Modern and Medieval Books: A Review Essay

A growing bibliography in medieval studies is beginning to take seriously. As manuscript studies in general have flourished, scholars have been increasingly interested not only in extracting texts from manuscripts for modern editions, but in understanding how material contexts help create textual meaning: alignments of texts within miscellanies, interactions of texts with images, layout and organization of texts as visual objects in their own right. One could mark start of this interest, or at least a new phase in it, with a 1993 conference at University of Pennsylvania, whose proceedings were published under title The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on Medieval Miscellany. (1) The papers collected in this volume explore entire medieval manuscripts as a way of understanding such important issues as miscellaneity and authorship. But it contributors to The Whole Book have taught us to consider medieval in their totality, modern studies that treat medieval manuscripts have remained resolutely fragmentary. It is rare for scholarship in manuscript studies to take form of a monograph, and even rarer for a single manuscript of literary interest to receive sustained attention and developed argumentation of a book-length study--elsewhere, of course, dominant standard of scholarly production. But study of manuscripts, even study of whole books, can usefully be conducted through medium of monograph, and doing so provides a new kind of access to experiences of medieval readers. (2) As Bernard Cerquiglini eloquently describes field of philology (closely allied with traditional manuscript study), the fastidious study of noteworthy bit is given most importance. He continues, philology's great fondness for notes, short papers, and critical analyses is well known. In bibliography of great philologists, besides editions, how many small notes devoted to a dialectal characteristic, how many brief remarks on three lines or on a variant are listed! (3) Literary manuscript studies have similarly been conducted in form of articles that exalt the noteworthy bit, only sometimes assembled into volumes that nonetheless tend towards miscellaneous. Conference volumes provide valuable venues for publishing important essays, for example, but even a conference with a thematic focus on manuscripts usually offers nothing beyond that to bind disparate contributions together. (4) Some especially significant medieval books--for example, Vernon Manuscript (Bodleian Library MS Eng. poet a.1), British Library MS Harley 2253, and Ellesmere Chaucer (Huntington Library MS EL 26 C9)--have been subject of useful essay-collections by a number of hands, but although subject of these volumes is unified, their arguments usually are not. (5) Other on manuscripts honor career of a manuscript specialist: a festschrift, for example, or a gathering of important work of a single scholar. (6) Sometimes an individual's body of work, though it ranges over a number of different artifacts, nonetheless retrospectively implies large arguments about medieval reading culture. Ralph Hanna's Pursuing History, for example, essentially a collection of previously published articles, has been carefully edited and introduced so as to illuminate the Middle English literary condition. (7) But more often these volumes, though are inspired or even governed by a single intelligence, collect studies that have no necessary coherence beyond circumstances of their authorship. Even a book like Kathleen Scott's recent Tradition and Innovation, where separate chapters come from her Lyell lectures and therefore share an occasion as well as an author, offers case-studies of five different manuscripts rather than a sustained argument; in Scott's words: they were truly that I liked and that had not been discussed before. (8) There are reasons for this piecemeal state of affairs, some of them related to risks of studying whole books at any length. …