bereth hew; For with ther giftys men them overgone, Thof thei were trew as any stone (ll. 97–102). Nonetheless, these comments that ostensibly are critical of men and their apparently innate lustful urges imply a lack of judgment on the part of women. Even those women of good standing are in danger of losing their reason when faced with “fare speche” (l. 94) and the promise of “gyftys” (l. 95), and our author implicitly aligns women with transgression to such an extent that women are wholly to blame for succumbing to the flirtations and loose talk of men. The inference seems to be that men behave in a way that is natural and predictable, and it is the responsibility of women to be wary and to remember the advice that is being shared. Yet this advice is to be understood as that emanating from a mother to a daughter; indeed we are reminded of this in the closing lines of the text that the mother is the one who has spoken: “Now I have taught thee, my dere doughter / The same techynge I hade of my modour” (ll. 203–04). However, both the overt and the more implicit attitudes to women not only suggest that the authority behind the work is masculine, but that

Instructing and Constructing Women  155 women in general are not sufficiently intellectually capable to be responsible for their own learning and instruction. The persona of the mother is consistently undercut by the attitudes and subjectivity of the male narrator/author, and the mother herself imparts knowledge gained not from experience or based on wisdom, but which was transmitted to her by her “modour.” In addition, the model of orality in the poem is in part complicated by the fact that the work is something that actually circulated in manuscripts and, later, in printed form, and perhaps was intended to appeal not only to younger daughters taking their first steps in the world, or to women more generally, but also to literate men. Shuffleton dates the composition of the work to the early- to mid-fourteenth century, and it is extant in five late medieval manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61, the base manuscript used by Shuffleton for his TEAMS edition, preserves How the Wise Man Taught His Son as well as other works that can be described as conduct literature or works of moral instruction.43 The manuscript also contains some romance texts: Sir Cleges, The Erle of Toulous and Sir Orfeo; several verse texts such as The Incestuous Daughter, and a tale about a knight and his jealous wife; it also preserves some devotional material, for instance, a Life of St Margaret, the shorter Charter of Christ and a work that recounts the story of the resurrection. The manuscript also contains a copy of Lydgate’s Dietary. Ashmole 61 has long been of particular interest to students of scribal culture and trends in popular reading in later medieval England: nineteen of the manuscript’s forty-one items are signed “Rate” in a scribal hand, and the copyist or compiler also illustrates parts of the manuscript with “curious” sketches of animals and flora.44 The significance of the volume extends well beyond the eccentricities of the scribe to a consideration of compilation practices reflecting “reading material popular with middle-class English families of the later Middle Ages” (Shuffleton, 2008). Though the compiler seems to have grouped particular texts with shared thematic concerns, as described briefly above, it is also possible that connections existed between texts not located side by side in the manuscript; for example, a reader or audience might find synergies and shared themes between The Good Wife and some of the devotional texts in the manuscript, several of which are Marian (including specifically addressed to mothers) and which implicitly encourage good devotional practice. Shuffleton notes that the volume exhibits a concern with the education of children and the management of the spiritual needs and behavioural interests of a family rather more than other contemporary miscellanies that contain recipes, medical texts and household manuals (2008); if the instruction preserved here is more obviously exemplary, this repository of texts does not neglect the female audience or potential reader. Several of the texts have female speakers and though, in some cases, as with The Jealous Wife, there is a negative

156  Instructing and Constructing Women slant, the place of the female in the family structure (and, indeed, in society in general) is if not celebrated, certainly acknowledged. The first stanza of Dame Courtesy mentions Biblical models, including the greeting of Mary by Elizabeth at the visitation, as examples of humility and courtesy, providing an instance of a moment in Christian history with which women can identify. Courtesy, the text says, “came fro heven” (l. 6) and therefore courteous behaviour is proper for a Christian. And the manuscript’s romances would have been considered reading material suitable for the female as well as for the male members of a household. The abundance of texts in verse contained in Ashmole 61 may indicate that the contents were intended to be in part committed to memory or recited; indeed many derive from “preaching material, including homily cycles and collections of exempla, and they retain signs of having been intended for oral delivery” (Shuffleton, 2008). The illiterate or semi-literate women of a household may have participated in reading for instruction, entertainment or contemplation, and the striking number of texts that feature a female voice, or strong feminine role models or perspectives to do with motherhood and nurture, would suggest that, at least in this context, female audiences were courted, and not alienated. As Mustanoja observes, one of the most valuable aspects of The Good Wife is its status as “a document of social history.” Apart from being the earliest extant set of instructions in English literature written for laywomen and not for nuns or anchoresses, it is one of the first in all E ­ urope addressed expressly to middle-class women (1948, p. 81). Nonetheless, scholars who deal with this genre of literature are still faced with issues that relate to the absence of recorded responses and evidence related to transmission amongst “those who did not automatically possess all the skills associated with literacy” (Meale, 1993, p. 3). Perhaps the model of orality and feminine dialogue that is privileged by this and by other, similar texts asks us to rework our position on late medieval female literacy, even to consider that the anonymity associated with The Good Wife does not immediately assume a lack of response or engagement on the part of contemporary women.45 How The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter was printed in 1597 in Certaine Worthye Manvscript Poems of Great Antiquitie Reserued long in the Studie of a Norfolke Gentleman, where it appears with three texts that purport to derive from a Norfolk manuscript: The Statly Tragedy of Guistard and Sismond, The Way to Thrifte, and a version of How The Good Wife which is here entitled The Northern Mothers Blessing.46 This is an octavo volume of thirty-nine folios, printed in London for Robert Dexter and compiled by one “J.D.”47 The work is dedicated to Edmund Spenser who is described as “the worthiest Poet” on the reverse of the title page, and The Northern Mothers Blessing is paired with The Way of Thrift, both of which occupy twelve leaves and are claimed to have been “[w]ritten nine years before the death of G. Chaucer.”48 The

Instructing and Constructing Women  157 text of The Good Wife, which (like the four other extant manuscript copies) differs significantly from Rate’s version in Ashmole 61, is divided into six-line stanzas, each of which is, as in the four other MS versions, followed by the refrain “My leue dere child.”49 It begins at sig. E3r with the following stanza: God wold that euery wife that wonyth in this land Wold teach her doughter as ye shal vnderstand, As a good wife did of the North countré How her doughter should lere a good wife to bee: For lack of the moders teaching Makes the doughter of euill liuing, My leue dere child. Instructional and didactic literature of this kind flourished in this period and was frequently the subject matter of choice in the early days of print. According to Glaisyer (who takes a fairly narrow perspective on didactic literature, focusing strictly on the ‘how-to’ genre of book that imparted specific skills like cookery or animal care), instructional texts were a popular choice with early printers; he notes that some of the first books printed in England were manuals and handbooks. 50 As we have seen in earlier chapters, a number of the early manuals issued by Caxton, de Worde and others were courtesy, cookery and household books. However, The Good Wife, which can certainly be categorized as didactic in its home in manuscript, seems to have an arcane property in print, contextualised differently, framed and prepared for print by male editors and printers, and overtly associated with Edmund Spenser. Though it is linked to and preceded by How The Wise Man Taught His Son in Ashmole 61, the MS context anticipates female readers by virtue of its other contents; the printed version seems, however, to appeal more specifically to a male audience interested in ephemera and antique works of literature and associated with men such as Stow and Spenser, both in one way or another involved in the recovery of older forms of writing. In this respect, The Good Wife is contextualised not as a new, relevant and cutting-edge instructional work but rather as a piece that is dated, perhaps of interest linguistically or formally to antiquarians, and revealing perhaps in some tacit way a shifting of attitudes around suitable reading material for women.

The Trotula Works It seems likely that, in some situations, instruction intended for women was imparted to them not by other women but by men51; indeed, several medieval texts that purport to instruct women explicitly ask that the information is read aloud to women by men. The corpus of Trotula texts,

158  Instructing and Constructing Women attributed to or influenced by the female physician Trota, or Trotula, of Salerno, frequently contain exhortations to literate men to read the information aloud to women.52 These are works concerned with women’s health – in particular, obstetrical and gynaecological medicine – that circulated in Latin and in many vernaculars from the thirteenth century, and they seemed to have been very closely associated, if not with the female physician herself, with cultures of female advice to women and instruction that was intended exclusively for women. According to ­Barratt, “these texts were seen in the Middle Ages as written by a woman, and their very existence must have influenced common perceptions of the range, status and role of women’s writing” (1992, p. 27). Keiser (who notes that the work of John Benton provides a compelling argument for male authorship of these texts) states that “[q]uestions concerning the roles of male and female practitioners of gynaecological and obstetric problems are of particular relevance to a consideration of the audience for these Middle English treatises, in which we find prologues suggesting the insensitivity of some males towards such problems” (1998, p. 3667).53 Barratt (who contributed the Trotula material to Wogan-Browne et al., 1999) argues that while it is “obvious and ‘natural’ to present knowledge about the female reproductive system under the rubric of a woman’s name, it is of course extremely rare to find a woman as auctor, given that the prevailing tradition (both late classical and medieval clerical) of authorship and authority was almost entirely masculine.”54 However, Green (2008, pp. 30–31) argues that a feminine influence can certainly be discerned in the creation of women’s medicine at Salerno. Despite uncertainty regarding the gender of the likely author of Trotula writings, it seems clear that in some instances these writings were intended to afford to women some measure of control over their own learning and their own health and well-being. Unlike The Good Wife, such texts do not necessarily reflect a context in which authority is strictly male; rather, the Trotula writings are focused on women, their special requirements for access to “this sort of intimate text” (­Wogan-Browne et al., 1999, p. 157), and on the cooperation and willingness of literate women to empower and educate less well-educated women in their households and families. These writings are inclusive as well as interested in the collective transmission of useful information to women, but they also are sensitive to issues around gender relations and a tension between written (and therefore masculine) authority. One of the best-known Trotula texts to circulate in Middle English was the prose treatise commonly called The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing, certainly known from the 1380s onwards in England, and extant in five fifteenth-century manuscripts that also contain medical tracts and recipes.55 It is the earliest of the five English translations of the Trotula and draws not on a Latin version but a version of the Old French prose translation, Quant Dex nostre Seignor, which had been in

Instructing and Constructing Women  159 circulation in England since the mid-thirteenth century (Green, 2008, p.  183, 184). The Knowing purports to have been crafted specifically with female readers or audiences in mind, justifying a stand-alone text for women for reasons that they are more febull and colde be nature than men been and have grete travell in chyldynge, ther fall oftyn to hem mo diverse syknes than to men, and namly to the membrys that ben longynge to gendrynge (Wogan-Browne et al., 1999, p. 158).56 The treatise is composed expressly to enable women to self-diagnose and treat the diseases and illness that relate specifically to gynaecology and obstetrics; the compiler states that s/he has done “myn ententyffee bysynes” to “drau [translate] oute of Latyn into Englysch dyverse causis of here maladyes, the synes that they schall knou hem by, and the curys helpynge to hem.”57 Moreover, even as the translator/compiler has widened access to the information by translating from Latin into English a text that had already been rendered in Greek, the further dissemination of the material by women to women is advocated in fairly strong terms: And because whomen of oure tonge cunne bettrye rede and understande thys langage than eny other, [that] every whoman lettyrde [may] rede hit to other unlettyrd and help hem and conceyle hem in here maladyes withowtyn scheuynge here desyse to man, I have thys drawen and wrytten in Englysch (Wogan-Browne et al., 1999, p. 157). The prefaces to texts concerned with childbirth “articulate various relationships between a female and male ‘author’ and a female audience” (Hellwarth, 2002, p. 74) and in this example women who are literate specifically in English are exhorted to transmit the text to those who cannot read, primarily for the purposes of modesty and dignity; but perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this prologue is that the education of women by other women is expressly encouraged, in particular with respect to their sexual and gynaecological health. Attempts by the author/ translator to dissuade readers who may access the text for scandalous reasons are informed not by a simple male-female dichotomy but by a distinction between those men who wish to help women and those who are interested in defamation or in reading the text with evil intent. The work, compiled for the “worschyp of oure Lady and of all sayntys,” is thus not forbidden to men, but it is asked that if a man comes across it he “rede hit not in no despyte ne sclaundure of no woman, ne for no cause but for the hele and helpe of hem… undyrstondynge in certeyne that they have no other evylys that nou be alyve than thoo women hade that nou

