Failure before Print (The Case of Stephen Scrope)

This article examines the copying and transmission of medieval texts in their manuscript culture in England during the Middle Ages. It considers the complicated process of the making of a manuscript from several perspectives including the difficult relationship between scribes and authors. It evaluates the different writing environments in which manuscripts were copied and circulated and analyses the difficulties associated with the transmission of the texts of two medieval authors, who are situated at the opposite ends of the medieval period: Ælfric of Eynsham in the tenth century and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth. The findings suggest that Ælfric and Chaucer share the same anxieties regarding scribes.

Taking a broad approach to a vast body of underresearched material, this chapter considers a significant gap in scholarship on early modern satire: Latin manuscripts. While the seventeenth century in important respects remained a manuscript culture, scholars have all but ignored the extensive production of Latin satire in verse and in hybrid forms between verse and prose. Certain literary phenomena, the chapter suggests, tend to be rendered invisible if we treat early modern English culture as monolingual. At the same time, it would be mistaken to see the production of Latin and English satire as distinct processes; they intermingle and respond to each other. What is more, 'Latin' itself was no monolithic entity in terms of satirical writing. The chapter demonstrates this diversity by treating not only imitation of classical verse satire and epigram, but also, for example, rhyming verse in Latin, which was a strong tradition with roots in the Middle Ages. In other words, the chapter charts two fields of investigation on satire that merit further attention: the changing relationship between Latin and the vernacular; and the lingering significance of manuscript culture in the seventeenth century.

Reviewed by: Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts by Kathryn M. Rudy A. R. Bennett Manuscript studies, Medieval Kathryn M. Rudy. Piety in Pieces: How Medieval Readers Customized Their Manuscripts. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016. 416 pp. £34.95. ISBN: 978-1-78374-234-9. In this comprehensive study, Kathryn Rudy makes an important intervention into studies of late medieval manuscript culture. "Manuscript culture" as a large phenomenon is a difficult object of inquiry, not least because manuscripts themselves are not easily treated within the frame of a single discipline, be it literary or textual history, art history, or media history. More difficult still is an attempt to characterize a large corpus of these objects as a single phenomenon pointing to larger trends within the economy, ecology, and society of the late Middle Ages in northern Europe. What Rudy is attempting in this book is nothing short of a large-scale qualitative study of the largest arm of late medieval manuscript production: the dramatic rise in the creation and consumption of books of hours. Her study focuses on the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, but as a major production center for these objects whose style was very much in vogue across Northern Europe, the impact of Rudy's study extends as far as the Dutch and Flemish books themselves did. The difficulty of Rudy's intervention is that she is attempting to enact a complete shift in the current conversations and conclusions about books of hours in the fifteenth century with an exhaustive, nigh on catalogic exploration of a large quantity of manuscripts. This is not a case study. This is not an attempt to make an argument out of a localized context that, by its very localization, generates a handy sample of objects that can be used for [End Page 487] evidence. It is instead attempting to redefine a totality—a large, sprawling, century-(or-more-)long whole by examining quite literally hundreds of manuscripts that feature in her study in 286 images. Rudy is executing a comprehensive redefinition of late medieval Netherlandish book culture—and by extension those of other countries, like England, whose book cultures interacted or traded with it. Rudy simultaneously upends the disciplinary logic of literary studies—that books are about authors and readers—and art history—that books are about artists and patrons—in order to center the conversation around books as usable technologies, with users and interface adaptations and upgrades—we might even say "hacks." This is based upon her introduction of what she calls the "modular method," in which various pieces of books could be made and purchased in discrete units in a build-a-book fashion. The mere fact that manuscripts could be made in this way, and that they sometimes were, is not in itself a new discovery. Rather, Rudy pushes readers to absorb the magnitude of this element of devotional book production as more common than not, which understanding, if it does not entirely redefine how scholars are thinking about late medieval book culture, at the very least must open up another vein within that culture that shows distinct characteristics of production and use—which are often the same thing, we discover in Rudy's analysis. First, the modular method essentially notes that as literacy rates and demand for books of hours rose after 1390—a date that Rudy identifies as a marked turning point—book labor became increasingly divided and specialized even as it was de-skilled by the proto-assembly-line practices. Book pieces were sold in what Rudy calls "design units"—or modules of images, texts, or sets of either. These units could then be purchased piecemeal to include a vaguely standard set of texts (The Little Office of the Virgin, The Office of the Dead, the Seven Penitential Psalms, and a calendar) as well as a number of other options that provided opportunities for tailoring by adding particular prayers, indulgences, saints, or images. What is more, however, is that Rudy argues that this kind of tailoring was not simply enacted at first production, but that manuscripts remained vital and accretive, accumulating texts, images, and objects, sometimes for centuries. In Rudy's...

