Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book 2021938591, 9780192843814, 0192843818

Table of contents :
Cover
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
1: ‘A Profit to People’: Introduction
The Whole Text
Knowable Emptiness
2: ‘Fingers Folded Me’: Making the Book
From Death into Life
Step-By-Stepto Salvation
From Death into Life
Interpreting the Book
3: ‘Covered Me with Tracks’: Writing the Book
Writingfeþer Boceras Hrædlice Writende
Boclic Snotornesse, ‘Bookly Wisdom’
4: ‘People Will Use Me’: Book as Archive
Set in a Book
Inscribing the Verdict
Spread the Word
The Immanence of the Book
5: ‘My Name Is Famous’: Presence in the Book
A Book of Reverence
Traces of Lost Voices
Faint Traces
Name as Participation
6: ‘In Spirit the Wiser’: Invisible Things in the Book
Invisible Joy
Visible Delight
Possession and Prayer
Adjacent Spaces
Filling the Void
7: ‘Covered with Protecting Boards’: Representing the Book
Depicting the Whole Book
The Haptic Book
8: ‘Cut by the Edge of the Knife’: Libricide and the Modern Book Trade
Biblioclasm: The Breaking of Books
Taking a Cut
Bits and Pieces
Making Whole Again
9: ‘More True and Better’: The Digital Book and Its Frameworks of Understanding
The Seductive Digital
Scholarly Fragmentation
The Real Thing
10: Bookending ‘Þa Wuldorgesteald’: The Wondrous Edifice
Bibliography
1. Websites
2. Printed Sources
Index of Manuscripts
Index

Citation preview

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/21, SPi

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/21, SPi

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/21, SPi

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts The Phenomenal Book E L A I N E T R E HA R N E

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Elaine Treharne 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938591 ISBN 978–0–19–284381–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843814.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface On 26 March 2015, Richard III was reinterred at Leicester Cathedral. His broken bones, discovered underneath a carpark at Greyfriars in Leicester, were cere­ moni­ous­ly laid to rest in a lead-­lined coffin. The archbishop of Canterbury, pre-­ eminent prelate of a church that did not exist when Richard III was on the throne in the 1480s, led the service. Benedict Cumberbatch, the dead king’s second cousin sixteen times removed, read the moving poem, Richard, written for the occasion by Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy. In that poem, Duffy imagines the voice of the king beseeching the modern era: ‘Grant me the carving of my name’.1 This desire to be inscribed and memorialized, while fictional in this poem, is real enough for sentient beings, who wish their lives to be remembered if not by deeds or offspring then through their name. The focus on being named and situated through a name-­made-­permanent is allied in its emphasis on writing by another fulcral event in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March; namely, the loan of Richard III’s own personal prayer-book for the occasion to reunite long-­dead monarch and long-­dormant manuscript. As scholar Lisa Fagin Davis tweeted on that day: ‘Very moving to see RIII reunited with his Book of Hours. Every medieval manuscript was once someone’s book’. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts explores the implications of this simple truth: that every manuscript was once in the world as someone’s book, and was often many people’s book in the years between its creation and now. It was a thing to be read, certainly, but also a thing written, sourced, shaped, and tooled by its creators; held, admired, perhaps caressed, neglected, or spurned by successive owners and handlers. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts considers how the medieval manuscript was and is perceived; its modes and meanings of produc­ tion and reception in the long medieval period from the end of the sixth century through to the fifteenth century and on into the present day. Accepting the basic phenomenological premise that the book is a whole textual object, albeit one sub­ ject to shape-­shifting, adaptation, and transformation, this study investigates the form and function of the handmade book, principally using British examples. This study demonstrates that an approach emphasizing dynamic architextuality allows us to re-­see the book in its wholeness and to better understand the signifi­ cances of this most unique of things.

1  Richard was published in The Guardian on 26 March 2015: http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/mar/26/richard-­iii-­by-­carol-­ann-­duffy.

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Acknowledgements As I finish this book, which has been too long in the making, most of the world is struggling to function during the COVID-­19 pandemic. I am ‘sheltering in place’, wondering if this kind of activity—writing books on medieval manuscripts—is really how I should spend my energy. Medievalist Andrew Prescott reminded me that it is precisely in these crises that we turn to literature, art, music, poetry, the spirit. He is right. And medieval manuscripts are the containers—the vessels—of the human spirit, so perhaps this will have been time well spent. This book began as an investigation into the types of interactions made by users of medieval books, a study which itself emerged out of years of work on medieval glosses within manuscripts and on twelfth-­century responses to pre-­ Conquest English texts. It has grown into something more extensive, now being an examination of attitudes towards medieval books mostly produced in the Western Christian tradition, and the ways in which these books appear to have been regarded. I have discarded as many pages of research as I have included, so this is a highly selective study in the end. From a thorough analysis of images of manuscripts within manuscripts, together with a detailed study of marginalia, annotation, and glossing, this book offers the first holistic account of the medieval book in the physical world—as icon, artefact, commodity, and as object of then-­ contemporary research. The findings open up new avenues for further work, and for a more comprehensive understanding of the significant role played by the medieval book from c.600 to the present day. I am grateful to Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright, and the two Readers at Oxford University Press, whose generous comments, helpful criticisms, and observant corrections helped shape the final book. In the course of this work I owe sincere thanks to my University of Manchester magistri: Richard Hogg, Gale Owen-­ Crocker, Donald Scragg, and the most brilliant of palaeographers, Alexander R. Rumble. Subsequently, my research has been facilitated by funding from Stanford University, particularly associated with the Roberta Bowman Denning Endowed Chair that I hold; and by a small grant from Florida State University which paid for research assistance from William Green and Kate Lechler, whom I thank. For their know­ledge, kindness, and warm welcomes, thanks to Gill Canell at the Parker Library in Cambridge, Sandy Paul and Steven Archer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Suzanne Paul at Cambridge University Library, as well as the librarians at the British Library, and those then at Florida State, particularly Bill Modrow, Ben Yadon, and Jane Pinzino. Celena Allen, Laura Ashe, Tom Bredehoft, Jayne Carroll, Patrick Conner, Anne Marie D’Arcy, Nick Doane,

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viii Acknowledgements Richard Emmerson, Toni Healey, Chris Jones (St Andrews), Beatrice Kitzinger, Christina Lee, Roy Liuzza, Katie Lowe, Diane Watt, and Eric Weiskott have played important roles in my thinking. I am grateful to my students at Stanford, espe­ cially Jeanie Abbott, Max Ashton, Lorna Corbetta, Ben Diego, Liz Fischer, HB Klein, Antonio Lenzo, Kim Ngo, Jon Quick, Astrid Smith, and Clare Tandy. It was  a privilege to work alongside Georgia Henley and Bridget Whearty when they were postdoctoral fellows here at Stanford. The Medieval Writers Workshop was such a helpful venue to present the general thesis of this work; thank you to Tiffany Beechy, Jacqueline Fay, Stacy Klein, Scott Kleinman, Heather Maring, and Britt Mize. Colleagues at the Extreme Materiality Workshop at the University of Iowa years ago were excellent companions for weeks of practical and theoretical discussion: thank you so much to Jonathan Wilcox, Tim Barrett, Jennifer Borland, Patrick Conner, Gary Frost, Karen Gorst, Matt Hussey, Cheryl Jacobsen, Karen Jolly, Vickie Larsen, Jesse Meyer, and Martha Rust. Students and faculty who heard various lectures about my research have offered substantive feedback for the last decade; these include medievalists at the universities of West Virginia, Wisconsin Madison, Caltech, De Montfort Leicester, Boston College, Sewanee, Yale, Texas Austin, Texas A&M, Fort Wayne, Toledo, Leiden, Washington, George Washington University, Colorado Boulder, Berkeley, Oxford, Tennessee Knoxville, Lincoln, Minnesota, Harvard, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews and the University of Iowa. At Stanford, I am indebted to Mark Algee-­ Hewitt, Giovanna Ceserani, Rowan Dorin, Ron Egan, Marisa Galvez, Ivan Lupic, Bissera Pentcheva, Stephen Orgel, Richard Saller, and Alice Staveley. Stanford University Libraries is comprised of wonderful colleagues for whom I am grateful, including Nicole Coleman, John Mustain, Tim Noakes, Kathleen Smith, Roberto Trujillo, and Rebecca Wingfield. Particular collaborators and friends over the years, Ruth Ahnert, Benjamin Albritton, Mateusz Fafinski, Jill Frederick, Catherine Karkov, Bill Stoneman, and Kathryn Starkey, inspire me with their exemplary scholarship and collegiality; Matt Aiello has been as significant a teacher to me as he has been a student; and Mary Swan was a singular friend and co-­worker, from whom I did and will continue to immeasurably benefit. Three dear friends—Orietta Da Rold, Andrew Prescott, and Greg Walker— have been long-­time allies, and kind and close readers. To them, and to Emma, Iola, Mark, and Julie Treharne, Katharine Thompson, and Kathleen Spowart, thank you so much. This book is for Andrew, Jonathan, and Isabel Fryett whose constant tolerance and love are appreciated more than words. Stanford, 20.xii.20

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Contents List of Illustrations xi 1. ‘A Profit to People’: Introduction

1

2. ‘Fingers Folded Me’: Making the Book

18

3. ‘Covered Me with Tracks’: Writing the Book

40

4. ‘People Will Use Me’: Book as Archive

62

5. ‘My Name Is Famous’: Presence in the Book

88

6. ‘In Spirit the Wiser’: Invisible Things in the Book

115

7. ‘Covered with Protecting Boards’: Representing the Book

146

8. ‘Cut by the Edge of the Knife’: Libricide and the Modern Book Trade

168

9. ‘More True and Better’: The Digital Book and Its Frameworks of Understanding

195

10. Bookending ‘Þa Wuldorgesteald’: The Wondrous Edifice

213

Bibliography 217 Index of Manuscripts 241 Index 243

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List of Illustrations 1.1 Cambridge Corpus Christi College, MS 2, folio 94r (The Bury Bible).

11

© Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

2.1 Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3501, folio 107r (The Exeter Book).

19

© Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Chapter, Exeter Cathedral.

2.2 University of Trinity, St David’s, Lampeter, Burgess MS 2.

34

© Reproduced with permission of Lampeter, University of Trinity, St David’s Library.

3.1 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 5. 4, folio 6v.

44

© Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge.

3.2 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201, p. 2.

52

© Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

3.3 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 459, folio 44r.

56

© Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

4.1 Hereford Cathedral Library, MS P. i. 2, folio 134r (Hereford Gospels).

66

© Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Chapter, Hereford Cathedral.

4.2 Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS A. 135, folio 11r (The Codex Aureus).

71

© Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Sweden.

4.3 Lichfield Cathedral Library, MS 1, page 141 (Llandeilo or St Chad Gospels).

76

© Reproduced with the permission of the Dean and Chapter, Lichfield Cathedral.

5.1 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 199, folio 11r.

95

© Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

5.2 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 199, folio 3v.

97

© Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

5.3 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383, folio 12r. © Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

99

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xii  List of Illustrations 5.4 Stanford University Libraries, MSS Codex 0877, folio 1r.

112

© Reproduced courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

6.1 London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A. viii, folio 3v.

118

© The British Library Board. Reproduced with permission.

6.2 London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A. viii, folio 4r.

119

© The British Library Board. Reproduced with permission.

6.3 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 17. 1, folio 6r.

123

© Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge.

6.4 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 17. 1, folio 4v.

125

© Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge.

6.5 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 4. 16, folios viii–ix.

133

© Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge.

6.6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 8846, folio 135r.

138

© Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

6.7 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201, a: p. 6; b: p. 7.

143–144

© Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

7.1 London, Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth MS 107, folio 84v.

147

© Reproduced by permission of Lambeth Palace Library.

7.2 London, British Library, Additional MS 33241, folio 1v.

151

© The British Library Board. Reproduced with permission.

7.3 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286, folio 129v.

159

© Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

8.1 Elaine Treharne Book of Hours.

171

© Elaine Treharne.

8.2 Elaine Treharne Book of Hours.

172

© Elaine Treharne.

8.3 Foliophiles Information Cards.

182

© Elaine Treharne.

8.4 Foliophiles Breviary Leaf. © Elaine Treharne.

183

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List of Illustrations  xiii 8.5 Salisbury Cathedral Library, MS 150, folio 129v, Psalm 139.

189

© Photo Elaine Treharne, reproduced with permission of the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral.

8.6 Walter Beals Medieval Booklet.

192

© Photo Isabel Fryett.

9.1 Wikipedia screenshot.

199

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1

‘A Profit to People’ Introduction

Noble works ought not to be printed in mean and worthless forms, and cheapness ought to be limited by an instinctive sense and law of fitness. The binding of a book is the dress with which it walks out into the world. The paper, type and ink are the body, in which its soul is domiciled. And these three, soul, body, and habilament, are a triad which ought to be adjusted to one another by the laws of harmony and good sense.1 W.  E.  Gladstone’s description of printed books in 1890 as bodies with souls clothed in bindings pre-­empts the ‘material turn’ of the present day, where objects are examined within their social, physical, and historical contexts, and as things encouraging particular kinds of responses from their human interactors.2 To conceptualize an object like a book as embodied and participating in the real world is to regard it phenomenologically, in as clear-­sighted a way as did Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty, the twentieth-­century French philosopher, and this opens up new avenues of understanding the book’s many shapes and roles in the world.3 Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts considers the manuscript codex architextually and phenomenologically from c.600 to the present day as a ‘being-­in-­the-­world’: how it is experienced; what its structures are; how it is an affective object that engages human senses; and also how it exists in its own right as a unique and valuable witness to the past.4 The method and ideas can be used to analyse and interpret any textual object from any cultural tradition. 1 W. E. Gladstone, Books and the Housing of Them (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1890), pp. 4–5. The chapter titles of Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts contain quotations from the Old English Riddle 26, the subject of Chapter 2. This tenth-­century Riddle tells the story of the creation of a book. 2  See, for example, Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics’, Journal of British Studies 48 (2009): 283–307. 3  Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1958; repr. 2009); published first as Phénomènologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, trans. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 4  Gerard Genette used the term ‘architextual’ as part of a larger scheme of genre and ‘transtextuality’ in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). See Elaine Treharne, ‘The Architextual Editing of Early English’, in A. S. G. Edwards and T. Takako, eds, Poetica: (Tokyo): An International Journal of

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. Elaine Treharne, Oxford University Press. © Elaine Treharne 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843814.003.0001

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2  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts This study highlights the book as edifice (hence ‘architextually’), a complete structure, by focusing on the creators, producers, users, and owners of manu­ scripts to engage with how they perceived the object itself. I focus on complex textual communities, multiple levels of literacy, relative degrees of multilingualism, the sentiments involved in making and handling manuscripts, the spaces within the manuscript, and the commodification and digitization of the book. Critically, characteristics of literacy—in writing, reading, and textual in­ter­pret­ ation—are bound up with issues concerning the authority of and access to record, and these varied from century to century, region to region, and person to person. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts testifies to the physical, spiritual, and intellectual work involved in the manufacture of handwritten books. It also reveals the ways in which users of books interacted with them: how browsers of manuscripts felt compelled to write in or mark the folios; how readers used the empty areas of the book to inscribe themselves into a lasting, bibliographical history; and how books were conceived of both in surviving written evidence and in the evidence provided by images of books in the contexts of manuscript illustration. This is a fascinating story, one which highlights how those who engaged with the leaves lingered over their moment with the book, disrupted the book, damaged it, enhanced it, expanded it. Knowledge of the reader-­user’s interactions with the codex is evidence of the significance of the manuscript book to its medi­ eval and more contemporary audiences, a significance which is both obvious and yet simultaneously undervalued. The significance is obvious because much of today’s modern, hyper-­literate world is perfectly aware of how important the book is, and has been, culturally, politically, intellectually, and socially; yet, until recently, the book’s crucial role in earlier cultures has ironically been rendered invisible, transparent, precisely because of its very ubiquity and its familiarity to a print-­saturated, and now digital, world. The turn in recent decades to Thing Theory has stimulated considerable interest in the human-­thing, human-­object relationship; the presence of things in literary texts and historical record; the physical facture and commodification of objects; and, especially in the related areas of study known as New Materialism, Speculative Realism, and Object-­ Orientated Ontology (‘OOO’), the agentive power of the inanimate.5 In his work, Graham Harman states that ‘real objects withdraw from all human access and even from casual interaction with each

Linguistic-­Literary Studies, vol. 71 (2009), pp. 1–13, where, however, the principles and general theory were in early development. 5 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003); Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History’.

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  3 other’, and that their existence is outside the human-­thing relationship.6 In considering the proximity of Thing Theory with earlier theories, Harman notes ‘[t]he problem that thing theory seems to share with the New Historicism lies in the assumption that “the real” has no other function than to accompany the human agent and mold or disrupt it from time to time’.7 For his own part, Harman sees substance in things, and in art and literature as things: things as autonomous whether or not a human actor is present. Bill Brown in his most recent work counters by privileging the subject in the relationship between humans and things, and by seeking to bring scholars back to a focus on the human.8 Much of this debate centres on the literary text and its positionality in and through time. For Trentmann, thinking about things means digging deep into the nature and history of an item or class of items in a consideration of modernity’s drive towards consumerism.9 In his recent monumental study, Empire of Things, Trentmann works to uncover the mutually constitutive relationship of consumers and their things with social power and systems of value. His research begins in earnest with the seventeenth century; some generalized comments about the medieval period set that millennium from c.500 to c.1500 firmly apart. Thus, for example, in the pre-­modern era, Trentmann comments that ‘avarice and the lust for things were said to distract Christians from the true life of the spirit’,10 and in his account, people seem only to have procured and owned things in the later medieval period; ‘It can be tempting’, he says, ‘to think of pre-­modern societies as extremes of in­equal­ity, where a few rich lords feasted off the many ragged poor, and this was true for much of Europe’.11 Postulating views like these marks the medieval period as something ‘other than’, whereas medieval things did, of course, exist in abundance, as any municipal museum can attest. As such, to date, Thing Theory and its allied theories of Object-­ Orientated Ontology, or indeed Actor-­ Network Theory, have not proven particularly inspirational for many medievalists or for my own work.12 In his critically important 2013 article, ‘The Call of Things’, Andrew Cole takes on this setting aside of the medieval to show the depth of relevant philosophies that predate not only these recent new fields of study, but also the Kantian and

6  Graham Harman, ‘The Well-­Wrought Hammer’, New Literary History 43 (Spring 2012): 183–20. ‘Speculative Realism’ is a term for asking, as Harman does at p. 184, ‘does a real world exist in­de­pend­ent­ly of human access or not?’ 7  Ibid. 193. 8  Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). 9  Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-­First (London: HarperCollins, 2016). 10 Trentmann, Empire of Things, p. 8. 11  Ibid. 32. 12  Actor-­Network Theory (ANT) is Bruno Latour’s major contribution to the subject-­object investigation, which strives to show the interconnectedness of all things. Latour conceives of objects as exhibiting consciousness and agency, which manifest variously depending on the social or environmental contexts. See, for example, Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­ Network-­Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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4  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts Cartesian.13 Cole takes his reader back to the mysticism of Meister Eckhart (d.1327/8) whose exposition of the Logos principle involved both seeing and hearing the pull of the created object; objects emerge, as Cole says, ‘as transmission devices’.14 Cole is right about the significance of the medieval to con­tem­por­ ary theoretical concerns and his call to medievalists is appreciated. The various medieval texts and thinkers cited in Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts will show how things were important a thousand and more years ago. Things were thought about; objects admired and engaged with in a myriad of ways. I hope to prove, then, through the investigation of books as ‘things’ and ‘objects’—terms I will use interchangeably—artefacts from the medieval period have much to offer contemporary ways of thinking about the relationship between the human and the (book-­as-­)thing. Principal among things for the purposes of Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts—though certainly not commonly owned or easily obtained—was the textual object. My thinking is most consistently guided and inspired by the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty (1908–61), which pre-­ empts Thing Theory by some sixty or so years, and which takes account of the world, all things in it, and our apprehension of it by our moving, living, embodied consciousness. The term ‘phenomenal’ is used in this study as a near-­synonym of ‘sensual’ in the Oxford English Dictionary’s meaning of ‘pertaining to the senses or physical sensation’ and as ‘capable of being known empirically, esp. through the senses or through immediate experience, perceptible’, and for Merleau-­Ponty, the phenomenal denoted the essence of things and things perceived.15 The broadly understood present-­day signification of ‘sensual’, for its part, with its denotation of passion, is occasionally acknowledged in this investigation of books, as we see the readers and users of manuscripts demonstrate a response to books that highlights the caress, the gentle stroke, deliberate rubbing, and, on occasion, a more determined abrasion.16 The more sensational connotation of ‘phenomenal’, suggesting the extraordinary, also occasionally features here. Ultimately, the medieval manuscript is a decidedly sensual and phenomenal object. From a philosophical perspective, in the realm of phenomenology the manuscript is of and in the

13  Andrew Cole, ‘The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-­Oriented Ontologies’, Minnesota Review 80 (2013): 106–18. See also D.  Vance Smith, ‘Death and Texts: Finitude before Form’, Minnesota Review 80 (2013): 131–44. 14  Cole, ‘The Call of Things’, p. 110. 15  Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2020): https:// www.oed.com, accessed 8 May 2020, s.v.v. ‘sensual’ and ‘phenomenal’, respectively (henceforth, OED). 16  On these physical interactions with the manuscript, see Kathryn Rudy, ‘Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 2 (2010): 1–26; Mark Amsler, Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages, Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies 19 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); Jonathan Wilcox, ed., Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  5 world; it is an object that, as will be discussed, is ‘inhabited’ and part of a network of experienced objects.17 Throughout this work, I shall draw upon the senses as the means to access the manuscript book which will enable readers to think differently about the codex. As the moving and interacting embodied consciousness of the animated being is so critical to Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology, so it is to my understanding of the meaning of the book. The store of memory that perceivers bring to their lived experience is critical too: we know how things work or how we should interact with them partly because of our built-­up store of knowledge. Such knowledge is also essential for our ability to flesh out any transcendent object which is only ever seen perspectivally. In this phenomenological understanding of the world, to see a tree as I approach it is to see the tree only from one angle, one perspective, but I am able to flesh out the tree, as it were, because of its context and my acquired knowledge of trees. When I look at a physical manuscript book, I can quickly obtain some understanding of what I am seeing from my perspective and I can guess at the extent or the weight or the materials based on my acquired knowledge. But to gain the fullest understanding of the book I need to see it in its entirety—immanently and from all angles open to me. I need to access the phys­ ic­al manuscript using all of my senses, including turning the folios to move through the book; holding the book with my hands, or having it open on my lap; turning the book to look at images; or, in the Special Collections room of the library, standing up to look at the spine, or twisting to get a better look at a small detail, because conservation regulations mean I cannot pick the book up. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts contributes to knowledge by asking that we re-­see the book with an eye to this wholeness, looking at the book in its various contexts of production and use, and thereby providing fresh perspectives on manuscripts through time.18 Merleau-­Ponty’s central tenets are that the body ‘is [one’s] point of view on the world’ and that ‘all the senses are spatial, if they are to give us access to some form or other of being, if, that is, they are senses at all’. For Merleau-­Ponty, the body is the means of being in the world, of ‘having a world’. Key to perception are all the senses and these include the senses involving muscle movement:19 proprioception (the sensory response to interior stimuli), kinaesthesis (the ability to instinctively feel and know how to move the body), and exteroception (the sensory response to external stimuli). These are specialist terms used by 17  Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm’, in his The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 130–55. 18  Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xxiii: ‘True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this sense an historical account can give meaning to the world quite as “deeply” as a philosophical treatise’. 19 See Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1958; repr. 2009), pp. 70, 217, and 146, respectively.

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6  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts phe­nom­en­ol­ogists to explain the manner by which humans interact with the world around them through movement and the sensitization of the whole body’s musculature and neurological system. As Taylor Carman explains, ‘For Merleau-­ Ponty, it is precisely the phenomenological dovetailing of our bodily movements with our visual orientation in the environment that constitutes our positive sense of being embodied perceptual selves’.20 It is sight, touch, and movement through the world that are strikingly present in Merleau-­Ponty’s existential phenomenology, and it is precisely these senses that are so fundamental to working with books, and, I argue, particularly medieval manuscripts, which are archetypally phenomenal objects, dependent on sensory engagement for their fullest interpretation. I recognize that this could be conceived of as an elitist position: since medieval manuscripts are generally quite inaccessible to all but advanced scholars, might it be the case that only those who can access these books in person can hope to interpret such an object fully? Perhaps that is the ideal scenario of study and apprehension, but manuscript books can be made more accessible by the provision of detailed and intelligible information, such as the physical extent of a manuscript; its materials; its history. Many repositories give some of this information in a legible way for those who browse or study their catalogues; no repository offers all. And while digitization is a boon for access to the text, there are many issues from a phenomenological point of view. With a concerted focus on a sensual, phenomenal response and on understanding the book-­as-­object, all of the senses become important simultaneously, even though sight might seem the most obviously crucial. Sight certainly was regarded as the dominant sense in many writings and depictions of the medieval period. Indeed, the ninth-­century silver and niello Fuller Brooch, housed in the British Museum and often discussed by art historians, visibly demonstrates the significance of sight, with the central superellipse taken up by a personified representation of Sight, staring with enlarged eyes directly at the viewer.21 This is ­echoed by four other figures staring out in the roundels at the top and bottom of the outer rim, while the full-­length personifications of Taste, Smell, Touch, and Hearing are set in lentoid frames around Sight. Yet vision is only part of the story for medieval book producers and users, as Chapter 2 will show; and while I am also interested in hearing, smelling, and tasting as responses to medieval manu­ scripts, I am most concerned to highlight the importance of touch in a book’s manifold functions. Touch and vision together provide what Merleau-­Ponty called ‘the first dimension’—depth.22 Touch is significant because of the inherent 20 Taylor Carman, ‘The Body in Husserl and Merleau-­Ponty’, Philosophical Topics 27 (1999): 205–26, at p. 221. 21  The object is available digitally on the British Museum website: https://www.britishmuseum.org, accessed 8 May 2020. 22 M.  C.  Dillon, Merleau-­Ponty Vivant, SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (New York: SUNY Press, 1991), p. 3.

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  7 hapticity of books, that is, books’ clear touchability.23 A book does not work unless it is touched. It cannot be opened, moved through, or closed without phys­ ic­al interaction. An untouched book, even one that is open in an exhibition case, is unfunctioning or limited in its functionality to what can be perceived from the one opening. In the exhibition case, the book becomes a static piece of art. This is obvious, but it is only in recent years with the emergence of digital technologies and the libric avatars24 offered through the platform of the tablet and computer screen that the innate and essential tactility of physically independent books has truly struck home. It is worth noting that when we look and see, there are ‘intermediaries’ between the eye and the object, such as light or how well one can focus, whereas, one might argue, to touch is a direct encounter.25 These are not independent means of perceiving the world: ‘there is not in the normal subject a tact­ ile experience and also a visual one, but an integrated experience to which it is impossible to gauge the contribution of each sense’.26 While maintaining an eye on seeing, I will also focus on the centrality of touch to the facture and function of the medieval book throughout this study; and the ways in which the digital realm seeks to emulate readers’ handling of books will also be evaluated in the final chapter. It will become evident that books and their touchability—the physical and material invitation of the book to humans to participate in its existence— have been particularly significant to audiences since the inception of the codex as a text technology. During the years of research for The Phenomenal Book, countless newspaper, magazine, and blog columns have lauded the digital enterprise to democratize learning through the provision of images online, in eBook form, and on DVDs. Simultaneously, other commentators have bemoaned the loss of the ‘real’ book in this period of text technological transformation.27 As will be seen, some of the

23  OED, s.v. ‘haptic’, from Greek ἁπτικ-­ός ‘able to come into contact with’. On haptic theory, see, for example, Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); F. Delogu, M. Gravina, X. Dong, M. Frolka, D. Kuhn, and N. Yu, ‘Tactile Beauty Is in the Hand, but Also in the Eye of the Beholder: Interaction between Haptic and Visual Experiences in Aesthetic Judgement’, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2020), DOI:10.1037/aca0000327. 24  ‘Libric’ as in ‘book-­like’ and ‘avatar’ as in ‘graphical representation’ (s.v. ‘avatar’, OED). 25  Komarine Romdenh-­Romluc, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Merleau-­ Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 203. Merleau-­Ponty’s concept of synaesthesia becomes interesting here: how we are able to see that an object is soft or hard becomes particularly pertinent when considering the online perception of medieval membrane—the animal skin from which most medieval books are made in the West up to the fourteenth century—which varies so widely in its texture. 26  Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 137. Cited, too, in Romdenh-­ Romluc, Guidebook to Merleau-­Ponty, p. 95. 27  A quick search online for ‘The Future of the Book’ will provide well over a million hits detailing every aspect—pessimistic and positive—of the past, present, and anticipated status of the printed book and digital possibilities. On this transformative era, see, for example, Jean-­Claude Carriere and Umberto Eco, This Is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation, curated by Jean-­Philippe de Tonnac and trans. Polly McLean (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012); and Laura Mandell, Breaking

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8  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts apocalypticism accompanying the so-­called ‘demise of the book’ is overdramatic and misplaced, but there is also a real need for bibliophiles, scholars, and students to understand what it is of the physical book that is transformed in the digital era, and, more importantly, what is elided of the medieval manuscript in not apprehending its particular features of sensuality, phenomenalism, and thus wholeness.28 Indeed, understanding how important the senses are in apprehending the manuscript book and ‘bookness’ will also inspire scholars in developing new models and interfaces for displaying the book in different ways on computer screens and other digital devices. This is something of particular importance for the handwritten book, which is uniquely created using organic materials that are never the same from one square inch to another and thus demand as close an attention to the physical detail as possible. Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts aims to bring to readers’ attention the significance of the manuscript book in its material, social, cultural, and physical contexts and networks. The study itself insists, among other things, on the re­appraisal of manuscripts as an integral part of the History of the Book, a dynamic, global field of scholarship that until recently had been in danger of forgetting the millennium of book production prior to the invention of printing in the West, to say nothing of book history in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Near and Middle East. Almost all the discussion in Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts is focused on the Western manuscript, because this is my own scholarly area of expertise. Even here, the real geography of the manuscripts I study is narrower still, highlighting British manuscripts for the most part.29 I hope, though, that the approach I take of examining dynamic architextuality and the role of the book-­as-­in-­the-­world can be useful for other text technological traditions. This work widens book history in material and geographical terms by insisting on the significance of the senses, and on the ways in which the the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age, Wiley-­ Blackwell Manifestos (Oxford: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2015). 28  See Elaine Treharne, ‘Fleshing Out the Text: The Transcendent Manuscript in the Digital Age’, in Holly Crocker and Kathryn Schwarz, eds, Flesh, Special Issue of Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval and Cultural Studies 4 (2013): 1–14. As The Economist’s Babbage blogger puts it: ‘Books may appear to inhabit a flat, monochromatic space. But . . . they carry a wealth of information which pours out only on close inspection, by looking, touching or even smelling a physical copy. They also change over time. This richness cannot—at least not yet—be captured in book-­scanning projects’, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/05/book-­digitisation, accessed 8 May 2020. 29  There are vibrant fields of manuscript studies for all of the major global traditions. For a super overview, see the short and accessible case studies in Bryan C. Keene, ed., Towards a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020). See also Geoffrey Roper, ed., The History of the Book in the Middle East (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); David Stern, ‘The Hebrew Bible in Europe in the Middle Ages: A Preliminary Typology’, Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 11 (2012): http://www.biu.ac.il/js/JSIJ/11–2012/Stern.pdf; Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China, Understanding China: New Viewpoints on History and Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). Other works can be found in the Bibliography.