160  Instructing and Constructing Women be seyntys in hevyn” (Wogan-Browne et al., 1999, p. 157). Therefore, though the impulse behind the creation of the text is to provide education and instruction for women, that instruction, where relevant, is also available to men who wish to assist and empower women. It is much more likely that these texts in manuscript were involved in a “tug-ofwar between men and women” as regards ownership (Green, 1992, p. 56), especially given that the growing professionalization of medicine was “grounded fundamentally on the valorisation of book learning” that brought with it a “marked masculinization” (Green, 2008, p. xiii). Green cites the fact that specialized medical practitioners were reliant on works in the vernacular to inform their treatment, as well as the likelihood that male practitioners, together with figures such as parish priests, were as involved in the gynaecological care of women as midwives, to support her theories that such works could have been accessed by both sexes (1992, p. 57); indeed, it is the case that, with increasing professionalization of and specialisation in medicine, there was also a broader lay audience for written texts on health (Green, 2008, p. 8). Writing in 1992, Green had identified over thirty Middle English manuscripts containing eleven different obstetrical and gynaecological texts or collections of recipes (p. 54), predicting then that numbers would continue to grow as work proceeded on various handlists and catalogues. 58 The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing may have reached a wider audience of both men and women than is suggested by its extant manuscript tradition. As mentioned, it is preserved in five manuscripts, several of which also contain medical texts and remedy books. 59 And while Green notes that “not a single woman has yet been identified as an owner of any of the extant manuscripts” (as well as acknowledging that there may have been copies that did not survive; 1992, p. 58), it remains likely that women, while not owning the volumes, may have had access to them in some way and thus exercised a sort of ownership over the information. Indeed, the Knowing seems to be addressed not to professional practitioners but to “knowledgeable laywomen concerned to help themselves and their neighbours” (Green, 2008, p. 184). If circulated in a household context, these volumes may have been available to the whole family, and Green suggests that an examination of the surviving manuscripts that contain such material reveals that several of the texts to women are contained in fascicles which, she notes, “conceivably could have circulated independently among midwives or laywomen with medical interests” (1992, pp. 58–59). Of the five manuscripts of the work discussed above (referred to by Green as Trotula Translation A), Bodleian Library MS Douce 37 is a single-text volume, while a second, Cambridge University Library MS Ii.6.33 “was apparently also originally independent, though it was later bound with another gynecological text” (Green, 1992, p. 59).60 And though many of the manuscripts described by Green likely anticipate a specialized readership of male medical professionals:

Instructing and Constructing Women  161 barber-surgeons, physicians and leech doctors, and although the text is “peppered with the author’s moralistic judgments,” it reflects a “­sincere concern for women” (Green, 1992, p. 65).61 Indeed, the intention expressed in the translator’s preface is indicative of an important and developing attitude: that women sometimes required specific, tailored instruction, that should in part be handed over to women themselves. We might say that the work operates in a similar way to birth girdles – amulet rolls that supplied specific textual and iconographical aid to and protection for women in childbirth and that also circulated as printed broadsides, mimicking the Virgin Girdle that was loaned by Westminster Abbey to royal and noble expectant mothers.62 Similarly, the Trotula “seems to be addressed to knowledgeable laywomen concerned to help themselves and their neighbours rather than to specialist midwives” (Green, 1992, p. 66) and, despite its circulation in patriarchal and institutional contexts, the text may have reached an audience that is not immediately discernible from its context(s) in manuscript. The version of the Knowyng contained in London, British Library, MS Additional 12195 seems at first somewhat out of step with the volume’s theme and co-texts. The book is indeed a collection of similarly didactic texts, but one that consists in the main of religious, legal, grammatical, and medical material: prayers and notes on services for certain times in the liturgical year, alongside notices of banns, wills and testaments, charms and recipes and an abridged version of John Lydgate’s short poem Rammeshorne.63 The volume has connections to the house of Austin canons at Creake, near Walsingham,64 but there are also, among the contents, several liturgical texts including some that relate to services typically used by the Carmelites. As Green notes, the part of the manuscript which contains the Knowyng (ff. 122–90), as well as other obstetrical recipes and astrological and prognostic material, was originally a separate manuscript; it is not known when it was bound together with the other part, which is mostly comprised of the liturgical, legal and grammatical material (1992, p. 66). This section of Additional 12195 may have served a wider community of users and readers than that suggested by the Austin and Carmelite contexts, or indeed by the female readership anticipated by the Trotula. It is possible that readers of both genders would have consulted the manuscript in a variety of contexts, perhaps also to access just one text, and the suitability of recipes in particular and certain portions of the Trotula for oral transmission sits well with the those parts of the volume containing religious services, prayers and charms. Even though the book is possessed of an authority that is masculine and ecclesiastical, it hints at a community of users that includes women, and several of the texts may have had multiple users outside of an institutional setting who indirectly accessed its lore. The Knowing of a Woman’s Kind in Childing (or the Trotula A translation) demonstrates that instruction for women, and medical instruction

162  Instructing and Constructing Women in particular occupied an interesting intellectual and cultural space. It is indebted to and in some instances framed by the forms of transmission characteristic of conventional patriarchal medical and instructional works; but in some cases, we find that it existed in fascicles and booklets, and even in single-text manuscripts, that might have allowed the text to move independently and unmediated throughout wide communities of readers and beneficiaries. In other words, the fluidity that is characteristic of manuscript and scribal culture meant that certain texts had the potential to operate outside of as well as within the context of the multitext manuscript book, and thus at least in some respects, women had control over the interpretation and dissemination of information and instruction specific to their bodies and their well-being, and to the conceptual spaces that they occupied in society. However, this feature seems to have been unusual to the medical sphere, and specifically to gynaecology and obstetrics, and with the increased proliferation of information and instruction for women in print, the responsibility for the instruction of women in other fields and disciplines seems to have fallen under a patriarchal system that controlled the production of books as well as the behaviour of women, in line with the attitudes discernible in The Good Wife. 65 Indeed, and as noted by Hellwarth, the increased dissemination in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of handbooks on women’s health in print “brought to the literate public women’s ­secrets […] managing and subverting female birth communities by accessing what were formerly rather isolated textual communities” (2002, pp. 50, 51).66 Furthermore, the medical patriarchy “relied on these female textual communities both for their medical literacy and their patronage” (2002, p. 51).67 Effectively, the image of women in early print and in manuscript is one that is largely constructed by men, in which women are the “passive objects of men’s imaginative construction, the literary equivalent of the male visual ‘gaze.’”68 And while Mendleson’s work is very much focused on “literary” and generic representations of women such as those found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century broadsides and ballads, and in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, her observation that generic images of women were familiar to medieval and early modern audiences via Christian and classical traditions of writing resonates with representations of women discernible in instructional writing from the late-fifteenth century. Her argument is that the “literate male elite” was familiar with these sources from specific works of theology and philosophy, while ordinary men and women were “exposed to cultural assumptions about gender difference through sermons and homilies, popular songs, and other forms of oral (and visual) transmission” (2011, p. 281). However, and particularly in the early part of the seventeenth century, “a handful of female authors ventured to appear in print. During the civil war period…hundreds of women from both the well-educated minority and the barely literate majority began to write,

Instructing and Constructing Women  163 publish and sell their works to a growing audience” (Mendelson, 2011, p. 280). The actual statistics for women’s authorship seem to be low: according to Knoppers there were only forty-two first editions by women in the period 1601–41, accounting for a half of one percent of published texts (2009, p. 10). Nonetheless, a theoretical shift in scholarship on early modern women’s writing from a biographical approach to consider “the materiality of gendered writing, the importance of including manuscript as well as printed texts, collaborative as well as single ‘authored’ texts, and women’s writings on a diverse range of non-literary, domestic and religious subjects, including those not explicitly treating female or feminine concerns” has broadened the sense of women’s contribution to written culture (2009, p. 6). This expansion of what constitutes women’s literature or writing for women must surely include the ways in which women participated in writing as readers, compilers and book-owners and as primary and secondary authors (Knoppers, 2009, p. 7). The same author also notes that “simply counting first editions of single-authored works undermines the presence and visibility of women’s printed texts” and that what is required is a more “historically apposite view of women’s writing” (2009, p. 10). As we have seen with Dorothy Lewkenore, women’s reading is linked to writing, and manuscript and print often intersected, with women generally preferring manuscript writing and commonplacing, making texts personally relevant and adapting them to suit their own needs (Knoppers, 2009, p. 10). This kind of direct but silent or unrecorded engagement with literary culture is in evidence in the home-compiled manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but is often indebted to printed works to which some women almost certainly had access.

Thomas Tusser and A hundreth good points of husbandrie Despite this trend towards a more balanced and positive representation of women in various spheres of printed information and literature, a change in part precipitated by the English Reformation,69 women were widely represented in early modern printed works in satirical and misogynistic ways, and female authors and readers were most closely associated with ballads and other plebian genres of literature.70 Information circulated in the early modern period for women readers continued to be controlled, framed and ventriloquized by men and by male voices. This is especially relevant with respect to instruction in the home or instruction that pertained to the management of a household and family. Thomas Tusser’s verse tract A hundreth good points of husbandrie, first printed as a quarto volume in 1557, is a good example of this phenomenon.71 The first edition comprised a husbandry only, but subsequent printings in 1562, 1570 and 1571 (also quarto volumes) each contained a second

164  Instructing and Constructing Women tract. This supplement was designed specifically to appeal to women and was appended to the main text. The fact that it is framed by the section intended for male readers probably reflects the attitude of Tusser or of his publisher to the instruction of women, their place in society and, indeed, their role within the home.72 Tusser’s tract announces on the title page that it has been “lately married vnto a hundrethe good points of Huswifry newly corrected and amplified with dyuers proper lessons for housholders, as by the table at the later end, more playnly may appeare.”73 The language used here, as well as the association of the texts with the institution of marriage, might well be evocative of a system of values that placed family life and the partnership of a man and a woman at its core, and might suggest to the reader that the texts are intended to be read side by side, as companion volumes, for “housholders.”74 The conceit, which imagines that the two distinct texts are united as if in marriage, is extended in the short preface “To the Reader” in which Tusser states that one of his principal aims has been that “husbandry and huswifery (as Cocke and Hen to Countrymen) all straungenesse gone might ioyne in one as louers should” (sig. A3v). Even though both tracts are physically and imaginatively linked by the author, it seems likely that readers would have in fact distinguished them from each other. The physical makeup of the volume encourages this, as does the fact that each tract is very emphatically gendered by Tusser. In the “Preface” to the husbandry, Tusser addresses the male reader, invoking his responsibility as a male author for the education of man and wife in the management of their household and retinue, but also involving the husband in the management of his wife: What lookest thou then at the last? Good lessons for thee and thy wyfe, Then kepe them in memory fast, From youth, to the last of thy life (sig. A2r). Having dismissed as frivolous the works of both Chaucer and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey as well as writings that are described as ‘[t] earmes painted with Rethorike fine” (sig. A2r), Tusser goes on to enumerate the benefits of husbandry, in short precepts and couplets, for example: “[i]f I be long present, what goodness can want” (sig. A2v). In addition, the author dedicates his work in verses addressed to Lord Paget of Beaudesert, his “speciall good Lorde and master”; the poem that features an acrostic that reads “Thomas Tusser Made Me”. The preface “To the Reader” acknowledges the dual audience for the volume, in particular towards the end where the author asks all readers (earlier characterised as “Iacke” [Jack] and “Besse”) that “for my sake they gently take what ere they finde against their minde, when he or she shall minded be thereon to looke” (sig. A3v). But this attitude is not

Instructing and Constructing Women  165 sustained in the layout or format of the tracts. The housewifery, which begins at sig. G2r, has a distinctive narrative voice and tone, addressing an audience with concerns and values that are represented as different to readers of the text that precedes it. Initially, the message seems not to vary from that found in the preface to the husbandry: “As louers desireth together to dwell, / So husbandrie loueth good huswiferie well.” However, this message encouraging unity and equality is subsumed in what might best be described as a rhetorical framework that advances gender difference. This is perhaps not at first immediately discernible, since the second text materially emulates the first, having its own preface and its own dedication, the latter a verse addressed to the Lady Paget and extolling the potential of housewifery to increase many purses with silver and gold (sig. G2v). So there is a material balance between the two parts of the work; however, the information offered to housewives is to a great extent informed by what has come before. A combative, competitive tone is established in the preface by way of precepts similar to those found in the husbandry: Take weapon away, of what force is a man? Take huswife from husbande & what is he than? … Though husbandrie semeth to bring in the gaines yet huswiferie labours seme equall in paynes. Some respite to hubands the weather doth send, but huswifes affaires haue neuer none ende (sig. G2r). The material that follows the preface and the dedicatory verse to Lady Paget is concerned to establish the importance of the housewife to the life of the household, and in relation to the male authority in that space, and to affirm feminine authority. This is achieved even in a literary context that appeals to the female reader but that also, implicitly, courts and requires the approval of the patriarchal reader, expecting that he too will be a consumer of this text. Indeed, the precepts speak as clearly to a male reader, in particular those that refer to the value of having an obedient, frugal and responsible wife (some of the primary precepts for the housewife, or “[t]wentie lessons alway to be obserued” [sig. B4v]), and to the propriety of Christian behaviour and the stability of Christian marriage, which, needless to say, carry implications about equality and hierarchy. The modern reader must be prepared to imagine the man as the first reader and, moreover, the instruction being relayed from husband to wife as appropriate. And even though those powerful societal and normative structures colour and flavour this tract, they facilitated a space, rather like that created by Dorothy Lewkenore in which women can operate with some agency. For example, the “Twentie Lesons” (sig. G3v) summarized at the beginning of the tract, though they offer instruction that is imperative rather than nurturing, gifts the female reader with the

