Experimenting with the Touch of Medieval Books. Part 2: The Practicalities

What can we learn from practice-led approaches to medieval codicology? Before pursuing my graduate studies in medieval literature, I trained as an illuminator. Over the course of a year, I took practical courses in gilding, pigment-making, and Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and later medieval styles of illumination at the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London. I now work primarily with gold on vellum, coupled with traditional pigments and foraged inks, to create both reproductions of medieval designs and original pieces. My undergraduate studies had already inspired a keen interest in the medieval material text, and it was always the illuminated manuscripts that would catch my eye, with their ability to capture and manipulate the subtle interactions between light, metal, and parchment. It therefore seemed a natural step to learn more about the practical side of the production and decoration of medieval books. I am now academically trained as a medievalist; working with manuscripts on a regular basis, I thus bridge two seemingly overlapping but still quite distinct fields.

Experiential and artistic knowledge of the processes and materials of illumination is very rarely applied to formal academic study. There have been two wonderful collaborations that use the practices of modern working scribes as tools for historical research: that of Patricia Lovett and Michelle Brown, and of Patrick Conner and Cheryl Jacobsen, both of which focus primarily on palaeography and script.[1] I was recently able to take part in a similar collaboration with postdoctoral researcher, Henry Ravenhall, but in our case, with a focus on gold, ink, and pigment in manuscript miniatures. Henry’s work explores the evidence of tactile interactions between readers and their books, and, in particular, instances in which images have been visibly (and often forcibly) erased. Faced with the obvious problem of not being able to test Henry’s hypotheses on actual medieval manuscripts, we decided to put my illumination training to experimental and destructive use, and create a mock-up miniature to rub out.

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Experimenting with the Touch of Medieval Books. Part 1.

How different would studying medieval manuscripts be if we could interact with these books like their earliest readers did? Anxieties about how the digital realm structures relations between people and things, both in medieval studies and beyond, give an urgency to this thought experiment. Books, of course, weren’t (and aren’t) just read: they are experienced through the senses, they are made to occupy certain spaces, they exchange hands, they invite interventions that promise to speak to future readers. Their ‘thing power’ is predicated on a tangibility and mobility that threaten to make way in the two dimensions of the digital image. Medievalists often emphasise the acoustic, tactile, and even olfactory qualities of handling parchment. These are sensations that can be approximated, though not fully replicated, in the reading room. There is, however, a set of more corporeal, even ‘dirty’, reading practices that can only be imagined in relation to these heritage objects. A twenty-first-century reader rubbing, scratching, stroking, or kissing a manuscript illumination doesn’t bear thinking about!

Or does it? Kathryn M. Rudy’s ground-breaking research on the traces of tactile interaction left on medieval books has shown, firstly, how pervasive such practices were, and secondly, how they point to a reader’s, or community of readers’, affectively-charged attachment to a text or image and what it represents or embodies. My postdoctoral project, funded by the British Academy and hosted by the MMLL Faculty in Cambridge, considers the stakes of these haptic practices for manuscripts written in medieval French. How do we read these signs of touch? How do we read with these signs of touch?

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Legacies of Paper: In the Archives and Beyond

Thinking Paper’s 2022 Lent Term Workshop

The Cambridge University Library’s Research and Collections Programme funds a number of incredible research projects: among them, the Thinking Paper project led by Dr. Orietta Da Rold (of the English Faculty) and Dr. Suzanne Paul (of the University Library). Thinking Paper refocuses attention on a medium that in Europe’s premodern era heralded a technological revolution: paper represents an important interdisciplinary conversation between literary scholars, historians of the book, economists, archivists, conservators, curators, artists, material scientists, surface chemists, bioarcheologists, and more. Understanding paper’s historical significance to these fields creates conversation that moves the materiality of the book not just to the forefront of scholarship, but to the center of research focused on the multivalence of a medium that continues to be essential to contemporary study—and life. 

Generating cross-disciplinary conversations was the focus of 2022’s Lent Term Thinking Paper Workshop, entitled ‘Legacies of Paper: in the Archives and Beyond’. By ‘legacy’, we intended to think about paper as an influential medium across multiple contexts ranging from the scientific to the historical to the literary. To engage that conversation from multiple angles, we invited speakers from an array of expert backgrounds to articulate how paper figured in their research. The results were stunning: speakers generously gave papers on early modern economies and class-structures, the contemporary ethics of the archives, new readings of texts like Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall,  and much more.

Title page of the 1616 folio edition, with list of actors opposite.

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Paper Trails: Can Anachronistic Technology Justify Anachronistic Analogies?

Morgan Library MS. M.817 fol.001r

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde focuses its narrative tension through paper: the material itself is essential to the plot of the poem. Troilus both confesses his admiration for Criseyde and later expresses his anxiety about her fidelity through his correspondence. Pandarus’s entire identity is encapsulated by his role as the mediator of these paper communications. Criseyde’s eventual betrayal of Troilus is heralded by her neglect of paper in answering Troilus’s missives. Most striking about paper in this poem, however, is the fact that it is an anachronistic technology at the center of a ‘Troy’ where Martha Rust intriguingly notes that clay tablets would have been in use.[1] Where Orietta Da Rold highlights Chaucer’s deliberate attention to paper itself as a material that underscores both plot and character development while making visible—and tangible—that plot’s most visceral themes,[2] paper is clearly too pivotal for its anachronistic presence to be incidental. This invites the following question: in centering this anachronistic technology, does Troilus and Criseydeinvite further anachronistic engagement? 

