Abstract
Reading English Verse in Manuscript c. 1350–1500 is a codicological, historical, and, to a certain extent, literary investigation into how contemporary readers engaged with the act of reading Middle English religious verse. As Daniel Sawyer remarks, readers of the period left very few clues as to how they read Middle English verse, making it a challenge for modern readers to understand how they reacted to the contents of these manuscripts. To embark on this challenge, Sawyer bases his study on a meticulous analysis of the book in its material form, on the part played (consciously or unconsciously) by scribes, as well as on the few marks that readers left. Reading English Verse in Manuscript offers a clear and useful methodology on how to investigate the act of reading from the analysis of forms, shapes and page layouts. The book is divided into five chapters (each focusing on a specific aspect) preceded by an introduction and followed by an appendix composed of ten tables, which reflect the impressive corpus that has been used, as well as a list of manuscripts consulted, an index, and a bibliography.
Chapter 1 draws the reader into Sawyer’s approach. It lays the foundation of his argument that is developed in following chapters and offers a description of the selected corpus. Although Sawyer draws from a variety of texts – which reflects that reading habits were not uniform but differed depending on the types of texts that were read – this research builds primarily on the close study of two vernacular manuscripts, Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae. Both documents enjoyed a wide circulation and varied readership besides dealing with a similar subject (the salvation of souls in the 12th and 13th centuries), but their contents were structured differently: Prick of Conscience was structured for linear reading (it contains a prologue, seven parts, and an epilogue), whereas Speculum Vitae would have been used like an encyclopaedia.
Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, for each of which Sawyer consulted several copies, contain references to the act of reading and the way information was organised. Their material aspect also gives insight into how a text was expected to be read at the time. Identifying the profiles of their owners and analysing the form of the copies consulted allows Sawyer to open a dialogue between shape and material form on the one hand, and reading and aurality on the other. Sawyer offers in-depth analysis of these manuscript copies, which he develops in the following chapters, starting with how readers looked for information in Middle English poems.
Chapter 2 investigates how readers navigated through manuscripts in order to read or find information. To understand how medieval readers handled manuscripts, Sawyer looks at paratexts and more specifically ‘navigational aids’, which helped readers find their way into the book. Sawyer identifies two types of aids: external aids, which include summaries, tables of contents, and indexes; and internal aids, located around or inside the columns of texts, which include marginalia, headers, and fixed bookmarks, but also running heads, numbering, notes, and glosses. These give us an insight into whether Middle English verse was read in a linear or a non-linear way. Their presence also informs us as to how readers reacted to Middle English verse, since their use of navigational aids was sometimes seemingly in opposition to the publisher’s or scribe’s intentions in shaping and structuring a text: the cutting of a bookmark within the margin of a manuscript copy, for example, indicated the importance of a specific passage that was not necessarily meant to be emphasised. Sawyer also concludes that paratextual elements allowed readers to think about the contents of the text in itself, as it helped them memorise and identify passages more easily.
Reading manuscripts also required ‘handling’ them – a concept that is developed in chapter 3. This section proposes a reflection on how a textual object’s physical properties shaped reading habits. A rich and careful examination of a document’s size, shape, weight, and binding in relation to their portability is carried out. This section also challenges preconceptions – the weight of a book seems to have played a bigger part in its portability than its size; stationary books, which were chained up in libraries or churches, were not portable but that actually made them available to a greater audience (as they could not be stolen) and small books were chained up too.
The shape and size of Middle English verse manuscripts, nevertheless, do not seem to have altered the poetic conventions of the time. If book production required scribes to think about length when copying a text, Sawyer shows that smaller books of verse, which were designed to be transported more easily, also responded to literary form. One of this book’s major contributions to research is Sawyer’s use of ‘interproportion’ – a method that he developed and that aims at calculating ‘how much of the page is taken up by the ruled area’ (p. 99). His findings reveal that only a small section of the page is actually occupied by written text, thus highlighting the importance and the role of margins.
Page layout is further developed in chapter 4, dedicated to ‘rhyming’. An inquiry into form and lineation (prose or verse), punctuation, and ‘bracing’ (drawing marginal braces to link rhyming words) suggests that rhyme was seen as an organisational feature and that these religious poems may have been read in rhyme units rather than syntactic units. The emphasis placed on rhyming words in Middle English verse reveals a link between verse, meaning, and learning/internalising. This special attention on rhyme is further developed through the treatment of braces, and more particularly on errors in bracing in the selected corpus. ‘Bracers’ were for the most part attentive readers, but a few readers made errors due to the mechanical bracing of royal stanza (ababxcc) and a reliance on eye-rhymes. Drawing braces in long manuscripts may have been a tiresome task, thus revealing that reading verse also demanded a physical effort which probably derived from intellectual pleasure, an obsession for rhyme and, less commonly, an aesthetic dimension.
This chapter ends with an insightful analysis on reading habits between 1350 and 1500. But a lot still remains to be uncovered, some of which Sawyer addresses in the last chapter.
Chapter 5, which is shorter than the previous chapters, covers areas of research that could be strengthened thanks to this study. Sawyer cautiously reminds us that some of the guidelines discussed in his book have been rejected by readers of other works and may not necessarily apply to other medieval texts (especially those from what he calls the ‘Chaucer canon’). Several fascinating points are raised, such as the hierarchy between scripts, the processes of highlighting, translation, the advent of print. Although the purpose of this concluding chapter is to open up new perspectives, the fact that these elements are not as painstakingly developed as the preceding ones left me wishing for more. I hope that Sawyer will carry on working on these elements in future studies.
Reading English Verse in Manuscript is a ground-breaking and compelling study, the findings of which will undoubtedly inspire further research on texts from the period. It is well written and easy to follow, and Sawyer’s attentiveness to his readers can also be felt – especially when he deals with lesser-known corpuses and complex minute details.