166  Instructing and Constructing Women possibility at least of some power within an unequal socially constructed partnership. It must be noted that the women addressed here are likely to be of the higher order of social classes (it is stressed that when the husband and wife are absent from the house, the servants are likely to “loyter” and remain idle), so that we might expect them to have more leisure time, more money and more power; but the female reader to whom Tusser appeals is second in command to her husband: “The husband abrode, the good wife must be chief, / and looke to their labour that eateth her beife” (sig. G4v). Tusser also includes some contemplative reading suitable for the housewife, in the form of poesies that are intended for display in the hall, parlour and bedchambers that reference spaces outside of the kitchen or those associated with household management, and position the woman as an integral part of the image and philosophy of a home. Indeed, Scott-Warren has noted that verses from this section of Tusser were painted on the walls in the parlours of some households and this asks us to rethink the spaces and ways in which instruction could take place and the role of an authoritative textual culture within an early modern household.75 Nonetheless, Tusser’s main concern in his instruction for the housewife is with the proper conduct of her work and with her proper moral and private behaviour in the context of married life. In that respect, the author takes the place of the husband, and the perspectives, advice and instruction here represent an entanglement of the voice of the author with that of a head of the household. The main part of the tract – the “hundred good pointes of huswiferye” (beginning at sig. G2r)76  – ­privileges in the same manner as does The Good Wife qualities associated with reputation, economy and industry: a good housewife should rise early, exhibit moderation in appetite and in tastes, be resourceful, thrifty and efficient, and correctly manage her servants and children. But she must also look to her behaviour; for instance, precept number five – “Sluttes corners auoided, shal farther thy health,  / Much time about trifles shall hinder thy wealth” – is indicative of a particular association between idleness and well-being. Implicit in this kind of instruction naturally is a lack of discernment on the part of the female reader, and there is an implicit assumption that laziness breeds lack of morality: women who tolerate “sluttes corners” (sig.  H1r), for instance, will greatly enhance their health and well-­being, while the next precept advises women to eschew idleness: “[g]o spin and go carde” (sig. H1v).77 Women are responsible for the economy and smooth running of the household as well as for their own behaviour both within and without the home. Tusser’s tract implies that the spiritual and moral condition of a woman is both a private and a public concern, profoundly connected to her behaviour to her husband within the home. Correct and appropriate behaviour towards her husband involves nurturing that is both

Instructing and Constructing Women  167 practical and emotional. She is exhorted to brew at home, for example, wherever possible, and advised that “[g]ood cokery doth please” (sig. H3v), and must also devote not just her labour but her time to her husband: “Good husband and huswife will some time alone /dine well with a morsell and suppe with a bone” (sig. I1r). The time alone must focus on the well-being of the patriarch: “Proude for thy husband to make him good chere / make mery together while time ye bee here” (sig. I3r). The wife is also expected to maintain order and quiet at table, ensuring that the servants behave well and attending to any squabbles or discord. The “hundred points” closes with a brief summary of expectations which, when followed, will please both her husband and her maker: Liue well and long, forbeare now among. Be lowly not solen if ought go amisse, what wresting may lose thee, that win with a kisse. Both heare and forbeare now and then as ye may, then Wenche God a mercy thy husband will say (sig. I3v). Tusser’s work of instruction ultimately imagines his readers as the inhabitants of an idyllic and rustic space, wherein old-fashioned values prevail and in which people remain untroubled and unaffected by national issues or political struggles (and indeed unconcerned with high literature by the likes of Chaucer).78 In effect, the main struggle that the husbandman and housewife will encounter is with thieving neighbours or slothful or misbehaving servants, for which latter problem the housewife must gently threaten but not enact violence: “A wand in thy hand though ye fight not at al, / make youth to their businesse the better to fall” (sig. H2r). The kind of woman that Tusser imagines is manifestly humble, good-humoured and wholesome, and his tract, and the kind of instruction that he issues, is tailored for her in particular; he stresses this at various stages, not least in his advice relating to the purchase of new clothes: “Though Ladies may rend & buy new e[ue]ry day, / good huswives must mend & buy new as they may” (sig. I2r). The inhabitants of this world imagined by Tusser make up, for him, a very special kind of class, and the stress placed on the carrying out of devotional duties, coupled with the inclusion, at the end of the tract, of a lengthy statement entitled “The Husband Mannes Beliefe” (described as a “Creede” in the first line; sig. L1v), has the effect of aligning the audience for this text with a simple, honest and straightforward faith and way of life such as is exemplified in the late medieval literature of the ploughman. This iteration of a simple life, coupled with Tusser’s retrospection, speaks to a simple worldview, in which the role of the woman (or ‘housewife’) is cleanly defined Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes, despite its simplicity, was hardly an obscure text: over the course of two decades, he worked on and

168  Instructing and Constructing Women reworked the material, and in 1573, he issued Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry United to as many of Good Huswiferie.79 As McRae notes, “the expansion of material was hardly the fivefold increase that the new title suggested” (ODNB)80; however, Tusser’s work did involve some additions, including his biography and a calendar of information and advice about the year in farming. Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry was especially popular: according to McRae, its publication in eighteen editions between 1557 and 1599 makes it probably the ­biggest-selling book of poetry during the reign of Elizabeth I, and it was issued in a further five editions up to 1638 (ODNB). 81 McRae also notes that Tusser’s texts were widely read in his lifetime and afterwards, and also throughout the social order; the text, we must assume, was also read by – or to – women even though their experiences of instruction by Tusser remain unrecorded. As Hunter notes, “most household or behaviour books, while for and about women’s lives, assumed that women would get their knowledge by way of the men in their lives – or at least that they were the correct channel” (2002, p. 524).

The English Housewife The work of Gervase Markham came to dominate the market for husbandry books from the period 1600 to 1620.82 His compilation The English Housewife, first published in 1615 as book two of Countrey Contentments, but which enjoyed considerable success as a distinct printing venture throughout the century, provides a useful point of comparison to Tusser’s works and a contemporary barometer for attitudes to women and to their education and instruction.83 Wendy Wall attributes this success in part to the manual’s gradual move away from proverbial, tried and trusted knowledge to the rationalisation of the domestic process, a project which, she argues, is carried out through “both textual and technical features of the book” (2011, p. 165). Nonetheless, Markham’s early versions express an overt concern with the ideal of the English housewife, promoting traditional practices and processes like home-brewing, baking and distillation; indeed, and as Wall states, Markham links “the virtues of womanhood to tasks important for the ‘generall good of this kingdome’” (Wall, 2011, p. 165), suggesting too that these virtues are necessary for the woman to be “compleat,” both inwardly and outwardly (title-page, 1615 edition).84 How then are women instructed and constructed by Markham? The author-compiler apparently remains aware of his intended and likely audience through the early incarnations of The English Housewife, removing certain paratextual features that were part of the 1615 edition and replacing them, in 1623, with more appropriate and gender-specific material. Where the 1615 edition is prefaced with an epistle to Sir Theodore Newton, the sometime patron of the author, as well as an address

Instructing and Constructing Women  169 to the reader by the text’s printer, Roger Jackson, the 1623 edition is foregrounded by an epistle to Frances, the Countess Dowager of Exeter, and sees Markham downplay his learned experience, confessing instead to having compiled the work from a “[m]anuscript which many yeeres ago belonged to an Honorable Countesse” (sig. A2r) (Wall, 2011, p. 172). The replacement of a statement on the veracity and compilation of the material to follow with a direct appeal to a female reader is a technique that doubtless says something about the kind of reader anticipated by Markham and his collaborators. Markham emphasises that in no way is the Countess Dowager in need of instruction, specifically of the type offered in the pages to follow; nonetheless, she is a hoped-for or ideal reader – for reasons of approval and authority – and perhaps too intended to be read, specifically as a model of the “compleat woman” alluded to on Markham’s title page.85 Unlike Tusser’s tract, which imagines and presents a prototypical rural housewife who must be content to remain in and be defined by the structures of the household, Markham’s work is concerned to appeal to and construct, in part at least, a type for the ideal English woman. The type of instruction offered by Markham is solidly practical, which might seem at odds with the grandiose claim that this work contributes to the “generall good of this kingdome.” Yet Markham “locates housewifery as part of a national ethic uniting classes and regions” and “fantasizes that “the English home can be insulated from professionalization and the market” (Wall, 2009, p. 104). Running things in the home in the most methodical, productive and thrifty manner possible provides not only a model for how the nation should conduct itself but finds for women a definite place and role within that model. Markham himself held old, chivalric values in extremely high regard and, according to Best, “believed… particularly in the ideal of an orderly hierarchical society led by an aristocracy that was noble in action as well as in birth” (1986, p. xi). Both Wall and Best find that Markham extols reliability, order and method, with Best noting that “[o]rganizational tidiness” is one of the “qualities that distinguishes The English Housewife from other handbooks of its kind” (1986, p. xix).86 It is this feature – the accessibility of the information and the logical manner in which it is presented – which in the main distinguishes Markham’s tract from Tusser’s. Whilst the earlier work is a collection of proverbs, precepts, wisdom, and verse, organised loosely but not logically, Markham’s sections are clearly, definitely demarcated, explained, and easily navigated. In Tusser we are afforded a sometimes troubling but frequently fond and jolly snapshot of the daily life and struggles of an English rural woman, whereas Markham (naturally concerned with the upper classes) is concerned with veneer, appearance and, by extension, with formal rather than personal qualities. Equally, while Tusser is concerned to measure and sustain the character, moral worth and

170  Instructing and Constructing Women interiority of his housewife along with her skills in management and husbandry, Markham maintains a focus on what is seen by the world, and thus suggests that once order and propriety are maintained publicly, one’s interior, private life will also thrive, in much the same way that the internal workings of the nation combine to result in a stable, successful England. This reading is borne out by Markham’s emphasis on appearance, hierarchy and social order, or what he sometimes terms “neatness,” and corresponds too to what Best suggests, when he notes that Markham’s housewife’s “mild sufferance” is an “outward sign of her inward spiritual humility” (1986, p. xxiii). Unlike Tusser, then, who arguably appeals to the female reader in a more cerebral, perhaps emotional manner, avoiding direct “how-to” instructions and speaking instead in ways that reference and reinforce common sense and good intentions, morality and good behaviour, Markham expects that a household properly run and managed, carrying out instructions to the letter, will thrive and prosper, and as such his instructions lack the colour and humour that is often discernible in Tusser. Markham’s compilation “includes some conventional words of advice” but, in terms of the housewife, it is “concerned almost exclusively throughout the book with her practical rather than her theoretical role” (Best, 1986, p. xxvi). In fact, his tract all but suppresses the expression and tolerance of emotional feminine and perhaps even maternal instincts, encouraging control and measured responses in all areas of the household and, by implication, in life. Markham’s housewife is expected to be emotionally controlled, sanitized, and, in many respects, desexualized; for example, in the kitchen she must be “cleanly both in body and in garments” but also she must strive not to be “­butter-fingered, sweet-toothed, not faint-hearted; for the first will let everything fall, and second will consume what it should increase, and the last will lose time with too much niceness” (sig. I2r). Moreover, prefatory remarks encourage modesty and temperance “as well inwardly as outwardly,” with emphasis firmly placed on the moderation and control of one’s emotions inwardly, as in her behauiour and cariage towards her husband, wherein she shall shunne all violence of rage, passion and humour, coueting lesse to direct than be directed, appearing euer vnto him pleasant, amiable and delightfull; and though occasion, mishaps, or the misgouernment of his will may induce her to contrarie thoughts, yet vertuously to suppresse them, and with a milde sufferance rather to call him home from his error, then with the strength of anger to abate the least sparke of his euill, calling in her minde that euill and vncomely language is deformed though vttered euen to seruants, but most monstrous and vgly when it appeares to before the presence of a husband (sig. B2r).

Instructing and Constructing Women  171 However, Markham’s primary concern is with what he calls the “inward vertues” of the wife’s mind which, though these preface his description of how she should look, still constitute a fairly generic list: she must be zealous and constant in her devotion to God, and a leader of her family and household in the same; she must submit to her husband and avoid rages and tempers, instead aiming to be directed and instructed; and she must suppress unworthy thoughts, and avoid as well the use of immodest language, even to the servants. Unlike Tusser, Markham consistently refers to the woman in the third person, asking us to more closely interrogate the matter of who might be the intended reader; effectively he seems to first address a man choosing a wife rather than the wife herself, and his instructions are delivered in a matter-of-fact manner, leaving little room for interpretation or variation. This is true even for the specific advice that he delivers on the desired appearance of the wife; in addition to maintaining a modest, temperate and unemotional demeanour, she must attire herself appropriately. According to our author-compiler, the housewife’s garments must be “comely and strong, made as well to preserue the health, as adorne the person, altogether without toyish garnishes… and as farre from the vanity of new and fantastique fashions, as neere to the comely imitations of modest Matrons” (sig. B2r-v). The ideal English housewife should be, first, well turned out but modestly dressed, and this exterior appearance should point to a character that is loaded with expectation but devoid of a sense of self and personality: … our English Hus-wife must bee of chast thought, stout courage, patient, vntyred, watchfull, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neghbour-hood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharpe and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkatiue, secret in her affaires, comfortable in her counsels, and generally skillfull in the worthy knowledges which doe belong to her vocation (sig. B2v). Markham’s treatise divides into sections on, for example, Health and Medicines, Herbs, Distillation, and Cookery, with each section prefaced by a short instruction relating to the state of mind or appearance of the wife as she approaches certain tasks; for example, the rubric to the Cookery asks the wife to address herself to the tasks with certain qualities: “she must be cleanly both in body and garments, she must haue a quick eye, a curious nose, a perfect taste, and a ready eare” (sig. I2r). The “how-to” methods of Markham, then, also ask the wife to prepare herself both mentally and physically in order to ensure that she can complete the tasks at hand in a wholesome manner. Essentially, though the impression given by the opening of the volume and the prefatory material is that Markham speaks to the potential or

172  Instructing and Constructing Women existing husband, when it comes to specific instructions it is clear that he addresses the imagined wife. He also is careful to delineate her areas of authority and influence within the home; for instance, in the section that treats of feasts and dining, he has the following comment: Now because wee alow no Officer but our Houswife, to whom wee onely speake in this booke, she shall first marshall her sallets… (sig. R4r-v). Markham reserves special authority for his housewife, clearly demarcating the parts of the household and family for which she holds responsibility and over which she can act as “[o]fficer” or “marshall.” In fact, this attitude respecting the woman’s dominion or area of influence is manifest from the outset, where the author in the preface deems that the wife is the mother and Mistris of the family, and hath her most generall imployments within the house: where from the generall example of her vertues, and the most approued skill of her knowledges, those of her family may both learne to serue God, and sustaine man in that godly  & profitable sort which is required of euery true Christian (sig. B1v). It seems that our author, while supporting the conventional view that a woman should be silent, submissive and obedient, is at the same time willing to concede (using interesting phrases that properly evoke patriarchal authority and power) that the wife should wield some power within the safe confines of her social situation.

