Reading envisioned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
January 2025
|
Chapter
|
Books, Readers and Libraries in Fiction
John Lydgate, history of fiction, James I of Scotland, Middle English, Robert Henryson, Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Mannyng of Brunne, history of reading, Older Scots
'He that no good can', again: three further unrecorded copies of a Middle English Proverb
December 2024
|
Journal article
|
Notes and Queries
Writing a teaching book
September 2024
|
Journal article
|
New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession
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.
pedagogy, Middle English
How to Read Middle English Poetry
April 2024
|
Book
A textbook that introduces students to Middle English poetry and offers advice about the understanding and interpretation of the genre, covering verse in English and Scots from c.1150 to c.1500.
Middle English, poetry, versification, close reading
Manuscript canonicity
February 2024
|
Journal article
|
Textual Practice
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.
What tongue does Chaucer’s Custance speak? 'Latyn corrupt' revisited
December 2023
|
Journal article
|
Medium Aevum
Verse Craft, Editing, and the Work: Shadows of Orfeo
April 2022
|
Journal article
|
The Review of English Studies
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.
Sir Orfeo, textual criticism, Middle English, comparison
Forgotten books: the application of unseen species models to the survival of culture
February 2022
|
Journal article
|
Science
The study of ancient cultures is hindered by the incomplete survival of material artifacts, so we commonly underestimate the diversity of cultural production in historic societies. To correct this survivorship bias, we applied unseen species models from ecology to gauge the loss of narratives from medieval Europe, such as the romances about King Arthur. The estimates obtained are compatible with the scant historic evidence. In addition to events such as library fires, we identified the original evenness of cultural populations as an overlooked factor in these assemblages’ stability in the face of immaterial loss. We link the elevated evenness in island literatures to analogous accounts of ecological and cultural diversity in insular communities. These analyses call for a wider application of these methods across the heritage sciences.
'The Influence of Pearl on Thom Gunn's "Lament"'
December 2021
|
Journal article
|
Notes and Queries
Thom Gunn, Pearl, Middle English
Form, time, and the 'First English Sonnet'
July 2021
|
Journal article
|
Chaucer Review
The earliest known English poem rhyming ababcdcdefefgg appears within John Metham’s 1448/9 romance Amoryus and Cleopes. However, scholarship cannot easily claim Metham’s lyric as “the first English sonnet”: contrary to past suggestions, available historical and manuscript evidence indicates that he did not intentionally create it as a sonnet, but rather composed in the form accidentally. This inset lyric’s rhyme scheme therefore represents, possibly uniquely in English, sonnet form without the sonnet tradition. Despite this isolation, however, attentive reading shows that the lyric achieves certain effects very like those produced by later English sonnets. The common features underpinning these effects even in a text not knowingly written as a sonnet might help criticism isolate factors which constitute form’s essence or quiddity.
lyric, form, Amoryus and Cleopes, sonnet, John Metham
III Middle English
December 2020
|
Journal article
|
The Year's Work in English Studies
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500
May 2020
|
Book
<p>This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers’ choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers.</p>
Pedant’s revolt: Dissent in the hierarchy of scripts
December 2019
|
Journal article
|
Journal of the Early Book Society
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.
hierarchy of scripts, manuscript decoration, codicology, palaeography, manuscript studies
Missing books in the folk codicology of later medieval England
October 2019
|
Journal article
|
Mediaeval Journal
Manuscripts underpin the study of the Middle Ages, but the numbers which survive are thought to be a small proportion of those once produced. These missing books can be studied through the physical descriptions in medieval records, texts which I frame as a form of ‘folk codicology’. A survey of 1511 such descriptions from later medieval England extends our knowledge of the appearance and handling of books. Through their practical taxonomies these descriptions also show how readers sometimes thought about the age, quality and beauty of manuscripts. At other times, however, readers were not interested in the physicality of books, or found that physicality to be a hindrance.
taxonomy, material text, England, materiality, later middle ages, codicology, aesthetics, wills, book lists, manuscript studies
IIIMiddle English
October 2018
|
Journal article
|
The Year's Work in English Studies
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
‘He that no good can’: An unrecorded copy of a Middle English proverb
January 2016
|
Journal article
|
Notes and Queries
SBTMR
Navigation by Tab and Thread: Place-Markers and Readers’ Movement in Books
January 2016
|
Chapter
|
Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Rediscovered manuscript fragments of The Prick of Conscience in the library of Queens’ College, Cambridge
January 2015
|
Journal article
|
Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society
This article describes and discusses nine previously unrecorded fragments of a lost copy of The Prick of Conscience. I combine close examination of the fragments themselves with quantitative data gathered from more than ninety other copies of the poem to reconstruct the manuscript they represent in a somewhat experimental exercise in reconstructive codicology. I also bring out these fragments' implications for the debate over the sheer size of the corpus of surviving copies. A transcription of the text on the fragments is included in an appendix.