Professor Daniel Wakelin: List of publications

Early manuscripts in the English language include religious works, plays, romances, poetry and songs, as well as charms, notebooks, science and medieval medicine. How did scribes choose to arrange the words and images on the page in each manuscript? How did they preserve, clarify and illustrate writing in English? What visual guides were given to early readers of English in how to understand or use their books? 'Designing English' is an overview of eight centuries of graphic design in manuscripts and inscriptions from the Anglo-Saxon to the early Tudor periods. Working beyond the traditions established for Latin, scribes of English needed to be more inventive, so that each book was an opportunity for redesigning. 'Designing English' focuses on the craft, agency and intentions of scribes, painters and engravers in the practical processes of making pages and artefacts. It weighs up the balance of ingenuity and copying, practicality and imagination in their work. It surveys bilingual books, format, ordinatio, decoration and reading aloud, as well as inscriptions on objects, monuments and buildings. With over ninety illustrations, drawn especially from the holdings of the Bodleian Library in Old English and Middle English, 'Designing English' gives a comprehensive overview of English books and other material texts across the Middle Ages.

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 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.