Conclusion Make money thy drudge for to follow thy wark, make Wisedome controller, Good Order thy Clark, Prouision Cater, and Skil to be Cooke, make Stewarde of all, penne, inke, and thy booke (A hundreth good pointes of husbandrie, sig. B2r). Tusser’s exhortation close to the beginning of A hundreth good pointes of husbandrie, a statement that does not have an echo or match in the Huswifry, seems to situate firmly the work of management, stewardship and, most important to our purposes here, the archiving and ordering of the household budget or other records, as the territory of the head of family. It is understandable that few books compiled by women survive, but it is also likely that women like Mistress Dorothy, who after

Instructing and Constructing Women  173 all leaves only a part of her narrative in Ashmole MS 1477, would have been silently involved in literate acts and cultures within the household. Although they perhaps would not have had any responsibility for the creation or maintenance of a household ledger or record book, they, like Dorothy, may have silently read and responded to the various instructional texts and other literatures that were deemed appropriate for them. They also, like Dorothy, conversed and exchanged views with other women, but in the main their experience of instruction and learning within the real and imagined sphere of the household remains unrecorded. We may allow ourselves to be surprised at the inventiveness and single-mindedness of this woman who wanted to leave her mark and her own record, perhaps for her daughters and descendants, most likely to acknowledge that her life was one in which experience and knowledge was gathered and improved upon, and was potentially of value – maybe to instruct, or just for remembrance – in its own small way. Instruction for women continued to develop and expand into the seventeenth century and beyond, but it also has an unrecoverable history that is oral, and that is represented by Dorothy Lewkenore’s book.

Notes 1 See Elaine Leong, Medieval Recipe Collections in Seventeenth-Century ­England: Knowledge, Gender and Text (D. Phil. Thesis, University of ­Oxford, 2005), and “Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82 (2008): 145–68; and Sara Pennell, “Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing. Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, eds V. Burke and J. Gibson (­A ldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237–58. Leong has identified some 259 recipe collections held in twelve major research libraries in the United Kingdom and United States (2005, pp. 20–67). 2 Ashmole 1477 dates from the fifteenth century and measures 263 × 202mm; it is made up of vi + 363 + vi folios. Several of the folios are blank and some are fragments or are of a non-standard size. There is no modern pagination in the volume and the foliation is misleading; the numbering begins at f. 20 and ends with f. 52; Ashmole’s own pagination then begins with p. 94, he evidently having mistaken the fifteenth-century five for a nine (see ­Eldredge, 1992, p. 89). For further bibliographical descriptions see Griffin (2013, pp.  xxvii–xxviii), Eldredge (1992, pp. 89–92) and Mooney (1994, pp. 245–61). 3 Linne R. Mooney, “Manuscript Evidence for the Use of Medieval English Scientific and Utilitarian Texts,” in Interstices: Studies in Late Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A.G. Rigg, eds Richard Firth Green and Linne R. Mooney (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2004), pp. 184–202 (p. 193, and figure 2). 4 These signatures appear to range in date from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. 5 See also Catherine Field, “’Many hands hands’: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books,” in Genre and Women’s Life Writing

174  Instructing and Constructing Women in Early Modern England, eds M.M. Dowd and J.A. Eckerle (Aldershot: ­Ashgate, 2007), pp. 49–64 (in particular pp. 52–3). 6 A still is the apparatus used in distillation essentially of a close vessel (alembic, retort, boiler) in which the substance to be distilled is subjected to the action of heat, and of arrangements for the condensation of the vapour produced See “still, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oedcom/view/Entry/190285 [Accessed 14 November 2018]. The “distillation of materials to isolate the active ingredients for a particular pharmaceutical would have been a central part of the work undertaken by many women on behalf of their families and larger communities” (Lynette Hunter, “Books for Daily Life: Household, Husbandry, Behaviour,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. IV: 1557–1695, eds J. ­Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 514– 532 (p. 515). 7 This likely refers to a work published by William Clever, The Flower of Phisicke (STC 5412; USTC 511490), printed in London in 1590 by Roger Ward. 8 For instance, the first entry reads: “[h]emp seed giuen to henns in winter, will make them lay eggs apace. 1000 Notable things. lib.2.Apl.19.” It was not unusual to find a manuscript recipe book that had been compiled from a printed text (Fissell, 2009, p. 156). There was something of a boom in printed receipt books during the Interregnum sparked by, according to Fissell, the publication of Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent’s 1653 A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery; over the seventeenth century, recipe books accounted for about 20% of the total vernacular medical books published each decade, but in the 1650s, recipe books were almost a third of such titles; Mary E. Fissell, “Women in Healing Spaces,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed Laura L. Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), pp. 153–64 (p. 157). 9 This is likely a reference to Thomas Lupton’s A Thousand Notable Things, of Sundry Sortes (STC 16956.3; USTC 515827) which was first printed in 1586 in London, by Edward White, and which went through several editions. It was written in plain English to “better profit a great sorte, then to feede the fancies of a few” (Hunter, 2002, p. 522). 10 Culinary and medicinal recipes often occur side by side in receipt books since “all ingestible substances […] were thoughts to be endowed with humoural properties that could have a beneficial or negative effect on the body” (Field, 2007, p. 52). 11 William H. Sherman, “Reading the Matriarchive,” in Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 55–67 (p. 54). In addition, Catherine Field (2007, p. 50) observes that the recipe book, a significant (and often overlooked) form of early modern women’s writing and self-expression, can be seen as a “site and strategy of female self-writing.” Recently, Kowalchuk (2017, p. 4) notes that the persistent overlooking of the receipt book reveals a “narrow conception of authorship”; she also laments that receipt books fail to make an apparance, for instance, in Ostovich and Sauer’s 2004 anthology of early modern women’s writing (p. 3); Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer, Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700 (London: Routledge, 2004). 12 Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), p. 20. 13 Recent scholarship is marked by a much greater awareness of female readers of texts, noting that they are often silent and marginal, their presence

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14 15

16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23

unrecorded. On the politics of women, reading and annotation see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, ­Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), pp. 196–97. Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Introduction: Critical Framework and Issues,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (­Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), pp. 1–17 (p. 11). Wendy Wall, “Women in the Household,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed L.L. Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), pp. 165–84 (p. 97). On ink recipes see chapter three of the present volume. Wall also cites the examples of the collections of recipes compiled by Mary Baumfylde, Sarah Longe and Lady Margaret Hoby, which display fine penmanship and attention to detail (p. 106, p. 108 n. 31). The receipt book is now Folger Shakespeare Library MS v.a. 430 and is dated 1640–1750. See Kristine Kowalchuk, Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen’s Receipt Books (Toronto: Toronto UP, 2017), p. 3. On early modern women and patronage see Helen Smith, “‘A dame, an owner, a defendresse’: Women, Patronage, and Print,” in her Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (­Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), pp. 53–86. Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth, “‘I wyl wright of women prevy sekens’: Imagining Female Literacy and Textual Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Midwifery Manuals,” Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 44–63 (15). Crawford, 1985, pp. 212, 266; cited in Alexandra Barratt (ed), Women’s Writing in Middle English (London, Longman, 1992), p. 1. Of course there are some notable exceptions to this: Christine de Pizan, as well as being an author in her own right, was an advocate for women’s access to textual cultures, arguing in Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) for equal competency in learning for women and girls; cited in Carol M. Meale (ed), Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 17 (Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 1. Marie de France is an example of a woman writing literature in the vernacular in the twelfth century (see Krueger, 2003, pp. 172–83); see Roberta L. Krueger, “Marie de France”, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, eds C. Dinshaw and D. Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 172–83. Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love is the earliest work in English that can be definitively attributed to a woman; see Nicholas Watson “Julian of Norwich”, in Dinshaw and Wallace (2003), pp. 210–21 (p. 210). The Book of Margery Kempe is the earliest extant autobiographical work in English; see Carolyn Dinshaw, “Margery Kempe,” in Dinshaw and Wallace (2003), pp. 222–39. Jennifer Summit, “Women and Authorship,” in Dinshaw and Wallace (2003), pp. 91–108 (p. 91). Maureen Bell, “Women Writing and Women Written,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. IV: 1557–1695, eds J. Barnard and D.F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), pp. 431–51 (p. 431). Summit also usefully notes that medieval anonymity was seen not as a lack of authorship, but as a form of authorship with cultural value in its own right (2003, p. 95). The will disposed of lands, whereas testaments dealt with moveable property (McFarlane, 1972, pp. 209–10; cited in Meale, 1993, p. 130). Testaments, however, cannot give a full view of the nature and extent of the female book-owning population since they are limited in terms of the marital status and class of the women to whom they refer (1993, p. 131).

176  Instructing and Constructing Women 24 Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Widows,” in Dinshaw and Wallace (2003), pp. ­58–69 (p. 66). 25 Joan Buckland was married to a councillor of John, duke of Bedford, a merchant of the Calais Staple and a Treasurer and Victualler of Calais under Henry VI. At the time of her death, Joan was living at her manor in Edgecote in Oxfordshire (Meale, 1993, pp. 132–33). See also Jenny Stratford, “Joan Buckland (d. 1462),” in Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, eds C. ­Barron and A.F. Sutton (London: Hambledon, 1994), pp. 113–28. 26 D.H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 14. 27 Green notes that for scholars like Clanchy “the widespread literacy amongst laypeople on which the success of the printed book depended was due to mothers teaching their children the elements of reading in the home, an extension of literacy from its earlier location in the monastery” (2007, p. 95, citing Clanchy, 1993, p. 245 and 1984, pp. 33–9). It has also been suggested that the “exclusion of women from public activity in the spiritual and intellectual life of the ecclesiastic hierarchy may have encouraged them compensatorily to involve themselves in more private devotional reading” (Green, 2007, p. 129). 28 Hellwarth draws attention to the work of Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003) and Frances Dolan, “Reading, Writing, and Other Crimes,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, eds V. Traub, M.L. Kaplan and D. Callaghan (­Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 142–67. 29 Second only to devotional works in terms of texts owned and read by women are romances, in both French and English; however, the evidence that women were readers of Chaucer, Gower and other English poets is scant, with the exception of Lydgate, the audience for whom certainly comprised women (Meale, 1993, pp. 139, 142; Green, 2007, p. 129). Meale notes, however, that evidence for female reception of Chaucer and Gower may not have survived (p. 142). 30 Julia Boffey, “Women authors and women’s literacy in fourteenth- and ­fi fteenth-century England,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150– 1500, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 17, ed C.M. Meale (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 159–82 (p. 159). 31 In other words, this chapter does not seek to identify direct, specific instructions to women, or dedications to individual women, but rather an implicit, silent audience for whom the reading material under discussion might be deemed relevant or suitable. 32 George Shuffleton (ed), How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter, TEAMS Middle English Texts (http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams [accessed 30 June 2018]); this fact is also noted by Tauno F. Mustanoja (ed), The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, The Good Wyfe Wold a Pylgremage, The Thewis of Gud Women (Helsinki: Annales Academiæ Scientiarum Pennicæ BLXI, 1948), p. 5. Shuffleton’s edition was first published in Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University for TEAMS, 2008), pp.  35–9; 427–31; 599–600; this edition is also available online at http://d.lib. rochester.edu/search/robbins/Ashmole+61?filters=sm_cck_field_text_ project%3A%22TEAMS+Middle+­English+Text%22 [accessed 30 June 2018]. See NIMEV 1882; DIMEV 3087. See also F.J. Furnivall (ed), Queene Elizabethes Achademy, etc. EETS ES 8 (1869; repr. 1973), pp. 44–51. 33 Felicity Riddy, “Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text,” Speculum 71.1 (1996): 66–86 (p. 86).

