Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

By Jessica Brantley

In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself.

Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9780812298451

Book preview

PREFACE

Across the field of medieval studies, interest in manuscripts has been rising steadily. Although paleographers and editors have long concerned themselves with the material witnesses to medieval texts, traditional manuscript studies have been newly energized by the histories of the book being written in many disciplines. Decades ago, scholars such as D. F. McKenzie, Robert Darnton, and Roger Chartier shifted the grounds of textual scholarship, demonstrating that bibliography can go beyond the simple collation of quires to ask questions about the social uses of books, and thus about the meaning of the texts they preserve. Within medieval studies, a similar shift moved manuscript studies away from the purely philological concerns that animate (for example) the introductions of early volumes produced by the Early English Text Society toward more general social and literary historical questions. Historians of both text and image have fruitfully examined the history of reading in the Middle Ages through the testimony of rich individual books. Whether it is called the archaeology of the manuscript book, materialist philology, or the new codicology, this kind of inquiry has formed the basis for some of the most exciting recent work on medieval history and culture.

Because of this deep and growing scholarly interest, the field of manuscript studies needs general introductions to working with textual artifacts from the Middle Ages. A number of important books have begun the work of opening this subject. The Medieval Book, the catalog of a forward-thinking exhibition at Yale University’s Beinecke Library organized by Barbara Shailor in 1988, has been indispensable in helping readers wrap their minds around these complex and sometimes daunting artifacts. More recently, Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham have written a practical Introduction to Manuscript Studies (2007) that offers excellent preparation for working with manuscripts in a serious way. Its companion volume, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson’s Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts (2012), provides a more specialized look at some of the important cultural contexts surrounding English literary books. More recently still, Ralph Hanna has collected his Oxford lectures into Introducing English Medieval Book History (2013), a useful series of investigations into the importance of manuscripts to medieval literary culture. All of these studies have inspired me and my students, and I rely gratefully throughout this handbook on much of the information they offer.

Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms has slightly different aims. My own introduction to manuscript studies began when scholarly references to the marginal images of Bevis of Hampton in the Taymouth Hours (London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 13) led me to wonder what other texts and images might be found with them on the page. My need to know everything I could about the material context of a single item led to a galvanizing encounter with a whole book, and my interests shifted from a concern with the part to a concern with the ensemble of parts. For that reason, I offer here an introduction to manuscripts motivated by a series of case studies, using the artifacts themselves as an inductive means to open the most interesting theoretical issues in the study of the medieval book. Ralph Hanna has described the piecemealism endemic to manuscript studies, the necessity of making particular arguments because persuasive general ones are so hard to come by (Introducing English Medieval Book History, xiii). And, indeed, that is one of my motivations for using case studies to structure this handbook; what Hanna calls lateral analogical thinking is a familiar and necessary part of studying medieval manuscripts. But, without attempting a general field theory, I also hope to use very particular arguments about single objects to open larger theoretical areas of inquiry. The concrete examples given here will enable readers to make their own way through the tangle of questions that any manuscript poses to the scholar, without too much interference from this or any other guide. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist readers in thinking through the implications of those questions, not only for medieval manuscript culture but also for book cultures more generally. I hope that providing beginning researchers with selected objects for their detailed analysis will encourage them to take manuscript studies in directions that no one currently working in the field can predict.

With illustrative examples from a range of significant collections, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms offers a broad survey of the material forms of literary manuscripts and their cultural histories. It includes a guide to interpreting the physical parts of a medieval book, as well as a number of case studies in particularly important and representative examples of medieval literature in manuscript form.

The first section, The Anatomy of the Medieval Manuscript, introduces and describes the parts of medieval books and the processes by which they were made. It includes discussions of the writing surface (stone, wax, papyrus, parchment, paper); the writing process (pricking and ruling, scripts, abbreviation, punctuation, musical notation, correction, annotation, editing); decoration and illustration (rubrication, line fillers, borders, marginalia, initials, illustrations, diagrams), and bindings (roll, codex). This section introduces technical terms in boldface, all of which can be found defined in the glossary. It concludes with a template for manuscript description that reflects the international standards currently being developed for digital bibliography and cataloging.

