Dr Daniel Sawyer: List of publications

Various practical challenges deter scholars from writing single-author teaching books, but such books have particular virtues to offer pedagogy. This article describes some of the choices made in the writing of a teaching book, How to Read Middle English Poetry. It is presented not as a set of final rulings on best practice, but as an account of decisions made, to lift the lid on the work and support the creation of more pedagogical tools in future.

Some manuscripts containing Middle English possess canonicity in modern scholarship for their own sakes, that is, for their interest as objects rather than due to the canonicity of their contents. The combination of many surviving manuscripts and a historical position largely before the coming of moveable-type print creates this manuscript canonicity; in this respect, Middle English studies stand out from comparable fields. Manuscripts with their own canonicity tend to be atypically large, and tend to gather many works, works that are often themselves not canonical. Although manuscript canonicity only rarely affects literary canonicity, the growth of manuscript canonicity shows how canonicity of all kinds emerges from teaching and research, not works or manuscripts. If literary scholars turn their attention to objects other than works, such as datasets, canonicity will develop around the new objects as it has around manuscripts. While the study of less-examined codices is worthwhile for other reasons, it can only move the hierarchy of canonicity around, and it cannot remove the stratification. However, manuscripts also invite thought on the books from the period which are now lost – the majority of books. Because research cannot make them canonical, these absent codices might help us think around canonicity.

The notorious divergence between the three extant texts of Sir Orfeo has tripped up some past studies and seemingly makes the poem forbidding ground for literary criticism. Yet study of those texts informed by Paul Eggert’s recent revitalization of the concept of the ‘work’ reveals that some aspects of form and versification persist surprisingly well across the three known copies. Criticism has frequently noted the two points in Sir Orfeo which use descriptive comparisons to Paradise. The standard referencing edition, however, presents the first paradisiacal comparison with deceptively little information about its textual state. Scholars, even those alert to manuscripts, have consequently erred when discussing the relevant passages. Attention to aspects of the poem’s versification such as through-rhyme, rhyme-pairing, and rhyme-breaking can offer a partial solution to the problem. This insight opens up a broader approach to reading the verse-craft of Orfeo across its extant witnesses. A study of the poem’s use of comparison offers a trial of that approach. Though individually formulaic, the poem’s comparisons would have had a significant cumulative effect on readers. This effect has implications for scholarship’s understanding of the figure of Orfeo and of the poem as a whole. Future research on this text might fruitfully attend more closely to textual problems, to verse form, and to the relationship between the two; future studies of Middle English texts in general might benefit from the concept of the work.

Scholars of later medieval English manuscripts understand that scribes shared a 'hierarchy of scripts' which let them choose different scripts for different purposes. Palaeographical evidence, chiefly taken here from Bodleian MS e Musaeo 76, but also in other codices, shows that during the fifteenth century different book producers could disagree over the relative formality of particular letter-forms. The hierarchy of scripts did exist, but it was a living, variable system rather than a stencil.