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  9 reader-­viewer’s perception functions, in analysing these early handmade books. It is fundamentally important to look again at how medieval manuscripts were manufactured, how they are represented to then-­contemporary readers, and how then-­contemporary readers and casual users as well as present-­day audiences respond to these books. It is absolutely clear that medieval manuscript makers and audiences touched these books; they looked at them, gazed on them, imagined them—sometimes from afar, sometimes in close and personal proximity. In the preparation of the Western manuscript up to the fourteenth century at least, in defleshing and dehairing the animal skin, ruling and pricking the cut pages, writing and drawing the legible text, threading and sewing the quires of gathered folios, perusing and turning leaves in the bound codex, manuscript artisans pierced, marked, smelled, and tasted these books.30 Medieval audiences heard and saw books read aloud; they memorized the texts and images; they perceived the potential of the manuscript to be so much more than just a series of folios upon which texts and images were inscribed. Modern audiences of scholars and browsers cannot easily recreate these earlier cultures of literacy. Indeed, a modern digitally focused society distances and desensitizes itself through the constant use of images and images of images, ­layered in a refractive index which simultaneously makes the physical object invisible. There appears to be no ‘thickness’ when we view images; the books online in digital repositories or social media seem close and immediate, but are not. We see an image captured on the screen of an image displayed in a virtual catalogue, comprised of images uploaded from a camera-­image of a manuscript, or even a facsimile. The discussion of the manuscript book as a voluminous and whole object in this study is a reminder of the narrowness of the ocularcentric nature of a great deal of scholarship. Such scholarship reflects the assumption that information is separated from the medium which carries it, which clearly is not true of manuscripts and documents. The proliferation of images threatens to obliterate metaphorically or distort digitally the materiality of the book—the book as object, thing, artefact; and to induce forgetfulness of the user as actual, as a toucher, intervener, inscriber. And it is not that one must have the object itself in order to undertake a more ‘real’ kind of scholarship or that viewing in itself is insufficient; as the event of a global pandemic such as COVID-­19 has shown, when one can only access images and facsimiles of medieval manuscript materials these have to be enough. It is, though, essential not to replace one form of libric or bookish existence with another. Most crucially, images provided through online repositories must be accompanied by an intelligent and legible interpretative

30  See, for instance, Jennifer Borland, ‘Violence on Vellum: Saint Margaret’s Transgressive Body and Its Audience,’ in Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More, eds, Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe: Construction, Transformation, and Subversion, 600–1530 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 67–88.

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10  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts framework that permits the viewer to begin their looking with physical and contextual information about what they see and how the digitized object exists in the real world, particularly in relation to its size and structure. As such, the following chapters examine evidence for medieval and more modern conceptions of and responses to the book, first through the detailed exam­in­ ation of Old English Riddles about the medieval book and scribal effort; then through retrieval of the kinds of marks made in manuscripts by users over long periods of time; and finally through the reception of medieval manuscripts in the modern commercial and digital worlds. I do not attempt a full century-­by-­century account of the ways in which manuscripts were received, but nevertheless I show how manuscripts and their users provide evidence of attitudes to the physical book upon which many have laid their very hands. In some cases, this work produces an interesting stratification of effect: some medieval readers, for example, felt compelled to write upon the blank folios of miniature images of books within the book, while others drew, wrote poetry, signed their name; still others annotated, or pointed a finger with a manicule, or expanded upon the original text they were reading. Blankness draws the viewer-reader-annotator into conversation with the text already present, even if the correspondence between the actors is easily apparent. There are discernible patterns of use that are age-­old, indicating modes of engagement that are comparable to the highlighting seen in modern students’ library books or that are reminiscent of the ancient graffiti traced onto the plaster of Pompeiian villas. In the former case, modern society tends to regard the marking-­up of a printed book, especially one that doesn’t belong to the individual making the marks, as vandalism. In the latter case, it may well be given the prolific nature of graffiti in Pompeii that it was almost a le­git­im­ate form of inscribed engagement; it is certainly assigned great cultural value now, as testimony to the lives and interests of citizens two thousand years ago. Something of this ambivalence towards inscribers in books or in otherwise empty spaces can be illustrated by the evidence left by a medieval reader of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 2, the famous twelfth-­century Bury Bible—a large, de luxe volume with magnificent illustrations.31 In this manu­ script, Moses and other Christian figures are depicted holding books, scrolls, and tablets, all of which were conceived by the painter to have blank surfaces. For a particular later medieval reader, though, blankness was clearly perceived as an aberration, for he (or possibly she) intervened in the manuscript by writing in small, cramped script onto the empty pages of some illustrated books and scrolls held by Moses and others. At folio 94r (Figure 1.1), in a scene where Moses holds up his book of the Law to an assembled audience, the illustrator originally 31  It is now a multi-­volume set in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The manuscripts in that library are available in digitized form at http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/. I briefly discussed this manuscript in ‘Distant’, in Leah Price and Matthew Rubery, eds, Further Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 89–99, at 97–8.

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  11

Figure 1.1  Cambridge Corpus Christi College, MS 2, folio 94r (The Bury Bible). © Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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12  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts intended the opening of the book to be blank. A later reader of the manuscript intervened, though, writing hec dicit dominus deus onto the verso of the opening. For this medieval reader, a book must have words, the page must be filled, and, for these moments of writing, the reader-­user perceived themselves to have ownership of both the miniature folios, and, consequently, CCCC 2’s own folios. Blankness represented the potential for the addition of knowledge, then. Even a slight intervention like this thus reveals something significant about the material nature of the book, its reception in fact and in figure. There is much to be dis­ covered about how medieval reader-­viewers conceived of the manuscripts they encountered—in this case with an insistence on inscribing themselves into the fabric of the book. Such a close encounter with the flesh of the codex is more than just the markings of a reader, the intrusion of ink on substrate. In chapters 38 and 39 of his Topographia Hibernica (The Topography of Ireland), written in c.1186, Gerald of Wales recounts the miracle surrounding the creation of a Gospel-­book he saw while touring Ireland earlier in the 1180s.32 These chapters are very well known, and often used by modern art historical scholars to illustrate early Irish manuscript art, and especially so in discussion of the beautifully illuminated Books of Kells and Durrow.33 What is particularly interesting is the account of the miracle of the book’s artistic and scribal production—through the grace of an angelic vision; and the depth of intellectual and spiritual scrutiny required to obtain a fuller appreciation of the book’s significance: 38. Of a book miraculously written (‘De libro miraculose conscripto’) Among all the miracles in Kildare, none appears to me more wonderful than that marvellous book (liber ille mirandus) which they say was written in the time of the Virgin at the dictation of an angel.34 It contains the Four Gospels in close accordance with St. Jerome, where almost all the pages are illustrated by drawings illuminated with a variety of the most distinctive colours. Here in one you see the face of Majesty divinely drawn (divinitus impressum); next, the symbolic forms of the evangelists (mysticas Evangelistarum formas), with either six, four, or two wings; here is depicted the eagle, then the calf; here the face of a man, then of a lion with other figures in infinite variety. If they are superficially observed, and in the usual careless way (usuali more minus acute conspexeris), you might perceive them to be smudges, rather than careful connections; expecting to find nothing exquisite, where, in truth, there is nothing which is 32  Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, trans. Thomas Forester, rev. and ed. Thomas Wright, In Parentheses Publications Medieval Latin Series (Cambridge: Ontario, 2000), pp. 123–4. 33  For example, Michelle P. Brown, ‘Marvels of the West: Giraldus Cambrensis and the Role of the Author in the Development of Marginal Illustration’, in Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, vol. 10 (London: British Library, 2002), pp. 34–59. 34  St Bridget of Kildare, who died in about 523.

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  13 not exquisite. If however you examine it more closely, and are able to penetrate to the secrets of the art depicted in these pictures (Sin autem ad perspicacius intuendum oculorum aciem invitaveris, et longe penitus ad artis arcana transpenetraveris), you will find them so delicate and exquisite, so finely drawn, and the work of knotted-­interlace so elaborate, while the colours with which they are illuminated are so blended, and still so fresh, that you will be ready to assert that all this is the work of angelic, and not human, skill. The more often and diligently I scrutinize them, the more I am surprised, and always find things as if anew, discovering fresh causes for increased admiration (Hæc equidem quanto frequentius et diligentius intueor, semper quasi novis obstupeo, semper magis ac magis admiranda conspicio). 39. How the book was composed (‘De libri compositione’) Early in the night before the morning on which the scribe was to begin the book, an angel stood before him in a dream, and showing him a picture drawn on a tablet which he had in his hand, said to him, ‘Do you think that you can draw this picture on the first page of the volume which you propose to copy?’ The scribe, who doubted his skill in such exquisite art, in which he was uninstructed and had no practice, replied that he could not. At this the angel said, ‘Tomorrow, entreat your Lady to offer prayers for you to the Lord, that he would assure that you can open your bodily eyes, and give you spiritual vision, which may enable you to see more clearly, and understand with more intelligence, and employ your hands in drawing with accuracy’. The scribe having done as he was commanded, the night following the angel came to him again, and presented to him the same picture, with a number of others. All these, aided by divine grace, the scribe made himself master of, and faithfully committing them to his memory, exactly copied in his book in their proper places. In this manner the book was composed, an angel furnishing the designs, St. Brigit praying, and the scribe copying.35

Within this widely discussed pair of chapters, there are a number of observations to be made about what the book meant to those who owned it, and to Gerald of Wales himself—a viewer of the manuscript. Strikingly, the emphasis on pro­ active­ly applied gazing and consequent development of inner sight or perception is remarkable and repeated in verbs of seeing, observation, looking, penetrating, and scrutinizing, as well as the angelic instruction ‘to open your bodily eyes’ for the provision of ‘spiritual vision’. But highlighted here, too, is how essential it is to be trained in order to be artistically competent; and how significant are the craft and physical work involved both in the actual production of that finely described 35  Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, trans. Thomas Forester, rev. and ed. Thomas Wright, In Parentheses Publications Medieval Latin Series (Cambridge: Ontario, 2000).

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14  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts artistry and in its clear appreciation: the skill of the scribe in their memorization and in their application of know-­how is, for Gerald and his readers, unparalleled, with rich benefits for the committed interpreter. For the institution showing the book, it was the miraculous circumstances of the book’s genesis that elevated it, a product of the gift of divine inspiration to the scribe. Those scribes in the Middle Ages who left comments in their manuscripts like ‘God help me’, and who are often wrongly described thereby as miserable or exhausted in their task, sought assistance from divine intercessors. In London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B. v, at folio 19r, for example, a rubricator-­ scribe wrote ‘God me helpe’ (‘God help me’) at the foot of the folio in red; and at folio 28v, the main scribe wrote ‘God helpe minum handum’ (‘God help my hands’) as the last words of the text. These can be seen as requests for grace in the scribal task completed as such an integral part of opus Dei. These requests are not always the sighs of fed-­up labourers. In Gerald’s description of the Kildare Gospel-­book, the scribe is told in his vision that he will be given the grace to see spiritually, and this acts as inspiration for his work, as it would be for those similarly blessed to see beyond the physical attributes of the manuscript. Gerald, moving kinaesthetically through the book, is awed as he turns folio after folio; moving backwards and forwards in the book for comparison between images, the book’s consequence was certainly made apparent through the exceptional and intricate quality of the artwork, which he stared at in wonder (intueor). Sight that is both inward and corporeal is of utmost importance here, but so is the sense of touch and handling of the book; of the clear mystical perception and contemplative demands of understanding with which an astute reader-­viewer could engage meaningfully. As Merleau-­Ponty explains: ‘perception is therefore not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being. I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.’36 For Gerald, looking at this Gospel-­book is a full sensory experience that takes in both the visible and the invisible. For him and for other medieval readers and audiences, the spirituality inherent in the craftsmanship of the book both reflected and contributed to the mystical divine content. This essential, but invisible, component of the medieval book forms a major part of my investigation, because understanding the wholeness of the book depends on reading it holistically—the invisible alongside the visible.

36  Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, in Sense and Non-­Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964); published first as Sense et non-­sense (Paris: Les Éditions Nagel, 1948), pp. 48–69, at p. 50.

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  15

The Whole Text The narrowness of focusing on the words or images contained within a textual artefact stems from the print-­culture boundedness of the contemporary world: readers are culturally and intellectually constructed through print culture and it is thoroughly embedded in modern life. The newer technologies of digital culture are themselves contained by the limits imposed by an over-­reliance on print consciousness. When one imagines, conceives of, or actually studies the medieval book, the primary impulse is to regard it as if it were part of a replicative chain of books.37 Scholars call a text like Beowulf the ‘unique surviving copy’ or ‘version’ of the poem, situated in London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius  A.  xv. Similarly, the large corpus of medieval homilies, saints’ lives, and other textual materials in the earlier medieval period are thought of as spreading outward through editorial mediation from a single ‘fair copy’, a ‘base text’.38 Many working on early textual materials think in terms of multiplicities, of disseminations, of stemmatic representations. But manuscript culture is not, and has never been, properly conceivable in these terms. Each book, each textual object, is a unique production and Chapters 2–5 here focus on individual manuscripts and texts to examine them holistically. While it is made up of component parts that can be studied individually, every book in its entirety is worth studying, attending to those parts of the object that are instantly visible and central, but giving equal time to those elements that are peripheral, even invisible, and ‘in-­between’. As Merleau-­Ponty would have it, the whole is not reducible to its parts; neither is a book or other object greater than the sum of its parts.39 The book can be conceived of as that which can be held, seen, and read, and all that is adjacent: the eidos or idea of the conception; the technē of the object or the know-­how and skill that is inherent in it; the poiēsis or making of the object. These Aristotelian modes of creation come to fruition in the plenitext, the fullness of textual interpretation gleaned through examination of every component of the textual artefact.40 Architextuality is constructed on this basic premise. Such an approach investigates the phenomenological book—the thing as it exists in the  world. It culminates in the holistic evaluation of the medieval manuscript 37  On this particularly, see ch. 1 of Thomas Bredehoft, The Visible Text, Oxford Textual Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 38  On the importance of the individual instantiation of text in the medieval period, see Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Paul Zumthor, ed., Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. Philip Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 39  Komarine Romdenh-­Romluc, The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Merleau-­ Ponty and Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2010). 40  For my coinage—‘plenitext’, see Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan, Text Technologies: A History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), especially the Introduction.

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16  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts in  the modern age, and provides a critique of biblioclasm or the breaking of books, as well as the flattening of the digital. Such an approach requires that we recognize in codices, whether complex books such as the Eadwine Psalter with its multi-columnar layout (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 17. 1) or simpler ones, like Cambridge Corpus Christi College, MS 303, some degree of their extensity; only in their entirety can these books be considered complete objects. In this system, a book’s heft and voluminousness is immediately apparent in the physical realm and is as important as other elements of the object in the pursuit of a fuller interpretation.41 Every aspect of these unique handwritten books is regarded as interpretable, and necessarily so.

Knowable Emptiness Thus far, what I have described goes only some way beyond the bibliographical approach modelled partially on D. F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts.42 Such an investigative method for an early printed book, as McKenzie shows, means that one might analyse not simply the text, but also the paratext, structure, peritext, context, cotext, perhaps even intertext, and so forth. For McKenzie, ‘what constitutes a text is not the presence of linguistic elements but the act of construction’.43 This construction is literal as well as social, economic, political, and intellectual. But, what is absent in this hermeneutic is, ironically, absence itself; namely, the absence of that which could be present, which is a most appropriate definition of blankness. What is particularly interesting about blankness in manuscripts is its invisibility: from the missing folios of blank leaves in digital repositories to the failure to account for space within traditional codicological examination (page size + writing grid size are usually given, tangentially providing the margin size, but this itself is subsumed within the focus on the writing), the empty is left vacant, without definition, without meaning. Emptiness, blankness, space, and other invisible features of the medieval manu­script are crucially overlooked in scholarship. Space is estrangement. Yet space is as present as any other component in a plenitextual investigation. And 41  William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), pp. 2:134–5 (ch. 20, ‘The Perception of Space: The Feeling of Crude Extensity’): ‘In the sensations of hearing, touch, sight, and pain we are accustomed to distinguish from among the other elements the element of voluminousness . . . . Now my first thesis is that this element, discernible in each and every sensation, though more developed in some than in others, is the original sensation of space, out of which all the exact knowledge about space that we afterwards come to have is woven by processes of dis­crim­in­ ation, association, and selection. “Extensity”, as Mr James Ward calls it, on this view, becomes an element in each sensation just as intensity is’. 42 D.  F.  McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See, too, from the literary perspective, Peter Barry, ‘Re-­thinking Textuality in Literary Studies Today’, Literature Compass 7.11 (2010), DOI:10.1111/j.1741–4113.2010.00758.x. 43 McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, p. 43.

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‘A Profit to People’: Introduction  17 this is both an interior, deliberate space (the specific choice not to write in that part of the book/bifolium) and an exterior, inadvertent space (that which surrounds the book, its heft plus immediate adjacency, its separation from other objects in the real world). It is both physical and supraphysical; and it is meaningfully expressed within and without medieval books and their facture, as Chapters 5 to 7 discuss. Space and blankness are part of the medieval manuscript’s mode of meaning. The binding, endleaves, core folios, text and image, margins, annotations, and all interventions by readers make up more of what the manuscript can offer for interpretation. Further, invisible and almost lost traces of ghosts who heard the manuscript being read, or left evidence that is erased or only intuited, add an important dimension to an appreciation of the extant textual and artistic record. My overall study is comprised of a number of close readings, then, that al­together serve to emphasize the wholeness of the manuscript. Chapters seek to determine how books and writing were understood and described in Early English poetry of the tenth century; they evaluate the ways in which readers, annotators, and browsers seem to have regarded the books in which they wrote; how modern scholars can better appreciate the invisible aspects of medieval manuscripts (and later books, too), such as the spirituality or joy inherent in the book; how medieval manuscripts were themselves depicted by manuscript illustrators; and how contemporary audiences enjoy and study these early, but now often fragmented, handmade books—which as Chapters 8 and 9 show is either through owning pieces of them, or from scrutinizing their digital aspects. What began as an extended study of the lexis, representation, and digital resurrection of manuscripts has become a concern to expose and explain the unity of the medi­ eval manuscript. In order to understand it fully, the book must be understood as a whole object. As such, when books are deliberately fragmented or displayed without the provision of any sense of their extensity, such actions run counter to the essence of these manuscripts, the intentions of their creators and producers, and the efforts of their early owners and perusers.

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2

‘Fingers Folded Me’ Making the Book

From Death into Life The Old English Riddle 26 found in the tenth-­century manuscript, The Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501), presents an account of a book’s production and purpose that is dramatically told by the book itself in a personal, tele­scoped narrative.1 This riddle, generally solved by scholars as ‘book’ or ‘Gospel-­book’, reveals all the major processes involved in a book’s production, as well as highlighting its intended function as a dazzling and profound work of art. The Exeter Book, itself, made perhaps in Exeter or Glastonbury in around 970 ce, contains over 120 English poems in total, including some of the most famous early English verse, such as Juliana, The Seafarer, and Wulf and Eadwacer. Among these poems are over ninety riddles, a number of which deal with books and book-­making.2 In riddles, the object of study is always indirectly described; sometimes, it is anthropomorphized, taking on human characteristics and introducing itself as if it were an animate object. This rhetorical device is known as prosopopoeia, and it is particularly effective for involving the riddle-­solver in an intimate relationship with the first-­person narrator, requiring close engagement between narrator and audience. The Gospel-­book Riddle 26 at folio 107r–v (Figure  2.1: folio 107r) 1  In Old English, the phrase ‘fingras feoldan’ from my chapter title means ‘fingers folded [me]’. As stated, all my chapter headings in this volume are quotations from the Old English Riddle 26, ‘Gospel-­ book’, in Exeter Cathedral Library, 3501, which, as this chapter will show, details the production and reception of an illuminated religious book. All Riddles discussed in this book are numbered according to George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds, The Exeter Book, The Anglo-­Saxon Poetic Records: A Collective Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). Other systems are in use by scholars, depending on how the textual boundaries of these short Old English poems are understood. 2 See  P.  W.  Conner, Anglo-­ Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-­ Century Cultural History (Boydell: 1993); R. Gameson, ‘The Origin of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry’, Anglo Saxon England 25 (1996): 135–85; P. W. Conner, ‘Exeter’s Relics, Exeter’s Books’, in Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson, eds, Essays on Anglo-­Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, King’s College London Medieval Studies (London: King’s College, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 2000), pp. 117–56. For translations and editions see, inter alia, Craig Williamson, ed., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); and Bernard Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, 2 vols (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000). It is not yet clear how many riddles relate to books and book-­making, since new solutions are still proposed occasionally; see Matthew Aiello, ‘Books in Battle: The Violent Poetics of Misdirection in Old English Riddle 53’, Review of English Studies 71 (2020): 207–28, DOI:10.1093/res/hgz/115.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. Elaine Treharne, Oxford University Press. © Elaine Treharne 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843814.003.0002

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  19

Figure 2.1  Exeter Cathedral Library, MS 3501, folio 107r (The Exeter Book). © Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Chapter, Exeter Cathedral.

cryptically details the violence that is an integral part of its own making and, paradoxically, the joy of its subsequent efficacy in bringing happiness and salvation to those who attend to its message. The Riddle’s deliberate opacity, which is such a key element of the riddling genre, suggests a reasonable level of literate understanding in its audience who would have to bring to bear some knowledge

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20  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts of medieval manuscript manufacture in order to correctly interpret the Riddle as referring to a book. Medieval books, as the Riddler will reveal, were constructed from leaves or folios made from the prepared and folded skins of calves, goats, or sheep; these folded leaves were pricked with a sharp awl to provide holes in the margins to be scored for ruling upon which the scribe would write with a feather quill and ink made from, among other possible organic ingredients, oak gall, ferrous sulphate, and water. The folios would be stitched together into gatherings or quires, and then bound between limp bindings or oak boards, the latter of which might be covered with leather or precious metal and decorated if the book were particularly highly valued. The manufacture of an early handmade book was thus a complex, time-­ consuming, resource-­ intensive, and skilful exercise. Books were expensive; their makers were trained craftspeople. Even the most ‘scruffy’ manuscripts demanded significant effort and time.3 The Old English Riddle of the Gospel-­book is edited here in full because of its  significance to appreciating how books were perceived by some in the Middle Ages.

5

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Mec feonda sum  feore besnyþede, woruldstrenga binom,  wætte siþþan, dyfde on wætre,  dyde eft þonan, sette on sunnan,  þær ic swiþe beleas herum þam þe ic hæfde.  Heard mec siþþan snað seaxses ecg,  sindrum begrunden; fingras feoldan,  ond mec fugles wyn geond speddropum  spyrede geneahhe, ofer brunne brerd,  beamtelge swealg, streames dæle,  stop eft on mec, siþade sweartlast.  Mec siþþan wrah hæleð hleobordum,  hyde beþenede,

3  Medieval Manuscript Studies has long been a field influenced, silently, by modern connoisseurship. As such, aesthetic judgements like ‘scruffy’ are, unfortunately, applied to books and documents when it is not useful to describe early textual objects in this way (see, for example, Jonathan Wilcox, ‘The Use of Ælfric’s Homilies: MSS Oxford Bodleian Library, Junius 85 and 86 in the Field’, in Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan, eds, A Companion to Ælfric [Leiden: Brill, 2009], pp. 346–68. Wilcox’s erroneous labelling is treated as if it constituted evidence by Gerald P. Dyson, Priests and Their Books in Anglo-­Saxon England [Cambridge: D.  S.  Brewer, 2019]). These so-­called ‘scruffy’ books required expensive materials and considerable levels of literacy and skill to produce. See further Elaine Treharne, ‘The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Old English Manuscripts and Their Physical Description’, in Matthew Hussey and John Niles, eds, The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour of A.  N.  Doane (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 261–83. See, by contrast, Christopher de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (London: Penguin, 2016).

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  21

15

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gierede mec mid golde;  forþon me gliwedon4 wrætlic weorc smiþa,  wire bifongen. Nu þa gereno  ond se reada telg ond þa wuldorgesteald  wide mæreð dryhtfolca helm,  nales dol wite. Gif min bearn wera  brucan willað, hy beoð þy gesundran  ond þy sigefæstran, heortum þy hwætran  ond þy hyge bliþran, ferþe þy frodran.  Habbaþ freonda þy ma, swæsra ond gesibbra,  soþra ond godra, tilra ond getreowra,  þa hyra tyr ond ead estum ycað  ond hy arstafum lissum bilecgað  ond hi lufan fæþmum fæste clyppað.  Frige hwæt ic hatte, niþum to nytte.  Nama min is mære, hæleþum gifre  ond halig sylf.5 An enemy robbed me of life, deprived me of worldly strengths, wetted me next, dipped in water, took me out again, set in the sun where I was violently deprived of the hairs that I had. Next the hard edge of the knife pierced me, ground clean of impurities. Fingers folded me and the bird’s delight made tracks across me with speedy drops6 repeatedly, over the brown brim it swallowed more tree-­dye, a portion of liquid, stepped again on me, travelled with black tracks. Next a man wrapped me with protective boards, covered me with hide, and adorned me with gold. So on me sang out the smiths’ splendid work, wound round with wire.

4  Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey, et al., eds, Dictionary of Old English: A to I online (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2018), hereafter DOE, shows, s.v. ‘gliwian’, that ‘gliwedon’ hints at the suggestion of ‘played’ as in ‘played a musical instrument’. I adopt here the DOE’s definition 2: ‘to sing, recite’. 5  Edited here from the manuscript facsimile produced by R.  W.  Chambers, M.  Förster, and R.  Flowers, eds, The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry (London: Humphries for the Dean and Chapter of Exeter Cathedral, 1933). My own translations appear throughout this book, unless ­otherwise stated. 6  Note in Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-­Saxon Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882), s.v. speddropa, ‘rheumy drop’. That is, ‘gum-­like’, ‘sticky’. This would be appropriate given ‘tree dye’ in the next line.

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22  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts 15

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Now the ornament and the red dye and the wondrous edifice7 widely glorify the peoples’ protector, not at all the punishment of the foolish. If the children of men are willing to use me, they will be the safer and the more sure of victory,8 in heart the bolder, in mind the happier, in spirit the wiser. They will have more friends, dearer and closer, more true and more virtuous, more good and more faithful, who will gladly increase their glory and happiness and surround them with benefits and with kindnesses and will encompass them fast with embraces of love. Ask what I am called, as a profit to people. My name is renowned, a gift to men, and itself holy.

This Riddle is highly sensual; to work effectively and fully, it is truly dependent on the listener-­reader’s senses and imagination. Just like an actual physical book can be noisy when a peruser makes their way through it—turning the thin paper pages of a large family bible, for example, or the heavy glossy pages of a de luxe coffee-­table volume—so the Riddle evokes noise and movement through the membrane, which is often stiff or thick and noisy. The noises of manufacture are conveyed in the poem through sound symbolism, of the ­aspiration of consonants, like , , , and in lines 1–11, which mimic the escape of breath from the animal, the scraping of the knife, and the act of folding the stiff membrane of the folios. In terms of its own sounds, in the opening few lines alone, internal rhymes or half-­rhymes create assonance: lines 1a and 2a half-­rhyme; wætte (‘wet’) and wætre (‘water’), which in their etymological and sonic qualities demand close attention, emphasizing the soaking process of the skin, prior to its depilation; similarly, dyfde and dyde are dynamic and repetitive, indicating the submersion and removal of the skin in and out of the water. The narrative is impelled forward by the repeating of the

7  Wuldorgesteald, lit. ‘wondrous mansions, wondrous possessions’. Here the translation ‘edifice’ offers the metaphor of the book as inhabitable building. 8 In emulation of ‘se sigefæstesta cyning’ (‘victoriosissimus rex: Christ’). The connotations of ‘sigefæst’ (‘victorious’, ‘victory-secure’) often seem to be with resurrection and repatriation; see s.v. ‘sigefæst’ in Antonette diPaolo Healey, with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang, comp., Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2009). This is especially so in the Ælfrician corpus and in the Canticle of Habakkuk: Deus dominus fortitudo mea et ponet pedes meos quasi ceruorum et super excelsa mea deducet me uictor in psalmis canentem: ‘Strængð min ⁊ he geset fet mine swylce heorta ⁊ ofer healicnyssa mine he gebryncð me sigefæst on sealmsangum singendne’ (‘The Lord God is my strength: and he will make my feet like the feet of harts: and he the conqueror will lead me upon my high places singing psalms’).

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  23 temporal adverb siþþan (‘afterwards’) reinforcing the step-­by-­step nature of the process of preparation; and the dramatic Nu (‘Now’) precisely half-­way through the poem at line 15a, which represents the specific moment of ­transformation from mere physical object to mode of salvation as Gospel-­ book—the Word of God. The Riddle’s opening thus stresses the violence implicit in the initial stage of medieval manuscript production, and makes that violence ‘personal’ through the personification of the membrane used to make the book. The first word of the Riddle—mec (‘me’, accusative singular)—stresses the significance of the animated speaker; the reoccurrence a dozen times of the first-­person personal pronoun, whether as subject, object, or possessive (ic, mec, min), strongly suggests the significance of the voice of the book: its imagined livingness. Making the slaughtered animal’s flayed skin the initial voice of the book illustrates the pre-­eminent importance of the book’s materiality, its physical presence, in the context of a Gospel-­book’s medieval reception. The skin-­Riddler is involuntarily deprived of ‘worldly strengths’ (woruldstrenga), only to become, through its function as a Gospel-­book, a mediator of heavenly strengths. This transformation is effected through the skin’s processing from living membrane to carrier of God’s word in the container of the book. The hairs that the pelt had (herum . . . hæfde ‘hairs . . . it had’) might paronomastically, through word play on hæfde and Old English heafod (‘head’), remind the listener of hairs on one’s own head, enhancing the sense of the speaking object’s potential anthropomorphism, but also alluding perhaps to the New Testament Gospel of Luke 12:7: ‘Yea, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: you are of more value than many sparrows’, slowly introducing the revelation of the Riddle’s solution as a Gospel-­book to the keen listener-­reader.9 The emphasis on living things in this short poem adds layers of meaning to the physical make-­up of the medieval manuscript, which, as flesh itself, is always an object that reminds its user of its once-­living status. Medieval manuscripts in Britain up to the fifteenth century were generally made, then, of the skins of sheep or cows or goats.10 The animal was excarnified and that skin was then dipped into a solution of lime and water to soften it, to assist in degrading any remaining gobbets of flesh, and to depilate the hair.11 This could take days and is an offensively smelly process, alluded to in lines 2–6 of Riddle 26. Line 6—snað seaxses ecg, 9  Throughout this book, I shall use the Douay-­Rheims translation of the Vulgate Bible. This is available online at http://www.drbo.org/. 10  Or, it might transpire as DNA analysis develops, deer. Any animal skin can be used to write upon, including ostrich with big holes caused by the size of the feather follicles, and squirrel, though many squirrels would be required for a book of any significant size. 11  To watch a brief introduction to this process, which clearly demonstrates the transformative effect of membrane preparation, see Jesse Meyer of Pergamena visiting Middlebury College, in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSHPX56ccOg.