Instructing and Constructing Women  177 34 A. Leslie Harris, “Instructional Poetry for Medieval Children,” English Studies 74.2 (1993): 124–32 (p. 126). 35 Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for Women (Hamden: Archon Books, 1983), p. 64. 36 This type of opening echoes the ballad tradition but that more properly it might be described as “recited minstrelsy” since ballads were traditionally sung. Nonetheless, it is strongly evocative of popular writings like outlaw tales and popular romance by virtue of the opening formula and the use of direct address; see Thomas H. Ohlgren, ed, Medieval Outlaws: Twelve Tales in Modern English Translation (Indiana: Parlor Press, 2005) p. 357. 37 All quotations from How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter are taken from the Shuffleton edition for TEAMS Middle English Texts. As mentioned, he edits the text from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61. 38 Following the fourth line Shuffleton introduces quotation marks, which last until the end of the edited text, and which further indicate that the speech is reported. 39 Harris contends that the address to a specific audience, such as a “dear daughter,” is not only a literary device to “make didacticism more palatable to a general reader” but also a “focus on adult worry about the young,” borne out by the frequent attention to child-rearing in such literature (1992, p. 131). 40 Riddy acknowledges that while the work is directed at an audience of young women, the possibility exists that it was also intended for mothers (p. 80). 41 Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry or The Book of the Knight of the Tower was compiled around 1372 by the fourth Geoffroy de la Tour Landry for his three daughters – Jeanne, Anne and Marie – indicating how they ought to behave as women and as wives; Offord describes it as a “compilation of moral precepts, with advice on how religious and social conduct”; M.Y. Offord (ed), The Book of the Knight of the Tower (London: EETS SS 2, 1971), p. xxxviii. The popularity of the work can be attested by the existence of various manuscripts and translations (Green, 2007, p. 199) and by the end of the fifteenth century it was very widely known. Offord edits William Caxton’s translation; the translation was completed in June 1483 and the text was printed at Westminster in 1484 (1971, p. xi). The prologue appended by Caxton states that the text is “a special doctryne & techynge by which al yong gentyl wymen specially may lerne to bihaue them self virtuously / as well in their vyrgynyte as in their wedlock & wedowhede” (­Offord, 1971, p. 3). 42 On silence and obedience in women see Rachel E. Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 115–8. In medieval literature, Griselda’s silent obedience and patience is a mark of extreme virtue in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale. And in early modern English drama, female self-expression is associated with lasciviousness; see Marguérite Corporaal, “An Empowering Wit and an ‘Unnatural’ Tragedy: Margaret Cavendish’s Representation of the Tragic Female Voice,” Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 14 (May, 2004): 12.1–26 (4). https:// extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-14/corpempo.html [accessed 30 June 2018]. 43 NIMEV 1985; DIMEV 3241. The other extant MSS are: Cambridge, Emmanuel College I.4.31 (c. 1350); California, Huntington HM 128 (c.1425); London, Lambeth Palace 853 (c. 1425); and Cambridge, Trinity College R.3.19 (c. 1463–90). See Mustanoja (1948, pp. 92 and following). 4 4 George Shuffleton (ed), “Introduction,” Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2008), www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/sgas.htm

178  Instructing and Constructing Women

45 46

47

48 49 50 51

52

[accessed 30 June 2018]. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61 is a paper volume of ff. ii + 162 + iii, measuring 418 × 140mm, and rebound in 1986 in white leather, but the original binding has been retained by the Bodleian Library. The MS is long and narrow in format and may be best described as a ledger; I am grateful to Margaret Connolly for sharing her thoughts on this volume. Volumes of this format were also used as account books; for an example of this see Richard Hill’s commonplace book, Oxford, Balliol ­College MS 354 (available online at: www.flickr.com/photos/­ balliolarchivist/sets/72157626911330875/ [accessed 30 June 2018]). The volume also ­contains poems, carols and family memoranda. For a detailed MS description and discussion of the scribal quirks and practices of Rate see Shuffleton (2008). Summit makes a similar argument about female authorship, arguing that anonymity is not a lack but rather a “form of authorship with cultural value in its own right” (2003, p. 95). STC 21499; USTC 513410. The anthology has been associated with John Stow, who is thought to have edited several literary works or collections in addition to his 1561 edition of Chaucer. The title page has the attribution “…now first published by J.S.”; Gillespie states that Stow owned a manuscript containing the fifteenth-century Guistard and Sismond (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19) but that it varies considerably from the version that is printed in 1597. She also notes that the comment made about the Northern Mother’s Blessing –that it was “written nine yeares before the death of G. Chaucer,” is typical of Stow, but that his association with this publication is less than secure. See Alexandra Gillespie, “Introduction,” in John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past, eds I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (London: The British Library, 2004), pp. 1–12 (p. 11). For Guistard and Sismond see NIMEV 3258; DIMEV 5116; for The Way to Thrifte see NIMEV 1982; DIMEV 3237. The volume was reprinted in 1812 by James Ballantyne (twenty-five copies only); by Henry Gibbs in the Hystorie of the Moste Noble Knight Plasidas (Roxburghe Club, 1873) in a reprint of a volume that had been compiled by Samuel Pepys, now in Pepys library, Magdalene College Cambridge; and The Good Wife was reprinted by William Hazlitt in Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England, 4 vols (1864–66), I pp. 178–92. The volume was printed by Robert Robinson for Robert Dexter in 1597. I refer to the version extant in Ashmole 61 here, the base text for the edition produced by Shuffleton (2008). Natasha Glaisyer, “Popular Didactic Literature,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, volume I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 510–19 (p. 510). Instruction of the kind that we find in The Good Wife and similar works “was usually derived from the current wisdom of the day and from the numerous popular collections of wise sayings based on the Bible (especially on the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus) and on the works of classical and early Christian writers. An important work in this respect is…Cato’s Distichs. It had an extensive influence on the instructive literature of the Middle Ages” (Mustanoja, 1948, p. 78). On male authorship and control of texts for women see Monica H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), in particular chapter one on Trota of Salerno (pp. 29–69) and chapter 4 (pp. 163–203) on vernacular writing. Barratt (1992, p. 27) rejects any question that Trotula actually existed, stating that she was indeed a practicing physician in the

Instructing and Constructing Women  179

53 54 55

56

57 58

59

60

late eleventh or early twelfth century in the Italian city Salerno, a famous centre of medical education in the Middle Ages. However, the only work that can be attributed to her with any certainty is the Practica secundum Trotam (The Practice according to Trotula), which was not translated out of Latin. See also Green (1989 and 2001), who in the latter work suggests that though the Latin Trotula texts represent “the most popular assembly of materials on women’s medicine from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries,” it was able to reach a much wider audience than one composed of “educated elites” by virtue of its frequent translation into most of the western European vernacular languages” (p. xi). On the circulation and different recensions of the Latin text see Green (2001, pp. xi–xii) and Green (2008, p. 166). In the latter, Green identifies five distinct redactions of the Trotula material circulating in English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. John F. Benton, “Women’s Problems and the Professionalization of Medicine in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 30–53. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999), p. 157. It is noteworthy that Chaucer’s mention of Trotula in Jankyn’s ‘Book of Wicked Wives’ “may suggest that the text circulating under her name was a byword for a particularly wayward or dangerous femininity” (­Wogan-Browne et al, 1999, p. 157). The Trotula texts were also well known in their Latin versions, with more than 3 dozen of the 118 extant Latin manuscripts having been copied in England (Green, 1992, p. 64). The Wife of Bath says that Jankyn’s book, which “[f]or his desport he wolde rede alway”, contains works by Trotula and “Helowys” (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, ll. 670, 677; The Riverside Chaucer p. 114). The extract supplied in Wogan-Browne et al. (1999) is from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 37, ff. 1r –2r. Green notes that the text was compiled from various sources, relying heavily on the Gynaecia of Musico as well as the Trotula major and Trotula minor (Green, 1992, p. 64). myn ententyffe bysynes is glossed as “exert myself diligently” (­Wogan-Browne et al, 1999, p. 158 n. 11–12). See also Keiser (1998, pp. 3667–69, 3861–63). The Voigts-Kurtz Search Program lists a total of 237 records on gynecological works dating from the eleventh century (eVK2, Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English. http://cctr1.umkc.edu/search [accessed 30 June 2018]. See Keiser (1998, p. 3861) in which he refers to the text as Trotula A: Our Lord When he Stored the World; and Green (1992, pp. 53, 64). The manuscripts that preserve the text are: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 483 and Douce 37, Cambridge University Library MS Ii.6.33, London, British Library, MS Sloane 421A, and London, British Library, MS Additional 12195. Green (1992, p. 64) also notes that over 3 dozen of the 118 extant Latin versions in Europe were copied in England; see also Green (2008, pp. 181 and following). For a more detailed discussion of fascicles containing medical texts for women see Green (1992, pp. 58–63). For a description of Cambridge University Library MS Ii.6.33 see Margaret Connolly, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist 19: Manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge (Dd-Oo) (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2009), pp. 229–31. The volume is small enough to have been portable and perhaps was even used at the bedside.

180  Instructing and Constructing Women 61 Green (2008, p. 185) observes that of the five extant manuscripts, at least three may have been owned by women on occasion; in addition, the small format of the extant manuscripts is reminiscent of the books of hours and prayer books owned by many women of the period. 62 See Joseph J. Gwara, and Mary Morse, “A Birth Girdle Printed by Wynkyn de Worde,” The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 13.1 (2012): 33–62 (35). The authors focus on a girdle printed by de Worde that invokes the intercession of SS Quiricus and Julitta, supposedly protectors of women in labour, but they also include work on five fifteenth-century amulet rolls that were likely used to protect parturient women, one of which was likely intended to mimic an actual girdle “with a strategic placement of particular prayers against [the woman’s] womb” (p. 37). One of the verbal incantations to SS Quiricus and Julitta included on the printed broadside may be found in British Library, Sloane MS 783B, a medical miscellany which also contains an incomplete copy of the Trotula (p. 41). 63 See Brown and Higgs (1988, pp. 45–51), Griffin (2013, pp. xix–xx), and Thomson (1979, pp. 193–211). 64 The first part of this theological, medical and astrological miscellany is in Latin, with some English at f. 66r; the second part is nearly all in East Anglian English; it is copied by several hands. See M. Benskin, M. Laing, V.  Karaiskos and K. Williamson, An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html ­[accessed 30 June 2018]. 65 See, for example, Elaine Hobby, “’dreams and plain dotage’: The Value of The Birth of Mankind,” Essays and Studies 61: Literature and Science, ed Sharon Rushton (2008): 35–52. The Birth of Mankind (1540) was the “first published text in English that sought to explain to the general reader where babies came from and how to look after them in their infancy” and was incredibly popular, remaining in print in its revised and expanded version of 1545 for more than one hundred years (p. 35). The work was translated from classical sources by Richard Jonas (High Master of St Paul’s School in London) and vastly expanded by physician Thomas Raynalde to include material and illustrations from Vesalius (pp. 35, 37). Jonas intended the work to appeal not just to medical practitioners but to the general reader, and he included in the introduction an “Admonition to the Reader.” Similar to the Trotula, it warns men not to use its sexual information in an ungodly way (p. 37) and perhaps implying that main readership will be male, though Hobby notes that Raynalde’s re-editing of the work introduces the subtitle “The Women’s Book” and at times explicitly addresses the female reader (p. 41). See also Elaine Hobby (ed), The Birth of Mankind (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 66 Hellwarth cites the examples of James Guillemeaus, Child-Birth Or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (1612); Jacob Reuff, The Expert Midwife (1637); and Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered (1671) and she discusses at length Eucharius Rösslin’s The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives (1513) and its influence on the English Birth of Mankind. 67 Hellwarth argues that in print these texts take on an “instructional, almost corrective tone” and that they become “more clearly addressed to a particular readership […] than their medieval counterparts” (2002, p. 51). For further discussion see Hellwarth, 2002, p. 51 and following. 68 Sara Mendelson, “Women and Print,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, volume I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed Joad Raymond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 280–93 (p. 280).

