This is in a sense ‘the book of the doctorate’, but it’s changed a great deal since I received my DPhil. The book is shorter, clearer and punchier. It draws on a significantly larger mass of evidence and corrects various errors and fuzzinesses in the doctoral work. And none of it has been published elsewhere: this is not a monograph whose most exciting chapter can be found as an earlier article.
The beginning of Song of Songs in Oxford, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 119: f. 177rb
You can now hear me read the first chapter of the later Wycliffite translation of Song of Songs in (an approximation of) fourteenth-century London Middle English, here.
Cut-and-fold finding tab: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. A 366, f. 14r
Back in 2016 I had a chapter come out in the fine collection Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, edited by Mary Flannery and Carrie Griffin. So fine was the collection, in fact, that it was one of the most-downloaded books on Palgrave’s entire literature list (not just medieval literature!).
My chapter discussed how we might study the fixed physical bookmarks sometimes found in medieval manuscripts, turning them into evidence which might tell us something specific about reading. It was, to my knowledge, the first detailed exploration of the uses of these rather enigmatic markers.
I’m still pretty pleased with it, and especially with the distinction I suggest between bookmarks which reinforce textual structures and bookmarks which cut across those structures. But I’ve since had a further thought about this evidence, hence this blog post…
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.
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.
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.