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24  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts s­ indrum begrunden (‘the edge of the knife pierced me, ground clean of impurities’)— represents not so much the scraping off of hairs on the frame where the skin would subsequently be stretched out to dry,12 but the first process after liming, when a lunellum is used to scrape the slimy, flaccid skin which has been placed over a vault-­like piece of furniture. At this point, the piercing of the knife might refer not just to the scraping, but to the puncturing of boils and other dermal imperfections. The Old English verb, sniðan, means ‘to cut (off)’, ‘to incise’, ‘to pierce’, ‘to amputate’, or ‘to lacerate’, emphasizing the violence of the knife’s actions, but also its cleansing consequences, and the potential benefits of this transformative process.13 After this, the skin was thoroughly rinsed and, while still wet, it was pegged to a large frame so that it could be stretched out to dry. Once dry, the membrane—now like a noisy drumskin—was painstakingly scraped with a lunellum again and then hand-­rubbed with pumice so that all remaining impurities could be abraded. Finally, the skin was taken down from the frame, cut into sheets, and folded into bifolia (folded sheets that when opened create two folios) for writing. Without the aid of mechanical intervention, this process from animal’s back to book could take weeks, or even months, of intensive human labour. The smell, dirt, and debris from the rotting flesh and the lime, the slimy wet dehairing, and the dust of the dried skin’s abrasion engage all five senses: olfactory, visual, aural, gustatory, and tactile. A bystander or craftsperson smells the lime and flesh and sweat; they see the wet and flaccid skin transform into a drum-­dry object after hours of work; hear the splashing, flopping, scraping, and rubbing; they have the dust of the scraped membrane on their clothing and in their nose and mouth; and, as producers and users, they are obliged to touch the product in its variety of texture. This sensual experience is vividly and intensely evoked in the ­opening lines of the Riddle, where this whole process is condensed into this sequence of aggressive verbs (‘robbed, deprived, violently deprived, pierced, ground’), enhanced by the enforced passivity of the speaker: first, the violent death of the animal and its flaying, then the actions of the parchmenter in soaking and depilating, incising and scraping, and finally the grinding as the skin is transformed into the smooth surface of the sheet, which when cut becomes a number of bifolia. When bifolia are folded, two conjoined folios

12  As Richard Marsden suggests in his edition of the poem in The Cambridge Old English Reader (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 314. On ‘sindrum begrunden’ as ‘deprived of impurities’, see Elena Afros, ‘Sindrum Begrunden in Exeter Book Riddle 26: The Enigmatic Dative Case’, Notes & Queries 51.1 (2004): 7–9, where, however, she misunderstands the process of ‘grinding’ out impurities as a subordinate part of the process of knife-­cutting. 13 The verb’s uses in Old English include the description of amputation by a doctor; and the removal of sins in the Rule of Chrodegang. See s.v. the variant, ‘a-­sniðan’ in the DOE; and see s.v. sniðan and snað in Healey, Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  25 result—the recognizable core component of the living book from which quires or gatherings are made.14

Step-­By-­Step to Salvation The temporal adverbs introducing the main sections of the poem (‘siþþan’, ‘siþþan’, ‘siþþan’, ‘siþþan’, ‘nu’ [‘next’, ‘now’]) form the transitions between the stages of making the book, and with these transitions comes a notable movement in the positivity of the experience. From being the victim of the parchmenter’s knife up to line 6, the skin-­Riddler thereafter becomes the recipient of the pen of the scribe. Described as a plain, an expanse—perhaps snowy, given that the quill (the ‘bird’s delight’) ‘made tracks’—the membrane embodies the completely organic nature of the text’s production as the ‘tree-­dye’ (the oak gall ink) is swiftly dropped onto the folio. At this point, the membrane is once more silently transformed: this time into meaningful and legible folios complete with words. Swiftly, the book is shaped into a whole, as we can understand from the impressively detailed description of the work of the binder, who creates for this book a cover of exceptional visual, tactile, and auditory brilliance. The wooden boards of the hard binding are covered with leather before being richly decorated with gold and further filigree work (the ‘wire’). What is being described may have been a precious cover, like those of the famous early medieval gold and jewelled boards of the ninth-­ century Lindau Gospels (New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS  M.  1), or the gold and jewels decorating the eleventh-­ century binding of the Gospels of Judith of Flanders (New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS  M.  709).15 In the case of the latter manuscript, for example, a gold-­relief Christ stands within the frame of a mandorla, upon which are embedded ­coloured gemstones (some of which are nineteenth-­century replacements). Christ’s hand is raised in blessing, and to his upper and lower right and left are the four symbols of the evangelists, Matthew (a man), Mark (a lion), Luke (a calf), and John (an eagle). The upper cover’s margins frame the whole board, with gold filigree work and cabochon stones. At first glance, instantly, before any viewer or user of the book had advanced inside the covers, the de luxe nature of the volume is visible, and is clearly intended to herald and parallel the spiritual richness and metaphorical treasure of its Gospel text. In Riddle 26, what is of special note in the description of the binding’s decoration is the way in which the sound of its manufacture 14  For a more detailed and entertaining account of membrane preparation, see Jirí Vnoucek, ‘The Manufacture of Parchment for Writing Purposes and the Observation of the Signs of Manufacture Surviving in Old Manuscripts’, in Gillian Fellows-­ Jensen and Peter Springborg, eds, Care and Conservation of Manuscripts, vol. 8 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), pp. 74–92. 15 The Morgan Library and Museum website: https://www.themorgan.org/collection/lindau-­ gospels and https://www.themorgan.org/collection/gospel-­book/128484 respectively.

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26  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts seems to be captured in the use of the past tense verbal form, ‘gliwedon’, which is usually translated as ‘adorned’. ‘Gliwian’, the infinitive, means ‘to play a musical instrument, to sing, to recite’,16 such that, by extension here, the ringing of the smiths’ work might be the intended meaning, making ex­uber­ant­ly noisy the cre­ation of the completed book. This noisiness is reinforced by the glorifying of the personified lavish decoration of the book’s pages: of the ornament (both of the adorned cover and, perhaps, of the illuminations within the book), the red dye of the rubrics and the glory of the voluminous book—its physical ­presence (‘þa gereno ond se reada telg / ond þa wuldorgesteald’). This glori­f y­ing of God (‘the people’s protector’) encapsulates both the form and function of the Gospel-­book, anticipating its use liturgically in preaching to teach and save Christian souls. The violence to the membrane and its transformation from a degraded form into an object of glory is reminiscent of Christ’s own violent seizing by his ‘feonda’ (‘enemies’) in the Garden of Gethsemane; and of The Dream of the Rood, a famous poem from the pre-­Conquest period, which details the vision of a sky-­filling, shape-­shifting cross (at once bejewelled and bleeding) seen by the narrator.17 The cross is revealed to be Christ’s cross, both his slayer and the means of salvation for believers, which is resurrected from its burial-­place to become a beacon of truth, a token by which those who honour it can be saved. Addressing the visionary or dreamer, the Cross, in its post-­resurrection phase, having been dug up by the Empress Helena in the fourth century and recognized as the miracle-­working Rood of Christ, declares: Nu ðu miht gehyran,  hæleð min se leofa, þæt ic bealuwara weorc  gebiden hæbbe, sarra sorga.  Is nu sæl cumen þæt me weorðiað  wide ond side menn ofer moldan  ond eall þeos mære gesceaft . . . . Now you might hear, my beloved hero, that I have experienced the work of evil-­dwellers, of grievous sorrows. The time is now come that they will honour me far and wide— men over the earth and all this glorious creation . . . .18

16  s.v. ‘gliwian’, DOE, definitions 1–4, especially 4, where it is suggested that ‘gliwedon has been taken as a figurative extension of sense 1 and translated “on me played the splendid work of smiths”, with gliwian as perhaps referring to the sound made by the metalwork on an ornamented book when it was moved about or opened’. 17  Michael Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1970; repr. 2004). 18  Elaine Treharne, The Dream of the Rood, in Old and Middle English: An Anthology, 3rd edn (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), pp. 124–5, lines 78–82.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  27 From a tree to a reviled symbol of execution to a miracle-­worker to a token of heavenly reward, a bejewelled processional object of hope, and a beacon of Christian community, the Cross transforms through time. In The Dream of the Rood, verbal and phrasal parallels and repetition unite the Cross, Christ, and the visionary in a similarly triumphant narrative of joy from despair, life out of death. And like the Cross in that Old English poem, the Gospel-­book of Riddle 26 reveals through its self-­referential narrative that it is able to save the souls of those who use, enjoy, or even take nourishment from it: Gif min bearn wera  brucan willað, hy beoð þy gesundran  ond þy sigefæstran, heortum þy hwætran  ond þy hyge bliþran, ferþe þy frodran. If the children of men are willing to use me, they will be the safer and the more sure of victory, in heart the bolder, in mind the happier, in spirit the wiser.

Just as the membrane is transformed into a means of salvation through its manufacture into a book, so the recipients of its written text are transformed from simply ‘children of men’ to children of God; from imperfect sinners to the immortal saved. A crucial term in the mode of transformation for those who come into contact with this animated book is ‘brucan’. Meaning variously ‘to enjoy’, ‘to take nourishment from’, and ‘to use’, this polysemic verb helpfully illustrates the complexity of the uses of a book, and especially a Gospel-­book that testifies, for the Christian, to the word of God (literally made flesh).19 For Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book 1, 29: ‘Sacred scripture is sometimes food for us, sometimes drink. In the more obscure places, it is food, broken up through study, made nourishing through chewing. It is drink in the more open places, which is absorbed as soon as it is discovered.’ This ingestion of spiritual nourishment ­echoes Augustine in his Sermon 38: ‘Read it, because it is more sweet than all honey, more pleasing than all bread, and you will find more joy than any wine’.20 When Elizabeth I read through her copy of the Geneva New Testament in 1581 she wrote on the volume’s first leaf a quotation from pseudo-­Augustine that engages with the same spirit of book-­use as in Riddle 26:

19  I have also discussed this briefly in ‘Distant’, in Matthew Rubery and Leah Price, eds, Further Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 89–99. 20 Augustine, Sermo 38, ‘Sermones ad fratres in eremo commorantes’: J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 40: 1304. Both of these citations, and many relevant others, are in Ivan Ilich, In the Vineyard of the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), particularly ch. 6. I should like to thank Professor Valerie Allen for this reference.

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28  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts August[inus] I walke many times into the pleasant fieldes of the holye scriptures, where I plucke vp the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning: Eate them by reading: chawe them by musing: And Laie them vp at Length in the hie seate of memorie by gathering them together: that so having tasted thy sweetenes I may the Lesse perceaue the bitternes of this miserable Life.21 Elizabeth’s use of pseudo-­Augustine extends the metaphor of the reading of scriptural texts as physical, cognitive, and spiritual nourishment. ‘This miserable Life’ (huius miserae vitae) is eased through the acquisition of God’s sweetness to counter the bitterness of living; the contrast of this life, as opposed to the next, is paralleled in Riddle 26, too, and as quickly as at line 2a, when the animal reveals it has been killed, deprived of its ‘worldly strengths’, as opposed to its spiritual powers. These powers encourage the hope of salvation for the listener-­readers, coming through all aspects of the recipient’s faculties: heart, mind, and spirit. The book will also sensually ‘encompass [users] fast with embraces of love’ (hi lufan ­fæþmum/fæste clyppað), both protecting its reader-­listeners and enveloping them in graceful love. The intimacy of this description with its emphasis on the intellectual, spiritual, and corporeal draws the audience of this Riddle in, suggesting a powerful relationship between the textual participants and the narrator. Such, then, is the power of the sensate book to engage the senses of the reader-­listener towards a positive end. What riddles do as a genre is defamiliarize the object that is being described in the first or third person. That defamiliarization allows the listener-­reader to see the object afresh, newly constructed from a different perspective. As scholarly interest in the materiality of medieval culture has grown, attention has turned to object-­focused studies. In recent decades, commentary has dwelled on Riddle 26 to emphasize the binding of the book;22 or the vernacular Riddles’ highlighting of the ‘idea of writing as a material voice [presented] repeatedly in the act of speaking’.23 For Ramey, this body of Old English riddlic texts in parallel with inscribed objects ‘demonstrate[s] a vernacular concept of writing as a ma­ter­ ial form of speech, and it is precisely this vernacular notion of writing as a voice

21  Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel, eds, Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 404. The editors point out that this is a quotation from Thomas Rogers, trans., A Right Christian Treatise: Entitled St Augustines Praiers (London, 1581). Elizabeth I introduced, perhaps accidentally, one change of ‘musing’ from ‘using’ in Rogers. This quotation written by Elizabeth is followed by a note in a seventeenth-­century hand: ‘This was queene Elizabethes booke & this was her owne hande writting aboue’. The quotation translates pseudo-­Augustine Meditationes. See J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina 40: 917. 22  Seth Lerer, Literacy and Power in Anglo-­Saxon England (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 220. 23  Peter Ramey, ‘Writing Speaks: Oral Poetics and Writing Technology in the Exeter Book Riddles’, Philological Quarterly 92.3 (2013): 335–56, at p. 336.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  29 that mysteriously inheres within the object, yet also stands apart and comments upon its own material identity’.24 If Ramey isn’t quite right to stress the vernacular in this way—since objects and textual remnants from numerous other periods and languages testify also to the concretization of utterance through inscription—he is right to focus on ‘precisely th[e] lyrical voice, rooted in the physical object, that becomes a defining feature of the Old English riddles’. However, along with the noise and the physicality of the book’s description of itself is the quietness of the words, the tracks, as they sit on the manuscript page and the stillness of the moments of swift silence as the bird’s joy—the feather—goes about making its tracks. Between the violence of the membrane’s cutting and the resounding noise of the goldsmith’s adornments is the sibilant and relative peacefulness of the scribe’s rapid movements. This emphasis on the material object simultaneously articulated and inhabited by the transient and evanescent lyrical voice, though, dims our eyes to the real purpose of the riddling book here: to enact salvation through evocation; to move the reader; to inspire and engender love. It is love—physical, all-­embracing love— that permeates the text, expressed through the book’s knowledge and belief that it can effect intimacy between individuals, an increase in love’s rich enfolding. This motif of embracing, enfolding, clasping, nesting, encompassing, enveloping informs all levels of the Riddle, so that the many layers of the book’s material components reflect the deep foundations of the spiritual love that emanates from this textual object (lines 11–14). As Chapter 7 will show, books are so very often depicted as being held with covered hands to denote the inherent sanctity of the object itself. Moreover, this is reflected, perhaps, in the use of highly specialized poetic lexis, lexis that is also often found in the Psalms. The language of building or constructing the book is fascinating and important. In one compound, ‘wuldorgesteald’ at line 16, a great deal is intended. This term is attested only three times in the Old English Corpus. It is translated variously by scholars as ‘glorious’ or ‘splendid’ or ‘wondrous’ ‘adornments’ or ‘decorations’ or ‘settings’, ‘dwellings’, or ‘mansions’. The Bosworth-­ Toller Dictionary suggests ‘glorious possessions . . . the binding of a book?’ The first element of the compound, ‘wondrous, glorious, splendid, marvellous’ seems straightforward enough. However, its connotations are almost always divine or miraculous in other texts, and indeed, the word also denotes heavenly glory, celestial wonder, and even heaven itself.25 The second component of the compound, ‘gesteald’ means a ‘settled place, an abode, a dwelling place’, even though many translators seem to focus on the ‘settings’ of the book—its adornments—as the focus. If one is capacious in translation here the book of the Riddle may be referring to itself, its many layers of composition forming a ‘wondrous dwelling’, a ‘glorious 24  Ibid. 336. 25  See s.v. wuldor in Bosworth-­Toller, especially meaning 2.

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30  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts abode’, that becomes for its readers a space on earth into which they can enter to taste for themselves a moment in heaven. The book becomes an edifice of salvific letters, in a metaphor that I use to describe books of this period generally—an edifice of letters, but here linked directly to heaven’s site or location. To see the book itself in this way as an edifice, a building into which one enters, is quite in accord with medieval theories of reading and memorizing. Gregory the Great, for example, describes his explicatory work: ‘First we lay the foundation in history, then by following a symbolical sense we erect an intellectual edifice to be a stronghold of faith and lastly by the grace of moral instruction we, as it were, paint the fabric in fair colours’.26 We build an ‘intellectual edifice’, a ‘stronghold of faith’, by following ‘the symbolic sense’ of the spiritual work; it is the ‘grace of moral instruction’, as Gregory puts it, that allows us to create the beauty of our metaphorical building through the building of knowledge. As readers use and peruse, ingest, digest, and enjoy the book, their salvation is effected, but still more, their happy life on earth is assured. This humane approach to the Christian effort—here acquiring the foundations of knowledge, constructing a firm mental space of learning—inspires devotion, insists on participation, encourages feelings, and demands subsequent actions. These feelings can be divided in the poem in a textured and nuanced way. In the opening lines (1–6) the violent life-­ destroying actions being done to the skin are followed by the gentler artistry of the page preparer, the scribe, the rubricator, binder, artisans, and goldsmiths. The central moment of transformation heralded by the temporal adverb ‘Nu’ creates the object in the present and moves us into a second half of the poem which deals intensely with feelings. These are not the feelings of being sliced, and pierced, manipulated, pulled, and inscribed upon. These feelings are the interior sensations of enjoyment, happiness, companionship, warmth, love, and grace, guided by the protective holy book. These gentle, life-­giving feelings are enactable through the book’s sacrifice in a beautifully balanced explication of wholeness— of outside, inside—of, as Merleau-­Ponty would have it, Ineinander, ‘each enveloping, enveloped’.27

From Death into Life ‘Woruldstrenga’ are dead; that is, the worldly strengths of the animal are destroyed by its killing. But these are replaced by the celestial, atemporal virtues of being an intercessor for the striving Christian. The implication of the Gospel-­ book’s

26  Gregory the Great, Epistle 5.53a, trans. in F.  Homes Dudden, Gregory the Great: His Place in History and Thought, 2 vols (New York: Longman, 1905), 1:193. 27  Merleau-­Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 268. Here, Ineinander means ‘intertwining’ and, like chiasmus, ‘being folded back upon’.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  31 dec­lar­ation of its apotropaic, or protective, efficacy is that rather as a stripped ­animal skin is base and dead, so the human without God is without spiritual life; and, as a membrane folio without text is empty, so is a life without God’s message. The idea of the living text is reinforced by the very form of the poem: an inanimate object brought to life, metaphorically resurrected, in order to obtain salvation. The gradual revelation of the object, like the experience of phenomena in the world itself, leaves only momentary impressions, because it is the final thing we encounter that we remember. Here, in Riddle 26, that is heavenly salvation. The solving of the Riddle involves an intimate relationship between text and reader/listener filling in all the gaps, resolving the aporia. It in only in the gaps, in the feelings engendered by the texture of the text, that the participant solves the Riddle of life and becomes ‘þy sigefæstran’ ‘the surer of victory’. In its self-­revealing, the Gospel-­book details its biography and mortography, as it synoptically and telescopically describes all of salvation history through its poem. And this poem gives us a clear indication of what a ‘book’ meant for the early English: from a phenomenological perspective, the intentionality of the book, this poet’s consciousness of it is of a complete, four-­dimensional object incorporating time into its being; and it contains both that which is visible (folios, texts, decoration, covers) and that which is invisible (spirituality, hope, love). Looking back at how books were understood by the early English, it is clear that they were encountered as multilayered and whole, voluminous and with heft and depth. They were not perceived just as a set of gatherings, or as representing simply the works they contained, which is how many contemporary scholars study them either through a codicological approach—that is, the study of the physical make-­up of the book—or as writings ready for transformation into modern editions.28 The voice of Riddle 26 is recalcitrant about the vocabulary or specific description of the book itself for obvious reasons. It is a riddle that functions principally through deliberate misdirection or enigma. The only specific book-­part that is provided is the unique compound, the hapax legomenon, ‘hleow-­bord’ (in the dative plural form ‘hleobordum’, ‘protective boards’) at line 12a.29 Here, there is probably word-­play on the dominant meaning of ‘bord’, which is ‘shield’, especially with the collocation at line 12a—‘hæleð hleobordum’—‘hero’ or ‘man’ plus ‘with the protective boards’. Such lexis, commoner in the poetry about the Germanic Heroic Code and its deeds of warriors and battles, reminds the perceptive listener-­reader of the demands of Christianity that the believer take on the role of miles Christi, ‘soldier of Christ’, through their life’s pilgrimage. It is also poignant, then, that in the medieval period, as now, books could occasionally be 28  On this, see Elaine Treharne, ‘The Architextual Editing of Early English’, in A. S. G. Edwards and T. Takako, eds, Poetica: (Tokyo): An International Journal of Linguistic-­Literary Studies 71 (2009): 1–13. 29 s.v. hleow-­bord in the DOE.

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32  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts called upon to protect their owners not just apotropaically to ward off evil through the word of God, or through edification, but could also be used as actual shields, as well as metaphorical guardians of the soul. Such is the case of the famous Codex Ragyndrudis, which is Fulda, Landesbibliothek, Codex Bonifatianus MS 2, written perhaps in Corbie in northern France in the late seventh century or first few decades of the eighth century. Produced through the patronage of a woman, Ragyndrudis, this collection of religious texts also includes eighth-­ century interventions in an insular hand.30 The book belonged to the English saint, Boniface, who as a missionary in the eighth century converted parts of Francia and Germania to Christianity. One of three surviving books associated with the saint, the Codex Ragyndrudis is most famous for being used by St Boniface as a shield against robbers in June 754, who attacked and killed him. The book suffered severe damage from deep vertical cuts in the upper and lower margins throughout the volume, which, legend has it, may have been received as Boniface held it up to protect his head. Certainly, the story of Boniface’s use of a book as shield is long-­ standing; the late tenth- or eleventh-­ century Fulda Sacramentary (Bamberg: Staatsbibliothek MS Msc. lit. 1 [A.II.12]) shows an image of the saint, slightly bowed in the face of his enemies’ attack, holding up his book to protect himself from the blow of the sword.31 Still united with the saint believed to be its owner, it is on display with Boniface’s skull in the Fulda Cathedral Museum. Similarly, University of Wales, Trinity, St David, Lampeter, Burgess Library, MS 2 was, according to myth, kept close to the monks of Bangor Is-­Coed in North Wales, who found themselves under attack by ‘heathens’ in the earlier medieval period. Donated to Lampeter St David’s College by Thomas Phillips in 1841,32 this late twelfth-­ century or, more probably, early thirteenth-­ century large manuscript contains a version of Peter of Capua’s Theological Distinctions, a short treatise on theological subjects arranged in alphabetical order, which are extant

30  The entire manuscript is available digitally at the Fuldaer Digitale Sammlungen https://fuldig. hs-­fulda.de/viewer/object/PPN438486781/5/; an inscription on folio 143v reads: ‘in honore dni nostri ihu xpi ego ragyndrudis ordinavi librum istum’. See Earlier Latin Manuscripts at https://elmss.nuigalway.ie/catalogue/1673; Malcolm B. Parkes, ‘The Handwriting of St Boniface: A Reassessment of the Problems’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 1976.98 (2009): 161–79; Rosamund McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 259; and Michel Aaij, ‘Boniface’s Booklife: How the Ragyndrudis Codex Came to Be a Vita Bonifatii’, The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe 10 (2007): http:// www.heroicage.org/issues/10/aaij.html, accessed 1 October 2020. 31  Images of this folio can quickly be found on the internet, as here: https://www.wga.hu/html_m/ zgothic/miniatur/1051-­100/08_1051.html, accessed 10 October 2019. 32  On the bibliophile, philanthropist, and surgeon Thomas Phillips, see Gwyn Walters, ‘Books from the “Nabob”: The Benefactions of Thomas Phillips at Lampeter and Llandovery’, Trafodion Anrhydeddus Gymdeithas y Cymmrodorion 1998/Transactions of the Honorouble Society of Cymmrodorion, n.s. 5 (1999): 36–61.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  33 here from ‘Defectum’ to ‘Surditas’.33 An earlier print description of the manuscript is positioned in a frame on the book’s pastedown, stating that this ‘Commentaries on the Scriptures, in alphabetical arrangement, found near Bangor, [was] supposed to have belonged to the Monks of that Monastery, who were murdered by the command of Ethelred the 2d, and thought to be stained with their blood . . .’. The manuscript’s two-­column text is, for the most part, relatively undamaged, but the lower margins have been severely hacked, at times with a rather bluntish knife, resulting in damage that has created great unevenness to these edges of the volume. What may have been wide and capacious lower margins intended for annotation and commentary have now gone, resulting in a rather oddly shaped volume—squarer than is usual for manuscripts of this date and genre. The manuscript shows a small group of calligraphically expert scribes, writing quite compressed Gothic textualis with fleuronnée initials. It is certainly a corporate book originally belonging to an ecclesiastical institution; but it is also a corporeal book—a book whose body has more to reveal than simply its textual contents. There are many interesting features to comment on in this manuscript, just as there are for the Codex Ragyndrudis or, indeed, the Exeter Book itself. However, the only attention that this manuscript has received beyond its brief codicological description was written not about the Distinctiones, or the script, but about half a dozen dark patches that stain the final (unpaginated) folios in the volume (Figure 2.2). These splashes of dark reddish-­brown had acquired a mythological status of their own within a short time of the manuscript’s donation to Lampeter in 1841. When George Borrow, the English writer, travelled around Wales in 1854, he walked from Llanddewi Brefi to Lampeter in Ceredigion. He described the recently founded St David’s College and its ‘grand curiosity’: The country between Llan Ddewi and Lampeter presented nothing remarkable, and I met on the road nothing worthy of being recorded. On arriving at Lampeter I took a slight refreshment at the inn, and then went to see the college which stands a little to the north of the town. It was founded by Bishop Burgess in the year 1820, for the education of youths intended for the ministry of the Church of England. It is a neat quadrate edifice with a courtyard in which stands a large stone basin. From the courtyard you enter a spacious dining-­hall, over the door of which hangs a well-­executed portrait of the good bishop. From the hall you ascend by a handsome staircase to the library, a large and lightsome 33  N. R. Ker et al., Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (London: Royal Historical Society, 1941; 2nd edn, 1964), pp. 2–3, give the following information: ‘Written in England in s.xiii1 [first half of the thirteenth century]. The only complete copy in an English library seems to be Hereford Cathedral P. vi. 6. This is manuscript number 2 at Lampeter St David’s University College’. Ker further describes the manuscript as ‘2 + Oxford, Bodleian Library, Lat. Th. c. 10, f. 102. Petrus de Capua, Distinctiones theologicae’. It is likely that the manuscript predates 1230 by some time, when ‘below top line’ writing began to feature in manuscript production; here, Burgess MS 2 is written ‘above top line’, characteristic in manuscripts prior to 1230.

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34  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Figure 2.2  University of Trinity, St David’s, Lampeter, Burgess MS 2. © Reproduced with permission of Lampeter, University of Trinity, St David’s Library.

room, well stored with books in various languages. The grand curiosity is a manuscript Codex containing a Latin synopsis of Scripture which once belonged to the monks of Bangor Is Coed. It bears marks of blood with which it was sprinkled when the monks were massacred by the heathen Saxons, at the instigation of Austin the Pope’s missionary in Britain. The number of students seldom exceeds forty.34

Clearly struck by this manuscript’s dramatic (and mythical) history, Borrow must have heard the story of the book’s bloody past from someone in the College. Possibly damaged by the ‘heathen Saxons’, perhaps even used as a shield, the book becomes a macabre reminder of the past, testimony to the work of British monks, and the disruption of turmoil in the early centuries of English settlement, which can here only refer to the conflict between Roman Christianity (introduced by Augustine in 597) and that of the Celtic church, which existed in Britain prior to the Augustinian mission. The conflict between these two branches of Christianity was settled in favour of the Roman at the Synod of Whitby in 664 ce, by which time all of the early kingdoms were Christianized. This historical 34  George Borrow, Wild Wales: The People, Language, and Scenery (1896; 3rd edn, London: John Murray, 1872), ch. 95, at p. 294.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  35 reference is despite the other context provided on the front of the manuscript, which is given as Æthelred II’s reign in late tenth- and earlier eleventh-­century England. Of course, such a story is impossibly anachronistic; the manuscript itself is late twelfth or early thirteenth century! But how entertained a librarian must have been to regale this English guest with tales of heathen Saxons and martyred monastic saints.35 This relatively obscure manuscript thus takes on a history much larger than it merits. Stains that would normally be disregarded or thought to indicate poor conservation and lack of care become instead indicative of the status that books can achieve by association with historical events or figures. While the Codex Ragyndrudis became a contact relic through its supposed physical link with St Boniface, Burgess MS 2 is simply a ‘curiosity’. But in both cases, their potentially apotropaic qualities—their (fictional) use in protecting or being corporeally associated with their religious owners—are more significant than the contents of the books themselves. Such instances of books, often Bibles, as saviours of lives can be discovered throughout history, right up to the modern day. In the First World War (1914–18), a young soldier named Leonard Knight was saved from a sniper’s bullet by the Bible which his aunt had given him;36 Private Leslie Friston’s Bible saved him from two bullets in a German air attack; and many other such stories are easy to find documented online. More recently, in 2014, a murderous attack on students at Florida State University in Tallahassee resulted in Jason Derfuss being shot, but saved by his Oxford University Press volume on John Wyclif.37 Hailed as a miraculous escape by many, the book certainly saved the student from possible serious injury, and takes on a whole new significance from its connection to this event. Rather like Riddle 26, it is the whole book—its history, its network of connections, its multiple functions, even its damage and fragmentation—that creates its fullest interpretative potential.

Interpreting the Book Books save lives and Riddle 26 reveals itself as Logos—the Word of God, the means of salvation, as well as membrane, oak gall, oak boards, and gold wire. It 35  The legend of the slaughter of these early monks on the orders of Augustine is found in many works, based on Bede’s account (Historia Ecclesiastica ii.2) of the Northumbrian king Ethelfrid’s attack on Chester in the early seventh century, when hundreds of sacerdotes and monachi from Bangor were killed. See, for example, the 1562 work by John Jewell, Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae in John Jewell, An Apology for the Church of England, trans. Stephen Isaacson (London: John Hearne, 1825), pp. 46–52, where Jewell describes the massacre being caused by the refusal of the Welsh bishops to accept Augustine as their metropolitan. 36 As reported by ITV news: https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2017-­ 01-­ 17/bible-­ saved-­ ww1-­soldier-­by-­stopping-­bullet/, accessed 10 May 2020. 37  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-­n ews/fsu-­s tudent-­j ason-­d erfuss-­s aved-­b ook-­b ag­campus-­shooting-­n252536.

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36  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts represents the noise of slicing, sloshing, scraping, stitching, sawing, smithing, singing, sighing, and saving. It is the smell and taste of guts and wood, fire and melting wax. The early English seem to have thought of their books as whole, and so whole that those books with religious texts, at least, included that which is seen—the material—as well as that which is unseen: the spirit, the immaterial. Early English lexis that is used to describe the make-­up of the book, together with specific collocations, permits a closer investigation of the manuscript’s production and reception in the early Middle Ages. As most many know and as briefly mentioned, a manuscript is comprised of an animal membrane cut into rectangles, which are then made into folios, usually in the form of a folded sheet—a bifolium (which ‘fingras feoldan’ in Riddle 26). The bifolia are then sewn together usually with linen thread coated with wax to form quires or gatherings. These are often quires of four bifolia in English medieval manuscripts, which thus make up gatherings of eight folios, or sixteen pages, since each folio has a recto (front) and verso (back). It is possible to encounter single sheets within the quires—singletons—which are either supplied because more writing space was required; or result from one folio of a bifolium being excised because of scribal error or some other reason. The block of quires, once completed with text and image, is then sewn into a binding, which can be a complex process, involving tawed thongs are threaded into carved channels in the boards and secured. Many original bindings survive from the later medieval period, but few from pre-­1100. One of the most famous bindings is that of the St Cuthbert Gospel—a hand-­sized manuscript of St John’s Gospel, found in St Cuthbert’s coffin when it was opened in 1104.38 It is the earliest European book still intact in its original condition. It was made at the north-­eastern monastic institution of Monkwearmouth-­Jarrow in the late seventh or early eighth century, and its binding was constructed in the Coptic style with linked stitches sewn into beech boards covered in goatskin leather. The manuscript, London, British Library, Additional MS 89000,39 was bought by the British Library in 2012 for £9 million, after a fundraising campaign to acquire ‘one of the world’s most im­port­ ant books’.40 There will be more on the St Cuthbert Gospel in a later chapter; here, suffice it to say that the Gospel-­book’s completeness and wholeness are re­mark­able. 38 The manuscript was formerly known as the Stonyhurst Gospel. Claire Breay and Bernard Meehan, eds, The St Cuthbert Gospel: Studies on the Insular Manuscript of the Gospel of John (London: British Library, 2015); Michelle  P.  Brown, Manuscripts from the Anglo-­Saxon Age (London: British Library, 2007), pp. 15, 37, 38; Robert D. Stevick, ‘The St. Cuthbert Gospel Binding and Insular Design’, Artibus et Historiae 8 (1969): 9–19; and for a facsimile, see T. Julian Brown, ed., The Stonyhurst Gospel of Saint John, with a technical description of the binding by Roger Powell and Peter Waters, Roxburghe Club (Oxford: University Press for the Roxburghe Club, 1969). 39  The entire manuscript is now digitized by the British Library at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay.aspx?ref=add_ms_89000. 40  https://www.bl.uk/press-­releases/2012/april/british-­library-­acquires-­the-­st-­cuthbert-­gospel— the-­earliest-­intact-­european-­book. It is said to be ‘in public ownership’ now, which, in the loosest sense it is, even though only a tiny number of experts will ever get to handle it.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  37 Its essence as a contact relic further enhances its significance, because it shows the importance attached to the physical object: that it would be placed in the coffin of the saint with whom it is and always was associated. The original binding of Cuthbert Gospel marks out an already exceptional manuscript as ‘the oldest intact European book’.41 The boards of the binding are thin, shaped pieces of wood, probably birch. The materials of construction im­port­antly provide the vocabulary of book history. The Modern English word ‘book’ descends from Old English boc, and from Germanic boc before that. It is derived from the term for the beech tree (bece in Old English). Writing-­tablets were made from beech and other woods, and wood was a major surface for carving; indeed, the word for writing-­tablet itself was originally bôk. All these early terms for a textual object clearly emphasize the materiality of the artefact: what it was originally made from. Boc is similar in this to the Welsh word llyfr (Old Welsh lhyvyr), which comes from Latin liber (‘book’), the origins of which denote the inside of the bark of a tree or woody plant. Codex derives from Latin for a block of wood, and the wood’s use for bound manuscripts emphasizes the phys­ ic­al similarities. Writing-­tablets were originally single sheets made from bark, or wood, sometimes hollowed out and filled with wax. When two or more of these tablets were conjoined with laces, they formed the shape of a codex—diptych-­ like, with facing sides for writing upon.42 This technology inspired the development of the book as it is to this day, with the most common characteristics of a ‘book’ being multiple leaves and some mode of binding. Simultaneously, the codex had developed as a major text technology in the second or third century, and was promoted particularly through the spread of a colonizing Christianity, emerging in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa in ex­amples like those of the third- to fourth-­century codices found in Nag Hamadi, Egypt in 1945, which have papyri folios.43 Lexis describing the early medieval manuscript book—boc, liber, and volumen ‘roll, book’—is effectively the same as terms encountered in modern codicology.44 Thus, the prolific English scholar and monk, Ælfric (died c.1010) discusses the form of the book in his Glossary, which translates Latin and Old English words. The group of words proceeds with Latin first and Old English translation second: 41  As a British Library catalogue description highlights: http://searcharchives.bl.uk/. 42  In the long history of text technologies, generally, these patterns of single-­double-­multiple have prevailed; one need only think of the smart phone, currently evolving from a single screen to a pair of screens ‘folded’ in the middle. 43  For a helpful introduction to the early book, see Michelle Brown, ‘The Triumph of the Codex: The Manuscript Book before 1100’, in Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds, A Companion to the History of the Book (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2007). 44  See Orietta Da Rold, ‘Materials’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, eds, The Production of Books in England, c. 1350–1530 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 12–33; and Ryan Perry, ‘The Sum of the Book: Structural Codicology and Medieval Manuscript Culture’, in Orietta Da Rold and Elaine Treharne, eds, Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 106–26.