Reviewed by: The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages by Thomas Forrest Kelly Katherine Hindley scrolls, manuscript studies, drama, legal history, medieval Europe Thomas Forrest Kelly. The Role of the Scroll: An Illustrated Introduction to Scrolls in the Middle Ages. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. 208 pp., fully illustrated in color. $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-393-28503-1. In the standard, simplified narrative of book history, the codex replaced the scroll and is being replaced in turn by the e-book. However, just as the e-book seems unlikely to kill the codex any time soon, the codex did not eliminate the scroll. Although typical medieval examples work differently than ancient scrolls, opening vertically rather than horizontally, the form persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. As Thomas Forrest Kelly points out in The Role of the Scroll, it persists even now: the scrolling action of online reading recalls the continuous text of a scrollformat manuscript. Placing the scroll (Kelly's preferred term) at the center of his investigation of medieval manuscript culture reasserts the importance of this neglected form. Kelly's preface sets out two key goals for the book. First, he aims to provide "an exploration, a set of highlights of some of the most interesting scrolls in medieval history, [putting] them in the context of the people who made them, commissioned them, and used them" (xiii). Second, he aims to answer the question, "Why make a scroll when you could make a book?" (xiii). The primary focus is on manuscripts produced in medieval western Europe, although the introductory chapter has a broader geographical and chronological reach, discussing scrolls om Asia, A ica, and the ancient world. The rest of the book is divided into chapters according to possible reasons for making scrolls: those that grow, those that represent continuous space or time, those used for performance, those intended for private or secret use, and those used in the conduct of a ritual. As Kelly notes, more than one of these reasons might apply to any given manuscript. Each chapter consists primarily of short case studies of particular manuscripts or manuscript types that illustrate that chapter's key reason [End Page 343] for choosing a scroll over a codex. The manuscript discussions provide glimpses of life in medieval Europe: scrolls containing the recipe collection The Forme of Cury introduce information about spices and feasting, for instance, while scroll-format inventories of New Year's gifts received in Elizabethan England spark paragraphs on gift exchange at court. The book therefore serves as a series of windows onto medieval European culture. This is both positive and negative in terms of Kelly's goals. It provides a clear and lively impression of the range of areas in which scrolls were used and, for a nonspecialist reader, an engaging introduction to an unfamiliar period. However, it also moves the focus om form to text, meaning that the emphasis on why to choose a scroll can be lost. The general reasons Kelly proposes for making scrolls are useful, and it is clear om the wealth of examples he provides that these are categories into which many surviving scrolls fall. However, the book's goal of showcasing especially interesting and extraordinary examples of scrolls is to some extent contradictory to its goal of explaining why a scroll might be made, since any explanation for why scrolls were chosen over codices requires equal attention to the most typical of surviving examples. While the reader is given a very welcome introduction to the richness of the scroll form, the book's arguments about individual scrolls occasionally fail to differentiate between things a scroll can do, and things a scroll can do that a codex cannot. For example, scrolls are said to be appropriate for recipe collections "partly because [the scroll] can grow, and partly because it can be opened to the recipe wanted" (53). While the possibility of extending a scroll may be important in the choice of form, it is surely not realistic to suggest that a scroll can be more easily opened to the desired recipe than a codex. A similar...

