I have a new article out, and a pretty weighty one too: at c.12,000 words, drawing on evidence of 1,511 (probably) lost medieval books gleaned from around 8,000 documents, ‘Missing Books in the Folk Codicology of Later Medieval England’ took some effort! I’m delighted to see it come out in The Mediæval Journal 7.2 (2017—well, 2019 for 2017); I’ve also deposited it in a non-commercial open access repository, where it is under embargo at the time of writing but should become available (I think) at some point in 2020.
Here is the abstract:
Manuscripts underpin the study of the Middle Ages, but the numbers which survive are thought to be a small proportion of those once produced. These missing books can be studied through the physical descriptions in medieval records, texts which I frame as a form of ‘folk codicology’. A survey of 1511 such descriptions from later medieval England extends our knowledge of the appearance and handling of books. Through their practical taxonomies these descriptions also show how readers sometimes thought about the age, quality and beauty of manuscripts. At other times, however, readers were not interested in the physicality of books, or found that physicality to be a hindrance.
In the piece, I propose that the records of the physical features of books left by later-medieval people deserve careful, systematic attention. In fact, they offer us the only physical information we have about many books, books which were recorded but have not survived. I use the phrase ‘folk codicology’ for such material—although I hope that the concept might be useful even to those who don’t like the phrase!
Such evidence can sharpen scholarship’s sense for the bookishness of the period, for physical appreciation, aesthetics and taxonomy at the time. In a quiet, habitual way, such material is a kind of aesthetic writing. In the closing sections, however, I suggest that the evidence also lets us see people sometimes not caring about the physicality of manuscripts, or experiencing that physicality as a hindrance and an annoyance. This final section is a bit of a provocation, and I won’t be surprised or annoyed if that bit draws disagreements. I do think, though, that scholarship sometimes takes risks by just assuming readers who both thought about and liked the physicality of their books.
To come back to that number of around 8,000 documents: while this work took a lot of labour on my part, it would have been impossible without Susan H. Cavanaugh’s extraordinary doctoral dissertation, ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned in England, 1300–1450’ (UPenn, 1985). This is one of the most frequently referenced unpublished documents in the field. I hope my notes in the article do Cavanaugh due justice, but I think she merits a paragraph of gratitude in this blog post too.
However this winds up being received, and even if my proofreading let errors slip through, I’m rather pleased that I managed to publish a 12,000-word peer-reviewed article about manuscripts which begins with a ghost story and ends on the word ‘necromancy’!
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