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38  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts Doctor—lareow (‘scholar’); magister—magister (‘teacher’); Scriptor—writere (‘scribe’); Scriptura—gewrit (‘piece of writing’); Epistola—ærendgewrit (‘letter’); Euuangelium—id est bonum nuntium, godspell (‘gospel’ or ‘good news’); Quaternio—cyne (‘quire’); planca—spelt (‘leaf ’ or ‘piece of parchment’); membranum—bocfell (‘membrane’, ‘vellum’, ‘parchment’); sceda vel scedula—ymele; penna—feða (‘quill’); Graphium—græf (‘stylus’, ‘pen’); pictor—metere (‘painter’); piccura—meting (‘picture’); minium—teafor (‘red pigment’); gluten—lim (‘glue’, ‘lime’); sculptor—græfere (‘engraver’, ‘sculptor’).45 It is interesting to note the close association in this excerpt of a book’s physical production, or the facture of handwritten documents, with scholarship and the gospels, and, as one might expect, with painting, engraving, and sculpture. Close interpretation of the use of ‘boc’ in context elucidates the complexity of its semantic range for the early English: as holy, as something to be seen—if not read; understood and heard, if not seen; as Holy Writ itself; or as the authority inherent in a written tradition—unassailable, true—a tradition into which Ælfric so self-­consciously inscribed himself. For Ælfric, ‘boc’ signifies the artefact made up of its component parts, but always regarded as a whole thing in the making. It is also Holy Writ, as indicated by his references to the books of the Bible throughout his Letter to Sigeweard. This is echoed in other works in Old English, such as the prose Vercelli Homily 8, where statements such as ‘þe Dryhten sæde on his bocum’ (‘the Lord said in his book’)46 are easy to miss, since they now seem so obvious, but where with in their specific cultural context, the embedding of the spiritual within the physical is critically important. Books in their wholeness take on an absolute authority; thus, Ælfric in his Admonitions reveals that: ‘Nis nan leodscipe swa grædig goldes and seolfres swa þa Judeiscan and þa Romaniscan be þam þe lareowas on bocum awriton’ (‘There are no people as greedy for gold and silver as the Jewish people and the Romans, about whom teachers have written in books’).47 And, one of the most frequent collocations throughout the medieval period centres on the ‘halgan boc’; and writings in ‘godcundum bocum’, or ‘Cristes bocum’, or ‘Godes bocum’ (‘holy book’ or ‘in divine books’, ‘in Christ’s books’, or ‘God’s books’, where the plural forms suggest perhaps the individual books that make up the Bible), underscoring how inseparable the idea of the book was from Christianity, and as more than just the 45  Directly transcribed and edited from folio 91r–v of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 499, Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary, available digitally at parker.stanford.edu. For these terms, see Jordan Zweck, Epistolary Acts: Anglo-­Saxon Letters and Early English Media (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), pp. 159–60. Ymele could mean ‘leaf ’, ‘scrap of membrane’, or perhaps ‘roll’ or ‘scroll’. All of these words have been analysed using the DOE, the DOE Corpus, and Bosworth-­Toller. Similar lists are published by Thomas Wright, A Volume of Vocabularies from the Tenth Century to the Fifteenth (privately printed, 1857), pp. 46–7. 46  Donald Scragg, ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, Early English Text Society, o.s. 300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 47  H. W. Norman, ed., The Anglo-­Saxon Version of the Hexameron of St. Basil; or, Be Godes six daga weorcum; and the Anglo-­Saxon Remains of St. Basil’s Admonitio ad filium spiritualem, 2nd edn (London: J. R. Smith, 1849), I 9.33.

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‘ Fingers Folded Me ’ : Making the Book  39 representative of God’s word; the book itself was God’s word.48 In terms of what is expressed in the word boc are its component parts, which are little changed in form from the books of the present day; and its wholeness, its phenomenal nature, composed of its physical heft and its invisible aura, its cultural value as a religious object or object of intellectual desire. A phenomenological approach insists that we perceive books as early medieval people seem to: as objects that were and are conceived and intended, made material and dis­sem­in­ated, received and used, and given a cultural value49—often as a result of what happened to the book once its blank spaces were filled.

48  On this, see further Michelle Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality, and the Scribe, British Library Studies in Medieval Culture (London: British Library, 2003). 49  This is the architextual model for all text technologies: full interpretative potential is derived from any textual object’s intentionality + materiality + functionality +/- cultural value: that is, why the object is created and produced; how it is produced; and how it functions in the real world. In addition, all textual objects have some degree of cultural value, even if it is a negative attribute and without any socio-­cultural, emotional, economic, or material value. See Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan, Text Technologies: A History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), Part I.

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3

‘Covered Me with Tracks’ Writing the Book

The connection between the writer, their tools, and the effort invested in writing a book is deeper than just the mechanical actions involved. Martin Amis explains his writing process as a wholly corporeal process: I make three versions when I write. I begin with longhand, then I type it up, and finally I make a cut-­and-­polished version. The computer answers the novelist’s need with sinister exactitude, as if it was designed by a novelist. But it’s always longhand to start with. I’m superstitious about that. It’s the fact that ink flows and typewritten stuff doesn’t. It feels like an extension of your own blood when you write in ink. This applies even though I use Bic Biros.1

In Riddle 26 of the Exeter Book, the processes of preparing the folios and beginning to write is described by the Gospel-­book itself as: fingras feoldan,  ond mec fugles wyn geond speddropum  spyrede geneahhe, ofer brunne brerd,  beamtelge swealg, streames dæle,  stop eft on mec, siþade sweartlast. fingers folded [me], and the bird’s delight made tracks across me with speedy drops repeatedly, over the brown brim it swallowed more tree-­dye, a portion of liquid, stepped again on me, travelled with black tracks.2

The quill was one of the scribe’s main writing instruments, and was used from at least the middle of the first millennium ce. It was generally a prepared feather from a goose, or swan, though feathers from smaller birds may have been used for tiny script, such as the Gothic hands seen in small Parisian Bibles of the thirteenth century. One of the earliest depictions of a quill is thought to be that in the 1  Martin Amis, ‘A Life in the Day’, Sunday Times Magazine, 10 June 2012. 2  Lines 7–11. See Chapter 1, above.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. Elaine Treharne, Oxford University Press. © Elaine Treharne 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843814.003.0003

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  41 mosaics of the Church of St Vitale in Ravenna, which date from the middle of the sixth century; in those images, the quill has been stripped of its barbs, and is aerodynamic and smooth. The quill quickly became a preferred tool for scribes, because it is more flexible than the reed pen for writing on membrane and paper; more manipulable and lighter in the hand; and quicker to write with.3 It remained in regular use until the nineteenth century. But more than quills could be used; knives might be employed to write or ‘to inscribe’, a meaning also intended by the Old English verb ‘writan’, as in this charm’s instructions for carving or inscribing in stone: Writ þysne circul mid þines cnifes orde on anum mealanstane and sleah ænne stacan on middan þam ymbhagan.4 Inscribe this circle with the point of your knife on a mealstone and cut a stake in the middle of the enclosure where the bees are kept.

This, and numerous other charms in the early medieval period, describe the act of writing on surfaces other than vellum or parchment, and demonstrate that these early cultures saw many objects as potential carriers of meaning, with words and the act of inscribing them having protective, magical, or divinatory potential. The book, and written documents, are, though, specifically designed for information dissemination. In the Old English Riddle of the Gospel-­book, the book reveals its own textual production: once the bifolium is folded to form two folios, which when nested inside others would form a quire or gathering, a fellow maker, the quill, takes on its own new life. In a sequence of rapid half-­lines, the animated quill mimics the flitting of the bird, swallowing ink from the inkwell and stepping across the blank folio dropping letters as it moves as if leaving tracks in the snow. The pen is charmingly described as fugles wyn, ‘the bird’s delight’, with the suggestion that something of that delight is transferred into the act of writing. The tree-­ dye refers to the iron gall ink made from ferrous sulphate and a crushed oak gall, which is a wasp’s nest that grows parasitically on oak. Sometimes carbon was also added. This creates a relatively stable dark brown or black ink, which is rather viscous in consistency. The personified quill takes up more ink from the ink well (‘over the brown brim’), and continues writing, laying down the foundations of 3  In terms of materials, paper has been used in China since the first century bce, and then gradually it became adopted as a writing support elsewhere as a result of trading routes, such as the Silk Road. It was not used in Europe until the twelfth century (see Orietta Da Rold, Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020]), but the earliest dated Arabic codex— Gharib al-­Hadith by Abu ‘Ubayd al-­Qasim Ibn Sallam—written on paper is ninth century: Leiden University Library, MS Or. 298. It is fully digitized at http://hdl.handle.net/1887.1/item:2000455. 4  A Charm of the Circle of St Columkill to protect bees. Phillip Pulsiano, ‘The Prefatory Matter of London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius  E.  xviii’, in Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne, eds, Anglo-­ Saxon Manuscripts and Their Heritage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998; repr. London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 85–116; G. Storms, ed., Anglo-­Saxon Magic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1948), no. 85, Charm 12.2.

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42  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts learning for others to follow. These five lines from Riddle 26, suggesting the delight at the tracks being made swiftly, lightly and fluidly, testify to an expert touch that is itself reflective of the skilful calligraphy on display in the Exeter Book, where the scribe of this Riddle is one of the most distinguished among all pre-­Conquest writers. The speed of the professional scribe, who might have been able to complete perhaps 150 lines of writing a day (depending, of course, on the size of the folio, the length of the line, and the number of words per line), is clearly a trait valued in Exeter Book Riddle 51 that enigmatically describes the art of writing at folio 113r–v of the manuscript: Ic seah wrætlice  wuhte feower samed siþian;  swearte wæran lastas, swaþu swiþe blacu.  Swift wæs on fore fulgum framra;  fleotgan lyfte deaf under yþe.  Dreag unstille winnende wiga,  se him wægas tæcneþ ofer fæted gold  feower eallum.5 I saw four amazing creatures journeying together; dark were their tracks, the traces very black. Swift was its journey, faster than birds it flew in the air, dived under a wave. He toils busily, the striving warrior, who showed the way over adorned gold to all four of them.

The solution to Riddle 51 is ‘Quill pen’, and this short poem is part of an extensive tradition of riddles in Old English and in Latin that focus on the tools of the scribe. The compact verse has been discussed widely in scholarly commentary on early verse,6 and I am principally concerned with what the poem reveals about the production of the book. What this literary challenge illustrates obliquely is the skill, focus, and physical exertion required to write proficiently in a high-­status 5  Also numbered as 49 in some authors’ reckonings. For all the Exeter Book Riddles, see Craig Williamson, A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-­Saxon Riddle-­Songs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). For more on scribal practices, see Patrick  W.  Conner, ‘Matched Hands’, in Jonathan Wilcox, ed., Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 39–73. I speak about the art of writing in an essay co-­written with Catherine Karkov, ‘The Presence of the Hand: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries’, in Geert Classens and Larissa Tracy, eds, Cross-­Channel Encounters in Medieval England and Beyond: A Festschrift in Honor of David F. Johnson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2021). 6  See Dieter Bitterli, Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-­Latin Riddle Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), ch. 7, ‘Silent Speech’, espec. p. 146. See also Emily V. Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-­Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 65–72, who is principally concerned with scribal authorship of poetry.

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  43 book that appears here to be decorated with gold leaf—an illuminated manuscript. The four amazing creatures could either be two fingers, the quill pen, and the scribe’s arm; or two fingers, a thumb and a quill pen. At folio 21v of the well-­ known ninth-­ century Mercian manuscript, the Book of Cerne (Cambridge University Library, MS Ll.1.10), the evangelist Luke stands in a circular frame above his symbol of the calf, which itself holds a completed and closed, vo­lu­min­ ous book. A haloed Luke looks straight at the viewer with a serene expression. In his left arm and hand he cradles an open book the colours of which match the calf ’s closed volume; in his right hand, held aloft in the air, is a long pointed quill, which is evidently balanced by the support of the thumb and the index and middle finger. This writing tool is a visible extension of the hand: a prosthetic that works as one with the scribe’s body to create the text. Similarly, in London, British Library, Additional MS 40618, a pocket Gospel-­ book dating from the eighth to the tenth century, which was made in Ireland, but moved to an English institution—probably Winchester—by the tenth century, two images of evangelists show them as scribes in motion. The original eighth- or ninth-­century image of Luke at folio 21v depicts the saint holding a book and looking face on at the viewer; another whole-­page image of Luke and one of the evangelist John at folios 22v and 49v, respectively, are painted with gold, carbon, orpiment, red lead, red ochre, and lazurite pigments,7 and represent modernized versions of the saints, created in England in the first quarter of the tenth century. These two tenth-­century images depict the saints writing their Gospels, and holding their barbless quills in their right hands between their thumb, which acts as a support, and the index and middle fingers.8 Another barbless quill appears in an image in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 5. 4 (Figure 3.1), a later twelfth-­century glossed psalter from Canterbury made for and annotated by Herbert of Bosham, and dedicated to his close friend and colleague Thomas Becket.9 Folio 6v contains a large illuminated P, within the bowl of which is an image of a bearded and focused St Jerome sitting on a stool

7  That is gold, black, yellow, red, and blue. This is the first instance of the use of lapis lazuli in the lazurite in pre-­Conquest England. See Katherine L. Brown and Robin J. H. Clark, ‘The Lindisfarne Gospels and Two Other 8th Century Anglo-­Saxon/Insular Manuscripts: Pigment Identification by Raman Microscopy’, Journal of Raman Spectroscopy 35 (2004): 4–12, where the manuscript pagination on p. 35’s key is inverted for pll. 3a and 3b. 8  It is very difficult to see the thumb in many images of scribes in manuscripts. It must be a support for the index and middle finger in holding the quill. In an illustration of the evangelist John in an early Gospel-­book from Tours (London, British Library, Additional MS 11848, c.820–30, folio 166v, digitized at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=add_ms_11848), the scribe is depicted holding the pen between thumb and the first two fingers of the right hand. 9  On this manuscript, which is the first of a two-­volume psalter and part of a four-­volume set including the Pauline Epistles, see Laura Cleaver, ‘Pages Covered with as Many Tears as Notes: Herbert of Bosham and the Glossed Manuscripts for Thomas Becket’, in Michael Staunton, ed., Herbert of Bosham: A Medieval Polymath (Woodbridge: Boydell for The York Medieval Press, 2019), pp. 64–86.

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44  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Figure 3.1  Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 5. 4, folio 6v. © Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows, Trinity College, Cambridge.

writing a manuscript on a lectern.10 Jerome is holding a sizeable red knife in his left hand, clearly balanced between thumb, index, and middle fingers, and then a 10  Fully digitized at the Wren Digital Library at Trinity College, Cambridge: https://www.trin.cam. ac.uk/library/wren-­digital-­library/. To access, click on ‘Medieval Manuscripts’, and find the shelfmark

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  45 very thin white quill in his right hand, again, balanced between thumb and index finger, resting on the end of the middle finger.11 The coordination of a concentrating Jerome is captured in his posture; his right foot is forward under the lectern, while his left foot is firm upon the ground. In the miniature book image, the folio, orientated at 180°, is ruled in red in a single column and the pen is held at an angle ready to write. In Trinity  B.  5. 4 itself, the accomplished scribe wrote between two lead-­drawn ruled lines. Ruling became clearly visible once manuscripts were produced with the lines ruled in lead or plummet from c.1125 onwards. Prior to the first quarter of the twelfth century, vertical and horizontal bounding and ruling lines had been made with a hard point forming a score in the manuscript that guided the scribe’s quill and thus kept the stint of copying tidy. Writing grids would be ruled vertically for a ‘justified’ guide for the line length, and horizonally to keep the writing effort straight. In Trinity B. 5. 4 the lead-­ruled writing grid dividing the writing space into two columns is clearly visible. It provides a guide for the x-height or minim-­height of the psalter text, with the same measure of interlinear spacing; in turn the psalter’s minim-­height ruling becomes the full height of the glossed text’s ruled space. Some of the letterforms of the most proficient scribes are written just above the ruled line, as if hovering in air. In Riddle 51, these horizontal and vertical lines, marked out in between patterns of pricking, represent the wæg (‘the way’, ‘the path’) along which the ‘striving warrior’—the scribe himself—guides his quill, thumb, and two fingers, which by line 3 (wæs, singular 3rd person, ‘[it] was’) has become one entity.12 In this short and inspiring poem, a professional monastic of the manuscript in the drop-­down menu. See also, Michael Gullick, ‘A Twelfth-­Century Manuscript of the Letters of Thomas Becket’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 2 (1990): 1–31. 11  Western medieval scribes are often depicted with a knife in their left hand and a quill in their right. This can be compared with depictions of scribes in other traditions, where the materials will often dictate the most appropriate tools; for example, London, British Library, Additional MS 7170, a Syriac Gospel lectionary from Mosul (modern Iraq), written in the early thirteenth century and showing considerable Islamic and Byzantine influences. In this beautifully illustrated manuscript, the four evangelists are shown writing their gospels with pen in hand (see https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/ syriac-­gospel-­lectionary for a selection of images). These holy scribes hold no knife, but then the material upon which they are imagined to write may be paper—like the lectionary itself—not membrane. Their completed Gospels are depicted as being held in an X-shaped cradle that appears to be wooden and portable. 12  This is also how Riddle 60 (a Pen, or Reed pen) at folios 122v–123r of the Exeter Book treats scribe, hand, and writing implement. Lines 10–14 of this seventeen-­line poem read: Þæt is wundres dæl, on sefan searolic  þam þe swylc ne conn, hu mec seaxes ord  ond seo swiþre hond, eorles ingeþonc  on ord somod, þingum geþydan . . . . It is a sort of wonder, a clever thought for one who doesn’t know of such thing how the point of a knife, the right hand, a man’s inner thoughts and a sharp point together all work to this purpose . . . . See further Roy F. Leslie, ‘The Integrity of Riddle 60’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67 (1968): 451–7.

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46  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts scribe, a craftsperson, unites with his quill: the technology and the user are perfectly synchronized in the work. The reader’s senses and imagination are called upon fully in the visual description and movement of the poem, and in solving its mysterious subject. The , , , and sounds of the alliteration throughout the Riddle—with double alliteration of and in lines 1 and 2—underscore the rapid movement of the quill pen through the air. And so perfect are the tool, technology, and producer that the quill flies faster in the hand of a scribe than it flew as a feather on the bird to which it belonged. As the spaces of the page are filled with the tracks of the writing, so, it seems is the luxury book with its gold adornment filled with meaning that is both directed and created by the scribal-­warrior. There are further allusions in the poem to the probable Christian message that Riddle 51 suggests is being written (even as the poem itself is being written): the four wondrous creatures are reminiscent of the four evan­ gel­ists; the ‘wiga’, ‘warrior’, is Christ, who can show the way to his four evangelists and all people. In this and other Exeter Book Riddles, the scribe is depicted as something of a miracle worker as the wielder of wondrous ‘creatures’, as a ‘striving’ or even ‘struggling warrior’ (‘winnende wiga’), the guide and teacher along the paths of the folio. Some scholars have perceived in the ‘fæted gold’, ‘the plated’ or ‘beaten’ or ‘ornamented gold’ of de luxe volumes, which are often Gospel-­books or psalters. Indeed, the phrase almost certainly refers to a religious book, and even though the Exeter Book itself lacks gold illumination or illustration, it too is certainly de luxe. It does contain visible traces of gold leaf though, showing that at some point in its medieval history it must have come into direct contact with the precious material, sheets of which may have been stored within the manuscript’s folios. The Exeter Book itself was certainly highly regarded in the first two centuries after its creation: it was discovered by Leofric, bishop of Exeter, and bequeathed by him to the cathedral library; it became the repository for texts that were meant to exist in perpetuity; and it was the erstwhile container of gold leaf, showing its value to the institution. The scribe of the Exeter Book Riddle 51, then, is likely to have thought of the work as part of a prestigious programme of copying.13 This substantial manuscript was always an important book, a presentation volume, with the finest craftsmanship on display. In writing the Old English riddlic description of the quill pen, itself an imaginative adaptation of earlier known Latin models, the scribe is referring to himself as a ‘wiga’, a warrior of God, in promulgating texts in the manuscript, many of which are fundamentally religious and instructive in nature. Writing was part of opus Dei, the daily work of God within the cloisters of religious orders. Riddle 51 presents an ideal and idealized union of scribe and tool, a

13  See Conner, ‘Matched Hands’.

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  47 joyful and uplifting account of this spiritual and embodied exercise. The Exeter Book scribe may have regarded his professional work as salvific—animated and lively as is the description of the feather and fingers in Riddle 51, and also animated by the effort of the Christian soul. The physical labour involved was a struggle as present-­day professional calligraphers can attest. Scribes and artists wrote and illustrated in a variety of spaces and conditions, with a wide range of resources, time, and expertise. Some monastic institutions may have had well-­ established writing rooms, called scriptoria (made famous in modern novels like The Name of the Rose),14 while other institutions, both monastic and secular, will have had barely any facilities for copying books. Many early medieval manuscripts, such as the Taunton Fragments or Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41, cannot be localized at present, because it is possible they may have been manufactured in an institution that has not yet been fully studied or for which specific evidence does not survive. The great monasteries of pre-­1200 England, such as Winchester, Canterbury, Worcester, and Glastonbury, have had significant numbers of manuscripts assigned to them; secular cathedrals, such as Exeter, Hereford, Salisbury, and St Paul’s, also produced manuscripts, some of which are localizable to their place of origin. Many more manuscripts remain unlocalized, however.15 By the later twelfth and thirteenth century, professional writing-­shops began to emerge in cities and towns, encouraged by the demand for books from university students and an emerging literate middle class. Professional scribes found employment in manor houses and manorial and other courts; in the administrative organs of an increasingly bureaucratized government; and in peripatetic work outside the major cities.16 The huge increase in the number of land transactions that is seen in this period required the local preparation of written documents, and this was a major factor in the growth of numbers of those who could write.17 Individuals who were well educated in a flourishing school system and who practised professional careers also went on to produce their own manuscripts in the privacy of their homes; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 and London, British Library, Harley MS 2253 are miscellanies that were compiled by literate professional people (often, but not always, men) for the use of their own households.

14  Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (London: Harcourt, 1983); Brenda Rickman Vantrease, The Illuminator (London: Macmillan, 2005); and see also the fictional biography of the medieval manuscript, the Sarajevo Haggadah, in Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book (London: Penguin, 2008). 15  See Neil Ker et al., Medieval Libraries of Great Britain (London: Royal Historical Society, 1941; 2nd edn, 1964), now available electronically, http://mlgb3.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/; and the volumes in Richard Sharpe, gen. ed., Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (London: British Library for British Academy,1990–). 16 See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 3rd edn (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013). 17  See especially the painstaking work of Kitrina Bevan in ‘Clerks and Scriveners: Legal Literacy and Access to Justice in Late Medieval England’ (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2013).

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48  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts In the Riddles that survive from pre-­Conquest England, it is possible to deduce something of the scribe’s conception or consciousness of the very act in which they were involved: scribal practice.18 And while each scribe undertook their work in distinct ways, what can be surmised is their reverence for the task. The poems demonstrate scribes’ kinaesthetic engagement with the tools, the substrate, and the larger whole—the book. Exeter Book riddles, such as Riddle 93 and Riddle 88, both of which can be solved as ‘Inkhorns’ and Riddle 60 (‘Reed pen’ at folios 122v–123r), describe the tools of the scribe at work. As numerous scholars have observed, these riddles combine the animate with the inanimate; highlight movement and interaction between objects, the environment, and human actors; and disclose a consciousness of both the utility and the ineffability of the world about us.19 In Riddle 93 (folio 130r–v), for example, the deer’s antler is the voice of the poem, explaining how its physical host—the deer—was killed; how it was stripped from its animal, fashioned as a thing that has one foot and that swallows ‘black, wood, and water’ (‘Nu ic blace swelge / wuda ond wætre’); and how it is attacked by the ‘ravaging foe’ (‘hiþende feond’), which is the quill, with its innards (the ink) going on to create something new in the writing that is produced from scribe, quill, and ink (‘oft me of wombe bewaden fereð, / steppeð on stið bord’, ‘Often, what comes from my inside travels covered steps on the stiff surface’). At the end of Riddle 93, which in the Exeter Book manuscript is damaged at both beginning and end, out of death comes life from the words on the membrane, ‘the stiff surface’. At folio 129r–v of the Exeter Book, Riddle 88 is yet more explicit about the good that can emerge from this violent reuse. While this poem is also damaged in the manuscript and thus text is missing, the poet reveals that: Nu mec unsceafta  innan slitað, wyrdaþ mec be wombe;  ic gewendan ne mæg. Æt þam spore findeð  sped se þe se[cað] …  sawle rædes. Now alien beings  tear within me, injure me inside.  I cannot escape. 18  In traditions of writing globally, scribes are depicted as dynamic and as actively engaged in the work of copying. Their depiction itself suggests the respect felt towards scribes-­as-­agents and their products. For example, in discussing Mayan manuscripts and vessels transmitting knowledge in pre-­ Hispanic times, Megan O’Neil highlights scribal culture as ‘interactive and performative’, and includes an image of seated scribes at work on block-­codices, with quill or reed-­implement in right hand; see Megan E. O’Neil, ‘The Painter’s Line on Paper and Clay: Maya Codices and Codex-­Style Vessels from the Seventh to the Seventeenth Century’, in Keene, ed., Toward a Global Middle Ages, pp. 125–36, at 129–30 and especially fig. 9.4. 19  For further scholarship on the Riddles, see, inter alia, Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Helen Price, Human and Non-­Human in Anglo-­Saxon and British Postwar Poetry: Reshaping Literary Ecology (unpub. PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2014), p. 92; http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/6607/; and John Niles, Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006).

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  49 On the track he will find  success, he who [seeks it], …  for his soul’s benefit.

Again, from violence emerges something of benefit for the soul (sawle rædes);20 the tracks of writing that are created by the unity of the ‘alien being’, the quill, and the dipping of the quill into the inkhorn, will ensure success for those who vol­ ition­al­ly seek the spiritual prosperity that results from reading instructive texts.

Writingfeþer Boceras Hrædlice Writende Being involved in the strenuous work to produce books was to be actively doing God’s work.21 In Cassiodorus’s vision for his monastery—the sixth-­ century Institutes of Divine and Secular Love—he wrote: Of all bodily labours which are proper for us that of copying books has always been more to my taste than any other. The more so, as in this exercise the mind is instructed by the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and it is a kind of homily to the others, whom these books may reach. It is preaching with the hand, to unleash tongues with the fingers; it is publishing to men in silence the words of salvation; in fine, it is fighting against the demon with pen and ink. As many words as a transcriber writes, so many wounds the demon receives.22

According to Cassiodorus, early medieval ecclesiastical or monastic scribes invested far more of themselves in their work than simply the labour with quill and ink. It might be helpful to think of the medieval scribe, certainly in the earlier period, not only as the producer of the text, but also—along with others, such as the person writing the titles (rubricator), the artist, the corrector, and the binder— as the energy and skill behind the creation of meaning in the book. That energy is embodied by the book; the craftspersons’ effort and know-­how inhabit the manuscript book, even when the book does not have at its centre an explicitly religious set of texts. Rather as Plato thought of the distinctiveness of form, object, and 20  On the use of ‘sawle rædes’ in homiletic prose and poetry, see Claudio Cataldi, ‘The “Secret Wound”: Homiletic Fragment I and the Vercelli Book’, Filologia Germanica 10 (2018): 31–50; and Jonathan  T.  Randle, ‘The “Homiletics” of the Vercelli Book Poems’, in A.  Orchard and Samantha Zacher, eds, New Readings in the Vercelli Book (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 185–224, at 202–3. 21  The section heading here reads as ‘the writing feather [pen] of a scribe writing quickly’, Psalm 44:2, and translates calamus scribae velociter scribentis. The Old English word writingfeþer occurs in six of the early medieval psalters with Old English glosses, and in an Old English fragmentary homily in London, British Library, Cotton Otho C. i, discussed by David McDougall and Ian McDougall, ‘“Evil Tongues”: A Previously Unedited Old English Sermon’, Anglo-­Saxon England 26 (1997): 209–29, at 220–1. 22  James  W.  Halporn and Barbara Halporn, trans., Cassiodorus, Institutes of Divine and Secular Learning (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), 1:xxx.

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50  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts meaning as eidos (‘idea’), mimēsis (representation), and technē (‘instrumental knowledge’), one can parallel these terms with, first, the conception of the book; second, the form of the book; and third, the skill required to create the book, including—and possibly mainly through—its text or text-­image. The technē of the scribe is writing—the nimble ability, the purposeful mental skill. The scribe is the craftsperson who contributes most significantly to the edifice of learning. One further component is notable and highlights Cassiodorus’s commentary on the copying of books: the aura that inheres in an object produced by the energy of the maker in their craft. For the twentieth-­century philosopher and scholar Walter Benjamin, ‘aura’ could be defined as an object’s ‘uniqueness’, authenticity, its ‘basis in ritual’, and its irreplicability.23 This object, for Benjamin, would be a work of art, but, actually, all objects have a greater or lesser degree of ‘aura’, or cultural value. All handwritten objects have potentially significant value, which is enhanced by age, scarcity, historical association, and connection with family, or a famous person or event. Thus, for example, a note on hotel stationery means very little, unless this note happens to be written by Albert Einstein in 1922 and kept by the courier. It sold in 2017 for $1.56 million.24 Analogously, a note written by one’s mother (in handwriting that proves familiar from the merest glimpse, despite the fact that the reader could not describe the details of that hand), has great value, but generally only to the recipient and family. Being able to detect an individual scribe at work, whether that is one’s parent, or a scribe from a thousand years ago, depends on a variety of components of the hand: the aspect (general impression of the hand, and whether it is upright or slanted, rounded or pointed, etc.), duct or ductus (the direction, order, and number of pen strokes), and individual letterforms themselves. For a hand like that of a close family member’s, aspect will identify the writer to the familiar recipient. For medieval scribes’ work, it is often a time-­consuming laborious task to localize, date, and identify individual scribes, which is the chief aim of palae­og­raph­ ers—those who study ancient handwriting in order to analyse and discuss manuscript production in the broader cultural context. Such slow scholarship involves the close analysis of the scribal performance eye-­to-­i. This can be achieved by investigating the script of the manuscript in person; through the examination of plates, where these are published; or by analysing the manuscript’s digital aspect at a repository, such as Parker on the Web.25 In my own palaeographical work, I often tend to move quickly through a digitized 23  Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), pp. 214–18. 24  The note on the stationery of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was deliberately given by Einstein to the courier in the full knowledge that it would have financial value. The German note read: ‘A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest. Albert Einstein. November 1922. Tokyo.’ See further: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/25/einstein-­ note-­about-­happiness-­of-­a-­modest-­life-­sells-­for-­15m, accessed 22 October 2019. 25 https://parker.stanford.edu.

