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Category: publication

Published: Reading English Verse in Manuscript

Published 27 May 2020 by Daniel Sawyer

My book, and a facsimile of Bodleian MS Fairfax 16

My new book was published this month. Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500 can be ordered from OUP here, and, in the UK, at the time of writing, Blackwell’s are selling it for about £5 less.

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.

Here is the blurb:

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Book Parts and the Feed

Published 31 May 2019 by Daniel Sawyer

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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First Fruits

Published 7 March 2018 by Daniel Sawyer

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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IMEV, SIMEV, NIMEV and DIMEV

Published 16 April 2016 by Daniel Sawyer

I recently published a note. The specific new discovery that it reports is not going to rejig the landscape of scholarship. By remarking on the previusly unrecorded appearance of a rhyming proverb in Bodleian Library MS Digby 99 the note alters our understanding of the textual and geographical affiliations of Balliol College, MS 354 (available online here), the so-called ‘commonplace book’ of Richard Hill.

But I make a broader point in my conclusion. In work on Middle English verse we rely on a set of indexes to keep track of what is what and where:

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Spaces for Reading

Published 22 March 2016 by Daniel Sawyer

I recently had a chapter published in Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England, edited by Mary Flannery and Carrie Griffin (New York, 2016). My bit’s about the various fixed physical markers for navigation that we find in medieval manuscripts—tabs, string, leather balls and so on—and I think it’s rather good—although I would say that, of course.

These little objects might seem less interesting than written marginalia, and aren’t as mobile as book ribbons or as mechanically sophisticated as book wheels (see this blog post for a good quick overview of all these types). But book ribbons and book wheels could move, and almost certainly all have moved since our period, and so we can’t now use them as evidence for readers’ attention to specific parts of books. Fixed markers, however, do let us track readers’ attention, or at least to track the parts of books which they expected to want to access rapidly.

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