Although writing was ultimately to transmute oral performance into quite new genres, nevertheless, even after the introduction of writing, oral mindsets and ways of expression have persisted in literary works everywhere, from antiquity to the present day. For centuries literature carries a very heavy residue of what I have styled primary orality, the pristine orality of cultures with no knowledge of writing. This residue notably diminishes from the age of Romanticism on, although it never entirely disappears. Therefore, literary history must show some awareness of orality-literacy interactions, past and present. In the European Middle Ages interactions between orality and literacy reached perhaps an all-time high. The Middle Ages had no print, though they prepared the way for it. In medieval manuscript culture, books were subtly assimilated more to oral utterance and less to the world of physical objects than they are in a high-technology print culture. (This is perhaps one reason why deconstructionists typically analyze texts composed for printing, not pretypographic manuscript texts.) Manuscripts were commonly read aloud or sotto voce even when the reader was alone. Speed reading was of course impossible, so why not vocalize? Vocalization helped the reader to absorb the full meaning (not simply some logocentric meaning), to eat the words, as Jousse has explained in La Manducation de la parole. 1 In early print even typeset words tended in significant ways to be managed not as visual units but as sound units.2

This article examines the relationship between the erudite hermit Peter Damian (c.1007–1072) and the abbey of Montecassino through a study of the manuscripts of his works housed in the abbey's scriptorium. Damian was a prolific writer and reformer whose ideas on spiritual perfection helped to shape the ideals of the ‘Gregorian Reform’ movement in the eleventh century. Through nurturing important relationships with monasteries such as Montecassino, Damian was able to articulate his ideas on monastic behaviour and how they translated into practice. Damian's correspondence with Montecassino revealed his thoughts on the connection between the eremitic and coenobitic vocations and how monks might ascend the spiritual hierarchy. A study of the manuscripts of Damian's letters reveals how the monks at Montecassino read and responded to those texts which were not only addressed to their community but also to other institutions. Whilst recent studies have informed historians about the nature of the spiritual life at Montecassino in the Middle Ages, and also of certain aspects of Damian's connection with the institution, to date there has been no study of the Damian manuscripts for what they can reveal of this complex spiritual relationship. This article therefore aims to contribute to recent scholarship on this issue whilst also seeking to shed light on the manuscript culture of eleventh-century monastic reform institutions.

Medieval English Manuscripts:

This paper reviews the changes and improvements in the design of Khuff Well completions in Bahrain; functions of the components will be emphasized and their performance evaluated. In general, there have been three basic completion designs. Early wells have 5" liner Cemented across the Khuff zones with 5" tubing tied back from the liner to the surface. Subse quent wells were completed with 7" casing with a mechanical set seal bore packer and 5" tubing anchored to it. The latest group of wells are equipped with hydraulic set packers and the tubing is tied back through a floating seal assembly to allow for movement. All designs use various configurations of landing nipples below and above the liner or packer seal assembly. Early designs also utili zed a sliding side door sleeve (circulating device) above the seal assembly. The later designs incorporate a landing nipple below a perforated pup in the tail section for flowing bottom hole pressure measurements.

This essay examines why online availability should not be conflated with accessibility in discussions of the digital humanities and medieval studies. Expert-oriented projects and discussions of the digital humanities in medieval Iberian studies tend to get “lost in collation.” These projects lose sight of the promises of democratization and accessibility that the digital humanities community values in favor of the traditional demands of philology.

