Professor Daniel Wakelin: List of publications

This Element explores the idea of publication in media used before, alongside, and after print. It contrasts multiple traditions of unprinted communication in their diversity and particularity. This decentres print as the means for understanding publication; instead, publication is seen as an heuristic term which identifies activities these traditions share, but which also differ in ways not reducible to comparisons with printing. The Element engages with texts written on papyrus, chiselled in stone, and created digitally; sung, proclaimed, and put on stage; banned, hidden and rediscovered. The authors move between Greek inscriptions and Tibetan edicts, early modern manuscripts and AI-assisted composition, monasteries and courts, constantly questioning the term 'publication' and considering the agency of people publishing and the publics they address. The picture that transpires is that of a colourful variety of contexts of production and dissemination, underlining the value of studying 'unprinted' publication in its own right.

<p><strong>Français</strong></p> En ce qui concerne la littérature anglaise, il existe peu de manuscrits autographes de l’époque précédant l’imprimerie, lorsque la plupart des manuscrits étaient des copies de bonne qualité destinées à être diffusées, et que des techniques éphémères, telles que les tablettes de cire, étaient utilisées pour composer. Il existe cependant quelques manuscrits autographes qui témoignent de la révision textuelle minutieuse des auteurs médiévaux. De plus, parce que les scribes qui copiaient les œuvres littéraires modifiaient souvent les textes qu’ils copiaient (la « variance » de Bernard Cerquiglini), ces copies contiennent des passages de ce que nous pourrions appeler une composition autographe. En outre, parce que la fin du Moyen Âge a connu une expansion massive de l’écriture « pragmatique » ou « ordinaire » (Paul Bertrand), ces écrits ont également produit des autographes dans les genres médicaux ou épistolaires, même s’ils ne sont pas « littéraires » à proprement parler. On pourrait suggérer que, pour les auteurs célèbres, nous avons une littérature sans autographes, et que, pour les écrivains ordinaires, nous avons des autographes qui élargissent notre conception des catégories de personnes engagées dans l’activité littéraire. <br> <p><strong>English</strong></p> There are few autograph manuscripts in English literary archives from before the age of printing: most manuscripts were fair copies meant to be distributed and were composed through ephemeral techniques, such as wax tablets. There are, however, some autograph manuscripts that bear witness to the painstaking textual revision of medieval authors. Also, since the scribes who copied literary works often modified the texts that they copied (“variance,” in the words of Bernard Cerquiglini), these copies contain passages of what we could call autograph composition. Moreover, because the end of the Middle Ages saw a massive expansive of “practical” or “ordinary” writing (Paul Bertrand), these works also produced autographs in the medical and epistolary genres, even if they are not strictly speaking literary. We argue, then, that while there are few if any autograph manuscripts for celebrated authors, there are, for ordinary writers, autographs that enlarge our idea of the types of people engaged in literary activity.

Since c. 2008 many special collections libraries have allowed researchers to take photographs of medieval manuscripts: this article calls such self-service photography ‘DIY digitization’. The article considers some possible effects of this digital tool for research on book history, especially on palaeography, comparing it in particular to the effects of institutionally-led digitization. ‘DIY digitization’ does assist with access to manuscripts, but less easily and with less open data than institutional digitization does. Instead, it allows the researcher’s intellectual agenda to guide the selection of what to photograph. The photographic process thereby becomes part of the process of analysis. Photography by the researcher is therefore limited by subjectivity but it also helps to highlight the role of subjective perspectives in scholarship. It can also balance a breadth or depth of perspective in ways different from institutional digitization. It could in theory foster increased textual scholarship but in practice has fostered attention to the materiality of the text.

When Chaucer, Lydgate, and their contemporaries made classical characters and classical allusions an important part of English poetry, they risked confusing scribes and readers. In the vein of recent studies of scribes as readers, this article explores the mistakes of scribes in copying and comprehending those details. In addition, this article explores the ways that poets’ phrasing implies awareness of those risks and seeks to mitigate them. The article thus presents the creation of the text as a coproduction between agents, which might be understood in the framework of pragmatics, the analysis of speech acts in social context. These problems in transmission, and the forestalling of them, first reveal how classicism, which later became a monumental tradition, was a risky interaction in some of its earliest phases in English poetry. Second, more briefly and tentatively, these problems suggest the risks of writing for scribal transmission in general.

This book gathers the best new work on manuscript books in England made during this crucial but neglected period. Its authors survey existing research, gather intensive new evidence and develop new approaches to key topics.

This book studies approaches to the production of manuscripts in medieval England, from the first commercial guilds to the advent of print.