The second section, Case Studies: A Selection of English Literary Manuscripts, provides a series of studies of significant literary books in order to highlight some of the most important questions surrounding the study of medieval literature. For example, how are we to understand authorship in the period? Or the interaction between image and text in an illustrated manuscript, the importance of miscellaneity in medieval literary production, the theoretical underpinnings of modern editorial practice, or the role of the book in medieval performative culture? The manuscripts chosen here demonstrate the interest of these abstract questions through tangible examples. The four poems of British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x, for example, usually ascribed to a single "Gawain-poet," raise urgent questions about the nature of medieval authorship. How much does codicological unity presuppose authorial unity for medieval and modern readers? To take another example, a copy of Piers Plowman in the Huntington Library assimilates what modern editors distinguish as the poem’s A-, B-, and C-texts, inviting readers to consider problems surrounding editing and the integrity of the medieval poem. Each case study introduces a landmark literary manuscript through some of the most pressing issues raised in the scholarship surrounding it, and each one points the way toward possibilities for further research.

Because no single volume can adequately address every aspect of the complex field of medieval manuscript studies, this handbook cites sources and resources that can help readers pursue specialized questions further. This is particularly important for the manuscript case studies, which are designed to be used as examples for the classroom or as the inspiration for individual research projects. Selected bibliographies for each manuscript will enable any reader to enter scholarly discussion around an unfamiliar object. Moreover, high-quality digital surrogates—all fully and freely available online—will allow readers of Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms to gain access to each of these manuscripts in its entirety, enabling further individual exploration and also facilitating the setting of assignments in the classroom. Through resources such as these, this introduction seeks both to address the literary critical subjects that attention to manuscripts can open and to enable the exploration of those subjects in concrete and particular terms.

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

Introduction

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.14–17)

Theseus’s well-known words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream offer a theory of literary creation precisely balanced between the transcendent and the physical. They describe the ongoing materialization of things unknown into bodies and forms, and thence into shapes. The initial mechanism for this embodiment is imagination, the faculty of mind whereby, according to premodern explanations of the physiology of the brain, sensory impressions create images that can be combined and recombined through the aid of memory. But the immaterial forms of unknown things are embodied equally in another way. By virtue of the poet’s pen—that is to say, literary language realized through the instrument of its recording—new ideas become enmeshed in words, and they take up a position in space: they are given a tangible presence. Moreover, written language gives to airy nothing a particular kind of local habitation in books, which provide the material context for literary expression. The pens of poets not only provide a language for the communication of ideas; they also give these ideas a powerful physical existence in the world.

Medieval texts, in particular, are not disembodied but take their meaning in part from the physical forms in which their original readers encountered them. These physical forms are manuscripts: literally, texts written by hand (Latin, manu scriptus) on any kind of surface. Unlike the productions of print culture, each manuscript is a unique creation of human hands, visibly distinct from any other in its material and textual embodiment. This uniqueness makes it easy to see that a medieval book is not merely a transparent container for the text it represents; instead, such a book is evidently an artifact, an individually created object whose physical characteristics contribute to or even structure the ideas it transmits. This insight—important for the history of the book in all periods—has particular purchase on manuscript study, for although any book is a material object, whose physicality participates in ways large and small in the creation of its meanings, the singularity of the handwritten manuscript makes the consideration of its forms a necessity.

The material forms of the manuscript book carry meanings different from those of print culture. On the one hand, the physical features of a specific volume seem to mean less than they would in the twenty-first century: Middle English scribes, for example, typically concern themselves so little with conventions of standardized spelling that they may write a word in two different ways on the same page. On the other hand, physical features that seem incidental might mean immensely more: in the absence of a universally agreed-upon critical edition, the particular way in which a poem and its glosses were laid out on a page, or the interactions among different texts contained in one manuscript miscellany, could significantly shape a medieval reader’s experience. Such contextual information is often lost or suppressed in modern printed editions of medieval texts, but recovering it can augment or even change our critical perception of those texts. The study of manuscripts is essential both to understanding the reading culture of the Middle Ages and to interpreting that culture’s productions.