Instructing and Constructing Women  181 69 The English Reformation “brought a more inclusive spirit to popular print culture…for the first time in British history, plebeian women could cite instances of positive representations of ordinary members of the female sex – some of them from very humble backgrounds but also including Elizabeth I – who had performed heroic deeds for the Protestant cause” (Mendelson, 2011, p. 283). 70 No female authors of blackletter ballads before 1660 have been identified but, according to Mendelson, “women were closely involved in the ballad trade, working as itinerant ballad sellers and advertising their wares by singing in the street” (2011, p. 283). In addition, the popular querelle des femmes – publications that referenced the wider debate relating to the “nature and capacities of the female sex” – led to numerous publications on either side throughout the late 1500s and 1600s (2011, p. 288). See also the essays in Joad Raymond (ed, 2011). 71 STC 24372; USTC 505447. 7 2 Tusser (c.1524–80) was born near Witham, Essex, and was elected to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1543, when he would have been nineteen; he had previously been in the choir at St Paul’s Cathedral and also attended Eton. By 1544 he had left Cambridge to serve William Paget at court and at his household in Beaudesert, Staffordshire. Tusser married c.1552 and left the service of Lord Paget, establishing himself (with little success) as a farmer. On the death of his wife he married a younger woman, with whom he had three children, and eventually he settled at Fairsted, near Witham. See Andrew McRae, “Tusser, Thomas (c. 1524–80),” Oxford  Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford UP, 2004). https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ul.ie/10.1093/ref:odnb/27898 [accessed 30 June 2018]. 73 I refer throughout to the 1571 edition, a copy of which is preserved at the British Library; it was “set foorth by Thomas Tusser Gentleman, Seruant to the right honorable Lord Paget of Beaudesert” (title page) and printed “at London in Fletestrete within Temple barre at the signe of the Hand and starre, by Richard Tottyl. Anno. 1571. Cum priulegio” (STC 24374; USTC 507367). 74 The reference here to marriage in terms of the two parts of the work might lead us to speculate that Tusser may have compiled the tract on housewifery for his new, much younger and perhaps inexperienced wife. 75 Jason Scott-Warren, “Reading Graffiti in the Early Modern Book,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73.3 (2010): 363–81 (p. 364). 76 There are in fact 120 good points, rather than the 100 mentioned in the title. 77 A “slut’s corner” is a corner left uncleaned by a sluttish person; “slut, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, www.oedcom/view/­ Entry/182347 [Accessed 14 November 2018]. 78 The Sylvan idyll is indicated throughout by instructions to the wife, in particular, with respect to the joys of hard work; for example, she is enjoined to take pleasure in “good musicke”, for the reason that “[s]uch seruants are often both paineful & good, / that sing in their labour like birdes in the wood” (sig. H2v). 79 This was also printed by Richard Tottel in London in quarto format (STC 24375; USTC 507680). 80 The text runs to approximately ninety pages and was reissued at various times throughout the late sixteenth century: 1574, 1575, 1576, 1577, 1579, 1580, 1585, 1586, 1590, 1593, 1597, and 1599. It continued to be of interest, being printed several times throughout the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s, though with less frequency.

182  Instructing and Constructing Women 81 McRae observes that those with a “practical interest in Tusser’s work were more appreciative” than literary commentators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of whom, including Gabriel Harvey, were scornful of his vulgarity. However, he was admired by men such as William Webbe, who described Tusser as the first georgic poet, and Francis Meres, who thought him very witty (ODNB). 82 On Markham see Hunter, 2002, pp. 515–19 and F.N.L. Poynter, A ­Bibliography of Gervase Markham, 1568?–1637 (Oxford: The Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1962). 83 STC 17342; printed at London by John Beale for Roger Jackson, 1615. For a discussion see Wendy Wall, “Reading the Home: The Case of The English Housewife,” in Renaissance Paratexts, eds Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 165–84. As Wall notes, the text was so popular as to go through ten editions in the seventeenth century (2011, p. 165), with versions appearing in 1623, 1631 (two editions), 1649, 1653, 1660, 1664, 1683 (two editions) and 1695; some later editions also appeared under the title Way to get wealth (2011, p. 254, no. 2). For a full account and edition of this text see Michael R. Best (ed), The English Housewife by Geravse Markham (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986; repr. 1994, 1998). Best suggests that Markham continued to issue different versions of his work to make extra revenue and notes that at one point there were five of his volumes on diseases of horses on the market, leading the Stationers to ask him to sign a memorandum, as follows: “I Gervase Markham of London, gent., do promise hereafter never to write any more book or books to be printed of the diseases or cures of any cattle, as horse, ox, cow, sheep, swine, goats, etc.” (1986, p. xiv). 84 For the purposes of this study I am concerned with the 1623 edition. 85 Hunter observes that Markham claims to convey the knowledge of a specific woman, perhaps the Dowager Countess herself; on the verso of the English Huswife titlepage (sig. Q1v) his publisher Roger Jackson notes that the book is “based on an approved Manuscript which [the author] happily light on, belonging sometime to an honourable Personage of this kingdome, who was singular amongst those of her ranke for many of the qualities here set forth” (2002, p. 519). 86 Revealingly, Best refers at one point to “Markham’s tidy mind” (1986, p. xxvii).

Afterword

Although the chief aim of this study has been to demonstrate that works of instruction can offer fresh perspectives on textual cultures and social attitudes from the period c. 1350–1650, it is heavily invested in the relationship between word and form, and the synergies between manuscript and print, and has read the works not in isolation from but in tandem with material contexts. This kind of reading, focused on the “material aspects and surrounding social practices of texts,” is increasingly seen as a valuable way to understand more fully textual content, and one that also negotiates the relationship between cultures of manuscript and print.1 Materiality, for this study, is central as a “critical mode of reading” (Daybell and Hinds, 2010, p. 2), a mode that when brought to bear on instructional writing, which is the poor relation of the literature of the period, has the potential to augment our sense of the significance of that writing. A central aspect of this study, then, has been to consider transmission and dissemination and the specific relationship between the author or authorial voice, the scribe or copyist, and the reader or listeners; in other words, how a work or volume communicates, both with contemporary readers and across time, with later audiences and the modern scholar. Consequently, my analysis has been alive to the individual volumes in which works are extant, both manuscripts and printed books, treating both formats as unique and uniquely revealing. A work in manuscript may be comprised of several discrete aspects or parts, and manuscripts themselves are often composite, or miscellaneous, consisting of a selection of unrelated texts; but that collection may have been consciously compiled, held together by a trend or trends less obvious to the modern reader. Similarly a book containing mixed genres of writing and knowledge need not be a miscellaneous gathering; the principles of organization may not be entirely obvious, but I hope to have shown, in some cases at least, that instructional genres of writing, particularly those that are transmitted in late medieval manuscripts, intersect and interact with their companion texts in fascinating ways. With the introduction of printing it became possible in theory to produce identical texts, but the books remain singular and interesting, and like manuscripts they often

184  Afterword display interventions by and engagement from different readers. And, as we have seen, the “process that turns a handwritten manuscript into a printed text is by no means straightforward” and it prompts the question of what happens to a text and its “communicative context” when printed (Jucker and Pahta, 2011, p. 4). The instructional writing extant in manuscript and print is incredibly varied in content and scope as well as in its attention to different aspects of materiality, and this study has offered only a small sense of that diversity. Despite evidence that suggests that for certain works in print there was a new class of professional reader, instruction often retains a direct interest in the entertainment of its audience, frequently enveloping elements of fiction and allegory, and paying close attention to narrative strategies, and importing such strategies from literature, or overlapping with commonly known devotional practices and texts. The presence of literary elements mixed with material that is socially, politically, and culturally interesting should enable us to challenge any simplistic view that instructional works cannot contribute to literary studies or the history of the book in any meaningful way. Nor should we assume that instructional literature is itself simplistic: this research has found that scholarly programmes to categorise, label, and catalogue older texts for a contemporary scholarly audience frequently result in definitions that, while necessary in order to help scholarship make sense of older textual trends and reading habits, actually oversimplify the evident complexity of those trends and habits. In reality, this study has revealed a comfortable intermingling of various genres of texts and writings, a complexity that gives this type of writing a particular richness and relevance. Instructional works in English occupy a particular place in the literary and textual canon. They reached and appealed to readers from all levels of society; and they are preserved in a surprising variety of manuscripts from the later medieval period, sitting easily alongside works of literature, history, devotion, politics and economics in manuscripts that we might consider to be carefully or professionally produced, as well as existing in the more humble type of household book that may have been homemade, compiled over time, but equally reflecting the interests and attitudes of its owner or owners. Printed works of instruction enabled a manuscript culture that persisted into the seventeenth century: they preserved recipes for ink and other materials to do with book and document production, and very often they provided the material for home book assembly: shorter pieces of instruction that were accessible and easily copied. Manuscripts themselves retained their cultural and textual value and were not simply discarded or disregarded, and they not only circulated alongside printed works but also contained the raw material to which the early printers such as Caxton, de Worde, and Pynson and, later the compilers, editors and authors of those new works of

Afterword  185 instruction, turned. The public appetite for works that were practical and accessible is yet another a unifying feature, sewing up further that perceived gap between the medieval and the early modern, and for the most part there was continuity both in terms of attitudes to instructional texts and the public attitude towards them and, generally speaking, in terms of the material that circulated in manuscript and print; thus instructional works repay investigation and close reading both materially and contextually, and there remains much work to be carried out on these varied, rich, and rewarding writings.

Note 1 James Daybell and Peter Hinds, “Introduction: Material Matters, in Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580– 1730 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–20 (p. 1).

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196 Bibliography Ivy, G.S., “The Bibliography of the Manuscript Book,” in The English Library Before 1700, eds F. Wormwald and C.E. Wright (London: Athlone, 1958), pp. 32–65. Jacobs, Nicholas, “The Old English ‘Bookmoth’ Riddle Reconsidered,” Notes & Queries 36 (1988): 290–92. John, Rylands, University Library, Manchester. www.library.manchester.ac.uk [accessed 30 June 2018]. Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998). Johnston, Michael, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (­Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014). Jones, Peter Murray, “John of Arderne and the Mediterranean Tradition of Scholastic Surgery,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, eds L. García-Ballester, R. French, J. Arrizabalaga and A. Cunningham (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), pp. 289–321. ———, “Medicine and Science,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. III: 1400–1557, eds L. Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 433–48. Jucker, Andreas H. and Päivi Pahta, “Communicating Manuscripts: Authors, Scribes, Readers, Listeners and Communicating Characters,” in Communicating Early English Manuscripts, eds Andreas H. Jucker and Päivi Pahta. Studies in English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 3–10. Kassell, Lauren, “Almanacs and Prognostications,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed J. Raymond (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), pp. 431–42. Keiser, George R., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, Volume 10: Works of Science and Information, ed A.E. Hartung (New ­Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998). ———, “Practical Books for the Gentleman,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. III, eds Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 470–94. ———, “Scientific, Medical and Utilitarian Prose,” in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed A.S.G. Edwards (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 231–48. ———, “Verse Introductions to Middle English Medical Treatises,” English Studies 84 (2004): 301–17. Kekewich, Margaret L., et al. (eds), The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John Vale’s Book (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing for Richard III & Yorkist History Trust, 1995). Ker, Neil R. Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 3 vols (Oxford: ­Clarendon, 1969–2002). ———, introd., Facsimile of British Museum MS Harley 2253 EETS 255 (­London: Oxford UP, 1965). Keynes, Geoffrey, A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968). Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren (eds), Robin Hood and other Outlaw Tales (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications/TEAMS Middle ­English Texts, 1997). Knoppers, Laura Lunger (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009).

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Index of Manuscripts

Aberystwyth National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn II.i (olim Porkington 10) ix, 79–85, 86, 87, 91–92, 104–105n26, 105n30, 107nn44–47 National Library of Wales, Peniarth 394D (olim Hengwrt 92) 48, 52, 65n27, 69n60, 69n62, 69nn63–64 Cambridge Emmanuel College, I.4.31 177n43 Trinity College, O.9.38 70n71 Trinity College, O.10.21 116 Trinity College, R.3.19 177n43, 178n46 Trinity College, R.14.41 (913) 31–32n47 Trinity College, R.14.45 92–94, 108n57 University Library, Ee.4.31 113 University Library, Ff.2.38 105n28 University Library, Ii.6.2 108n53 University Library, Ii.6.33 160, 179n59, 179n60 University Library, Ll.4.14 113, 139n17 Copenhagen Royal Library New Collection, 314 15–16, 31nn42–43 Exeter Cathedral Library, 3510 (Exeter Book) 74, 102n3 Lincoln Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 70n71 London British Library Additional 10440 18–20, 31–32n47, 32nn48–51

British Library Additional 12195 161–179n59, 180nn63–64 British Library Additional 29729 29n28 British Library Additional 31042 70n71 British Library Additional 48031A 36 British Library Cotton Nero A.x 76–77, 103n14 British Library Cotton Nero D.iv 102n8 British Library Egerton 2433 116, 118, 139n19 British Library Harley 278 (Ludlow Manuscript) 78 British Library Harley 1684 2 British Library Harley 2252 86–90, 91–92 British Library Harley 2253 78, 94–95 British Library Harley 2381 16, 31n44 British Library Harley 4011 54, 40–41, 53–55, 65n29, 65–66n32, 69n66, 69–70n67 British Library Royal 17.C.15 16–18, 31n45, 31n46 British Library Royal 17.D.15 34, 33–37, 60–61, 61nn1–2, 61–62n3, 62nn5–8, 63n9, 63n14, 63–64n16, 69n65 British Library Royal Appendix 70 63–64n16 British Library Sloane 421A 179n59 British Library Sloane 686 48 British Library Sloane 783B 180n62 British Library Sloane 965 119–21, 139n20, 139–40n23 British Library Sloane 1315 57–58, 138n8, 139n18 British Library Sloane 1317 122–23, 140n27

208  Index of Manuscripts British Library Sloane 2027 57, 55–57, 59, 69n65, 70n72, 70n73, 70–71n74, 71n75 British Library Sloane 2453 116, 117 British Library Sloane 2584 104–05n26 Lambeth Palace 853 177n43 Society of Antiquaries 282 50–52, 65n27 Society of Antiquaries 287 48–52, 65n27, 69n62 University College Anglia 6 122, 139n17 Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 397 12–14, 15, 34n38 Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 564 117 Manchester Chetham’s Library, 8009 (Mun.A.6.31) 40–41, 58–59, 65n29, 71n76 New Haven Yale Center for British Art, R486.M43 1450 104–105n26, 105n30 New York Columbia University, MS Plimpton 260 122, 139n17, 140n25