Over the last few years, the Federal Institute for material research (BAM, Berlin) together with the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC, University of Hamburg) have initiated a systematic material investigation of black inks produced from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (ca. fourth century CE–fourteenth/fifteenth centuries CE), aimed primarily at extending and complementing findings from previous sporadic studies. Part of this systematic investigation has focused on Egyptian Coptic manuscripts, and the present preliminary study is one of its outputs. It centres on a corpus of 45 Coptic manuscripts—43 papyri and 2 ostraca—preserved at the Palau-Ribes and Roca-Puig collections in Barcelona. The manuscripts come from the Monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit, one of the largest monastic settlements in Egypt between the Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic Period (sixth–eighth centuries CE). The composition of their black inks was investigated in situ using near-infrared reflectography (NIRR) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF). The analyses determined that the manuscripts were written using different types of ink: pure carbon ink; carbon ink containing iron; mixed inks containing carbon, polyphenols and metallic elements; and iron-gall ink. The variety of inks used for the documentary texts seems to reflect the articulate administrative system of the monastery of Bawit. This study reveals that, in contrast to the documents, written mostly with carbon-based inks, literary biblical texts were written with iron-gall ink. The frequent reuse of papyrus paper for certain categories of documents may suggest that carbon-based inks were used for ephemeral manuscripts, since they were easy to erase by abrasion.

The turn to materiality as an increasingly important element of the study of the Middle Ages both emerges from and responds to a range of intellectual and epistemological trends over the last forty years or so. One field which might provide fertile ground for the centering of such questions is precisely that of digital textual editing, both because of advances in the theory of critical editing and because the digital mode may offer alternative spaces to accommodate material aspects of manuscript culture to those of printed editions. In what follows then, I aim to review what digital critical editing of iberomedieval works has done so far, and what the future might hold for materiality in digital iberomedievalism.

This introduction presents the second part of a themed issue on Moving Jobs: Occupational Identity and Motility in the Middle Ages, whose first part appeared in volume 20 (2024). It discusses the advantages of considering the concept of motility to investigate the combination of movement and occupation, and its reflection on identity construction. Some of the issues that the contributions to both parts have addressed include how mobility could have important consequences on social advancement and the shaping of identities; the kinds of networks that helped the movement of individuals and were created by them; the importance of micro-mobilities and the local horizon of the medieval communities. The introduction also summarises the contents of the three new contributions. Irene Bavuso investigates the mobility of smiths in early post-Roman England; Robert Portass focuses on local mobilities in rural societies of tenth-century northern Spain; Joe Glynias concentrates on the highly mobile career and multiple identities of the eleventh-century intellectual Ibn Buṭlān. The introduction concludes with some reflections on how to approach female work and mobility – a theme that has been traditionally less visible in early medieval scholarship, and for which one may profit from theoretical refinements and well as from a cross-disciplinary broadening of the pool of investigated sources.

This chapter examines the relationship between swords and chivalric culture in the high Middle Ages. It brings together the implications of literacy with the symbolic meaning of material objects to build an understanding of the cultural shaping of warrior identity. At the same time, as the economy expanded, new material means were available to represent a man and advertise his status in public ways. In other words, more swords came into a world where signs of identity were needed that could represent a man in his absence, and where documents but also other objects — seals, coats of arms — proliferated. The question is: what role did swords have; how were swords unique among such signs? Now required for knighthood, swords were both more and less than a weapon, but in ways rather different from swords in earlier centuries. It is the political valence of swords that dominated their use in ceremony and image in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. Thus, knights' swords existed on a continuum with swords imagined as symbols of rule.

The four-volume sub-series ‘Petrifying Wealth’ explores the sudden ubiquity of masonry construction between 1050 and 1300 in Southern Europe and its profound effect on the European landscape. New questions about wealth, society, and medieval building are explored, which highlight the link between construction in durable materials and the shaping of individual, collective, and territorial identities: the birth of a new, long-lasting panorama, epitomising the way we see the space and territory of Europe today. Volume 4 investigates the ‘petrification of wealth’ during the central Middle Ages across the lands of present-day Spain, Italy, and France from perspectives of art history, visual and material culture, and history. Through both focused case studies and broad-ranging comparative surveys, the book explores innovative approaches to existing works in stone as well as architectural imagery. Some of the foundational ideas on which this volume builds are individual and collective investment in significant stone undertakings; memory and identity within networks of patronage, gender, and power; implications of spaces and topographies — real or imagined — for works in stone; impacts of violence on construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction; and representations of stone monuments through other forms of cultural manifestations, whether visual, material, or textual.