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  51 manuscript, seeing what makes itself apparent, focusing on the most obvious indicators of mise-­en-­page, such as rubrics or embellished initials. It pays to slow down, and discovering I had left pages 2–3 (facing verso-­recto) of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 open on my laptop prior to a translatlantic flight, I spent some hours working through every graph and element of the scribe’s practice. Corpus 201 is an eleventh-century anthology with parts that were probably written in Winchester, Worcester, and Exeter. As long as I did not click off the page, I was able to work through every detail Zoom capability still functioned without an internet connection on the flight, so I could focus on minutiae. This effort was rem­ in­is­cent of pre-­digital days, when working from a photo­copy of a plate with alphabet sheet in hand to perform a close reading of script meant that one became conscious of the nuance of individual letterforms. This leads to a recognition that no single a could easily represent the total ­performance of a scribe’s a’s. Individual letters change depending on contiguous graphs, but there will nearly always be a proportionality of space and measure throughout the hand’s stint that yields to expert recognition. This intimate level of engagement is what makes the difference in the perception of manuscript detail. With CCCC 201, the result of critical gazing is an appreciation of the scribe’s meticulous and sustained formation of a curly-­ bowled p, or the notable angle of the pointed a. There is no doubt that scholars can ‘read’ far more slowly than the scribe ever wrote and can now via the digitized image see tiny detail—that which the scribe might never have seen or been bothered about. In the image of CCCC 201, page 2 (Figure 3.2), full zoom function in Parker on the Web allows the viewer to see exactly how the scribe was working with the quill. This scribe was self-­conscious: the use of Caroline Minuscule script for Latin text but English Vernacular Minuscule for Old English evinces a linguistic awareness carefully demonstrated. The scribe was also deliberate about pen lifts, which slows the writing down; for example, e is made of three distinct strokes; the tail of g is quite often linked with a hairline stroke to the subsequent letter; and there are many letters where the freedom and expert calligraphy of the scribe is evident in the minor flourishes to letterforms. The elongated letterforms ensure that there is a wholeness to the final effect of the stint and this sense of wholeness involves the space of the writing grid, where there are few irregularities in the tidy right margin. At what point did the scribe realize that the final s in ‘ures’ should be written in a tipped-­over fashion to fill the space to the end of line 27? This characteristic of the scribe’s practice is seen in the lateral expansion of the letter n in ‘on’ and ‘wisan’ at line 5, and elsewhere, and demonstrates the desire to ensure a neat right margin to the writing grid. The aesthetic of regularity is important to the scribe. This visual fullness and neatness pre-­empts a desire to fill up space that is frequently seen in copying manuscripts, and will be discussed further in Chapter 6. The scribe’s consciousness of the writing grid and its potential for both precision and playfulness extends to the role of the scored line in the writing

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52  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Figure 3.2  Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201, p. 2. © Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  53 effort. The scored line was of some significance to the scribe; it seems to balance the hand and the overall performance, of quill to membrane.26 The lower stroke of the punctuation mark known as a punctus versus, which looks akin to a modern semi-­colon and indicates a major pause, almost always sits upon the ruled line. In addition, descenders where there is a 22° angle at the second movement show the ruled line to be of some significance to this scribe’s work—as it had to be for all scribes in terms of keeping their writing straight and organized. The scribe’s precision and expertise are manifested in the dimensionality of the writing: the letter o almost looks three-­dimensional with its perfection of chiaroscuro. Using what has been described as ‘a delicate, unusual hand of [the beginning of the eleventh century]’,27 the scribe was aware of dimensions and proportionality: there is a visualizing of the available space created by the deployment of high ascenders on the top line; and the proportions of body of the script to the parts of the letters that ascend and descend is effective in emphasizing the interlinear space. The flow of the script is enhanced by the 45° angle on the feet or serifs of the minim strokes (the stroke that forms an i, or the two downward strokes of n and u, or the three of m), and this angularity is visible again in the very pointy form of the letter a. The modern-­day idiom relating to a person who is meticulous is that they ‘dot their i’s and cross their t’s’.28 While early medieval scribes only started putting dashes above the letter i in the twelfth century to distinguish it from other minims, in the case of the work of this Corpus 201 scribe, accents are placed over particular vowels to demonstrate a long vowel sound, and neumes—the medieval musical notation scheme, which occur in various places through this scribe’s stints—are also included. Such practices indicate that the texts copied by this scribe were for public consumption—to be read aloud or sung, and this intentionality in the scribe’s writing suggests that he or she directed the flourishes towards the viewer-­reader: to be aesthetically pleasing as well as entirely functional. The scribe took pride and pleasure in the work, adding embellishment and precise serifs and extensions as adornment. It was not just gold, then, as in Riddle 51, that enhanced scribes’ work in this early period; it was an awareness of the public and devotional nature of the task. Similarly, in London, British Library, Additional MS 28188, the main scribe of this eleventh-­century liturgical manuscript from Exeter focused on precision and clarity throughout his work (and he is almost definitely a ‘he’, since Exeter scribes were part of the bishop’s newly founded secular cathedral household). This important manuscript combined a pontifical and a benedictional; that is, a prayer-­book specifically for a bishop and a collection of episicopal blessings, 26  It is impossible to tell how deep the score is in the digital image, and this might be coercing the pen as it moves through letterforms and between letters, as the word syn at line 4 of page 3 suggests. 27 Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts, p. 90. 28 The OED provides the earliest use of this idiom to 1820 in the Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), 1 February: ‘Pray, sir, what is the object of referring a bill to a committee—merely to dot the i’s and cross the t’s?’

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54  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts respectively. Linked by Andrew Prescott to benedictionals produced in Winchester, these books were critically important for the exercise of the bishop’s authority in his diocese.29 The importance of authority is evident in the manuscript’s impeccable clarity; the relative spaciousness of the interlinear and marginal layout; the use of blue and red rubrics, and green, red, and blue enlarged initials for ease of legibility. Different sizes of script are also to denote specific voices (the bishop’s, the congregation’s) within the ceremony. Like thousands of other medieval scribes, to his meticulous practice indicating concern for intelligibility for the reader, he added joie de vivre, an exuberance, to the overall writing performance that shows the craftsperson’s concern for aesthetic excellence, and an awareness of being written to be publicly seen. London, British Library, Harley MS 863, a psalter again from Exeter in the third quarter of the eleventh century, was partly written by the same scribe as Additional 28188. Both these Latin volumes were clearly intended for institutional use in public services of worship and would have been predominantly employed by the bishop, Leofric, and his senior clergy.30 Harley 863, folio 117r, when viewed through its digital aspect, is immediately impressive, though it is neither illuminated nor elaborately dec­or­ated.31 Its simplicity, at first glance, is one of its strengths: it is clear, spaciously laid out, and, like Additional 28188, contains numerous information retrieval tools, such as coloured capitals and varying script sizes, to facilitate the reader’s ability to find the texts required. Scribal performances could be as skilled as those of the writers of small, pocket-­sized Parisian Bibles in the thirteenth century, where the Gothic script is so tiny that most readers now require a magnifying glass (and even at that time, perhaps, a rock crystal magnifier) to distinguish them. In palaeographical terms, scholars consider grade a useful way of distinguishing between hands. High-­grade script, like those of the tiny Bibles, tends to be associated with the more de luxe volume, especially those containing biblical texts. As Peter Stokes comments: ‘economic factors must have been a consideration at all stages in the history of book production, and it seems hard to refute that the more important texts would have been the ones on which the greatest resources were spent’. These resources included the hiring of scribes trained to write in the highest grades of script, as classified from evidence accrued by modern palaeographers.32 There are many 29  Andrew Prescott, ‘The Structure of English Pre-­Conquest Benedictionals’, British Library Journal 13 (1987): 118–58. 30 Elaine Treharne, ‘The Bishop’s Book: Leofric’s Homiliary and Eleventh-­Century Exeter’, in Stephen Baxter, Catherine Karkov, Janet Nelson, and David Pelteret, eds, Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 521–37. Both of these manuscripts are digitized at the British Library website and can be discovered using their shelfmarks and also by searching for ‘Exeter’ manuscripts. 31  For the digital ‘aspect’, see Chapter 9. 32  Peter A. Stokes, ‘The Problem of Grade in Post-­Conquest Vernacular Minuscule’, New Medieval Literatures 13 (2011): 23–47, at p. 26. Stokes considers the evidence for the existence of grade,

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  55 problems with describing individual scribal performances in terms of grade, however; for example, terminology that focuses on proportion, like litterae tunsae (‘shorn letters’), which was used by contemporary medieval writers to describe the earliest Irish script, is taken by modern palaeographers to connote a value judgement, when no such judgement is implied by the collocation. So, ‘shorn letters’ are adjudged to be ‘stumpy’, which is rarely a compliment, especially when palaeographers privilege the ‘graceful’ and ‘delicate’ in an unclear descriptive hierarchy.33 Grade and modern aesthetic hierarchies invariably, if inadvertently, diminish the competence of scribes who wrote ‘lower’ grades of writing in the more utilitarian kind of manuscript—if, indeed, ‘utilitarian’ is even an appropriate label for the rare and revered handwritten book in the medieval period. Thus, for example, from the thirteenth century, manuscripts containing theological treatises exist in large numbers, and are generally not highly decorated or thought of as de luxe. They are, though, constructed and written with care and an eye to the reader, individual though that reader may be (perhaps reading to a wider audience, or using the book as a reference tool). In Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 459, a thirteenth-­century anthology of Latin moral and pastoral works, a number of hands, described as ‘very good’ by the manuscript scholar, M. R. James, copied works by theologians such as William de Montibus, Stephen Langton, and Robert Grosseteste.34 This book was designed for an individual reader, albeit one who performed the texts from a lectern during meals in the monastery refectory—the monastery being Peterborough, as the press mark suggests.35 Any scribe’s stint in this manuscript is representative of a well-­trained ecclestiastical copyist in this period. At folio 44r (Figure  3.3), Thomas of Woburn’s Solacium Anime (Comfort for the Soul), the scribe writes the opening of this penitential text in an expert, clear, and regular Gothic rotunda script—rotunda because of the rounded shoulders and rounded feet on minims, like m and n. The writing sits just above the ruled line, with consistent formation of letterforms, relatively few abbreviations (unlike scholastic texts of this period, where ab­bre­vi­ ations are frequent), regular punctuation, and helpful minor decorative devices to help the reader find their way around the dense block of writing. Such devices including, at p. 25, late medieval advertisement sheets that publicized the different forms of writing that an individual scribe could offer customers. 33  Stokes, ‘Problem of Grade’, p. 27; See also Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 170, and references therein. See also Elaine Treharne, ‘“The Good, the Bad, the Ugly”: Old English Manuscripts and Their Physical Description’, in Matthew Hussey and John Niles, eds, The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour of A. N. Doane (Brepols, 2012), pp. 261–83. 34 M. R. James, Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1912), II, item 459, pp. 383–8, at 383. The catalogue is available as a PDF at https://parker.stanford.edu/parker. 35  The information on the manuscript, its Peterborough provenance, and contents comes from Parker on the Web, https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog.

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56  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Figure 3.3  Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 459, folio 44r. © Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

include the use of miniation; that is, red ink is used to infill particular letters that denote a new sentence or section (such as the N in Nichil at line 1; and the capital V in Ut at line 2). Miniation is also used to highlight the correction of the scribal error in line 8, recidivaveris (corrected from recidivivaveris), where the scribe had repeated one iv that had just been written; this is an eye-­skip error known as dittography. The opening of this new text on this recto is denoted and made more discoverable not only by an embellished red and blue puzzle initial, but also by the title and sub-­headings being rubricated (in red ink) within the text (at lines 1, 2, and 4) and the overall title being provided for ease of access in a different hand in the top right corner. At this point in the production of texts, running headers

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  57 were known and used, but not for this particular work, it seems. An experienced medieval reader—accustomed to contracted and abbreviated words—would have been able to find their way around the manuscript itself by noting the titles in the top right of new texts; and around the actual text by noting punctuation, and where new units of text began, emphasized in red. There is no question that there were scribes whose handwriting was variable or unpractised in the Middle Ages.36 Often inexpert writing might belong to a novice, but what seems to be irregular or poor writing on occasion belongs to a known scholar, like Wulfstan, archbishop of York (d. 1023); or the person in charge of the production of a manuscript—the corrector and senior compiler—as with the third scribe in the mid-­ twelfth-­ century English religious codex, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 303.37 In the case of the famous Tremulous Hand of Worcester, their writing of the late twelfth or earlier thirteenth century seems desperately untidy at first glance, but this scholar-­scribe is thought to have suffered from a neurodegenerative condition.38 As work by Christine Franzen and others has shown, the Tremulous Hand was certainly a significant scholar, glossing multiple Old English texts into Middle English and Latin, as well as composing literary works of their own making.39 In The First Worcester Fragment, contained in Worcester Cathedral Library, MS F. 174, the Tremulous Hand comments nostalgically on the loss of institutional learning in England since the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Tremulous Hand reminds the reader: Sanctus Beda was iboren her on Breotene mid us, and he wisliche bec awende þet þeo Englise leoden þurh weren ilerde; and he þeo cnotten unwreih, þe questiuns hoteþ, þa derne diȝelnesse þe deorwurþe is. Ælfric abbod, þe we Alquin hoteþ, he was bocare and þe fif bec wende— Genesis, Exodus, Utronomius, Numerus, Leviticus. Þurh þeos weren ilærde ure leoden on Englisc . . . . 36  Julian Brown reminds scholars of the need to focus on the ‘quality’ of handwriting, which seems, to me, to be a somewhat different mode of evaluation than ‘grade’ or unstated calligraphically inspired terminology. See T. Julian Brown, A Palaeographer’s View: The Selected Writings of Julian Brown, ed. Janet Bately, Michelle Brown, and Jane Roberts, Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 43. 37  On Wulfstan of York, see N. R. Ker, ‘The Handwriting of Archbishop Wulfstan’, in P. Clemoes and K.  Hughes, eds, England before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 315–31. For examples of less proficient hands, see Karkov and Treharne, ‘The Presence of the Hand’. 38  Deborah Thorpe and Jane E. Alty, ‘What Type of Tremor Did the Medieval “Tremulous Hand of Worcester” Have?’, Brain: A Journal of Neurology 138.10 (2015): 3123–7. 39  Christine Franzen, The Tremulous Hand of Worcester, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

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58  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts Saint Bede was born here in Britain with us, and he wisely translated books with which the English people were taught; and he unravelled those knotty problems, known as doctrinal questions, that secret mystery which is of great value. Abbot Ælfric, who we know [as well] as Alcuin, he was bookish and translated the five books, Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Numbers, Leviticus. Through these men our people were taught in English . . . .40

Here, the Tremulous Hand, in typical idiosyncratic script, demonstrates em­phat­ ic­al­ly the importance of the copying of books and transmission of key works. The self-­awareness of this scribe’s own place within textual culture is certain—encapsulated in the second-­person pronouns ‘us’ in the first line and ‘ure leoden’ (‘our people’) in line 9—illustrating how important books and learning were, and how the Tremulous Hand seemed to hope their own effort would be as effective as those of each previous ‘bocere’ (‘scholar’, ‘scribe’) they mention and admire.

Boclic Snotornesse, ‘Bookly Wisdom’ One of the Old and early Middle English terms for a scribe is, then, ‘bocere’ (as well as ‘writere’), which also means ‘scholar’ and ‘author’, creating a close link between the person who writes and the person who has intellectual authority. In his account of the deuterocanonical Book of Judith in the Old Testament, Ælfric, the prolific Old English religious author who died in around 1010, revealed his unease in writing about events that are not strictly canonical. His own scepticism led him to anticipate questions from his imagined audience, so he comments authoritatively: Nis þan nan leas spel: hit stent on Leden, þus on þære bibliothecan. Þæt witon boceras, þe þæt Leden cunnon, þæt we na ne leogað.41 This is no false story: it stands in the Latin, and thus in the Bible. Scholars know, those who understand Latin, that we do not lie at all. 40 Treharne, Old and Middle English Anthology, pp. 363–65. See most recently, Stephen Pelle, ‘An Ælfrician Source for a Passage in the Worcester Fragments’, Notes and Queries 63 (2016): 186–91. Pelle offers a suggestion that the Tremulous Hand knew Ælfric’s Interrogationes Sigewulfi, and conflated the Old English sermon writer with Alcuin. I have modified my translation here in the light of Pelle’s argument. 41  Mark Griffith, ed., Judith, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), lines 404–6.

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  59 Ælfric here validates the work of the most advanced scholars—those who know Latin—and associates their knowledge with the most sacred and unassailable of sources, the Bible. He is explicit in his assertion of the truth of Judith twice, just to ensure no doubt remains. Scholars, experts then, are keepers of divine truth, as well as translators of those truths, making accessible that which is otherwise out of the reach of an unlearned audience; in this, Ælfric’s own translation work from Latin into Old English is aligned with the divine work of biblical translators like Jerome. Similarly, Byrhtferth, monk of Ramsey (d. c.1020), in his early eleventh-­ century Enchiridion or manual, a computistical and calendrical work, defended the aims of his English and Latin writing by explaining that he worked from monastic sources: Þas þing we gemetton on Ramegsige þurh Godes miltsigendan gife. Forþan ic ne swigie for ðæra bocera getingnyssum ne for þæra gelæredra manna þingum þe þas þing ne behofiað betweox heom to wealkynne.42 We found these things in Ramsey through God’s merciful gift. Therefore, I ­cannot be silent because of the rhetoric of the scribes nor for the sake of those learned men who have no need to discuss these things between themselves.

Recognizing the merits of scribes or scholars and learned men, Byrhtferth brings learning to a wider audience, and defends his actions as translator by reference to his divinely inspired discoveries of authorities upon whom he could draw. In Psalm 44 in some of the Old English glossed psalters, ‘bocere’ translates ‘scribe’, but elsewhere in the Early English corpus, the Dictionary of Old English restricts the meaning of ‘bocere’ to ‘Jewish scribe’ (in relation to particular texts’ translations), or principally ‘scholar/author’.43 The expanded meaning of ‘scribe’ to ‘scholar’ is relevant throughout literate communities of the earlier medieval period and is part of a larger range of terms related to bookness that makes concrete the significance of the written word to these cultures.44 In Old English, the close association of the word ‘boc’ with those who produced and used the object is hardly surprising. A unique compound word—‘bocweorc’—occurs in Archbishop Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity, which outlines the roles of elite members of society, such as kings and bishops. Of bishops he says:

42  Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge, eds, Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, Early English Text Society s.s. 15 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 43 s.v. bocere, DOE meanings a and b, for ‘author/scholar’, and meanings c and c.i. for ‘Jewish scribe/ functionary’. 44  On Hebrew manuscripts, see, for example, Colette Sirat, Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); on Arabic manuscripts, Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Turnhout: Brill, 2009); and on the manuscript in China, see Guolong Lai and Q. Edward Wang, eds, Manuscript Culture in Early China, Chinese Studies in History 50, 3 (2017).

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60  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts Item: bisceopes dægweorc, ðæt bið mid rihte his gebedu ærest and ðonne his bocweorc, ræding oððon rihting, lar oððon leornung.45 Item: A bishop’s daily work is that he first says his prayers properly, and then does his book-­work, whether reading or writing, teaching or learning.

The expectation that bishops and other prelates, monks, nuns, and those engaged in religious life would produce books is well known. In the monastic guide for sign language, the Monasterialia indicia, monks were directed about how to ­communicate when silence was regulated in their institution. In the text of the Monasterialia ­preserved on folios 97r–101v of London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A. iii, instructions are given for how to indicate an inkhorn and a quill pen: Ðonne þu blechorn habban wille, þonne hafa þu þine þri fingras, swilce þu dypan wille, and awend þine hand adune and clyce þine fingras, swilce þu blæchorn niman wille. Fiþere tacen is, þæt þu geþeode þine þri fingras tosomne swilce þu feþere hæbe and hi dype, and styre þine fingras swilce þu writan wille.46 When you want to have an inkhorn, then take three fingers as if you want to dip them and turn your hand down and clench your fingers as if you want to pick up an inkhorn. The sign for a feather [quill] is that you join your three fingers together as if you have a feather and dip them, and move your fingers as if you want to write.

The three fingers here are probably the thumb, index, and middle fingers. The pen’s identity is entirely focused on the object—the feather—and miming the physical action of writing. This close association of writing, scholarship, and church throughout the Middle Ages is perhaps the most important point. For Ælfric, who was part of the larger reform movement among the Benedictine religious order in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, this was an association much to be maintained. For him, the significance of writing—as an object, a thing—was in the mysteries it conveyed, as the Tremulous Hand of Worcester observed in The First Worcester Fragment. Ælfric explains that: Oft gehwa gesihð fægere stafas awritene, þonne herað he ðone writere 7 þa stafas 7 nat hwæt hi mænað. Se ðe cann þæra stafa gescead, he herað heora fægernysse, ræt þa stafas, understent hwæt hi gemænað. Nis nah genoh þæt ðu stafas scawie, buton þu hi eac ræde þæt andgit understande . . . . þa bec wæron awritene be

45 Wulfstan, Institutes of Polity, ed. Jost, 2.1.1 77. 46  Friedrich Kluge, ‘Zur Geschichte der Zeichensprache: Angelsächsische Indicia Monasterialia’, Techmers internationale Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1885): 116–37.

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‘ Covered Me with Tracks ’ : Writing the Book  61 Criste ac þæt gastlice andgit wæs ðam folce digle oð þæt Crist sylf com to mannum geopenade þæra boca diglnysse æfter gastlicum andgite.47 Often someone sees lovely letters written then praises the writer and the letters, and not know what they mean. He who knows how to understand those letters praises their loveliness, and reads the letters, and understands what they mean. It is not enough that you behold letters without also reading them and understanding their sense . . . . These books were written concerning Christ, but the spiritual sense was hidden from the people, until Christ himself came to men, and opened the books’ secrets, according to the spiritual sense.

For Ælfric, appreciating the beauty of manuscripts is insufficient; the viewer has to be able to read and, in reading, understand the spiritual message. This profound association of the written word with divine sense is manifested throughout early medieval book history, as subsequent chapters will show. Ælfric clearly conceives of writing, of letters, and of their container, the book, as phe­nom­eno­logic­al; that is, he sees that which is invisible as being integral to the visible object. The book, and everything in it—from those texts originally conceived as part of the contents to the notes and interventions of all subsequent users—is a vo­lu­min­ous and immanent object that demands the viewer-­reader’s fullest attention. The book is neither reducible to its parts, nor easily described or immediately understood.48

47  Peter Clemoes, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series, Text, Early English Text Society s.s. 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 277–8 (with silent modernisation). This passage is also discussed by Ciaran Arthur, ‘The Gift of the Gab in Post-­Conquest Canterbury: Mystical “Gibberish” in London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A. xv’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118 (2019): 117–210. 48 Sean Dorrance Kelly, ‘Seeing Things in Merleau-­Ponty’, in Taylor Carman, ed., Cambridge Companion to Merleau-­Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 74–110, at 76.

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4

‘People Will Use Me’ Book as Archive

To access the book wholly it is critical to engage with all those readers, writers, owners, and perusers who made their way through the manuscript. Merleau-­ Ponty’s explication of perception, of embodied consciousness, talks of perceivers as lodging themselves in the objects they experience. He explains that ‘to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it’.1 From this, I think of textual objects, and perhaps of all things, as ‘inhabited’. In the case of manuscripts, they are peopled: crafted by individuals, read by careful participants, inscribed by others who came later in the book’s life. These inhabitants matter, and their perception of the book, often discernible through their interactions with it, are fundamentally important, allowing us to read book history fully through the book in its voluminousness. Merleau-­Ponty also comments rather evocatively, ‘Whether it be a question of vestiges or the body of another person, we need to know how an object in space can become the eloquent relic of an existence’.2 This chapter will, then, investigate the book as an ‘eloquent relic’ of existences, evaluating how other users of books sought to participate in the spaces of already-­written manuscripts, and particularly appreciated the memorializing function of the book, and its seeming per­ man­ence. Many existing medieval books were subsequently used as repositories for documenting information that their owners or caretakers deemed worth preserving. Writing is linked to security through generations; it is the vehicle for the relic of deeds and promises past. Thus, in a grant in 995 ce from King Æthelred to Æthelwig, Æthelwig who is the king’s miles (‘soldier’), is granted five hides (‘mansi’) at Ardley in Oxfordshire, forfeited by three brothers.3 In this very long Latin and Old English charter, the opening is focused overtly on expressing a truth that highlights the necessity of a literate culture and its organized methods of recording:

1  Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 79. 2  Ibid. 406. 3 P.  Sawyer, ed., Anglo-­ Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London: Royal Historical Society, 1968), #883, available online at E-­Sawyer: https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk. See also Dorothy Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, c. 500–1042, I (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1955), #117, p. 525.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. Elaine Treharne, Oxford University Press. © Elaine Treharne 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843814.003.0004

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  63 Quicquid perpetualiter permanens a secularibus agitur, seris litterarum firmiter muniri debetur, quia hominum fragilis memoria moriendo obliviscitur quod scriptura litterarum servando retinet. Whatever is transacted by men of this world to endure forever ought to be fortified securely with ranks of letters, because the frail memory of men in dying forgets what the writing of the letters preserves and retains.

It is quite ironic that this original charter was lost, though any single-­leaf document is obviously more at risk than a bound book. This charter only survives because it was copied, much later, into a book that survives now as London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B. vi (the Abingdon Cartulary), written in the thirteenth century. Even in this instance, then, the expectation of permanence expressed in the charter finds its manifestation in the reconfigured form of the codex. This effort at preservation within the context of the book, specifically, demonstrates that the manuscript was conceived of as an enduring object. Charters and letters have occasionally survived precisely because they were inserted into a precious book. Thus, for example, the earliest surviving single-­ sheet charter from pre-­ Conquest England, known as the Reculver Charter (London, British Library, Cotton MS Augustus II. 2, dated to 679), seems most likely to have been inserted into a Gospel-­book or a similar volume, perhaps kept on the altar at Reculver monastery.4 Its importance as the foundation charter of the monastery is underscored by its script—uncial, the most prestigious book-­ hand in this period. This conceptualization of the written record as the reification of the per­man­ent, made more authoritative by its association with a sacred book, was a particularly important concept for the early western medieval world. It was explicitly articulated in the later medieval period, in a popular Latin work entitled Philobiblon (‘the Love of Books’) written in 1344 by Richard Bury. In his first chapter, Bury comments that: The undisclosed truth of the mind, although it is the possession of the noble soul, yet because it lacks a companion, is not certainly known to be delightful, while neither sight nor hearing takes account of it. Further the truth of the voice is patent only to the ear and eludes the sight, which reveals to us more of the qualities of things, and linked with the subtlest of motions begins and perishes as it were in a breath. But the written truth of books, not transient but per­man­ ent, plainly offers itself to be observed, and by means of the pervious spherules 4  See, particularly, Nicholas Brooks, ‘The Early Charters of Canterbury Cathedral’, British Academy Review 24 (2014): 38–41, at p. 39. For an analogous example—a later survival of a single-­sheet love poem inserted into a sixteenth-­century printed volume of Chaucer’s Works—see Elaine Treharne, ‘“Tristis Amor”: An Unpublished Verse Love Letter from Lady Elizabeth Dacre Howard to Sir Anthony Cooke’, Renaissance Studies 26 (2012): 673–90.

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64  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts of the eyes, passing through the vestibule of perception and the courts of im­agin­ation, enters the chamber of intellect, taking its place in the couch of memory, where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind (ubi aeternam mentis congenerat veritatem).5

Here, Bury expresses suspicion of the ephemerality of speech and sight in comparison to the apparent permanence of writing in and through books. A renowned bibliophile, Bury collected hundreds of manuscripts that he aimed to leave to an Oxford college he wanted to found, but debts accrued in his later years meant his collection was sold and dispersed.6 The amassed collection he had hoped would be his permanent legacy was testimony to his love of the form and content of the medieval book. The extended architectural metaphor that he draws for the entrance of truth into the mind ‘through the vestibule of perception and the courts of imagination, [into] the chamber of intellect, taking its place in the couch of memory’ is one that has been well studied in relation to the concept of the memory and practices of learning,7 but it is a metaphor that is also helpful for thinking of books themselves. While the ‘written truth of books, not transient but permanent’ (veritas scripta libri non successiva sed permanens) enters the sensual and intellectual being through sight, so sight—figuratively, in addition to phys­ic­ al­ly—allows access to the space of learning that is a book. Here lies the power and the potential permanence not simply of writing and image, but also of books as containers of truth, as themselves edifices of letters. These metaphors of the book as edifice and memorial inspire a consideration of those writers, readers, and browsers, who advanced through books and interacted with them as architextual spaces that were clearly regarded as secure and eternal in this world when nothing else was.

Set in a Book Superficially similar public and permanent records are frequently found in early medieval Gospel-­books, both vernacular and Latin, in just the same way that family Bibles from the early modern period onwards hoard the records of 5  Richard Bury (d.1345), or Richard of Bury, an ecclesiastical and royal administrator, and later Bishop of Durham, is also known as Richard Aungerville. See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Richard Bury [Aungerville], 1287–1345’, by W. J. Courtney (2004): https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/4153; N.  Denholm-­ Young calls Bury: ‘the greatest bibliophile in medieval Europe’, in ‘Richard de Bury (1287–1345)’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (1937): 135–68, at p. 160. See  E.  C.  Thompson, ed., Philobiblon at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/626/626-­h/626-­h.htm. 6  Courtney, ‘Richard Bury’, ODNB; Denholm-­Young, ‘Richard de Bury’. 7  The classic study is Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; 2nd edn 2008), especially ch. 7.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  65 generations’ significant events.8 It is clear that from the emergence of the codex itself, Bibles and Gospel-­books held a very special significance for their owners. These owners might often be a religious community of monks or nuns, or aristocratic patrons, or an entire social group in a town or even a shire. The sacred and, in these centuries, effectively unchanging nature of the book—its essential quality, core of the Christian religion—generated its venerable status as relic, sacralized artefact, holy repository of essential record. Given this obvious interpretation of contemporary responses to the verbum Dei it is immensely interesting to investigate how additional text finds its way into the codex and the methods by which these acoustic ghosts leave us traces of their voices. An eleventh-­ century account of the consequences of a shire-­ moot in Herefordshire in the reign of Cnut permits insight into how a single, privileged, early medieval person conceived of the manuscript book as an archive, but also as a permanent memorial. Within the eighth-­ century Gospel-­ book, Hereford Cathedral Library, MS P. i. 2,9 blank space on final folios—the recto of folio 134r and its blank verso was filled up in the first half of the eleventh century by this account of the text’s own making (Figure 4.1): Her swutelað on þissum gewrite þæt an scirgemot sæt æt Ægelnoðesstane be Cnutes dæge cinges. Þær sæton Æðelstan biscop, ⁊ Ranig Ealdorman, ⁊ Edwine þæs ealdormannes [sunu], ⁊ Leofwine Wulsiges sunu, ⁊ Þurcil Hwita, ⁊ Tofig Pruda com þær on þæs cinges ærende. ⁊ þær wæs Bryning scirgerefa, ⁊ Ægelweard æt Frome, ⁊ Leofwine æt Frome, ⁊ Godric æt Stoce, ⁊ ealle þa þegnas on Herefordscire. Þa com þær farende to þam gemote Edwine Enneawnes sunu, ⁊ spæc þær on his agene modor æfter sumon dæle Landes þæt wæs Weolintun ⁊ Cyrdesleah. Þa acsode þe bisceop hwa sceolde andswerian for his moder. Þa andsweorode Þurcil Hwita ⁊ sæde þæt he sceolde gif he þa talu cuðe. Þa he ða talu na ne cuðe, þa sceawode man þreo þegnas of þam gemote þær ðær heo wæs, ⁊ þæt wæs æt Fæliglæh; þæt wæs Leofwine æt Frome ⁊ Ægelsig þe Reada ⁊ Winsig the shipman. ⁊ þa þa heo to hire comon þa acsoðon heo hwylce talu heo hæfde ymbe þa land þe hire sunu æfter spæc. Þa sæde heo þæt heo nan land hæfde þe him aht to gebyrede, ⁊ gebealh heo swiðe eorlice wið hire sunu, ⁊ gecleopade ða Leoflæde hire magan to hire Þurcilles wif. ⁊ beforan heom to hire þus cwæð: ‘Her sit Leoflæde min mage þe ic geann ægðer ge mines landes, ge mines goldes, ge rægles, ge reafes, ge ealles þe ic ah æfter minon dæge’. ⁊ heo syððan to þam þegnon cwæþ: ‘Doð þegnlice, ⁊ wel abeodað mine ærende to þam gemote beforan eallum þam godan mannum. ⁊ cyðaþ heom 8  For a list of Gospel texts, see ‘Earlier Latin Manuscripts’ at https://elmss.nuigalway.ie/corpus/3. 9  For a detailed description of the manuscript, see Richard Gameson, ‘The Insular Gospel Book at Hereford Cathedral’, Scriptorium 56 (2002): 48–79.