Recovering the readings implied by medieval manuscripts is a necessarily interdisciplinary project, including a vast range of different subjects that might be relevant to any particular book: methods of making parchment, the iconography of St. Jerome, the locations of bookshops in Paris, the transformations of royal seals, and foreign influences on Chaucer’s vocabulary—just to name a few. Topics in codicology (or the study of the codex) include the making of parchment and paper, the sewing of quires, the construction of bindings, and the layout of the page. Paleography sometimes refers to the study of all aspects of old books, but even in its strictest and most literal sense of old writing, it encompasses a crowd of different scripts extending from Roman capitals in stone inscriptions to the Bastard Secretary common in fifteenth-century manuscripts, not to mention widely divergent habits of abbreviation and correction. Painstaking editorial and textual criticism are required to present a medieval text in a modern form, for manuscript witnesses often provide conflicting testimony to the work itself. Historical documents and legal instruments such as charters, bulls, or letters can be authenticated through specialized knowledge from the field of diplomatics. The many types of manuscript decoration and illumination require art historical attention to the ways in which medieval books construct meaning through visual means, and the history of musical notation can help to reconstruct performance cues. In short, manuscript studies require the collaboration of many scholarly fields, including but not limited to linguistics (what might in a slightly antiquated mode be called philology), history, art history, musicology, literature—and even scientific fields such as biology, chemistry, and computer science, which have contributed to the compositional analysis of parchments and inks. Each of these disciplines brings its particular skills, its hard-earned knowledge, and most of all its own questions, assumptions, and methodologies to the objects at hand.

This book aims to provide a general introduction to manuscript studies for readers whose particular interests lie in medieval literature. The field of medieval literary studies has long depended on manuscripts, of course. The nineteenth-century editions that facilitated the widespread study of medieval texts made explicit their dependence on manuscript evidence. But that scholarly tradition was primarily textual and philological, concerned with how to reconstruct readable texts from fragmentary remains in order to develop histories of literature and language. More modern editions have typically moved farther from considering the original forms of the texts they encounter. But it is clearer than ever that manuscripts are important to literary analysis. Medieval books provide indispensable contexts for understanding literary culture, and even for establishing (or questioning) the historical parameters of the literary itself. Bringing the traditional archival strengths of medieval manuscript studies together with the larger, more synthetic, and theoretical achievements of recent approaches to material texts, this handbook aims to ask such big questions.

Reading Medieval Books: Manuscript Studies in the Twenty-First Century

What does it mean to read medieval books? To answer this question, it will be helpful to unpack its polyvalent terms, beginning with the first one: What does it mean to read?

On one level, this book is concerned with reading medieval books as their first users did, in a simple effort to learn what is written down on their pages. Given unfamiliar scripts, myriad scribal idiosyncrasies, and the potential for damage over time, it is not always straightforward in the twenty-first century even to decode the letters on the medieval manuscript page. Even less straightforward is the effort to recapture the experiences of medieval readers. The present participle in my title—reading—emphasizes the importance of process to the activity of looking at and interpreting medieval books; a manuscript is not an inert object, but one that comes alive in an interaction with a human mind. The practice of reading may seem uncomplicated at first glance, but wide variations both synchronically and diachronically require careful attention. Any book reads (and thus means) differently at different moments depending on the circumstances under which it is read, differences registered in various modes of engagement we might describe as perusing, consulting, skimming, scanning, reciting, examining, inspecting, meditating, deciphering, studying. Moreover, medieval encounters with books, as scholars have worked to discover, were sometimes shaped by cultural expectations and habits different from those that shape modern reading. When a medieval reader is not a person sitting still in a quiet room alone, but rather a listener moving through a crowded and noisy hall, we have to reconsider how broadly the activity can be defined. Modern readers of medieval books must interest themselves in reconstructing the historical encounter with a text, even if they will never be able to replicate it in every way.

With necessary respect for the historical distance that separates modern from medieval readers, this book is also concerned with reading medieval books in the sense of interpreting them: what do manuscripts communicate fundamentally about the meanings of texts? If it is true that medieval texts cannot be properly understood without recourse to their physical contexts, what do those contexts reveal? Historical processes of interpretation are even more difficult to imagine and reconstruct than modern ones, but the physical shapes of manuscripts can provide some clues to how their original readers used them. Manuscripts shape their readers’ understanding through paratexts that might include indexes, explanatory glosses, or visual elements such as layout and decoration. Manuscripts also reveal their readers’ understanding through marginalia, corrections, notes, and other physical traces of medieval readers at work. By making readers’ perceptions visible as an object of study, manuscripts also provide a reading of medieval literary and intellectual culture (and medieval culture all told). At their most instructive, medieval books offer a perspective on medieval structures and habits of thought, one that tells us not only what people read, but also how they imagined themselves reading it.