Oxford Balliol College, 354 178n44 Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61 65n26, 105n28, 155–57, 177n38, 177–78n44, 178n49 Bodleian Library, Ashmole 189 114 Bodleian Library, Ashmole 1477 xx, 144–49, 172, 173nn2–5Bodleian Library, Bodley 483 179n59 Bodleian Library, Douce 37 160, 179n56, 179n59 Bodleian Library, Lat. Misc. C. 66 89–92, 107nn48–49, 108nn54–55 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 813 107–108n51 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D. 238 124 Bodleian Library, Rawlinson D. 1220 121, 140n24 Bodleian Library, Tanner 2 96–97 Bodleian Library, Tanner 407 107n51 Paris Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 8216 2 Bibliothèque National, anglais 25 30n35 San Marino Huntington Library, HM 128 177n43 Washington Folger Shakespeare Library, v.a.430 175n15

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Agnus Castus 58 Alexander (the Great) 56 almanac(s) xv, xix–xx, xxi–xxii, xxiv, xxix n41, 26, 110–43; see also Middleton, Thomas Allen, Thomas 110 Allestree, Richard: A New Almanack and Prognostication (1639) xxi, 132–35, 142n45, 142n50 Anglo-Saxon England xviii, 74 Anglo-Saxon literature 73–74, 77, 102n4 Antwerp 95 Aristotle 56 Arnold, Richard: Arnold’s Chronicle (The Customs of London, 1502) ix, 95–97, 108–109n62, 109n63 The Art of Limming (1573) 97–98, 109n64 Arundel, Archbishop: Constitutions 85 Arundel, Earl of 133 Ashburnham House 62n6 Ashby-de-la-Zouche 143n55 Ashfield, Sir Edmund 99 astrolabe 116, 130, 136, 139n16 astrology i, xiii, xxiv, 13, 29n27, 110–43, 140n26, 140n31, 143n55 Augsburg 2 von Augsburg Steiner, Heinrich: Kleine wundartzney 2 The Babees Book 39, 65–66n32 ballads 42, 96, 150, 162, 163, 177n36, 181n70 Ballantyne, James 178n47 Barnet, Battle of 36, 37 Bartholomaeus Anglicus: De proprietatibus rerum 112

Bate, John: Mysteries of Nature and Art (1634) 100, 109n68 Baumfylde, Mary 175n15 Beale, John 182n83 Bedford, John Duke of 176n25 van Berghen, Adraien 95 Berners, Dame Juliana: Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms (Book of St Albans) 47, 67n46 Beveridge, William (bishop of St Aspah) 63–64n16 Bible 73, 76, 84–85, 114, 156; Ecclesiasticus 178n51; Book of Proverbs 178n51; Book of Revelation 76; Wycliffite 85 birth girdles 161 Blackfriars 141n42 Boleyn, Anne 29n29 Bollard, Nicholas: Craft of Grafting 68n55, 79 Bologna 1, 2, 27n4 Bonetus Locatellus 2 Book of Aristotle 140n28 Booke of Cookerye 145 The Book of Destinary 118, 121, 122 Book of the Duke and the Emperor 59, 71n76 The Boke of Pawmestry 122 The Book of Physiognomy 122 books: bequests of 148–49, 175n23; cartularies 91; commonplace 52, 86, 89, 90, 91, 95, 107n43, 107n51, 121, 138–39n15, 163, 177–78n44; cookery 48, 50, 68n53, 68n56, 68n58, 144–46, 157, 171; courtesy xxii, xxiii, 99, 157, 33–72; of hours 121, 123, 148, 180n61; household

210 Index 38–40, 49–50, 78, 85, 105n28, 111, 144–46, 149, 155, 157, 160, 163–84; medical/surgical xxi, xvi, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxvin12, xxviin21, 1–32, 111, 112, 113, 118–20, 144, 148–50, 155, 157–63, 174n8, 178–79n52,179n60, 180n62, 180n64, 180n65; printed xii, xiv, xv–xx, xxii, xxiii–xxiv, xxiv, 1–11, 21–32, 45–48, 89, 95–101, 121–22, 123–37, 144–46, 147, 163–72, 183–84; prices of 142n46, 142– 43n54; receipt / recipe books xvii, 144–46, 174n8, 174n10, 174n11; seditious 126, 143n57; selling of 83–84, 88–89, 108n52, 153n55, 168; watermarks in 62n8, 107n49; and women 144–84; see also printing press; recipes Boulogne 29n255 Boys, Lady Sybille 65n26 Braem, Conradus 2 Brahe, Tyco 136 British Museum 20, 31n44, 31n45, 32n48, 35, 36, 62n8, 63–64n16, 70n72, 71n75; Montagu House 62n8 broadsides 161, 162 Browne, Daniel 135 Browne, Edward (Dr) 19, 20, 32n53 Browne, John 109n67 Browne, Sir Thomas 19–21, 25, 32nn52–56; Religio Medici 19, 20 Brunfels, Otto: Ein nützliches wunderartzney büchlein 2; Kleyne wundartznei 2–3 Buckland, Joan 148, 176n25 Buckminster, Thomas 134–35; An Almanack and Prognostication for the Year 1598 142n52 Bullein, William xvi, xxi; Bulleins Bulwarke of Defence Against All Sicknes, Sorenes and Woundes (1562) xxviiin37; The Feuer Pestilence xxvi n12 Burgh, Benedict: Governance of Kings and Princes 56; Secrees of the old philosoffres 69n65 Buxton, John 142n46 Byng, Thomas (master of Clare College Cambridge) 133 Bynneman, Henrie 141n41

Calais 55, 176n25 Cambridge 135 Cardan, Jerome 136 Carmelite order 161 de Castello, Bonaventura 2 Castiglione: The Courtier (1528) 38, 64n20 Caxton, William xxvin5, 25, 47, 48, 67n47–48, 157, 177n41, 184; Book of Curtesye (1477) 47, 67n47; Boke of fayttes of armes and of chyualrye (1489) 70–71n74; Book of the Knight of the Tower (1484) 177n41 Certaine Worthy Manvscript Poems of Great Antiquitie Reserued long in the Studies of a Norfolke Gentleman (1597) 156–57 The Charter of Christ 155 Circa Instans 12, 118 Civil War 132, 143n55 Chamber, John (surgeon) 7, 8, 21, 29n29 Chamberlain, Joseph 135 chanson d’aventure 41–42, 29n30 Charles II, king of England 18, 62n6, 62n8, 63–64n16 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy 59, 64n17 charms xvi, 58, 161 Chaucer, Geoffrey 42–43, 60–61, 67n47, 74, 149, 162, 164, 167, 176n29, 178n46, 179n55; Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn 102n5; Boece 74; Canterbury Tales xiii, xxiii, 33–37, 42–43, 60–61, 61n1, 62n5; The Clerk’s Tale 177n42; The Wife of Bath’s Tale 149, 179n55; Troilus and Criseyde 9, 30n34, 74, 85 Cheshire 68n54, 89, 104–05n25 Christine de Pizan: Boke of fayttes of armes and of chyualrye (1489) 70–71n74; Livre de la Cité des Dames 175n19 Churchyard, Thomas 26–27n1 Clare College, Cambridge 133 Cleanness 76 Clever, William: The Flower of Phisicke (1590), 145, 174n7 Cole, Thomas 29n27 Colyns, John 86–89, 91–92, 95, 96, 106–107n41 “The Complaint of a Hare” 79

Index  211 Copernicus 136; Defence of Heliocentrism 26; On the Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs 26 Cotton, Sir Robert 100 Craft of Dying 53 The Crafte of Lymnynge of Bokys 79–89, 107n44 Creake (nr. Walsingham): Austin canons at 161 Cunningham, William (surgeon) 1, 22–23 Dade, William 135 Dame Courtesy 156 Daye, John 141n42 Dee, John 110, 137, 137n1 Dexter, Robert 156, 178n48 Digges, Leonard 110, 141n40; Almanacke and Prognostication (1556) 141n39; Generall Prognostication forever (1571) 141n39, 142n43; A Prognostication Euerlasting (1585) ix, 127–31, 141n39; Stratiocios (1579) 141n41; Tectonicon (1556) 129, 141n42 Digges, Thomas 26, 128–29, 141n39, 141n40 Le Dru, Pierre 3 “Earth upon Earth” 79 Edgecote (Oxfordshire) 176n25 Edward IV, king of England 35–37, 62n7, 64n17, 69n65, 70–71n74 Edward VI, king of England 29n29 Edward Fines, earl of Lincoln 128, 141n40 Egenloff, Christian 2, 3, 21, 28n19 Elizabeth I, queen of England 29n25, 110, 142n53, 168, 181n69 Elyot, Sir Thomas: The Book named the Governour 38, 64n20 envoy 45, 53, 56, 70n68, 70n70, 74–75 The Equatorie of the Planets 138n11 Erfurt 3 The Erle of Toulous 155 Essex 29n27, 140n27, 181n72 Eton College 181n72 Evans, John 143n55 D’Ewes, Anne 146 An Exact Table of Fees of all the Courts at Westminster (1694) 101 The Exafrenon 138n11

Flanders 70n69, 109n63 Fleet Street 1, 26n1, 109n67 The Flowre of Pysicke 145 de la Fontaine, Jean 3 forest 42, 43, 66n36 Forme of Cury 52, 69n62 Fortescue, Sir John: Somnium Vigilantis 36, 62n9–11 Frances, Countess Dowager of Exeter 169, 182n85 Frankfurt 3, 28n19 Frederick III, king of Denmark 31n42 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor 59 Frend, Gabriel 134–35 Frost, W. 135 Gale, Thomas (surgeon) 1, 23–24, 27n11, 28n11, 29n25; An Excellent Treatise on Wounds made with Gunneshot 29n25; Enchiridon of Chirurgery 5, 29n25 Galen 29n25, 58, 118 Galileo 136 Gallen (almanac maker) 142n46 Gemini, Thomas 141n39, 141–42n42 “A Generall Rewle for to yeue Medycyns” 58 Geoffroy de la Tour Landry 152, 177n41 George II, king of England 35 Gerlier, Durand 3 Gibbs, Henry: Hystorie of the Moste Noble Knight Plasidas 178n47 Glockner, Thomas 3 Godfridus Super Palladium 68n55 The Golden Table of Pythagoras 122 The Good Book of Kervynge and Servis 52 Götz, Paul 2 The Gouernment of Health (1558/9) xxviiin37 Gower, John 176n29 Grammar, Abraham 135 Granville, Mary 146 Gray’s Inn 142n46 Grosseteste, Robert 48, 50, 68n55 Guido Bonatus 128, 136 guilds xxii, 1, 2, 5, 7, 15, 28n11, 29n25, 29n29, 30nn31–32, 48, 79, 83–84, 89, 97, 104n23, 106n37 Guillemaeus, James: Child-Birth Or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (1612) 180n66

212 Index Gülfferich, Hermann 3 Guy de Chauliac 2, 15, 27n6, 28n11, 139n21; Chirurgia magna 119; Inventarie of Cyrurgie 30n35 Hall, John xvi, xxi, xxii–xxiii, 1–32; A Poesis in Forme of a Visyon 29n27; The Court of Virtue 5, 29n27; The Proverbs of Solomon 5, 26n8 Hall, Rowland 29n25 Hart, Andro 141n39 Hart, Richard, prior of Llanthony Secunda, Gloucestershire 63n16 Harvey, Gabriel 182n81 Hawkins, G. 135 Hazlitt, William: Remains of the Early Popular Poetry of England (1864) 178n47 Heber, Richard 20 Henri de Mondeville 27n6 Henry V, king of England xxiii, 40, 48, 53 Henry VI, king of England 55, 63n9, 69n65, 70–71n74, 176n25 Henry VIII, king of England 7, 28n11, 29n25, 29n29, 30n30, 64n20, 108n62 Henry Daniel: Dome of Urines (Liber uricrisarum) 112 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey 164 Herbst, Magno 3 Hewlett, William 135 Hill, Richard 90, 178n44 Hippocrates 118 Hippolito Donato 100 Hoby, Lady Margaret 175n15 Hoccleve, Thomas 106n40; The Regiment of Princes 103n18 Holbein, Hans (the Younger) 29n29 Hopper, Clarence 50–52 Howard, Katherine 30n30 How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter xxiv, 150–58, 162, 176n32, 177n39–40, 178n47, 178n51 How the Wise Man Taught his Son 155, 157 Hudie, Simon (surgeon) 7, 8, 21 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester xxiii, 39, 40–45, 53, 55, 64n24, 65n29, 66n37, 70n69 hunting xiii, 47, 65–66n32, 66n36, 67n46, 67n49