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66  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Figure 4.1  Hereford Cathedral Library, MS P. i. 2, folio 134r (Hereford Gospels). © Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Chapter, Hereford Cathedral.

hwæm ic mines landes geunnen hæbbe, ⁊ ealre minre æhte, ⁊ minan agenan suna næfre nan þing, ⁊ biddað heom beon þisses to gewitnesse’. And heo ða swæ dydon; ridon to þam gemote, ⁊ cyðdon eallon þam godan mannum hwæt heo on heom geled hæfde. Þa astod Þurcil hwita up on þam gemote, ⁊ bæd ealle þa þægnas syllan his wife þa land clæne, þe hire mage hire geuðe, ⁊ heo swa dydon. ⁊ Þurcill rad ða to Sancte Æþelberhtes mynstre be ealles þæs folces leafe ⁊ gewitnesse, ⁊ let settan on ane Cristes boc.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  67 Here in this document it is revealed that a shire-­moot sat at Egelnothstan10 in King Cnut’s day. There sat Bishop Æðelstan,11 and Ealdorman Ranig, and Edwin the ealdorman’s son, and Leofwin son of Wulsig, and Thurkil the White, and Tofig Prud came there on the king’s business. And there was Bryning the sheriff and Ægelweard from Frome, and Leofwin from Frome, and Godric from Stoke, and all the thanes in Herefordshire. Then Edwin, Enniaun’s son, came to the meeting and he made a claim against his own mother of a piece of land that was at Wellington and Cradley. Then the bishop asked who would answer for his mother, and Thurkil the White said that he would, if the facts were made known to him. Since he did not know the case, three thanes from the meeting were selected to go to where she was, and that was at Fawley; these were Leofwine of Frome and Ægelsige the Red and Winsig the shipman. And when they came to her, they asked her what claim she had to the land for which her son was suing. Then she said that she had no land that belonged to him at all, and she became extremely angry with her son, and called to her kinswoman, Leoflæd, Thurkil’s wife. And then she spoke to her in front of them, and said: ‘Here sits my kinswoman, Leoflæd, to whom I grant my land and my gold and my clothing and my robes, and everything I own, after my death-­day’. And then she said to the thanes: ‘Act like thanes and announce my message properly to the meeting before all the good people, and inform them to whom I have granted my land and all my possessions, and to my own son never a thing, and ask them to bear witness to this’. And they did so; they rode to the meeting and announced to all the good people what she had charged them to do. Then Thurkil the White stood up in the moot, and asked all the thanes to give to his wife the lands which her kinswoman had granted her clear from any other claim, and they did so. And Thurkil rode then with the permission and witness of all the people to St Æthelbert’s minster, and had it set forth in a Gospel-­book.12

This eleventh-­century addition to the eighth-­century Gospel-­book that yet survives to tell its tale is a stunning example of the justified optimism of Thurkil when he rode to Hereford to ask for the court’s decision to be entered into a manuscript that he, and all of the people present at the shire meeting, evidently believed would become a permanent record. As such, this preserved legal record 10  Aylton or Aylestone Hill in Herefordshire. 11  Bishop of Hereford from c.1013 until his death in 1056. 12  The text is translated in Whitelock, ed., English Historical Documents, #135, p. 556. For brief discussions, see Simon Keynes, ‘Hereford Cathedral Diocese before 1056’, in Gerald Aylmer and John Tiller, eds, Hereford Cathedral: A History (London: Hambledon Press, 2000), pp. 3–20, at 16–18; Andrew Rabin, ‘Anglo-­Saxon Women before the Law: A Student Edition of Five Old English Lawsuits’, Old English Newsletter 41.3 (2008): 33–56; and Daniel Donoghue, Old English Literature: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2004), pp. 1–5.

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68  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts can bear witness not only to Leoflæd’s claim to her kinswoman’s land and possessions, but also, and fascinatingly, to a determined collective endeavour to ensure that the sequence of oral testimonies given before the moot and at Fawley was confirmed in writing in a fashion that is greater than the sum of its parts for what it reveals about methods of information exchange in eleventh-­century England. The detail in this record shows how evidence was assiduously gathered: who was participant in these important regional meetings; who was able to speak and order the acquisition of evidence; who carried out the process of gathering the facts; and how those facts were sent along a chain of informants. The ‘revealing’, ‘announcing’, ‘making known’, ‘informing’, ‘witnessing’, ‘testifying’, and finally ‘recording’ demonstrate the interrelationship of the oral and the written in ways that are familiar still in current legal practice. What is fascinating about this example, and the few others of its kind, is the role that the Gospel-­book plays in the assurance of rightful action. Within that codex, we see the appropriation of sacralized space on the folio for essentially unrelated, secular material.13 Thurkil the White, or others of the moot, knew about the book and it must have been a familiar process to have significant court decisions entered into ancient manuscripts that represented the shire. Gaining the permission of those present, Thurkil was able to use that permission to have an ecclesiastical scribe at Hereford acknowledge the importance of the decision— so important that it is entered in perpetuity into space on the eighth-­century folios. These added legal texts are permitted to break out of the writing grid meticulously laid down in drypoint rule, illustrating an overriding of the propriety of the original design of the page. A boundary of blankness provides an acknowledgement of necessary textual decency, and then the Old English text escapes the bounding lines, filling the remaining space. As is the case with old family Bibles, it is permanence that these recordings seek, and, in the case of Hereford P. i. 2, achieve. The explicit recognition of the book’s function as public repository for the entire community is demonstrated by this account in which Enniaun issued an oral will—a rare example of an historically attested woman declaring her wishes in her own voice—, rejecting her son as beneficiary and bequeathing her land instead to another woman, Leofflæd, wife of Thurkil the White. The book’s anticipated arch­ival function becomes self-­referential, and the Gospel-­book’s efficacy in preserving testimony is self-­authenticated, for the ‘ane Cristes boc’ in Thurkil’s account is this very book of Christ: Hereford Cathedral Library, P. i. 2. The second eleventh-­century record is added on the final blank folio 135r. Dated to the 1040s, it reveals that Leofflæd’s brother, Leofwine, has purchased a half-­hide of land at Mansell in Herefordshire from Eadric, the son of Ufic: 13  A second additional text is entered into folio 135 of Hereford Cathedral Library, P. i. 2; it is an eleventh-­line record of purchase datable to the 1040s. See Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts, p. 156.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  69 Her swutelað on þissum gewrite þæt Leofwine Leofflæde broðor hæfð geboht healfe hide landes æt Malveshylle æt Ædrice his mæge, Ufices suna, mid healfe marce goldes, ⁊ mid ane punde seolfres, ⁊ twegen oran, æfre in his cynn to fane, ⁊ to syllanne þam þe him æfre leofost. Beo on Swegnes eorles gewitnesse ⁊ Æþelstanes bisceopes ⁊ Þurceles hwitan ⁊ Ulfceteles scirgerefan ⁊ ealra þara þegna on Herefordscire ⁊ þara twegra hireda æt Sancte Æþelberhtes mynstre, ⁊ Sancte Guðlaces.14 Here it is revealed in this writ that Leofwine, Leofflæd’s brother, has bought half a hide of land at Mansell from his kinsman, Eadric, son of Ufic, for half a gold mark, and one pound of silver, and two ores to be held forever by his family and to be given to whomever he most desires. This is done in the witness of Earl Swegn and Bishop Æthelstan, and Thurkil the White, and sheriff Ulfketel, and all the thanes in Herefordshire, and the two communities at St Æthelberht’s minster and Saint Guthlac’s.

In this account, it is possible to learn more about the process of witnessing and recording. Here, the scribe specifically mentioned the bringing together of the key secular and ecclesiastical governors of the shire, with all the nobility plus the regular communities of canons and monks. The close relationship of Thurkil to the bishop and to the minster seems assured by his prominence in these records. His acknowledgement of the vital role that writing plays in securing the future is perspicacious. As if to confirm the book’s sacred status and others’ belief in it, it survived a fire at Hereford Cathedral in 1055—a survival that underscores its significance to the community that saved it then and still conserves it now, a thousand years later. Gospel-­books, Bibles, homiliaries, and other books containing the Word of God—perhaps particularly psalters—seem, for much of the pre-­1200 period to be deeply significant for more than just the intrinsic sanctity of the text.15 These books were most often deemed worth saving in situations of extremity. In the case of the Hereford Gospels, it was the only book to survive the terrible fire at Hereford Cathedral in 1055. Indeed, some centuries earlier, other Gospel-­books were saved with determination to protect the spiritual legacy of an institution. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the St Cuthbert Gospel were retrieved by the Lindisfarne monks, together with the body of Saint Cuthbert, and carried away from the Holy Island after the Viking incursions in 793. So, here in Hereford Cathedral Library, MS  P.  i. 2, both the respect shown to the Gospels as sacred, eternal text and textual repository and the appropriation of that space and taking 14  Catalogued at The Electronic Sawyer: https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk/charter/1469.html. 15  For the range of books, see Richard W. Pfaff, ed., The Liturgical Books of Anglo-­Saxon England, Old English Newsletter Subsidia Series 23 (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 1995); and Richard  W.  Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On the psalter specifically, see M. J. Toswell, The Anglo-­Saxon Psalter (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).

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70  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts over of the page demonstrate the esteem in which the manuscript was held. The taking over of the space in the book represents a metaphorical marking of territory belonging to Enniaun and Leofflæd. One might argue that here the ‘marginal’ text added to the Gospel-­book becomes central; the Gospels’ significance becomes newly contemporary and about both the present recording of text and the future assurance of land ownership, sacralized by inclusion in the host-­book. Each of the three Gospel-­books just mentioned—the Hereford, Lindisfarne, and Cuthbert Gospels—was preserved by acts of personal and institutional effort. It is not just the splendour or sacred association of the books that saved them; there is also an overwhelming sense that emerges from the medieval period that those who owned, or kept, or had access to books recognized the potential per­ man­ence of the codex—a cultural object, an institutional artefact in many cases, whose preservation was paramount. It was perhaps even an expectation of those who knew of the books, who used them, that these volumes would survive fire, diaspora, theft, and still remain to tell the story of those who had passed through them, leaving vestiges of lives and events. One of the best-­known books from the pre-­Conquest period is the Stockholm Codex Aureus (Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS  A.  135), a mid-­eighth-­ century Gospel-­book. The most famous folio from this 193-­leaf manuscript is the opening of the text of St Matthew’s Gospel—folio 11r (see Figure 4.2).16 The ruled writing grid is emphatically framed, and within the larger frame, seven lines of large square ­display capitals contain the Gospel beginning at Chapter 1, verse 18 (the oblique stroke here represents the end of the manuscript line): ‘Christi autem / generatio / sic erat cum esset des-/ponsata mater eius / Maria Ioseph antequam / convenirent inventa / est in utero habens /’.17 The opening word, ‘[of] Christ’, is abbreviated to the curvilinear Chi-­Rho (the first two Greek letters of the sacred name followed by the genitive ending: XPI, ‘Christi’), two-­lines high, but extending outside the frame, and the rest of the text is written in alternating lines of gold letters on a background dec­or­ated with a red line as if the letters are hanging, and embellished coloured letters on a solid gold background. As with similar elaborate folios opening the Gospels in other manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells, legibility was evidently not the key concern for those who produced this book. The folio’s ability to alert the senses, to bring attention to its phenomenological self, is uppermost in the design. It is monumental—from the use of a capital script often used in Roman epigraphy, to the size of the writing, and its linearity of execution. It is therefore a highly appropriate setting as a memorial, which is how one might well regard the

16 This folio was displayed, disbound, in the Anglo-­Saxon Kingdoms exhibition at the British Library in London (2018–19). 17  ‘Now the generation of Christ was in this wise. When as his mother, Mary, was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child [of the Holy Ghost]’.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  71

Figure 4.2  Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS A. 135, folio 11r (The Codex Aureus). © Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Sweden.

later additional nine-­line text that extends into the upper lower, and right margins in a much smaller, ninth-­century English minuscule script:18 + In nomine Domini nostri Ihesu Christi. Ic Ælfred aldormon ⁊ Werburg min gefera begetan ðas bec æt hæðnum herge mid uncre claene feo; ðæt ðonne wæs 18  In a still later hand, right at the top of the folio, is ‘+ Orate pro Ceolheard pr[esbyter], Niclas ⁊ Ealhhun ⁊ Wulfhelm aurifex’: ‘Pray for the priest Ceolheard, Niclas and Ealhhun, and Wulfhelm the goldsmith’.

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72  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts mid clæne golde. ⁊ ðæt wit deodan for Godes lufan ⁊ for uncre saule ðearf[e],19 ond forðonðe wit noldan ðæt ðas beoc lencg in ðære haeðenesse wunaden. ⁊ nu willað heo gesellan inn to Cristes circan Gode to lofe ⁊ to wuldre ⁊ to weorðunga, ⁊ his ðrowunga to ðoncunga, ⁊ ðæm godcundan geferscipe to brucen[ne] ðe in Cristes circan dæghwæmlice Godes lof rærað, to ðæm gerade dæt heo mon arede eghwelce monaðe for Aelfred ⁊ for Werburge ⁊ for Alhðryðe, heora saulum to ecum lecedome, ða hwile ðe God gesegen haebbe ðæt fulwiht20 æt ðeosse stowe beon mote. Ec swelce ic, Aelfred dux, ⁊ Werburg biddað ⁊ halsiað on Godes almaehtiges noman ⁊ on allra his haligra ðæt nænig mon seo to ðon gedyrstig ðætte ðas halgan beoc aselle oððe aðeoðe from Cristes circan ða hwile ðe fulwiht stondan mote. + In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I, Ealdorman Alfred, and my wife Werburg reclaimed this book from the heathen army with our own clean money; that then was with untainted gold. And we did that for the love of God and for the benefit of our souls, and because neither of us wanted these books to remain any longer among the heathen. And now we want to give them to Christ Church for God’s praise and glory and honour, and as thanks for his sufferings, and for the use21 of the holy community which daily sing praise of God in Christ Church, so that they might pray aloud every month for Alfred and for Werburg and for Alhthryth, for the eternal healing of their souls, as long as God decrees that Christianity might remain in this place. And also I, Earl Alfred, and Werburg bid and pray in the name of God almighty and of all his saints that no man should be so bold that they give away or take these holy books from Christ Church as long as Christianity might remain there.

The carefully written declaration of the book’s ransom from the Viking army reveals a good deal about the nature of those who came into contact with the codex: the recognition by the Viking raiders that this was a precious object to be maintained and exploited; the expectation of Alfred, Werburg, and the scribe (as well as the later priest, Ceolheard, and the goldsmith, Wulfhelm) that the writ-­ like text will remain in the book for as long as Christ Church itself remains Christian; that the naming of the book’s ransomers, when read aloud, would be efficacious in their salvation; and that the eighth-­century Gospel text demanded care and respect from the scribe, as the mise-­en-­page of the folio is closely followed in the writing of the Old English, which never impinges upon the ori­gin­al work, but sits outside its frame, as if a frame itself. The holiness of the book is, of course, inherent in its divine words, but it is ­signified too by the importance implicit in the statement that it was ransomed 19  The text breaks off here and resumes beneath the original writing grid containing the Gospel. 20 ‘ðæt fulwiht’ is translated here not as ‘baptism’ in and of itself, but in its metonymic reference to ‘Christianity’; s.v. fulwiht 13 in the DOE. 21  Or ‘enjoyment’.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  73 ‘mid uncre claene feo; ðæt ðonne wæs mid clæne golde’ (‘with our pure [or ‘clean’] money; that then was with pure [or ‘untainted’] gold’). The material purity of the purchase reflects the spiritual purity of those to whom the money belonged: Alfred, Werburg, and Ahlthryth, their daughter. This piety is further emphasized by the donation in perpetuity of the codex to Christ Church, where, presumably, the inscription was made in the mid-­ninth century. The book reveals its own physical salvation through the words of its ransomers, themselves saved by the intervention of the book and the hope of the book’s performance as their names are read aloud. It is certainly the case that the Codex Aureus marginalia became central to the book’s new function as historical repository and simultaneously mode of divine mediation. This is absolutely explicit in the juxtaposition of the names of the donors with divine intercessors, each carefully made by the scribe, presumably at the family’s request. This direct proximity of Alfred and Werburg to heaven is made not only by their names’ suprascription above the elaborate decorated Chi-­ Rho but also continues—not through the long explication of the book’s rescue— but through the least visible marginalia, the seeming extraneousness of the ‘outside’ in the right margin.22 This is astonishing because the names of the donors are consciously lined up with the holy family: Christi autem  Ælfred generatio sic erat cum esset desponsata mater eius  Werburg Maria Ioseph antequam convenirent inventa est in utero habens  Ahlðryð/eorum (de Spiritu Sancto).

This visual allegiance of the ealdorman with Christ, the wife and mother with Mary, and the daughter with the womb intimates the much-­desired union of the family with their holy intercessors. It illustrates the significance of the book’s physical make-­up, its being in the real world, its phenomenological import for those who are encouraged to enjoy and use (Old English ‘brucan’) it. Just as we see the gold-­leafed decoration illuminating the monumental square capitals,

22 I made this point some years ago—in a lecture delivered in Morgantown at West Virginia University in 2010, and then subsequently in lectures and papers delivered elsewhere, including the University of Leicester in April 2010. I am grateful for the feedback of the audience. An abbreviated discussion of this manuscript appears in my essay, ‘Distant’, in Leah Price and Matt Rubery, eds, Further Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 89–99, at 96–7. The same interpretation is discussed briefly in Clare Breay and Joanna Story, Anglo-­Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War (London: British Library, 2018), p. 174; and by Seth Lerer, ‘What Was Medieval English’, in Tim William Machan, ed., Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 15–33, DOI:10.1017/CBO9781107415836.002.

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74  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts elaborately and deliberately framed like a stone sculpture, the imperial script obfuscating a clear or easy reading—the page and its layers of text are meant to be looked at, contemplated, and then read, as the detail emerges. The gold leaf as a background for lines 2, 4, and 6, but as letter-­formation in lines 1, 3, 5, and 7 would have created an intensely dynamic folio, varying in its light and life according to the illumination from daylight or candlelight. In certain dimmer light, the words ‘generatio’, ‘mater’, and ‘utero’ leap from the block of text; in other light, the gold letters themselves rise from the page.23 Here, too, architextually, the marginalia (unlike in the Hereford Gospels) are intimately related to the Latin through the names’ linking with Christ, Mary, and the virginal womb. The opening of St Matthew’s Gospel has especial significance for this later textual addition. The book is twice ransomed: once from the Vikings; a second time as ransom for the souls of Alfred, Werburg, and their daughter. Here, the ritual of the book is enacted for the early English in that it is both a cere­ monial deed to inscribe details about the salvation of the book for these donors and the book acts as salvation for those inscribed (like a Liber Vitae itself) in its ritualized, liturgical function. It becomes, then, a literal monument, a tombstone of letters. It is clear from the carefully lineated marginalia, and the declaration above and below, that this page was deliberately chosen for the additional text. The opulence of the decoration makes the display of this leaf obvious, its preservation more assured, the eternity of the names’ visibility guaranteed. And it is the scripture that becomes the marginal note now, as the Old English donor inscription surrounds the frame, illustrating a mentality of literacy that insists the book evinces an archival, totemic, apotropaic, and salvific set of functions—all proclaimed here from attending in and to the sidelines.

Inscribing the Verdict This idea that the book a thousand years ago was thought to be probably or potentially permanent—one of few objects in this early culture that seem to be regarded in this way—offers an initial explanation for some of the entries written into codices after their completion. A number of examples in both English and Welsh, some squeezed into any available space, are seen in the St Chad or Llandeilo Gospels, kept at Lichfield Cathedral. The 236-­folio manuscript was ­possibly written in Wales, the Marches of Wales, or Lichfield itself, in around 730, 23  Using all the editing functions of photos on a MacBook Pro, a downloaded image can be made to shift quite significantly in its multiple aspects. Images can be downloaded from the fully digitized manuscript at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Codex_Aureus_(A_135) and https:// archive.org/details/urn-­nbn-­se-­kb-­digark-­4890092, but viewers should beware of the site-­creator’s image manipulation. This is discussed in Chapter 9.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  75 and is known to have been at Lichfield since at least the tenth century.24 It is the work of a single scribe using a half-­uncial script, is one surviving volume of two, and it contains the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and part of Luke up to 3:9.25 This manuscript is still used by bishops of Lichfield when they are ordained, demonstrating both the holiness of word and object in unison within the performative book—the Gospel-­book as the touchstone for oath-­swearing.26 Numerous additions to the manuscript testify to its hoped-­for status as per­ man­ent repository of legal and personal information. Similar to the Stockholm Codex Aureus, ransomed by Alfred and Werburg and presented to Christ Church, Canterbury, the Llandeilo/St Chad Gospels were bought and donated to the church. A four-­line insular minuscule inscription of c.800 in the upper space within the frame of the Gospel’s writing grid on page 141 records that (Figure 4.3): Ostenditur hic quod emit + Gelhi + filius Arihtiud hoc evangel / ium de Cingal, et dedit illi pro illo equm optimum, et dedit / pro anima sua istum evangelium deo et sancti Teliaui super altare. / + Gelhi + filius Arihtiud . . . et + Cincenn + filius Gripiud.27 It is revealed here that Gelli, son of Arthudd, bought this Gospel from Cingal, and gave his best horse to him for it; and he gave, for his soul, that same Gospel to God and St Teilo upon the altar. + Gelli + son of Arthudd and Cyngen, son of Griffudd.

It is possible that this records the form of an original donation signed perhaps by the donor and witness—Gelli and Cyngen.28 It may have been reinscribed from an original position at the back of the Gospel-­book, and it testifies to the presence of the manuscript in Wales at the church of St Teilo in Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire

24  On this Gospel-­book, also known as the Lichfield Gospels, see Pamela James, ‘The Lichfield Gospels: The Question of Provenance’, Parergon 13 (1996): 51–61, at p. 51. The name ‘+ Wynsige presul’ at the upper margin of folio 1 represents Wynsige, the tenth-­century bishop of Lichfield. 25  The second volume was lost in the seventeenth century. The whole manuscript is digitized and available at the Lichfield Cathedral website, https://lichfield.ou.edu/st-­ chad-­ gospels, accessed 21 January 2020. Note that the home-­page’s description of the Gospels as ‘an exquisite blend of Irish and Anglo-­Saxon influences’ entirely and unfortunately elides the Welsh provenance and possible origin of this manuscript. On the process of digitization and its findings, see Bill Endres, Digitizing Medieval Manuscripts: The St Chad Gospels, Materiality, Recoveries, and Representation in 2D and 3D (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019). The texts added later to the manuscript, some of which are discussed here, are known numerically as Chad 1 to Chad 8 in scholarship. 26  Like Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 286, the St Augustine Gospels upon which the archbishop of Canterbury still swears an oath at his ordination (https://theparkerlibrary.wordpress. com/2013/03/20/augustine-­gospels-­and-­the-­enthronement-­of-­the-­archbishop/); or the Lincoln Bible upon which some American presidents swear their oaths of office. 27 For images of this page, and Bill Endres’s effort to reveal erased text, see https://lichfield. ou.edu/141-­intrigue, accessed 21 January 2020. 28  As Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E. Owen show in their excellent article, ‘The Welsh Marginalia in the Lichfield Gospels Part I’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 5 (1983): 37–66, at p. 48, this is Gelli ab Arthudd.

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76  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts

Figure 4.3  Lichfield Cathedral Library, MS 1, page 141 (Llandeilo or St Chad Gospels). © Reproduced with the permission of the Dean and Chapter, Lichfield Cathedral.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  77 before the year 814, when Cyngen is said by the Brut y Tywysogion to have died.29 The use of space here is significant and while the inscriptions seem not to bear any relationship to the final verses of St Matthew’s Gospel, there may be per­tin­ ence in the selection of this page. In respect of the mise-­en-­page, with the exception of the openings of the Gospels and the evangelists’ portraits (at pages 2–5, 142–3, and 217–21), no other pages in the manuscript are framed as is page 141. This framing with monochrome geometric interlace would have left the original eight lines of Gospel-­text isolated, surely inviting interveners to write within the book’s space. The various hands who have added later texts on this page have added the donation inscription; within the frame itself, and outside the frame in upper and right-­hand margins are names of those who wished to be remembered for eternity. Immediately under the donation inscription and continued beneath the eight lines of half-­uncial script completing the Gospel of Matthew, but still within the decorated frame around the Gospel text, is an Early Welsh and Latin memorandum, known as the ‘Surexit’—the earliest vernacular secular record in a book— and thoroughly discussed in Jenkins and Owen’s analysis of ‘The Welsh Marginalia’.30 Two or three blank lines between the Gospel-­text and the second part of the addition lead Endres and others to speculate that an erasure of other text has taken place, which is impossible to recover at present. There seems to have been, then, sustained effort to write on this page, in particular—easy to find as the texts would be at the end of the Gospel and within the frame, and closely associated with the scriptural verses of Matthew (28:19–20) that highlight: all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. [20] Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.31

These powerful words align the divine father and son with Gelli and his father, Arthudd as well as with Cyngen, son of Griffudd. Other text on this same page may also highlight the same family’s legal affairs, inscribed in perpetuity into this sacred volume. The contents and disposition of this multilingual Welsh and Latin text (Chad 2) form the focus of detailed investigation by Jenkins and Owen to determine whether it or the donation inscription above the Gospel-­text on page

29  James, ‘Lichfield Gospels’, p. 52. That the book was bought for the price of a horse leads James to assume the manuscript was a stolen good. 30  Jenkins and Owen, ‘The Welsh Marginalia Part I’, pp. 51–2. 31  ‘. . . omnes gentes babtizantes eos in nomine patris et fili et spiritu sancti [28:20] docentes eos observare omnia quaecumque mandavi vobis et ecce ego vobis cum sum omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi finit, finit’.

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78  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts 141 might be the earlier addition.32 ‘Surexit’ provides an outline of a land dispute settled at an assembly (akin to the record discussed above in the Hereford Gospels) and it is, as Jenkins and Owen explain, ‘the earliest of the pitifully few records which show us [Welsh] law in action’.33 The parties—Elgu, son perhaps of Gelli in the donation inscription on page 141 of the Llandeilo/St Chad Gospels, and a certain Tudfwlch settle the latter’s claim to land-­rights by the exchange of a horse and cows. Its permanent recording in the Gospel-­book reveals not simply the spectrum of vernacularity where Latin came as easily to the scribe as that scribe’s native and contemporary Welsh, but also ‘seems to be the work of one who had some familiarity with written narrative’.34 This familiarity extended to acknowledging how important it was for local noble families to record their history with the aid of the most sacred books belonging to the major regional institution. That books were sought out for their permanence as repositories demonstrates a communal regard for these vehicles of recorded memory, a regard that is reflected in the respectful use of space within the book itself and the close proximity of physical concerns of territory and law with the spiritual doctrine of the scripture. Notably, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the early mixed majuscule script of ‘Surexit’, discussed by Jenkins and Owen, may also indicate a deliberate attempt on the part of the scribe, whose hand they describe as of ‘rude character’ and ‘inadequate skills’ to archaize the writing: ‘If we called it a minuscule verging on Half-­uncial, we might suggest that the script was influenced by the script of the Gospel text, but he may have made a deliberate choice of an old-­fashioned style as proper for a rather solemn record’.35 What this consciously emulative style of letter-­formation does suggest is both an ap­pre­ci­ ation for the solemnity of the record and a veneration for the object into which the scribe was writing: an effort to underscore the sacred nature of the book by seeing inscribing the record as an act in imitatio scribendi, akin to living in imitatio Christi.36 There are many other interventions in the St Chad Gospels, from names of individuals seeking salvation by inclusion in the folios of the eternal text to Old English law-­suits settled in the margins of the book. At page 4 of this manuscript, text is squeezed into two lines in the lower margin, but still, we should note, following the notional delineation of the Gospel frame above. 32  Jenkins and Owen, ‘The Welsh Marginalia Part I’, pp. 56–61. 33  The text is edited and discussed in detail in Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E. Owen, ‘The Welsh Marginalia in the Lichfield Gospels, Part II: The “Surexit” Memorandum’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 7 (1984): 91–120, at p. 109. 34  Jenkins and Owen, ‘The Welsh Marginalia Part II’, p. 114. 35  Jenkins and Owen, ‘The Welsh Marginalia Part I’, pp. 59–60, at 60. 36  This is a characteristic of hands writing in English in the post-­Conquest period, as I discuss in my ‘Invisible Things in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv’, in Maren Clegg-­Hyer and Jill Frederick, eds, Texts, Textiles and Intertexts in Honour of Gale Owen-­Crocker (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), pp. 225–37.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  79 This highly respectful scribe writes an eleventh-­ century Old English document,37 acquitting one Godwine, son of Earwig, from the accusation of ‘unrihtwif’,38 a rather inconsequential document, one might imagine, except for the stated involvement of Lichfield’s Bishop Leofgar himself. The early records of land transactions in Llandeilo in South Wales suggest complete ownership, surrounding the main text, and occasionally almost over-­writing it. Their place in the top margin shouts ‘read me first’, dominating the page at first glance, breaking the writing grid’s frame, and spilling all over the upper lines. But notwithstanding this element of predominance on the page, it is the understanding by those entering land transactions and proceedings of hearings that make it clear these codices, these containers, were expected to retain as per­ man­ent this inscription of events. Without the names, especially, in the earlier eighth-­century Llandeilo or St Chad Gospels, we would lose an understanding of the complex migration of this book. In the Llandeilo/St Chad Gospels, there are three names at the lower left of page 217: ‘Wulfun’, ‘Alchelm’, and ‘Eadric’.39 These drypoint names, analysed in an Anglo-­Saxon England article by Gifford Charles-­Edwards and Helen McKee to determine the movement of the manuscript from Wales to Anglo-­Saxon England, are Old English. Their script can, most likely, be dated to the tenth century, after the manuscript reached England from Llandeilo Mawr. Little else can be deduced, except to say that these names are added not just anywhere. They are adjacent to Teudur, a Welsh saint. Placement in close proximity with a saint’s name, like this, is a deliberate act of honouring the saint, but also ensuring access to the intercession and merit of that saint. That the names should be English, but the saint himself Welsh, speaks to the intercultural exchange that is now recognized as so important in this period.

37 ‘Her sutelað an þæt godwine earwigs sunu hæfþ gelæd fulle lade æt þan unrihtwife þe Leofgar bisceop hyne tihte. ⁊ þæt wæs æt Licitfelda’ (‘Here it is revealed that Godwine, Earwig’s son, has walked a bad path with a woman of poor repute of which Bishop Leofgar himself instructed and that exculpation from the charge was produced at Lichfield’). See Bosworth-­Toller, s.v. læddan. 38  The Electronic Sawyer states the events of this addition as S 1462a (http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/ sdk13/chartwww/eSawyer.99/S%201428a-­81f.html): c. ce 1017 x 1027 (Lichfield): Declaration that Godwine, son of Earwig, has been cleared of the accusation of unrihtwife brought by Leofgar, bishop [of Lichfield]. Ker, Catalogue, p. 158; Heyworth, Wanley, p. 142. 39  Digitized and discussed here: https://lichfield.ou.edu/. Other names are also included in the manuscript: for example, at p. 221 ‘[]DVLF’ and ‘+Berht/elf ’ appear in the centre of the left-­hand margin, while ‘Past [+icc]’ is in the bottom margin. At p. 226, the names of ‘Berhtfled’, ‘Elfled’, and ‘Wulfild’ appear, all of which are in the bottom margin. On these marginalia, see Gifford Charles-­ Edwards and Helen McKee, ‘Lost Voices from Anglo-­Saxon England’, Anglo-­Saxon England (2009): 79–89; and Jenkins and Owen, ‘The Welsh Marginalia in the Lichfield Gospels, Part I’, where at pp. 46–7 links are demonstrated between the Gospel-­text of the Llandeilo/Chad Gospels and the Hereford Gospels, discussed previously.