Exploring these modes of medieval reading raises a further question of special interest to scholars of literature: what distinguishes the literary object from other kinds of written production? Is a literary manuscript one that contains a particular kind of text—poetry, for example, or acknowledged fictions—or is it a manuscript that is read in a particular way, with particular kinds of attention, for particular ends? From this second perspective, literariness is one potential product of the methods of reading employed to address any book. Thinking beyond such simple distinctions as separating verse from prose, or imaginative from factual reporting, attention to varieties of medieval reading might instead align books such as histories and philosophies with fictional stories because of their reliance on narrative modes, but separate them from charts, calendars, or legal documents. Conversely, cipher poems might begin to resemble diagrams more closely than verse narratives. Exploring the kinds of attention that have historically been paid to literary objects, but never taking the category of the literary for granted, this handbook aims to foster attention to the kinds of reading that medieval books can provoke.

The second complicated term to consider is medieval. While it is clear in broad strokes what this word means—the term medieval usually designates the historical period between circa 400 and 1500 CE—it is less clear what it implies about the history of those centuries. Insofar as they constitute a discrete era, the Western Middle Ages might be defined by language (Latin), religion (Catholicism), or even the prevalence of the handwritten book before the advent of the printing press. In fact, one could argue that the changing technology of the book is the primary way in which literary scholars mark the end of the medieval era—a more important marker even than the linguistic change from Middle English to modern English, or the confessional change signaled by the Reformation (which was itself perhaps facilitated by the advent of the press). Yet although the shift from handwritten to printed books introduced some far-reaching changes in the manner in which information technologies were produced, it also sustained many continuities. For one thing, manuscript culture persisted for centuries after the introduction of mechanized printing and continued to shape literary culture in significant ways. Moreover, the shape of the codex arguably makes as much of a difference in intellectual culture as the technology of handwriting on parchment, and the codex persisted through the shift from script to print—and, indeed, persists into the digital era. Accordingly, the shift from scroll to codex, one that happened largely before the beginning of the medieval period, may account for a greater rupture in book culture than the shift—gradual in many ways—from handwritten to printed book. From this perspective, the continuities between medieval and modern books might be as revealing as the differences.

Tracing critically the historical shift from script to print requires careful thinking about what defines medieval manuscript culture as against our contemporary experience of the modern printed book. Ironically enough, in noting the ways in which electronic textuality has changed our relation to information, the field of media studies has revealed significant affinities between pre-print and post-print reading. Scrolling on a computer screen provides an alternative to the technology of the codex, and the discontinuous reading fostered by hyperlinks mirrors some medieval reading practices. And although the middleness of the Middle Ages differs from the middleness of the medium—defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the physical material (as tape, disk, paper, etc.) used for recording or reproducing data, images, or sound—the etymological root of media is visible in the Latin name by which we call the age: medium aevum. In shuttling from one thing to another, both perform a useful kind of intermediation, for in the study of media and the study of the Middle Ages scholars are trying to look squarely at phenomena that have sometimes seemed only ancillary to the real subject of inquiry. The study of manuscripts is a particular historical version of media studies, then, and the insights from both fields can be mutually informing.

The example of electronic media raises a final question of definition from my title: what, after all, is a book? What characteristics define this most familiar form of information technology? And how might one understand its definitional characteristics—whether conceived as material or immaterial—to contribute to its meaning? Terms such as text, poem, or work imply particular structures of meaning, modes of interpretation, or methods of composition, suggesting literary forms that are less material than book. If materiality is the key, one might stipulate that a book must take the shape of a codex: the familiar spine-with-pages shape that has been a supremely useful technology and the dominant form of reading material for more than one thousand years. But etymology indicates that, in its earliest forms, the word book in the singular meant only one tablet, page, or leaf. The plural sense of pages, that is, of a book as a multipage codex, gradually attached to the singular form of the word as a back-formation. Surprisingly distinct from the codex, then, the history of the word opens the possibility that a book in the broadest sense might be any portable material expected to hold text—including printed pages made of paper, but also including handwritten quires of vellum, both wooden tablets and iPads, the Torah, a computer screen, a smartphone, and even objects such as coins. These are all familiar platforms for reading—inscription technologies, to borrow a phrase from media studies—that show nontrivial similarities to the objects we are more comfortable calling books. Although one might quibble, the more capacious definition is useful for its provocation and for bringing many kinds of reading under comparative consideration.

