Books

How to Read a Medieval Book: Recomposing Bodley 851

In manuscript cultures of the Middle Ages, every textual object was hand-crafted by human agents who practiced varying degrees of attention, competence, and care. Medieval scribes were imaginative publishers, the first readers of their own copy, and frequently authors in their own right.

How to Read a Medieval Book, develops a generalizable book-historical method for reading medieval mixed-content manuscripts as complex literary artifacts. Relying upon manuscript evidence for how scribes collected, distributed, and arranged texts in physical form, this study asks how individual manuscripts themselves preserve and generate knowledge about the construction of literature. It argues that close attention to the material production of mixed-content manuscripts can serve as a mechanism for identifying textual groups, a blueprint for determining effective critical approaches, and a means for understanding medieval texts in their individual contexts.

The method requires persistent attention to a single book-object. Accordingly, one medieval manuscript is discussed at length: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851. This English mixed-content manuscript contains over twenty texts, written in eight or more different scribal hands and compiled over the course of decades. Two well-known texts present in Bodley 851 survive uniquely within its bindings: the full text of Walter Map’s De nugis curialium and the much-contested Z-text of Piers Plowman. This study recovers the conversation conducted between Map’s essayistic Anglo-Latin prose and Langland’s alliterative Middle English verse in their single manuscript context. It further inquires into how each text relates to popular Anglo-Latin poems compiled within in the same collection, including the Speculum stultorum, the De coniuge non ducenda, and the Apocalypsis goliae episcopi.

In How to Read a Medieval Book, the production of a single manuscript informs a shifting archive of textual relations, in which material compilation continuously alters the horizons of literary meaning. My analyses treat a wide array of topics at the intersection of material and literary cultures that will be of interest to medievalists and generalist readers alike, including medieval representations of women, depictions of marvelous and fantastic occurrences, and scribal habits of imitation.

Codicological Categories in Medieval England

Modern scholarship on medieval source material tends to separate book-historical study from literary interpretation. Without significantly addressing textual contents, book historians can uncover an astounding array of information surrounding the economic, social, and political processes that governed medieval manuscript production. Without significantly addressing material contexts, literary scholars undertake assessment of texts, individually or in groups, in terms of poetry, prose, history, romance, Latinity, vernacularity, devotion, parody, and praise – as a small sampling of appropriate descriptive terms – according to formal, conventional, and thematic markers. Several scholarly movements, such as the ‘New Philology’ and the ‘New Formalism’, have endeavored to bring these two modes of study closer together. No clear methodology has arisen from these movements, however, and the most successful studies have not generated replicable procedures for scholars to follow, modify, or critique.

Codicological Categories in England proposes to aggregate data describing mixed-content medieval manuscripts and the texts they preserve, to use book-historical tools in the development of generalizable methods for inquiry into medieval texts and their books simultaneously, and to discover tailored literary critical approaches to oft-neglected popular texts in their individual manuscript contexts. Harnessing rapidly developing digital tools in network analysis, I propose to examine the distribution of popular texts in Latin and vernacular languages within their surviving manuscript contexts. I consider manuscripts in terms of textual affiliations created by differentiated acts of scribal labor in a plurality of contexts. I aim to change the way we approach an enduringly complex subset of the medieval archive and to reassess the way we consider the interpretive significance of surviving books. Manuscripts that appear to lack any single overarching principle are most apt to reveal fresh perspectives on authorship, genre, and textual affiliation when analyzed individually and at scale.

The proposed project has two concrete aims: to produce excellent scholarship for academic use and to produce a public-facing web application for engaging non-specialists with interest in the popular cultures of the Middle Ages.

Essays

Reading Too Much, Forgetting More: The Apocalypsis goliae episcopi in Print and Translation

When John Bale, in his famous index, attributed the Apocalypsis to Walter Map, he adopted a position that had been available in manuscript hands for at least one-hundred years. Under his direction, this Anglo-Latin anti-ecclesiastic satire of the twelfth century was first printed in 1546, and at least partly after Bale’s influence, it would be printed and reprinted dozens of times in dozens of collections in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, by Protestants and Catholics alike. In some cases, individual owners provided their own annotations and translations, many of which signal unease about rapid technological changes alongside concern about corruption in the church. This essay tracks the afterlives and material of a poem about the material afterlives

Goliardic Networks

Twice in recorded history the goliards have reached something like popular stardom: in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as protected or anonymous ecclesiastics launching endless social critiques in maddeningly punny verse; and in the first half of the twentieth century, as bibulous, love-making, springtime vagabonds dedicated to wine, women, and song. And a few codicological units, as in the Carmina Burana, the Cambridge Songs, or the latter sections of Harley 978 bear such associations out. The vast majority of manuscripts containing “goliardic” verse, however, are not dedicated to satire or song, women, wine, or whimsy. True miscellanies, such manuscripts mix Latin poetic material with patristic sermons, classical authorities, scholastic inquiries, visions, saints’ lives, and myth. This essay interprets metadata from the British Library as a network of texts and books, beginning with those items most commonly associated with the goliards in medieval and modern discourse, and uses standard methods for measuring likeness and influence to re-assess the effectiveness of the “goliardic” tag according to patterns of manuscript transmission.