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Spread the Word Gospel-­books from Britain, Ireland, and the Continent in these early centuries frequently contain additions—usually legal texts, names, royal and episcopal documents, manumissions, and, often, short memoranda concerning land. Such textual additions speak to the sacred book as archive, community repository; as being owned by individuals (often bishops), but more broadly as belonging to an institution and the surrounding community. For Thurkil and the shire-­moot to agree and determine that the land settlement should be immediately written into the Hereford Gospels indicates a deeply felt understanding of the significance of that single codex to the whole locale. Similarly, the Llandeilo/St Chad Gospels’ long history demonstrates similar sentiment and cultural understanding of the importance of record, no matter the different places associated with it, or the various languages of participants in the performance of that book. In all these cases, the phenomenon of the book in the lives of local society (notably the noble families, whose bequests and titles are generally recorded) is as a sensual and kinaesthetic artefact. The keeper of the books discussed above would, presumably, fetch the book from its chest or shelf and bring it, with quills, knives, and ink, to the space in which the testifier stood, perhaps at or near the altar. The meticulous hand copying the documents in the Hereford Gospels or the Stockholm Codex Aureus suggests a careful and perhaps time-­consuming process of writing, which may have followed upon the drafting of the text. The less calligraphic writing in the Llandeilo/St Chad Gospels—certainly of the ‘Surexit’ memorandum—suggest on-­the-­spot textual transmission. While participants in the recorded events watched, they saw history in the making, the casting into eternity of their stories.40 These books were to be brought out as proof of decision-­ making; to be touched and sworn upon; and the association of local text with perpetual scripture must have provided surety of permanence, as was certainly the case with the Reculver Charter, discussed above, for instance. Gospel-­books were also made the more sacred by their association with prelates and the aristocracy. Numerous Latin Gospel-­books were obtained or given to King Athelstan in the tenth century, for example, and then donated to various institutions, including Christ Church and St Augustine’s, Canterbury, and Chester-­le-­Street. These books, and others, have been extensively studied by Simon Keynes and David Pratt, among others.41 Pratt notes the particular 40  See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, on the significance of permanent record. 41 Simon Keynes, ‘King Athelstan’s Books’, in M.  Lapidge and H.  Gneuss, eds, Learning and Literature in Anglo-­ Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 143–201; David Pratt, ‘Kings and Books in Anglo-­Saxon England’, Anglo-­ Saxon England (2013): 297–377, which is a well-­referenced analysis of royal libric culture in pre-­ Conquest England; T. A. Heslop, ‘The Production of de luxe Manuscripts and the Patronage of King Cnut and Queen Emma’, Anglo-­Saxon England 19 (1990): 151–95; Elaine Treharne, ‘The Book as Movable Property in England in the Early Middle Ages’, in J.  Hinks and C.  Freely, eds, Historical

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  81 a­ ssociation of Gospel-­books with Kings Athelstan, who reigned from 924–39, and Cnut, who reigned from 1016–35, though, as the examples discussed in this chapter suggest, Gospel-­books belonged to or could be accessed by noblemen too. Gospel-­books in the eighth to eleventh centuries, as in the lives of ordinary fam­ilies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were recognized containers for information that had to be retained beyond what was possible through memory: not just retained, either, but formalized and sacralized through as­so­ci­ ation with God’s word, and in a manner that respected the original book’s mise-­ en-­page and authority.42 Thus, in the case of manumissions entered into the Latin Bodmin Gospels (the Breton manuscript, dating from the latter decades of the ninth century—London, British Library, Additional MS 9381) and the eleventh-­ century Old English version of the Gospels in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MSS 140 + 111, the additional texts are respectfully added in between the architectural frame of the folio, or in margins, or on blank folios.43 In this way, books became repositories for the precious documents of institutions and individuals. The archiving of legal transactions and of personal names is suggestive of the desire for permanence. Writing became a mani­fest­ation of truth, with its inherent authenticity, requiring as stable a home as is pos­sible in an earthly world of little permanence. That permanent home is specifically the book, which, as object, carried and contained time.44 This object prompted an exploration of mortality and transience for many medieval people; both the transcendent and the immanent inhere in these early books, just as in buildings or their remnants, and other cultural vessels.45

The Immanence of the Book Another Gospel-­book became a window to the desire for permanence. This codex contains only a single Gospel, but is one of the most famous of medieval books: Networks in the Book Trade (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 70–83; and Treharne, Living through Conquest, passim. 42  Indeed, in the Family Bible, blank pages (sometimes titled) were incorporated to permit the copying of births, marriages, deaths, and other genealogical information. The impetus in some of the medieval texts copied into Gospel-­books among others is not very different. 43 The Bodmin Gospels are fully digitized at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx? index=0&ref=Add_MS_9381; CCCC 140+111 are digitized at https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/. On these manuscripts, see further P. Robinson, ‘Self-­Contained Units in Composite Manuscripts of the Anglo-­Saxon Period’, Anglo-­Saxon England 7 (1978): 231–38; Treharne, Living through Conquest, pp. 113–21; and Elaine Treharne, ‘The Conners of Exeter, 1070–1150, in Edward Christie, ed., The Wisdom of Exeter: Anglo-­Saxon Studies in Honor of Patrick  W.  Conner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 11–26. 44  As objects do now. They contain memories, encapsulate moments, inspire reflection. Thus, the buildings in The Ruin and The Wanderer spark the laments on the past in the present with consequent prognostications about cultural decline now and in the future. The book thus functions like a building in this same transtemporal sense. 45  As in reliquaries and icons, for example.

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82  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts London, British Library, Additional MS 89000, the late seventh-­ century St Cuthbert Gospel, or Stonyhurst Gospel, as it has also been known.46 Some years ago, the British Library conducted a seven-­month campaign to raise nine million pounds to retain the Gospel for the Library, after the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College, who had owned the manuscript since the eighteenth century, decided to put it up for sale.47 Like all manuscripts, famous or not, the St Cuthbert Gospel is an extraordinary production; it is even out-­of-­this-­world, for it has absorbed the merits of the saint, St Cuthbert, with whom it resided in close contact for perhaps four hundred years, buried adjacent to his incorruptible body. Reminiscent of the fate of the Cross in the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood,48 this book was interred with Cuthbert in the late seventh century, only to be resurrected at the translation of the saint in 1104 in Durham, when—in an act of Anglo-­Norman ap­pro­pri­ation— the saint’s coffin was opened and its artefacts revealed.49 One could not imagine a more ‘embodied’ book than this Northumbrian manu­ script made at Monkwearmouth-­Jarrow. Its survival, uncorrupted as St Cuthbert himself was said to be, is profoundly significant, because it is the earliest Western manuscript still in its original binding; the skin of the book and its red leather Coptic binding are intact, as St Cuthbert’s flesh and hair were also alleged to be intact after his death. The book, a holy prosthesis, had as its first certain audience the dead saint, when it was included in his newly made coffin, a levis theca (light

46  The whole manuscript is digitized here: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay. aspx?ref=Add_MS_89000. This small, hand-­held manuscript (about the same size as an IPhoneX) was displayed in the 2018–19 ‘Anglo-­Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War’ Exhibition at the British Library, where its case was to the left of the enormous early eighth-­ century Codex Amiatinus— Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatino 1. The Codex Amiatinus is a pandect, a complete Bible of 1,040 folios, weighing 75lb, and measuring 505mm × 340mm, with a width of nearly a foot. For the press interest, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/18/behemoth-­bible-­ returns-­to-­england-­for-­f irst-­t ime-­in-­1 300-­years-­c odex-­amiatinus-­british-­l ibrary-­anglo-­s axon-­ exhibition. The juxtaposition of the St Cuthbert Gospel with this enormous pandect reinforced the  personal nature of the small book in contrast to the institutional glory reflected in the large Codex Amiatinus. The latter was commissioned by Abbot Ceolfrith, designed and produced in Monkwearmouth-­Jarrow, and sent as a gift to Pope Gregory II in 716. 47  https://www.bl.uk/press-­releases/2012/april/british-­library-­acquires-­the-­st-­cuthbert-­gospel— the-­earliest-­intact-­european-­book. 48  The Dream of the Rood from the Old English Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare MS CXVII) dates from c.980, and is localizable to St Augustine’s Canterbury, where I’ve suggested it might have been written for St Dunstan. The Dream of the Rood is a vision poem, in which the Cross of Christ reveals the story of the Crucifixion from its point of view. The Cross explains that it was thrown into a pit (lines 75–7) and then dug up and covered in gold and silver. In the light of this chapter’s overall focus on book-­users’ interventions in manuscripts, the Vercelli Manuscript also has additional text at folio 24v (on a folio left half-­blank after Vercelli Homily IV), which is the neumed response of a chant derived from Psalm 26 and sung at Lent, Adiutor meus esto. Ne derelinquas me deus, salutaris meus. N. (‘The Lord is my helper; do not leave me, O God of my salvation’ [Name]). See the image at https://www.bl.uk/collection-­items/vercelli-­book. 49  C.  F.  Battiscombe, ed., The Relics of Saint Cuthbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956); Dominic Marner, St Cuthbert: His Life and Cult in Medieval Durham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  83 chest), at the initial translation in 698, eleven years after Cuthbert’s death.50 So venerated was this book, that its transformation from book to sacred and fetishized object was confirmed after its discovery in 1104 when, it seems, the archbishop of York was subsequently permitted to wear the book around his neck in a little sling while officiating at Durham’s High Altar.51 Now as then for the throng in the nave of the Cathedral—those without any personal contact with the book— the Gospel becomes a living remedy, the focus for an audience of hopefuls, praying that saintly merits might emanate from the book to salve the soul. For this audience, it is the status of the book lying ‘ad capud beati patris nostri Cuthberti’ that is its new meaning. This provenance is signalled by two textual additions to the book that provide the same information: Evangelium Iohannis, quod inventum fuerat ad capud beati patris nostri Cuthberti in sepulcro iacens Anno translationis ipsius. The Gospel of John that had been found at the head of our blessed father, Cuthbert, lying in the grave in the year of his translation.

The first inscription providing this information, written in the twelfth century, is now mostly erased—scraped off the vellum. It was a rather bold intervention into the manuscript, written immediately on top of the opening words of the Gospel at folio 1r, presumably around the time of the book’s resurrection.52 Here, ‘at the head of ’ the Gospel, then, was an inscription paralleling the body-­book relationship (thus text parallels the body, and inscription parallels the book), as the new audience took ownership of the little codex, transforming its function from mere scripture to divine cipher. These words were rewritten in the thirteenth century on folio ii verso, facing the opening of the Gospel with a more respectful distance and re-­establishing, through the erasure of the folio 1r inscription, the ‘purity’ of the original text while maintaining the significance and authenticity of the

50  On which, see Jane Hawkes, ‘The Body in the Box: The Iconography of the Cuthbert Coffin’, in Eric Cambridge and Jane Hawkes, eds, Crossing Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Art, Material Culture, Language and Literature of the Early Medieval World (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2019), Part II, ch. 8 (n.p.). 51  As T. J. Brown, ed., The Stonyhurst Gospel of St John (Oxford: Roxburghe Club, 1969), pp. 2–5, discusses, a later twelfth-­century Durham narrative of miracles of Cuthbert records that when the coffin-­lid was opened in 1104, ‘a book of the Gospels lying at the head of the board’ was seen by onlookers. The translation of 1104 was very widely reported at the time. The major account is De miraculis, ch. 7; and Simeon of Durham, T.  Arnold, ed., Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia: Historia Ecclesicc Dunhelmensis, eadem historia deducta, incerto auctore usque ad A.  D.  MCXLIV Sequuntur varii Tractatus, in quibus de Sancto Cuthberto et Dunelmo agitur. Epistola Symeonis de Archiepiscopis Eboraci, 2 vols, Rolls Series 75 (London: 1882) 1:258. See also B. Colgrave, ‘The Post-­Bedan Miracles and Translations of St Cuthbert’, in C.  Fox and B.  Dickins, eds, The Early Cultures of North-­West Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), pp. 305–32. 52  Digitized on the British Library website at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref= Add_MS_89000, accessed 27 January 2020.

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84  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts archaeological excavation of the book and its observed contact with the saint’s body. In the functional transformation of book from personal devotional object associated with the person of St Cuthbert to displayed relic and wonder, we move from an audience that is proximate, adjacent, literally in touch with the book, to those who are distanced, viewing, libric onlookers. These gazers, the distant viewers of the book, are those medieval congregations who would have seen a book from afar during a service, or displayed on an altar; or modern museum-­haunters, who view the magnificent volumes one often sees in posters or online home-­ pages—the billboards for medieval studies: the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Codex Aureus, the Bury Bible. Indeed, indirectly referencing the de luxe nature of these books in seeking to save the St Cuthbert Gospel for the British Library, Lynne Brindley, the institution’s chief executive at the time of the campaign, stated: The St Cuthbert Gospel is an almost miraculous survival from the Anglo-­Saxon period, a beautifully preserved window into a rich, sophisticated culture that flourished some four centuries before the Norman Conquest.53

Here, for the twenty-­first-­century audience of the St Cuthbert Gospel, the promoters imagine that what resonates is the near-­miraculousness of its survival— emphasizing its sacrality and divine associations; its completeness, so ‘beautifully preserved’; and its testimony to a ‘rich’ and ‘sophisticated culture’, which is at once true and yet far from its intention, perhaps. For this tiny and easily portable book, its ninety folios measuring 130mm × 90mm, could not be more unlike the great volumes usually displayed to the masses of pilgrims attending cathedrals or visiting exhibitions.54 Its size and its relative plainness (there are no illustrations; the decoration centres on the simple red inked capital initials) testify precisely to the ascetic nature of its postmortem owner, Cuthbert; it reflects his well-­known simplicity and his often-­eremitical contemplative life. With the exception of the geometrical decoration of the intricate binding, the seeming simplicity of this book could not be more different from its near-­contemporary, the massive Codex Amiatinus (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiat. 1), or the Lindisfarne Gospels, at 340mm × 240mm, with which the Cuthbert Gospel is currently displayed.55 We might instead think of it as like a work of minimalism; its modesty is its grandeur. Pared back to the essential Word, that is all there is for 53 http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=14071913#.T3CW9458y_E. 54  One thinks here of numerous examples, such as the display of the Winchester Bible at Winchester Cathedral (for glimpses of which, see the promotional video for the exhibition ‘Kings and Scribes: Birth of a Nation’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJH0M7dQaTo&t=5s). 55  On seeing the Codex Amiatinus at the Anglo-­Saxon Kingdoms Exhibition in 2019, Jo Koster described the experience as ‘visceral, like a punch in the stomach . . . . I literally reeled away from it’ (https://m.facebook.com/notes/jo-­koster/anglo-­saxon-­kingdoms-­mind-­blown/10157016475918288/); the St Cuthbert Gospel is noted as ‘a palm-­sized manuscript’.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  85 reading, contemplation, and undistracted self-­ introspection. Julian Brown ­comments that the book: ‘owes its beauty to simple design and perfect execution. The decorative elements in the script never interfere with the basic structure of the letter-­forms’, and such clarity of purpose heightens the expertise and craftsmanship of the book itself, while insisting on close and personal interaction from the book’s reader.56 After its initial instantiation, this little Gospel-­book was quickly equipped, through hurried rubrics and marginal crosses, to be used at masses for the dead.57 Its long-­term function was, appropriately, to accompany the dead St Cuthbert after his first translation, probably in order to protect the coffin.58 After the book’s resurrection in 1104, its function was confirmed again, less as text than apotropaic token, totemic symbol, and, when divested of the three little red satchels in which it was kept, representative of the body of the saint, his merits, and venerative potential. It thus bears testimony to something other than itself, having become truly fetishized in its entirety—as object—by its new audience of worshippers at the medieval Durham Cathedral. With the St Cuthbert Gospel, therefore, as with all medieval manuscripts, it is the book as artefact, as well as yielder of text—as an edifice of letters—that might most concern us. To understand the medieval book and its audiences, we need to think in terms of ‘wholeness’. And for the pared-­back St Cuthbert Gospel, we can consider it just as we would consider minimalist art. Frances Colpitt, in her work on Minimal Art, reminds us that: The instantaneousness of the Gestalt . . . is a central thesis of Minimalism. The form is completely given at once. What unfolds in time is the experience: a series of changing perceptive states based on the relationship of the viewer’s body to the object.59

Colpitt adds that for the minimalist object, the ‘lack of expressive content also induces the outer-­directedness of the object, forcing the spectator to locate the meaning of the work within the experiencing self rather than within the object’.60 This emphasis on the experiencing self can be allied to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, reminding us that our place in the world, and our understanding of the world, comes from the body as it moves voluminously through time and space.61 In relation to the book, specifically, we can think of the way in

56 Brown, The Stonyhurst Gospel, p. 59. 57  Ibid. 27. 58 Ibid. 34, discusses the placement of pocket Gospel-­books in shrines and coffins in Ireland and Egypt. 59  Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990), p. 97. I owe this reference to Rosalyn Cowart. 60  Ibid. 88–9. 61  See Merleau-­Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, for example.

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86  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts which we experience the whole codex at once, but only engage with it as we literally move through it. It is through muscular movement—proprioception— and through our other senses more generally that our experience of the world is wholly embodied, even if our perspective is sometimes only transcendental, only partial (as is the case with digital images to be discussed in Chapter 9). It is this very subjectivity of response that makes the idea of ‘audience’ so intriguing; for medieval manuscripts, perhaps like any work of art, are both pragmatic tools and metonyms of something larger at the same time. With the Cuthbert Gospel, it is both its Gestalt and its potential for an idiotextual in­ter­ pret­ation (a reading that is particular to one person, or one set of people) that signify the book’s multivalency, just as its wholeness and holiness signified it in 1104. Yet at no point does the ordinary audience member move through the book—turn the pages, feel the membrane, shut the covers: the audience, those onlookers, see only the whole. The movement through the book, the experience in time, can only be done vicariously, imaginatively, through agency other than our own. This suggests that the audience for this book, and other displayed books, is simultaneously everyone and no one. We see the whole book, but only perspectivally, rather than immanently, in its closed entirety. Interestingly, during the campaign to raise the money to buy the Cuthbert Gospel, it was the manuscript’s ‘intactness’ that marked it out: its wholeness, completeness, and the fact it looks the same in the modern period as it did in the eighth or the twelfth centuries. It has now become a national symbol of Britishness, a unique object (as if other manuscripts are less than unique). Significantly, given its place of origin in the Northeast of England, the British Library’s purchase agreement includes a provision for Durham Cathedral to display the manuscript from time to time. It is thus a symbol of sacredness both at a national level (‘a rare gem and an extraordinarily precious piece of heritage for the nation’) and regionally (‘for the people of Durham and North East England, this is a most treasured book’), where the book will periodically be reunited with its saint.62 For each viewer, each gazer, the book thus transforms, and its wholeness becomes wholly different—a new experience for each participant. It is national book, a Catholic icon, holy writ, sacred relic, regional landmark, masterpiece of early book-­making, and these transformations depend on its audiences, particularly that of its first known dedicatee, its companion-­saint. The ethereal and celestial audience to whom the Cuthbert Gospel was initially directed is reminiscent of other dead medieval audiences: dead, but yet protecting the living through their divinity or holy merits. Thus, scribes are known to have addressed God or the saints during their writing stints, presumably as they sat 62  These are quotations made at the time of the manuscript’s purchase by the vice-­chancellor of Durham University, Chris Higgins, and the dean of Durham, Michael Sadgrove, respectively: https:// www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=14360.

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‘ People Will Use Me ’ : Book as Archive  87 down to begin a day’s work. Prayers for the souls of book donors or for those whose names are inscribed into books, as will be discussed, were said in ecclesiastical institutions where the book itself acted as mediation between this world and the next. This eternal, all-­surrounding, audience drew out the best of the scribe or the officiating religious in his or her venerative opus Dei, but also acted as patrons and benefactors of the scribe and the book. We should not underestimate the significance of this anticipated earthly and heavenly audience; the medieval book as visible and permanent intercessor is a vital component of its being.

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5

‘My Name Is Famous’ Presence in the Book

Having established that the medieval book was regarded as an object of per­man­ ence to be retained, saved, harboured, and used as a repository for eternity, it is little wonder that then, as now, owners inscribed their names to testify to their title of the book, and perusers wrote their names in the margins and on the fly­ leaves to witness their temporary presence in the book. Names in manuscripts can often be used as evidence for the localization or provenance of a book; palae­ ographers and textual historians spend many hours trying to track down obscure people, who leave only their names as remembrance of their use, often casual, of the medieval book. In Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.  14. 39, a thirteenth-­ century manuscript of English, French, and Latin poetry, a poet-­scribe, Michel of Arras, declared his precarious existence in an English couplet written in between two central texts at folio 28r: Hic am Michel of Arras Wl sone ic am viryeten, alas! I am Michel of Arras Full soon I’ll be forgotten, alas!

In her research, Diane Speed reveals that this Michael is the probable author of five lines of poetry at the end of a work known as the Biblical History (lines 345–9).1 The first of these lines, 345, pleads: Louerd Seint Cucbrit, wid þewes wite me þes nict! May the lord Saint Cuthbert protect me against thieves this night!

This is a poetic touch that reveals a little more information about an individual’s prayers and devotional practices and daily worries in the thirteenth century and

1 Diane Speed, ‘A Ballad of Twelfth Day: Texts and Contexts’, in Chris Bishop, ed., Text and Transmission in Medieval Europe (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), pp. 199–222, at 207–8.

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book. Elaine Treharne, Oxford University Press. © Elaine Treharne 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192843814.003.0005

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  89 helps in building up a picture of the work and cultural milieu of the literate per­ son, otherwise so easily overlooked. Michel of Arras’s fear of being forgotten inspired the inclusion of his name as an explicit and active participant in the book. For him, the book as a container clearly felt permanent—the ‘vessel more lasting than himself ’, as Billy Collins would have it.2 Since this folio is digitized, and so many names are now accessible to modern audiences not simply interested in the extrapolation of a main text, it is possible to recover that which lies beyond the scope of most pressing scholar­ ship: the erased, the overwritten. Those who wrote their names in manuscripts are easily overlooked, but just to write a name required a cut quill, made-­up ink (or a drypoint tool or plummet), access to the manuscript for long enough to write, and skill in writing to at least a basic, pragmatic level. It is not likely, therefore, that most names, notes, or margi­ nalia are doodles or scribbles, as we might think of doodles or scribbles now, and as they are frequently labelled.3 They provide a sense of ownership by the note-­ writer, even if that ownership was temporary. Pulsiano argues that ‘Such doodles bring us into the world of modest play, of readers and scribes seeking distraction and succumbing to the urge to interrupt the silence of blank space; and now, as then, they offer the observant reader some respite from the labours of the text, although one cannot assume in all instances that the texts themselves were read’.4 I show here that many, if not most, inscriptions, most marginalia—whether so-­ called doodles or more substantial—might be regarded as deliberate and inten­ tional actions to which meaning can be attributed. There can be few more obviously conscious namings than ensuring one’s own posterity by writing into a codex filled with Logos, the Word of God, in all its glory. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Lindisfarne Gospels, a manu­ script of such visual power that it is venerated today as much as it must have been venerated by the monks who created and used it. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D. iv, datable to c.700, is widely known as one of the British Library’s ‘treasures’ and as an iconic representative of Britain’s history, as the previous chapter discussed. It appears frequently on television; its ornamented pages are reproduced on notebooks, coasters, and cards; and it was one of the first

2  A stanza from Billy Collins’s ‘Marginalia’ (in Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems [New York: Penguin, 2001]) memorably imagines early Irish monks copying Gospel-­books and invokes the permanence of the medieval manuscript as a means of transmitting the efforts of scribes. 3  Phillip Pulsiano, ‘Jaunts, Jottings, and Jetsam in Anglo-­Saxon Manuscripts’, Florilegium 19 (2002): 189–216, at p. 216. See also, generally, Rolf Bremmer and Sarah Larratt Keefer, eds, Signs on the Edge: Space, Text and Margin in Medieval Manuscripts, Mediaevalia Groningana 10 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007). There is excellent recent work on marginalia by, notably, Heather  J.  Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Yale: Yale University Press, 2001); and Michael Camille’s masterly interrogation of the art in margins, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). 4  Pulsiano, ‘Jaunts, Jottings, and Jetsam’, p. 120.

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90  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts manuscripts to appear as a ‘turn-­the-­pages’ exhibit online and in the foyer of the British Library itself.5 In a colophon added to blank space at the end of the Gospel of St John at folio 259r, Aldred, a priest at the community of St Cuthbert in Chester-­le-­Street, County Durham, reveals that it is he who wrote an Old English gloss throughout the exceptional codex, almost three hundred years after the manuscript’s cre­ ation.6 In a lengthy statement of thirty, cramped lines, he filled the original fifteen lines left blank on this folio with an explication of how the original Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This seeming compulsion to write that Aldred felt represents a desire to add cumulatively to knowledge, to augment that which the book itself already declared when he obtained it. These Latin lines, glossed in English, are followed by a statement testifying to the creation of the Lindisfarne Gospels itself by Eadfrið and Æðelwald, bishops of Lindisfarne, Billfrið, the anchorite, and Aldred: . . . Ond [ic] Aldred, presbyter indignus et misserrimus—Ælfredi natus, Adredus vocor; bonæ mulieris (id est ‘til wif ’) filius eximius loquor—mið Godes ful­ tummæ and Sancti Cuðberhtes hit ofergloesade on Englisc, ond hine gihamadi mið ðæm ðriim dælum: Matheus dæl, Gode ond Sancte Cuðberhti; Marcus dæl ðæm biscope; ond Lucas dæl ðæm hiorode, ond æht ora seolfres mið to inlade; ond Sancti Iohannis dæl for hine seolfne (id est ‘fore his saule’) ond feouer ora seolfres mið Gode ond Sancte Cuðberhti, þætte he hæbbe ondfong ðerh Godes milsæ on heofnum . . . . . . . And [I] Aldred, unworthy and most wretched priest—son of Alfred, I speak as the distinguished son of a good woman (that is ‘good woman’)—with God’s help and St Cuthbert’s, glossed it in English, and made myself at home with the three parts: the part of Matthew, for God and St Cuthbert; the part of Mark for the bishop; and the part of Luke for the monastic community, together with eight ores of silver for his acceptance into that community; and the part of Saint John for himself (that is, ‘for his soul’) together with four ores of silver for God and St Cuthbert, so that, with God’s mercy, he might be received into heaven . . . .7 5  As I write at the beginning of 2020, the Lindisfarne Gospels is exhibited in the British Library’s Sir John Ritblat Gallery in a ‘Sacred Texts’ glass case, adjacent to the Cuthbert Gospel, and straight ahead of the visitor as they walk up the stairs to the gallery. 6  See Julia Fernández Cuesta and Sara Pons-­Sanz, eds, The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels: Language, Author and Context, Anglia Book Series 51 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); Lawrence Nees, ‘Reading Aldred’s Colophon for the Lindisfarne Gospels’, Speculum 78 (2003): 333–7; and Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500 (London: British Library Publications, 2005), pp. 34–7, pl. 5. See also, Elaine Treharne, ‘The Authority of English’, in Clare Lees, ed., Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature 500–1150 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 554–78. The manuscript is digitized in its entirety on the British Library website (https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/). 7  Edited from the manuscript facsimile. Parts of the Lindisfarne Gospel, including the colophon folio, are available in an interactive format at the British Library website: www.bl.uk/collections/

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  91 This colophon has rightly attracted significant attention from scholars, since it is remarkable evidence for the creation of one of the most ornate, important, and de luxe manuscripts to survive from early England. Of interest here, however, is the obvious authority that Aldred felt he had to intervene in a magnificent and revered volume to complete it with an English gloss. His vernacular glosses intrude into the spacious design of the book in a daring act that reflects the degree of ownership and spiritual connection to the original Latin gospels felt by Aldred, but also an obvious concern for an imagined audience of detractors. His colo­ phon, with its careful parallelism between the four evangelists and the four cre­ ators and adorners of the Gospel-­book must surely be intended not only to reveal, but consciously to counter any claims that could be made of libric vandalism in his alteration of the book from a splendid scriptural treasure to be looked at to an accessible book to be read and studied. In this way, Aldred changed the nature of the codex to widen its audience; to turn it into something potentially approaching a schoolbook, a translation aid, generically (but not materially) akin to Cambridge University Library, MS Gg. 5. 35, and the many other multilingual or glossed books from the pre-­Conquest period.8 What is also interesting in this rather extraordinary interlinear intervention— that hybrid insular minuscule sitting above the clarity and beauty of the Latin uncial writing—is the revelation of Aldred’s name. This naming process ensures Aldred’s place in the final Book of Life, made apparent in Revelation 20:12: ‘And I saw the dead, great and small, standing in the presence of the throne, and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged by those things which were written in the books, according to their works’. Similarly, in Revelation 3:5, the significance of the presence of the name is made obvious as the equipollent of eternal life: ‘He that shall overcome, shall thus be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, and I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels’.9 His close and thoughtful association with St John vicariously bestows upon Aldred the Evangelist’s role of spokesperson ‘Who hath given testimony to the word of God, and the testimony of Jesus Christ, what things soever he hath seen’ (Revelation 1:2). Yet this spokesperson, Aldred, this revealer of God’s Word, wrote in English, testifying to the unequivocal authority of the Northumbrian language, written in harmony with Latin throughout the Gospels, translating for  the benefit of St Cuthbert’s community, the bishop, and his own soul. This

treasures/lindisfarne. The ‘ic’ in the first line has been erased, but is clearly visible. All translations are my own. 8  See A. G. Rigg and G. R. Wieland, ‘A Canterbury Classbook of the Mid-­Eleventh Century (the “Cambridge Songs” Manuscript)’, Anglo-­Saxon England 4 (1975): 113–30. 9 For more on this, see Elaine Treharne, ‘The Endurance of the Name, 700–1500’, in Elina Gertsman, Deirdre Carter, and Karlyn Griffith, eds, Tributes to Richard  K.  Emmerson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021). The Book of Life is common to the Judaic and Christian traditions.

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92  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts colophon reveals not only the direct intended audience for the work—the recipients of Aldred’s prayers—but also how the book’s function was altered through the addition of the gloss in the space between the Latin text, and in the margins of the folios. And where other major traditions of writing, such as we see in early Chinese, Hebrew, and Arabic manuscripts, frequently have scribal colophons, it is relatively rare to find colophons in Western Latin and vernacular codices in the earlier medieval period, and perhaps up to the fourteenth century. This has sig­ nificant implications for scholars’ ability to accurately date and localize handwrit­ ten books; without a colophon or other explicit mark denoting place or time of production, only the palaeographical and codicological attributes of the book can be used for these fundamental aspects of investigation. With respect to Arabic manuscripts, though, Gacek explains that while not all codices have colophons, many do, and sometimes these are ‘two-­tier colophons’ that provide the name of the scribe and the name of the author of the text itself. Colophons might describe the type of text and how it was copied, together with details about the exemplar, who commissioned the copy, by whom the book was copied, when, and where.10 In many Hebrew manuscripts, too, the colophon provides critically important information about the scribe, localization, date, and purpose of the manuscript.11 These colophons are an integral part of the manuscripts, whereas in the case of Aldred’s colophon, it was added to the blank space of the early eighth-­century Gospel-­book. It reveals so much of note that it rather makes one wish other scribes and users of books had been similarly inclined to reveal their identity and motivation. Even without this specific detail, though, there is much that can be determined from the traces of those who encountered manuscripts.

A Book of Reverence I consider this later use of space in manuscripts as part of the dynamic archi­ textuality of the book: this use of the interlinear, the marginal, the textual left­ over. In the case of Hereford Cathedral Library, MS  P.  i. 2, discussed in the preceding chapter, legal documents were entered into spaces left blank by the manuscripts’ original scribes. In the Llandeilo/St Chad Gospels, names, and longer texts were added at various stages in the manuscript’s early medieval life. 10 Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts, pp. 71–6. 11  See, for example, the discussion of the scribe of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Hébreu 7—Solomon ben R.  Raphael—discussed by Eva Frojmovic, ‘Inscribing Piety in Late-­Thirteenth-­ Century Perpignan’, in Javier del Barco, ed., The Late Medieval Hebrew Book in the Western Mediterranean: Hebrew Manuscripts and Incunabula in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 107–47. Solomon reveals that ‘I have written this book for myself, and I have arranged in it the Torah, the Prophets and the Hagiographa in one volume. And I have completed it here, in the city of Perpignan, in the month of Sivan, the day after Shavuot, in the year 5509 after the creation of the world [1299]’ (ibid. 107).