From the perspective of reception, or use, perhaps a book is most helpfully defined by what its readers do with it. Perhaps the word itself signals something significant about readers’ experience of the written surface, something that has become an expressive part of the meaning of the text. But even setting aside the significant difficulties in defining the activity of reading across space and time, it is important to consider how it is changed by the material forms of the thing read. All of these objects include writing on a surface: a billboard, a computer screen, a trade paperback romance novel, a biology textbook, a child’s picture book, a phone book, a magazine. Most of these books even preserve the shape of the codex. But their marked differences reveal that the way an object looks affects our understanding of how to use it and even what it is—whether durable or ephemeral, mostly text or mostly image, to be read continuously or consulted now and then. A reader approaches the information densely packed in a reference work differently from the illustrations of a glossy brochure. These differences of use point to some commonalities, however: the importance of visual elements in shaping the experience of reading any book and the extent to which reading a material object is always an activity of looking. All books—whether illustrated or not—are three-dimensional objects that can be manipulated in space, and all letterforms are visible two-dimensional realizations of sound.

Even though its focus is explicitly manuscript studies, this handbook keeps all these definitional questions in mind as it addresses the reading of medieval books. Most of the objects under discussion clearly are manuscripts—they were written by hand. But they are also manuscript books—codices mostly not so different from the objects we call books today. If thinking about reading as a process highlights historical change, calling both medieval and modern reading machines by the name of books highlights their continuity. The codex is a remarkably durable and long-lasting form of reading machine. It is hard to say whether or not it will be superseded soon, but the medieval centuries can provide some of the history upon which we might base guesses about its future. The medieval period is a remarkable time in the history of human communication because of the technological transitions it saw: from roll to codex at the start, and from manuscript to print at the end. One of the ways to understand the importance of medieval books is to compare our experience of them to our own (often unexamined) cultural conceptions of the book in its modern guises. Current media shifts become newly legible through the complicated media ecology of the Middle Ages—a time of change that also set up many of the features of contemporary bibliographic culture, of what we know as books now.

The consideration of medieval manuscripts as books also highlights an important connection with current methodologies of literary criticism outside of medieval studies. As is already clear, my approach to manuscript studies shares an important premise with the field known as the history of the book: the idea that books are not transparent containers of information but objects whose material shapes and visible forms contribute to their meaning. As Katherine Hayles has put it in Writing Machines, a study of contemporary print and digital texts, the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean (25). From one perspective, this refusal to separate content from form has a long heritage in literary study: the practice of close reading, or practical criticism, teaches us that the structure of a sonnet cannot be separated from its meaning—these necessarily inform each other, whether they reinforce a single interpretation or, alternatively, conflict. But these observations have generally concerned abstracted literary form: a sonnet, a sestina, a novel, a verse drama. Thinking about material form offers another powerful way to approach this question, for it is increasingly clear both that the content of a book is determined, in part, by its visible structure, and, conversely, that the material form of a book is also determined by the content of its texts. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan first taught us to observe. We cannot simply look through the material form of a book, and it is not so easy to separate (pace the common medieval metaphor) the wheat from the chaff.

Reading Medieval Texts: Chaucer’s Adam Scriveyn

Despite the many ontological and conceptual continuities between them, medieval manuscript books nonetheless offer information technologies that are different in many ways from modern printed books. As any reader approaching a rare book library knows, manuscripts are precious, expensive, and guarded accordingly. They are unique, like art objects; indeed, many are art objects in their own right. Each manuscript represents a relatively large investment of time and labor, and yet they are imprecise copies, full of errors. The relations among all the parties involved in production are differently configured, too: the making of a medieval book is collaborative, yet often the interactions between author and scribe, author and patron, author and illustrator, and scribe and illustrator are less clear than one might expect. Reader and writer can be specially affiliated by the process of making a book by hand, since the creative activities of the reader as commentator or glossator are functionally and even formally indistinguishable from the activities of the writer. On the other hand, the figure of the scribe intervening between reader and writer looms larger than the figure of the compositor, and what the manuscript reader eventually sees is at least several shaky steps away from what the author intended.

Chaucer addresses many of the particularities of medieval book culture directly in a short lyric to his scribe, Adam, a poem that takes as its theme its own manner of production. The poet complains about the scribal culture through which his works were realized:

Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle

Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe,

Under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle,

But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe;

So ofte adaye I mot thy werk renewe,

It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape,

And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.

With a startling hostility, the author critiques practices of production that threaten to undo his literary makyng: he accuses his scribe of negligence and rape, a word that most obviously means haste, but which might also intimate its more familiar meaning of sexual violence. Although it is possible that the tone of the poem is more joking than it would at first appear—such egregious insults perhaps betray a certain intimacy—the stakes of the jest are nonetheless high. According to Chaucer’s wordes, scribal error leads to a false