The Incestuous Daughter 155 Ipomydon 59, 86, 88, 107n42 Jackson, Roger 169, 182n83, 182n85 Jane, William 63–64n16 The Jealous Wife 155–56 Jerusalem 74–75, 102n9 Johannes aus Wetter Saur 28n19 John of Burgundy 139n21; Plague Tract 16, 119 John Dudley, 2nd Earl of Warwick 48 Jonas, Richard (High Master of St Paul’s School) 180n65 Jones, William 109n65, 135 Julian of Norwich: Revelation of Divine Love 175n19 Kantz, Gabriel 3 Kenilworth 142n53 Kent 27n2, 142n43 Kent, Elizabeth Grey, Countess of: A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery 174n8 King’s College Cambridge 181n72 Kingston (near London) xx, 145 Kingston, Felix 141n39, 141n42 Knyghthode and bataile 70–71n74 Kopf, Peter 28n19 Lakes, Thomas 135 Langley, Thomas 142n46 Lateran Council (1215) xxviiin30 Lanfranc of Milan xiv, xxiii, xxv, 1–32; Anatomia 12; Chirurgia magna 1, 3, 28n14; Chirurgia parva (‘A Little Treatise on Surgery’) xx, xxi, xxii, 1–32 L’Estrange, Roger 136, 143n57 Legenda Aurea 54–55 Leicester 142n53 Leicestershire 143n55 Leiden 32n55 Lewkenore, Dorothy (Dorothy of Kingston) xx, xxv, 145–49, 163, 165, 172 The Libelle of English Policy 54, 55, 70n68 Liber Catonis 59 Liber Niger 50 Licensing of the Press Act (1679) 143n57 Life of St Anne 59 Life of St Dorothy 59

Index  213 The Life of St Katherine 105n28 The Life of St Margaret 155 Lilly, William 132, 136, 137, 142n47, 143n55; Anima Astrologia (A Guide for Astrologers, 1676) 136; Christian Astrology (1647) 136; Merlinus Anglicus Junior 143n5; Merlini Anglici Ephermeris 143n55 litany, the 139n16 literacy xxii, 60, 68n51, 85, 89, 100, 107n50, 115–16, 125, 127, 147, 149, 156, 159, 176n27–28, 176n30 Lollards 84–85, 106n38 London 29n25, 29n29, 30n32, 59, 62n7, 63n14, 65n29, 83–86, 90, 95–97 Longe, Sarah 175n15 Louis XI, king of France 35, 37, 62n7 Louvain 2 Lucy, Walter 106n40 Lupton, Thomas: A Thousand Notable Things, of Sundry Sortes (1586) 145, 174n9 Lydgate, John 53, 55, 67n47, 176n29; “Desolation of Rome” 69–70n67; Dietary 54, 155; Lyf of our Lady 53; Rammeshorne 161; Secrees of the old philosoffres 69n65; Stans Puer ad Mensam 39, 45, 53, 65n26; “Tretise for Lauandres” 65n26; see also Benedict Burgh Lyon 1, 3 lyrics 107n42, 149, 150 Madden, Sir Frederick 35 Maidstone (Kent) 27n2, 29n27 Margery Kempe 149; The Book of Margery Kempe 175n19 Markham, Gervase xvi, xxiv, 168–72, 182n82, 182n86; Countrey Contentments 168; The English Housewife (1623) 168–72, 183n83 Marie de France 175n19 Marshe, Thomas (printer) 1, 5, 26–27n1, 141n39, 141–42n42 manuscripts xiv–xxv, xxxiii–xxxv, 7–21, 183–84, 73–95, 112–24, 136–37, 138–67; books of hours 121, 123, 148, 180n61; devotional manuscripts xv, xviii, 52–53, 55–59, 70n71, 72n83, 78, 84, 90, 105n28, 111, 113, 116, 147–49, 155, 176n29, 184; medical/surgical 7–21, 33–37, 48–61, 121, 140n28,

144–46, 157–63, 178–79n52, 179n60, 180n62, 180n64–65; booklets in 19–20, 59, 63n15, 71n78, 86, 92, 94, 120, 160, 162, 179n60; compilation of xiv, 78, 84–85, 86–92, 97, 111, 113, 118, 122, 144–46; decoration of 18, 49, 50–51, 55–56, 59, 75–101, 118–23; illumination of 75–101, 102n8, 103n17, 104n24; manuscript miscellanies xxv, 37, 49–50, 78, 85, 86–95, 104n22–23, 105– 06n28, 113, 138–39n15, 180n62, 180n64, 183; materials of 73–101; ownership of xix, xx, 18, 19–21, 58, 68n54, 69–70n67, 87–92, 140n27, 144–48, 149, 160, 163, 176n29; production of 73–101; psalters 123, 148–49; sammelband 67n47; scriptoria 74; vade mecum 67n46, 119, 126; see also books; scribes Matters of Cookerye and some Physicke 145 Matters of Household Proffit 145, 146 May, Robert: The Accomplisht Cook (1660) xxi Memorable Medicines 145 Meres, Francis 182n81 Middleton, Thomas: The Owl’s Almanac (1618) 132 Milan 27n4 Milan, Visconti of 1 Milman, Henry Salisbury 68–69n59, 69n61 Morgan, Octavius 50, 68–69n59, 69n61 Morte Arthur, stanzaic 86, 88 Multon, John 36, 37, 63n14 Mum and the Soothsegger 113 Musico: Gynaecia 179n56 Neve, John (?) 135 Neville, Lord, Archbishop of Canterbury 48 Newton, Humphrey 89–91, 95 Newton, Sir Theodore 168 Nicholas of Lynn 123, 124 A Noble Book off Cookery 48 The Northern Mothers Blessing 156, 178n46 Octavianus Scotus 2 The Orthographicall Declaration 101, 109n69

214 Index Orwin, Thomas 141n39, 141–42n42 Oxford 32n55, 63n16; Oxford University 66n37 Paget, Lord of Beaudesert 164, 181n72; Lady Paget 165 Palladius: De re rustica 48, 64n24 Paris 1–2 The Parlement of the Thre Ages 65–66n32 Paternoster Row (London) 36 Patience 76 Peacham, Henry 109n66; Graphice; The Most Auncient and Excellent Art of Drawing and Limming (1612) 99–100; Minerva Britannia (1612) 99–100, 109n67; The Art of Drawing With the Pen and Limming in Water Colours (1606) 98–100, 109n65; The Complete Gentleman (1622) 99, 109n66 Pearl 75–77, 83, 102n9, 103n10, 103n14 Pecock, Reginald 9; The Donet of Cristen Religioun 30n34 Pegnitzer, Juan 3 Pepys, Samuel 137, 178n47 A Perfyte Pronostycacion Perpetuall (1556) ix, xxii, 124–27, 128, 140n34, 141n38 Perkins, Samuel 135 Pictura urinarum 16 Piers Plowman 85, 113 Plawdon, Thomas (surgeon) 8 Pond, Edward 135 printing press i, xiv, xxiv, xxvin5, 3, 11, 25, 26, 83, 97, 98, 100, 121, 132; see also books (printed); William Caxton; Wynkyn de Worde The Promisse of Matrimonie 35, 62n7 The Prose Brut 56, 113 psalms: Miserere mei, Deus (psalm 50) 107n51; penitential 129n16, 139n16 Purfoote, Thomas 97 Pynson, Richard 68n53, 123, 184–85, 140n30; Book of Cookery 68n53, 56 Queen Isabella’s Book of Medicines 12 querelle des femmes 181n70 Raleigh, Sir Walter 131 Ranger, Phillip 135

Raynalde, Thomas 5, 7, 180n65 recipes/receipts 50, 68n58, 95–96, 144–46, 155, 161, 173n1; alchemical 108n57; codicological xxiii–xxiv, xxv, 77–101, 103–04n20,104n22, 104n25, 106–07n41, 107–08n51, 175n15, 184; culinary 52, 174n10, 174n10; medical 118, 140n28, 158, 160, 161, 174n10; magical 58; see also books; manuscripts The Recovery of the Throne by Edward IV (The Balett off the Kynge) 36, 37 Red, William: Amanach ephemerides (1507) 123, 140n30 Reformation 20, 163, 181n69 Restoration 141n37 Reuff, Jacob: The Expert Midwife (1637) 180n66 Rivers, Peregrine 135 Robert of Gloucester: Chronicle 56 Robert Reynes of Acle 90, 107n51 Roberts, James 134, 142n52, 142n54 Robin Hood 42–43, 60; outlaw tales 42, 177n36 Robinson, Robert 178n48 Rodd, Thomas 20 Rösslin, Eucharius: The Birth of Mankind (1540) 7, 180n65; The Rose Garden for Pregnant Women and Midwives (1615) 180n66 Rudston, John 135 Russell, John: Boke of Kervynge xix, 46–53, 64n23, 66n38; Boke of Nurture xix, xxii, xxiii, 33–61, 53–61, 139n18 Sachse, Melchior I. 3 Salerno 158, 178–79n52 Schott, Johann 2 Schrick, Michael 28n19 Scot, Reginald: A perfite platform of a hoppe garden (1574) 141n36 Scott, Robert 63–64n16 scribes xx, xxi, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18–19, 28n10, 31–32n47, 34–35, 52, 58–59, 63n9, 63n14, 63–64n16, 69n62, 69–70n67, 71n78, 71n80, 74, 75–95, 102n3, 102n5, 103n14, 103n18, 104n23, 104–05n27–28, 106n40, 107n51, 114–15, 117, 118, 121–22, 139n19, 139n22, 144,

Index  215 155, 183; Adam Pinkhurst 74, 75, 102n5; Hammond Scribe 61–62n3; Ludlow scribe 94–95; “Rate” (scribe of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 61) 155, 157; see also books; manuscripts Secretum secretorum 69n65, 112, 137n4 Seneschausy 40, 65n27 The Seven Planets 117, 139n18 Seville 3 Shakespeare, William 134, 162; Love’s Labour’s Lost 132 Sharp, Jane: The Midwives Book (1671) 180n66 Shirley, John 106n40 The Siege of Jerusalem 105n28 Sir Cleges 155 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 76 Sir Orfeo 155 Sloane, Hans 32n54, 137 Sofford, Arthur 123 Somer, John 123, 124, 140n31 Somerset 29n29 Sotheby’s 20 The South English Legendary 112 Spenser, Edmund 156, 157 Stationer’s Company 26n1, 133, 135, 142n52, 143n55 The Statly Tragedy of Guistard and Sismond 156, 178n46 St Dunstan-in-the-West 1 St James the Apostle 86 St John the Apostle 75–76, 102n9, 103n10 St Julitta 180n62 St Paul’s Cathedral 83, 181n72 St Paul’s School 180n65 St Quiricus 180n62 Strot, W. 135 Stow, John 26–27n1, 29n28, 157, 178n46 Strasbourg 2 St Veronica 91, 108n53 Surcestre, William 106n40 Swift, Jonathan 32n54 Syr Gawayne and the Carle of Carleyle 79 Theyer, Charles 37, 63n16 Theyer, John 18, 25, 31n45, 37, 60–61, 62n6, 62n8, 63n16; Aerio mastix 63n16 Thomas, tenth Lord Berkeley 69n65

Thomas, the Bastard of Fauconberg 36 “The Trentale of St Gregory” 50, 69n60 Thornton, Robert 70n71 “The Thyrrty Days of the Mone” 58 Torrent of Portingale, romance of 59, 72n83 Tottill, Richard 97 Trevisa, John 112 Trier 59 Trinity College Cambridge 99 Trota of Salerno 178–79n52 Trotula texts xxii, xxiv, 157–63, 178–79n52, 179n56, 180n65; The Knowing of a Woman’s Kind in Childing 158–63; see also books (medical) Tusser, Thomas xv, xvi, xxiv, 171n72, 182n81; A Hundreth Good Points of Husbandrie (1557) 163–68, 169, 170, 171, 172, 181n71, 181n73, 181n76; Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry 168, 181n79, 181n80 Vale, John 36, 63n14 Vaux, John 135 Veale, Abraham 66n38 Vegetius: De re militari 56, 69n65, 70–71n74 Vesalius 180n65; On the Structure of the Human Body 26 Vicary, Thomas 2, 7, 15, 28n11, 29n29; The Anatomie of the Body of Man 28n11 Virgin Girdle 161, 180n62 Walter of Henley: Book of husbandry 40, 48, 50, 52, 65n27, 68n55 Walton, Izaak: The Compleat Angler (1653) xxviiin31 Ward, Roger 174n7 Waters, Fr. 135 Watkins, Richard 134, 142n52, 142–43n54 The Way to Thrifte 156, 178n46 Webbe, William 182n81 Welles, Humfrey 107–108n51 Westminster xxvi n5, 29n29, 48, 101, 177n41 Westminster Abbey 161 White, Edward 174n9 White, John 135 William de Machlinia 62n7

216 Index William of Saliceto (Guglemio Saliceto of Piacenza) 1, 19; The Fourthe Book of Anathomye 19 The Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy xix, xxi, xxiv, xxv, 113–25, 136–37, 138nn8–12, 139nn16–17, 139n22, 140n26 Witham (Essex) 181n72 Woodhouse, John 135 de Worde, Wynkyn xxiii, 45, 46–49, 65n27, 67nn43–44, 67nn46–49,

68n53, 69n64, 157, 180n62, 184; see also books (printed); printing press Wriothesley, Charles 97 Wyer, Robert 124–25, 127–28 Yates, John (surgeon) 7, 8, 21 Yorkshire 29n29 Yvoire, Guillaume 3 Zwickau 3