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  93 The adding of text and drawing to empty spaces is not at all rare; there are tens of thousands of manuscripts where incomplete, partial, or abbreviated notes, com­ ments, drawings, and literary snippets are written into space, many including names. Within the living medieval book, over the centuries, readers and browsers left all kinds of interventions and traces of themselves, sometimes with their name representing their whole being—the only such testimony to that person’s presence on this earth. How did those who saw the emptinesses of marginal or endleaf spaces within the manuscript subsequently interact with this inviting phenomenon of the book’s artefactuality? In what ways did early users of the book engage with its space? Indeed, what is space? Space is the absence of what should be—what is expected to be—present. In the case of books, this marginal and interlinear space, the space left over at the end of copying a text where the scribe may have taken up less of the folio than planned, is public. These spaces become generative places for dia­ logue, exchange, and comment. In modern book-­use, this space—the marginal— is generally out of bounds unless we own the book ourselves. Students who add their personal intervention, their asterisks, their Notae Bene, to the margins of their library books are to be censured. But medieval souls engaging in this dia­ logue are our main clues to the ways in which a manuscript was perceived by its users and their relationship to that book. This is clear from the one scholar’s per­ sonal interaction with his own manuscript—Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 199. In the case of Ieuan ap Sulien (d. 1137), a priest, scribe, and scholar at Llanbadarn Fawr, near Aberystwyth in Wales, some of his working days began with the composition of a distich, written in the top margins of his manuscript of Augustine’s De trinitate.12 These short verses chiefly focus on beseeching divine or saintly assistance in the act of writing and completing this book requested from Ieuan by his father, Sulien, bishop of St David’s in Wales. We know, just from this, that Ieuan’s audience therefore included the celestial and the terrestrial, God, the saints, and his own ecclesiastical superior: his father. These real and ethereal audi­ ences, for Ieuan, as for so many scribes, were not just constructed but also present in the mind’s eye of the scribe as he set about his craft. In his work on this manuscript, Timothy Graham was able to reconstruct a good number of these distichs, which were already damaged before being cut off by the Parker Library contracted binder in 1953. This excision included a single verse that Graham identifies at folio 68v as a prayer to ‘a merciful parent’: O genitor clemens tanto succurre labori . . . . O merciful parent, assist so great a labour . . . .13 12 David Howlett, ‘Rhygyfarch ap Sulien and Ieuan ap Sulien’, in R.  Gameson, ed., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 701–5. 13  T. Graham, ‘The Poetic, Scribal and Artistic Work of Ieuan ap Sulien in Corpus Christi College,

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94  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts Graham considers this to be a plea to God, the spiritual audience, to facilitate a good day’s copying. Given Ieuan’s immediate audience—the intellectual patron of his work—is his actual father, this functions as a direct address to a dual father­ ship; it is a reference not only to God, but also to Sulien, himself—Ieuan’s father, former bishop of St David’s, who requested the manuscript. Sulien may well have been the intended recipient of this exquisite work, indicating something of the impetus for the production of medieval manuscripts: not simply an act as devo­ tional part of opus Dei, but a personal and genuine gift of devotion for the monas­ tic institution and for the pater familias there. More specifically linking CCCC 199 to its place of production—Llanbadarn Fawr—is a truly exceptional, politically charged poetic intervention in his own work by Ieuan ap Sulien, the scribe (Figure 5.1). On folio 11r, he writes an englyn, an Old Welsh, elaborate four-­ line verse, here devoted to the institution’s saint, Padarn: Amdinnit trynit trylenn; Amtrybann teirbann treisguenn. Amcen creiriou gurth cyrrguenn; Amdifuys dual, bacl patern. The very bright, all-­woven tunic exercises Its holy power around a lofty cross. No other relic can be compared with Cyrwen; A wonderful gift, Padarn’s Staff.14

This englyn is a formal quatrain of seven-­syllable lines, unusually here rhyming throughout. It refers directly to the salvific and liturgical function of the embroi­ dered tunic associated with the eponymous patron saint of Llanbadarn—Padarn. The verse also directly connects with the figure carved in a nine-­foot cross still at the church in Llanbadarn Fawr, a mile or so outside Aberystwyth. Also called upon in the englyn is the holy and apotropaic function of the relic that is Padarn’s staff, called Cyrwen. The tunic and the staff were, apparently, gifts given to Padarn when he visited Rome with St David in the sixth century. Nora Chadwick sug­ gests the reference might specifically be to the peace-­making power of a saint’s relic and Paul Russell links manuscript, englyn, and ecclesiastical institution closely through the work of Ieuan.15 By analogy, the book itself—CCCC

Cambridge MS 199: Addenda and Assessment’, National Library of Wales Journal 29 (1996): 241–56. 14  Newly translated by Paul Russell to demonstrate that Ieuan ap Sulien wrote this englyn in praise of St Padarn and his gifts of a richly woven tunic and a staff from a visit to Rome: ‘The englyn to St Padarn Revisited’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 63 (2012): 1–14. 15  Nora  K.  Chadwick, ‘Intellectual Life in West Wales in the Last Days of the Celtic Church’, in Nora K. Chadwick, ed., Studies in the Early British Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 128–82, at 198; Russell, ‘The englyn to St Padarn Revisited’, passim.

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  95

Figure 5.1  Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 199, folio 11r. © Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

199—acquires a totemic and pacific function through association with the saint, and this attribution is particularly interesting given the post-­Conquest period in which this verse was written. This was a time of significant cultural trauma, loss, and disruption, and which, within a generation, saw the end of the ecclesiastical

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96  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts institution—the autonomous clas (a family-­run regular order, peculiar to Wales, and subsumed by the Normans in the course of the twelfth century)—at Llanbadarn Fawr.16 The englyn also suggests an audience of not just the divine, and of Ieuan and his father, but also an audience who could access Welsh: a linguistically exclusive medium. The manuscript—a now incomplete copy of Augustine’s De trinitate— becomes something else: a repository of texts that add to the corpus of nationally significant poetry, seeking protection resonant with a desire for peace.17 The intended audience would, presumably, have been much more appreciative of this early and unique Welsh verse than the much later bookbinder, John Gray, who, in  the 1950s, when rebinding the volume for the Parker Library seems to have removed almost all the vernacular that, already damaged, had remained in the upper margin. Multilingual volumes are not at all rare in the medieval period, of course. But oftentimes, the nature of the multilingualism comes not from the text(s) ori­gin­ al­ly copied into the manuscript, but by the addition of annotations, glosses, and complete works in different languages. These additions change the function of the manuscript, and reveal something about its users and their relationship with the book of which they are, inevitably, temporary owners. For CCCC 199, it attracted a least one later medieval annotator, who interacted directly with the text, high­ lighting through the use of maniculae, drawn with very long fingers, those many parts that engaged them (as at folio 3v of this manuscript in Figure 5.2). This late thirteenth-­century anonymous annotator corrected the text, clarified readings where the earlier medieval script created problems of legibility, updated punc­tu­ ation, provided rubrics and notae marks, and demonstrated throughout the clos­ est attention to the text. These user’s marks in the manuscript are among the most commonly found kinds of interventions in medieval books. Tens of thousands of such examples survive, carried into posterity by the survival of the book itself. It is interesting to consider how such additional texts found their way into codices and to investigate the methods by which these otherwise unknown readers left us visible vestiges of their presences.

Traces of Lost Voices It may be, that with the exception of library books, present-­day conceptions of books are as private objects belonging to an individual, who might sell the book,

16 J. R. Davies, The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003). 17  For a full study of this manuscript and of the scholars of Llanbadarn Fawr, see Sarah Zeiser, ‘Latinity, Manuscripts, and the Rhetoric of Conquest in Late-­Eleventh-­Century Wales’ (unpub. PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2011).

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  97

Figure 5.2  Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 199, folio 3v. © Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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98  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts or loan the book, but to another single reader at any one time. Medieval books, by contrast, were often public spaces, owned by an institution, or groups of people, or sequences of owners (right up to today). The public domain of the folios within their host books makes inscriptions and annotations, commentaries, and add­ itions public declarations. These declarations sometimes take ownership of the manuscript, intimating writers in the space who seem not to be using the book for the words it already contains, but to redirect the space for their own, quite different purposes. In this way, present-­day readers of medieval manuscripts can discover how these objects are inhabited by those who have moved through them. Merleau-­Ponty observes of things around us that ‘each cultural object spreads around it an atmosphere of humanity’, and this can be nowhere most apparent than in the handmade book.18 Books become living objects, their biographies extended into time and space by users’ interactions, changing the focus or shape of the textual artefact. Such shifts of function are well illustrated by Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383, a post-­Conquest English Lawbook, datable to the second quar­ ter of the twelfth century. It is associated with St Paul’s, London, because of the addition of a text known as ‘Scipmen’.19 It almost certainly did not stay at St Paul’s, as this discussion will show. A short French text added to folio 12r (paginated in Matthew Parker’s red pencil as ‘5’), has been previously disregarded because it is marginal, and is therefore not the text. This is the marginalization of the marginal; evidence of scholars’ unwillingness to engage with the integral nature of inter­ actions in the spaces of the medieval codex and to understand all textual inter­ ventions as consequential.20 No textual addition in this period is trivial; no surviving marginal or edged-­out textual element should be overlooked in our desire and holistic effort to trace the presence of evanescent predecessors. This French verse in CCCC 383, folio 12r, was added in the first half of the thirteenth century, perhaps around 1230 (Figure 5.3). This verse seems never to have been edited or translated, though M. R. James, whose eye often caught marginal things of interest, transcribed it in his Catalogue of manuscripts in the Parker collec­ tion.21 The added text is of importance, though—not for the light it throws on the 18  Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 405. 19  Thomas Gobbitt, ‘Cambridge Corpus Christi College 383’, in O. Da Rold, T. Kato, M. Swan, and E.  Treharne, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010): https:// www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/mss/EM.CCCC.383.htm; Thomas Gobbitt, ‘Audience and Amendment of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383 in the First Half of the Twelfth Century’, Skepsi 2 (2009): 6–22. http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/journals/skepsi/issues/issue%202/index.html. 20  Scholars working with manuscripts have, until the last decade, been reliant on limited access to these primary sources, either because of time, or money, or the lack of good reproductions. The conse­ quences were that there was little time to spend on the margins or evidence in the manuscript that was not directly relevant. Digitization is changing this dramatically, opening up all the folios of manu­ scripts for scrutiny and contemplation. 21 M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), pp. 2:230–1, at 230.

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  99

Figure 5.3  Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383, folio 12r. © Reproduced by permission of the Masters and Fellows, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Early English laws, to which it is thematically distinct, but for discovering some­ thing about the user of the book, their cultural context and their response to the manuscript they inscribed: how this manuscript functioned in this individual’s world after its initial production. The poem is written in six long lines filling in the empty space in the bottom quarter of the folio and in a semi-­formal book-­hand that shows signs in the looped d and long s of a hand that will become Anglicana script within a few

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100  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts decades. The scribe has respected the writing grid of the Old English text on the left, retaining the verticality, but extended the text beyond the writing grid on the right to make the most of the width of the page, which now has its right lower corner excised. As a reader moves through the manuscript or its digital images, it would be quite possible not to spot this addition straight away, because, despite the different script, the writer has striven to integrate the poem visually and has not otherwise marked the poem out from the English text either by lineation, as one might expect by the second quarter of the thirteenth century, or by providing white space between the English and French, or by indicating a new literary work through rubrication or an enlarged opening initial.22 The mise-­en-­page of the English law-­codes (Æthelred’s laws precede the poem from folios 11r–12r and Alfred’s laws come after from folio 12v) includes red enlarged initials at the begin­ ning of the text, and rubrics, which are occasionally squeezed in, in red. That this short French text has no rubric, no white space, suggests an almost surreptitious act of literary composition—one that is private and for the informed reader. It  also testifies to the normality (but still significance) of multilingualism in the manuscript context. Research into the multilingual Middle Ages is flourishing in contemporary scholarship, recognizing that manuscript producers and con­ sumers were linguistically accomplished and perceived different languages as permeable modes of expression.23 Yet, this little poem in CCCC 383 shows the relative ease with which complete new texts could be inserted into spaces ori­gin­ al­ly designed for something quite different, or for nothing at all. The poem, which I shall title La Seisine: ‘Possession’ reads: Ki ben est amé e bel ami a, ke li faut il? [mole to hise Wortent] Tant hunt chacé cist oisel suz l’umbrage, ki est estrif sunt. De druerie fine les plusurs notent sulun lur curage, les queles deivent aver la seisine. La maviz dist ke dames de vasur deivent aver la seisine d’amour. Le rosinol dist ke ce serreit utraie. Eiz deivent puceles au frois ni saige La maviz—End.24 22 At ‘Parker on the Web’: https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/mv340ty8592, accessed 21 February 2020. 23 See Elizabeth Tyler, ed., Conceptualizing Multilingualism in Medieval England, c.800–c.1250 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 24  In my initial arrangement as verse and the translation, I was very kindly assisted by Geert de Wilde (Anglo-­Norman Dictionary, University of Aberystwyth), with many thanks indeed. Eric Weiskott, Boston College, helped with the scansion of the French. I have since re-­worked this transla­ tion and lineation, and all errors here are mine.

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  101 When you are loved and have a beautiful friend, what do you lack? [English interpolation?] Those who have been chasing this bird under the shade are in dispute. Of courtly love most of them sing according to their heart [about] which ones should have possession. The Thrush says that ladies should have possession of the love of their vassal. The Nightingale says that such a thing would be an outrage.25 Young women have to hold back from a rush [after] the unwise thrush—End.

The legal language of the poem seen in terms such as ‘estrif’ (‘debate’, ‘dispute’) and ‘seisein’ (‘possession’) is the only discernible link to the Early English law-­ codes that surround the verse. If the writer of the poem were reading the law-­ codes, one could just about imagine the English laws offering inspiration to write a debate. Yet, as it transpires, the poem is about the nature of love, and in focusing on the theme of giving chase in love, it is one of the earliest references to the popular medieval genre of the avian debate, perhaps most familiar from the later thirteenth-­century English poem, The Owl and the Nightingale.26 This poem also links indirectly to the short romance, as seen in the Breton Lay tradition of Marie de France. In one of Marie’s short lays, Laüstic, a central character is Le rosignol, the Nightingale. The bird acts as the intermediary of courtly love between a knight and a married lady, who is trapped in a loveless marriage. In Yonec, another lay by Marie de France, a lover transformed into a bird visits a lady imprisoned by her jealous old husband. In this short, dense poem, La Seisine, then, the deployment of the thrush and the nightingale, who sing according to their dispositions about courtly love, fits a context that might have been inspired by Marie de France’s Lais. Each bird offers a dialectic opinion on the nature of love, becoming part of the sub-­genre of courtly love 25  Anglo-­Norman Dictionary, http://www.anglo-­norman.net/gate/, s.v. ‘utraie’ can mean ‘heinous act’, but also ‘an act of immoderation’, ‘wantonness’. This potential sexualization of the courtly love shown here is reinforced by ‘curage’, which can also mean ‘lust’, ‘sexual desire’. 26  See the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, http://www.anglo-­norman.net/gate/, s.v.v. ‘estrif’, ‘seisein’ (‘to possess’, ‘hold sway over’), and ‘vassaur’ (‘minor noble’, ‘lesser vassal’). ‘Vasur’ is a unique spelling, and the word is only otherwise attested in the contemporary French texts, The Song of Dermot and the Earl and Le Roman de Waldef. Notably, in the Prologue to Cligés, lines 6–7, Chrétien de Troyes listed among the works he composed ‘Et de la hupe et de l’aronde/Et del rossignol la muance’ (‘And one on the metamorphosis of the hoopoe, swallow, and nightingale’). See W. W. Kibler and C. W. Carroll, trans., Chrétien de Troyes: Arthurian Romances (London: Penguin, 1991; repr. 2004). On the motif of the nightingale, and especially John of Howden’s later thirteenth-­century Rossignos, see Jocelyn Wogan-­ Browne, ‘The Tongues of the Nightingale: “Hertely redyng” at English Courts’, in K.  Kerby-­Fulton, John Thompson, and Sarah Baechle, eds, New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2014), pp. 78–98.

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102  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts debate poetry emerging in England in the later twelfth century, with texts such as those of Marie de France or Le Russinol voleit amer, culminating in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls in the late fourteenth century.27 As in courtly love poems, like the Breton Lay Sir Orfeo, there are allusions to aristocratic pursuits. Falconry might be hinted at in ‘the chase of the bird’ at line 3; and the phrase ‘suz umbrage’ suggests the hood of the predator bird, and the temporary blindness caused by love. At line 10, when the unwise ladies (‘puceles’) are described as ‘a throng’ or being ‘in a rush’ in the phrase ‘au frois’, they become like a dense flock of startled birds. In this poem, the Nightingale tenders the opinion that young women must be cautious and maintain their purity, while the Thrush is all for getting possession of a lover’s heart. The female subjects, the ‘dames’ and the ‘puceles’ (women of all ages, perhaps), are advised to hold themselves back, to remain true to themselves, and not to follow the words of the Thrush. In some poems, like The Thrush and the Nightingale in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, folios 136v to 138r, dated to the later thirteenth century, the Nightingale takes on the attributes of Christ who adores his virgin mother as a symbol for all women.28 In La Seisine: ‘Possession’, the Nightingale advises the maintenance of a maiden’s decorum and modesty, which is the less appealing option for the maiden than that of following the throng who chase after the Thrush. This short poem advising women on their behaviour as potential lovers, or in debating the merits of marriage (the Nightingale) versus adultery (the Thrush), is part of a much larger body of courtly love literature, of texts proffering guidance or saintly models, and of satirical literature directed at young, often noble, women. Women were both producers and consumers of such literary works: Marie de France herself is the most famous writer of short romances in this period; but other female writers include Clemence of Barking, a twelfth-­century nun at Barking Abbey who wrote an Anglo-­Norman passion of Catherine of Alexandria. Scholars note, too, that John of Howden’s later thirteenth-­century poem on the nightingale, Rossignos, was offered to Eleanor of Provence—a patron and audience for such literature.29 It might be that La Seisine itself was written by and for a woman. And indeed, it may have been composed by the browser of CCCC 383, whose name appears in a note in a contemporary hand (the same hand?) at the bottom margin of folio 24r: (‘Matildis Bey’ soror magistri Roberti bey’ de Abbend[ . . .]’). It is difficult to pinpoint who Matilda Bey’ might be, other than taking at face value her declared relationship as sister of Robert Bey’ of 27  P. Meyer, ed., ‘Manuscrits Français de Cambridge’, Romania 15 (1886): 236–357, at pp. 241–6. 28 Conveniently edited by Bella Millett, at Wessex Parallel WebTexts: http://wpwt.soton.ac.uk/ digby86/thrushtxt.htm. See, inter alia, Susanna Fein, ‘The Fillers of the Auchinleck Manuscript’, in Carol  M.  Meale and Derek Pearsall, eds, Makers and Users of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 70–3, on medieval debate and advice literature about women. 29  Maureen Barry McCann Boulton, Sacred Fictions of Medieval France: Narrative Theology in the Lives of Christ and the Virgin, 1150–1500 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), p. 142.

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  103 Abingdon, a Master Robert of Abingdon. Two Roberts of Abingdon are recorded in the Close Rolls: one, who died in 1286; and a second, a brother of Richard de Abingdon, the king’s chamberlain, also in the 1280s, both rather too late for the inscription in CCCC 383.30 It is possible that this Master Robert of Abingdon (d.1243) is the brother of St Edmund of Abingdon, sometimes known as Edmund Rich (d.1240).31 According to the ODNB, there were also two sisters of Edmund, known as Margaret and Alice, though other accounts suggest that there may have been between six and eight children to Mabel and Reginald Rich.32 Whoever this Matilda is, she, or some other owner of the book, was also responsible for the added directions in French and Latin for the reading of the psalms at folios 40v–42v of CCCC 383, additions that are not at all related to the twelfth-­century versions of the Laws of Cnut at folios 38r–52v. In the same hand as La Seisine, at the foot of folio 42v, a French Direction for the dying introduces verses from Psalm 115: Qui dit ces dous vers a sun moriant. salme nenterat mie en enfern: ‘O Domine quia ego servus tuus. Ego servus tuus ⁊ filius ancillæ tuæ. Dirrupisti vincula mea: tibi sacrificabo hostiam laudis, ⁊ nomen Domini invocabo. Whoever says these two verses when they are dying, their soul will never enter hell. ‘O Lord, for I am thy servant: I am thy servant, and the son of thy handmaid. Thou hast broken my bonds: I will sacrifice to thee the sacrifice of praise, and I will call upon the name of the Lord’.33

30  Calendar of the Close Rolls 1279–1288 (London: Mackie and Co., 1902), pp. 194, 301, and 557: https://books.google.com/books?id=M5BCAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA557&lpg=PA557&dq#v=on epage&q&f. 31  See J. C. Russell, ‘Notes on the Biography of St Edmund of Abingdon’, The Harvard Theological Review 54 (1961): 147–58, at p. 153. See C. H. Lawrence, ‘Edmund of Abingdon’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2005): DOI:10.1093/ref:odnb/8503, accessed 24 February 2020. Could ‘bey’ in ‘Matilda Bey’ mean ‘ring’, ‘treasure’ (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-­idx?type=byte&byte= 12254095&egdisplay=compact&egs=12261342) and therefore, by extension, ‘Rich’ as in St Edmund Rich, as St Edmund of Abingdon was erroneously known after his father’s name? Edmund and Robert were thought to have two sisters, who entered the nunnery at Catesby. 32  C. H. Lawrence, ‘Robert of Abingdon and Matthew Paris’, English Historical Review 69 (1954): 408–17. She was perhaps abbess of Catesby, though that person is also called ‘Margery’. As such, Matilda’s identity is not secure. Interestingly, in references to this short inscription in CCCC 383: ‘Wormald . . . speculates that this Robert of Abingdon could be the brother of Edmund’, p. 21, n. 125 in J.  C.  Holt, George Garnett, and John Hudson, Magna Carta, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Nothing further is added. 33  Folio 40v, bas-­de-­page, Psalm 115:16–17. I am editing and discussing these Directions for the Troubled in my essay on the books and writings of abbesses and nuns in Corinne Saunders and Diane Watt, eds, Women and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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104  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts This sequence of ten Directions for the Troubled at folios 40v to 42v is written neatly at the bas-­de-­pas, underneath the Early English laws. Each is offset to the left of the original writing grid, in a neat but dense sequence of lines. The Directions are apotropaic, instructing the reader to say verses of psalms as charms if they find themselves in difficult or deadly situations. These are prompts for ver­ bal performance, written here in CCCC 383 as guides to the memory of the reader. This female writer named as Matilda has thus transformed this book from an archive of vernacular law-­codes, the property of an institution, to a personal repository of multilingual texts of varying genre: Romance, liturgical, oral-­ performative, and devotional. Female ownership, probably through a religious institution, seems confirmed by a short trilingual note in the left margin of folio 60v, which reads ‘.v. feit diet miserere meidens’ (‘say “Mercy, women” five times’ or ‘Women, say “Mercy” five times’).34 This shift from public, shared property to pri­ vate, individual use is notable, and it also suggests that this book was certainly in the hands of a female owner by the thirteenth century, an owner for whom the book had become a space with which to interact intentionally to store texts important to her. It is exciting to identify this later, religious woman user of the manuscript, whose interest in the English text is not immediately apparent, and yet whose literacy cannot be doubted. Her desire to return to the poetic text at folio 12r might be indicated by the cut corner—a kind of medieval dog-­ear to the page, cut because membrane cannot be easily folded; this significant information retrieval tool (if such it is) suggests the desire for the permanent reminder of this text. The Directions for the Troubled are clustered in a sequence of folios that would be quickly identifiable by the position of the text at the foot of the folio. In so many other cases in medieval manuscripts, where passers-­through leave traces, it is impossible to detect how they might find their way back to their notes. Here, the careful positioning of the texts assists in quick detection of the additions to the manuscript. The significance of Matilda’s textual compositions lies, too, in the evidence they provide for a knowledge of the mobility of medieval books through inter-­library loan or donation, particularly in the central Middle Ages, and particularly when those books involve English texts. Recent research suggests that some books writ­ ten in English seem to have been dispersed in the twelfth century from male Benedictine establishments to female Benedictine establishments or non-­ monastic institutions.35 London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv, for example, is a substantial mid-­twelfth-­century Christ Church manuscript. It con­ tains instantiations of pre-­Conquest homilies and saints’ lives, together with

34  This note may be prompted by the Old English text here, which is II Æthelred, and which, while dealing with the Danish and English conflict, refers to the breach of the peace through killing. 35  See, for example, Elaine Treharne, ‘Invisible Things’, in Clegg-­Hyer and Frederick, eds, Texts, Textiles and Intertexts (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), pp. 225–37.

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‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  105 post-­Conquest compositions, such as the English extracts from the Elucidarium by Honorius Augustodunensis, and it certainly became the property of a female reader-­writer by the end of the twelfth century. This particular reader-­writer, an unnamed ‘ancilla’, compiled a prayer to Thomas Becket and she may have been a nun at the abbey of Barking, where Thomas Becket’s sister, Marie, was abbess.36 In what ways and from where Early English texts, particularly, were donated to female institutions in the later twelfth and earlier thirteenth centuries, is a ques­ tion worth investigating further.37 An architextual approach to the extant medieval book corpus—that is, the examination of a manuscript as an ‘edifice of letters’—is one that encourages an audience to see the manuscript as a whole from its mode of production to its inclusion of later notes and traces of use. That it is whole does not equate with its being ‘complete’. This approach insists on the inclusion of what is generally regarded as marginal material, incidental and irrelevant. It reveals a great deal about the medi­eval audience’s perception of the book, their interactions with it; the complex networks of manuscripts users in the period and the sensibility (‘mental perception, awareness of something’) with which they intervened in the books they passed through. From this approach, it is possible to detect multiple anticipated audiences—from the real father of Ieuan ap Sulien’s poetry, to the reader who corrected the law-­codes in CCCC 383. Moreover, though, such an approach attends to specific and unanticipated audiences, who often give their name, and interact with the body of the book to create something new—the female intervener in the Old English law-­book, who may never have engaged meaningfully with the texts themselves. The addition of texts in CCCC 383 are the traces are of someone who recognizes that the book, and particularly its empty margins and end-­leaves, represents public space—space for dialogue or engagement or record—in which they can intervene to enhance the text, critique the text, or ignore the text. Whatever their method and level of engagement, every act of interpolation effectively illustrates the multifunctional nature of the codex and its infinite potential to embody the words and wisdom of its otherwise unknown passers-­by.

Faint Traces The book as a repository of names, whether made explicit by writers like Aldred or Matilda or Ieuan ap Sulien or listed by someone else, is well attested in 36  I edit this text in Treharne, Living through Conquest, p. 157. George Younge, in a personal com­ munication, suggested Barking as the localization of this scribe and prayer based on finding the same prayer in the Barking Ordinale. I am grateful to him for this information. 37  It is notable that earlier thirteenth-­century prayers to the Virgin Mary are added to the contem­ porary English Trinity Homilies—Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 15. 42.

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106  Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts medi­eval volumes. Names are particularly significant for the information they might reveal about localization, date, and ownership of the manuscript through its long biography. But all marginalia, annotations, ‘doodles’, lists, and other inter­ ventions in manuscripts mean something. Given the skills required for writing in the pre-­modern period—the training, the level of literacy, access to books, ma­ter­ ials, and tools—no traces left by users of codices were easy or thoughtless, trivial or accidental. Many questions emerge from the study of marginalia and add­ ition­al texts. Cambridge, Corpus Christ College, MS 302 is an early twelfth-­ century extensive collection of homilies, many written by the Old English abbot and monk, Ælfric, whose Catholic Homilies and Lives of Saints were among the most widely copied English religious prose from c.990 to c.1220.38 The manu­ script might have been copied in the Southeast of England, mostly by one accom­ plished scribe. Ælfric’s sermon for the first Sunday in Lent, Dominica I in Quadragesima, is copied at pages 112–20 of the manuscript, and has received sporadic annotation by an interested medieval reader, which has an important signification of the public function of this text within this specific manuscript context. At page 113, the rele­vant portion of Ælfric’s English discusses Christ’s sacrifice for mankind on Good Friday—anticipated by this early Lenten homily: Nu wæs he swa eaðmod þæt he geþafode þam deofle þæt he his fandode, ⁊ he geþafode lyðrum manum þæt hi hine ofslogon. Deofol is ealra unrihtwisra manna heafod, ⁊ þa yfelan men synd his lima. Nu geþafode God þæt þæt heafod hine costnode, ⁊ þa lima hine ahengon. Þam deofle wæs micel twynung, hwæt Crist wære? His lif næs na gelogod swa swa oðra manna lif. Crist ne æt mid gyfernysse, ne he ne dránc mid oferflowendnysse, ne his eagan ne ferdon worigende geond mislice lustas.39 Now he was so humble that he consented that the devil be his tempter, and he allowed vile men to kill him. The Devil is the head of all unrighteous men and the evil men are his limbs. Now God consented that that head betray him, and the limbs hung him. To the devil it was a great doubt, what might Christ be? His life was not ordered like the lives of other men. Christ did not eat greedily, nor did he drink excessively, nor did his eyes wander among various desires.

In the right margin aligned with ‘manna heafod’ onwards are four and a half short lines, written in an expert later twelfth-­century hand that uses a Caroline form of 38  Elaine Treharne, ‘Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 302’, in English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220: https://em1060.stanford.edu/cambridge-­corpus-­christi-­college-­302, accessed 27 February 2020; Loredana Teresi, ‘Ælfric’s or Not? The Making of a Temporale Collection in Late Anglo-­Saxon England’, in Aaron J. Kleist, ed., The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice and Appropriation, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, vol. 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 284–310. 39  For the full homily, see P. M. Clemoes, ed., Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series Text, Early English Text Society s.s. 17 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), xi, p. 267. Silent expansion of abbreviations are added here.

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 17/08/21, SPi

‘ My Name Is Famous ’ : Presence in the Book  107 f and s, rather than the English Vernacular Minuscule forms of those graphs. This expansion is clearly intended to augment the Ælfrician text with the category naming of who the ‘evil men’ are: Robberas ⁊ Reafera[s] / þeofas ⁊ falsa mynetera[s] / Wicche ⁊ wanwestras40 / þe fordoþ men ⁊ ma[n]/na bigleofa. / Robbers and spoilers and thieves and false money-­ dealers; sorcerers and ­perverse marauders [or: ‘witches and immoral women’] who destroy men and men’s livings.

The expansion is a clarification felt essential by this manuscript reader, and it adds precision to the original text’s metaphor of the evil ‘limbs’ that embody the demonic head of the Devil. The addition naming the sinful is simultaneously public and private. It is public in content—the kind of expansion common in medieval preaching texts—where the deliverer of the sermon wants to provide specific examples of the ‘evil men’ of the text to maintain the clarity of the didactic mode; but here, the sequence of evildoers is not connected to the main text by a visual cue, lacking any form of indicative sign to link it directly to the text. The most obvious cue is its placement at the end of the precise line on which ‘yfelan man’ occurs, but intervening words potentially detach the expansion from its actual referent. This lack of a cue would make the expansion and its relevance not automatically clear, indicating perhaps the intention of slow, private reading, even if for subsequent public delivery. The dating of this addition from later in the twelfth century (as can be deduced from the z-shaped nota almost on the line and the forms of f and s) is interesting too in the light of the emergence of newly composed English homilies at this time, such as those in London, Lambeth Palace, Lambeth MS 487.41 This mar­ ginal note shows that there were careful readers of earlier English homilies, who, as in this case, seemed to be preparing these religious texts for new purposes, new contexts of production.42 Indeed, this expansion seems linked to movements increasing the preaching of the vernacular at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries.

40  I am grateful to Professor Antonette di Paolo Healey, who corresponded with me in March 2009 about this addition, suggesting that ‘wanwestras’ was the preferred reading over Ker, Catalogue, p. 97, ‘wanpestras’, though this is certainly how the term is written. This latter reading might be a possible compound with an Anglo-­Norman element ‘pestre’ ‘to devour’; thus, ‘wan’ + ‘pestre’ might be ‘plun­ derers’? David Trotter, in a private communication, suggested to me that ‘wanpestre’ could be ‘loose women’, derived from ‘a postulated A-­N gaupe (or waupe) + suffix -estre (