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Daniel Sawyer Posts

Book Parts and the Feed

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 185, f. 32v, catchword: ‘his broder

I have a new publication out: a chapter in Book Parts, edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth. The collection as a whole considers the histories and uses of all the different components which go to make up a book. While the individual chapters draw on their authors’ research, they’re also relatively accessible, so as to serve undergraduates, new graduate students, and anyone else taking their first steps in book history.

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Against Dullness

This is a trimmed and lightly edited version of a paper I gave in the Bodleian’s Weston Library in January 2019. I was asked to say something useful to graduate students across a range of humanities disciplines, and so I set out to demonstrate the potential interest of manuscripts which might seem to us to be normal and boring.

I think there might be some useful points made here, and I doubt I can publish it elsewhere, so I’m going to put it out as a blog post in case it might help anyone.

I’d like to look at a ‘dull’ or ‘mediocre’ later medieval English literary manuscript and bring out what might be interesting about it. Such manuscripts by no means the ugliest and messiest productions, but they’re also a long way from being the most luxurious, and they rarely receive attention.

It is (I think) by looking at seemingly dull, normal manuscripts that we might learn the most: normal manuscripts are the crucial context for the exceptional books which excite us, and normal manuscripts also let us study normality, a neglected topic in and of itself.

Front cover of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 486
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 486, front board and cover

Let’s consider MS Laud Misc. 486. This book contains a copy of The Prick of Conscience, the most widely-witnessed medieval English poem. We usually ignore this text because of the sheer number of surviving copies and because of its content, which modern taste finds rebarbative. The poem is followed by a copy of Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis by the same scribe.

The very brief online description of this manuscript would probably not excite us. But in fact the book offers many points of interest.

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First Fruits

The ‘Towards a New Edition of the Wycliffite Bible’ project which employs me recently put up a public prototype version of the project’s digital result: an open-access online edition of both versions of the Wycliffite Bible, designed to be expanded collaboratively in years to come. I gave a very quick paper introducing the project at Oxford’s interdisciplinary Medieval Studies meeting this week, and this seemed like a good moment to put up a new post contextualizing the project here.

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Studying Manuscripts: A Diagram

I’m writing up a few more extended thoughts on the joint Early Book Society / John Gower Society conference last week, but for the moment I thought I’d share this useful(?) diagram:

(For a full-size version click on the image!)

When I was an MSt student preparing to tackle my summative essay on the palaeography and codicology course, Dan Wakelin told the class that it would be best, as a rule of thumb, to study either a few features in many manuscripts, or many features in a few manuscripts. I passed this useful advice on when I taught part of the same MSt course this year. When I came to write my paper for EBS, I realised that this advice was relevant to some of the ways we think about manuscript studies in general, not just when we’re starting out, so I built this diagram.

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Recent Engagements, Forthcoming Attractions

Earlier this term I gave a paper at Teaching the Codex 2, a colloquium at Merton College here in Oxford. This was the sequel to a similar meeting last year, about teaching of/with/and manuscripts. The first TTC gave us a overview of manuscript teaching and available resources. The second felt like a proper extension, ramifying into detailed discussions of manuscript pedagogy in different disciplines and contexts.

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This is how we Rolle

This week, at quite short notice, the excellent Michael Madrinkian and I found ourselves in a room recording readings of lyrics from Richard Rolle’s Ego dormio. This isn’t normal. Indeed, when I mentioned this to a friend and said that it’s unusual to be reading Rolle aloud, my friend said ‘It’s unusual to be reading Rolle full stop.’ So what happened?

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