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The Pictorial Cycle and Iconographic Practices of Cambridge, University Library, Kk.1.7

MS Kk.1.7 contains The Pilgrimage of the Soul – the Middle English adaptation of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s fourteenth-century poem Le Pèlerinage de l’Âme. All of the extant manuscript copies of the Soul reserve space for illustration, indicating that miniatures played an integral role in the manuscript tradition of the Soul. Close comparison of the scenes chosen for illustration reveals an archetypal programme of illustration. Most copies show preparation or completion of twenty-six scenes, and these scenes show a high degree of consistency in subject and, often, iconography.[i] In Kk.1.7, a total of seventeen scenes are illustrated, and possibly one or two others are missing due to loss. The illustrator made critical decisions not only about which moments of the narrative would receive greater emphasis, but also about the iconography of these scenes, thereby deciding how they were presented and constructing reader responses. 


CUL, Kk.1.7, fol. 1r. Copyright Cambridge University Library
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MS Ee.4.32 and the Case of the Disappearing ‘Pope’

MS Ee.4.32 is datable to s. s.xv2 and contains two texts: The Three Kings of Cologne and the English Prose Brut Chronicle. Renown Brut scholar Lister Matheson asserts that: ‘The Middle English prose Brut survives in more manuscripts than any other Middle English work except the two Wycliffite translations of the Bible’[1]. Matheson’s compiled catalogue of the Brut lists nineteen extant versions of the Latin Brut[2], forty-nine versions of the Anglo-Norman Brut[3], and over one-hundred-seventy versions of the Middle English Brut[4]. For a complete list and location of these manuscripts, please see Matheson’s monograph The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle. 

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Arthur Marotti’s The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England

Arthur F. Marotti’s The Circulation of Poetry in Manuscript in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2021) is a study that examines the transmission and compilation of poetic texts through manuscripts from the late-Elizabethan era through the mid-seventeenth century, paying attention to the distinctive material, social, and literary features of these documents.The study has two main focuses: the first, the particular social environments in which texts were compiled and, second, the presence within this system of a large body of (usually anonymous) rare or unique poems. Manuscripts from aristocratic, academic, and urban professional environments are examined in separate chapters that highlight particular collections. Two chapters consider the social networking within the university and London that facilitated the transmission within these environments and between them. Although the topic is addressed throughout the study, the place of rare or unique poems in manuscript collections is at the center of the final three chapters.The book as a whole argues that scholars need to pay more attention to the social life of texts in the period and to little-known or unknown rare or unique poems that represent a field of writing broader than that defined in a literary history based mainly on the products of print culture.

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An Introduction to Biocodicology and the Beasts 2 Craft Project

The life of a book holds many stories, all leaving an invisible signature trapped in the pages, waiting to be read by those with the keenest eye. However, what if an eye is not enough? Invisible traces have seemed impossible to recover, but this is all changing with recent technological advances available to us. The emerging field of Biocodicology1 offers the tantalising prospect to read these long forgotten biographies, revealing complex stories of use, handling, storage and production.

But why is this relevant? What can we really learn that cannot already be ascertained from reading the text? The value of the materiality of manuscript production cannot be overstated. Understanding the craftsmanship involved in the production of materials, so intrinsically linked to the users themselves, are as much a part of the codex as the words inscribed on the page. Understanding book production in terms of the livestock economies that sustained them, the choice of animals (age, sex, breed), the idocincracies of each skin requiring specialist knowledge of treatment and production. But then there are additional stories imprinted on the completed text, how was it being used? Were these objects of reverence with barely a scratch as proof of their sacred status, or are they everyday books to be used and thumbed and splashed and cleaned? Much the same way as our favourite recipe books contain evidence of the ingredients we use, manuscripts may present similar signatures from their users, a drop of wine here, a stain of milk there, a veritable feast of biomolecules preserved for posterity, lying dormant waiting to be revealed.

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Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop, Easter Term 2019

Friday 3, 10, 17, 24 May, 2-4pm, Milstein Seminar Room, University Library

The Cambridge Medieval Palaeography Workshop is a forum for the discussion of medieval script and scribal practices, and the presentation, circulation and reception of texts in their medieval manuscript contexts. Each workshop focuses upon a particular issue, usually explored through one or more informal presentations and general discussion. All are welcome.

Friday 3 May 2019    ‘The Eloquent Page: Reflections on The Renaissance Reform of the Book in Britain

Dr David Rundle (University of Kent) 

David Rundle introduces his new monograph, The Renaissance Reform of the Book in Britain: The English Quattrocento, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology (2019), highlighting its implications for the study of the late medieval palaeography.

Friday 10 May 2019  ‘Manuscripts as Molecular Archives’

Prof. Matthew Collins (Archaeology, Cambridge/University of Copenhagen) 

This workshop provides an introduction to biocodicology, to the aims and methods of the ERC ‘Beasts to Craft’ project, and to the potential of biomolecular analysis to shed light upon the materials used in the production of medieval written artefacts and the wider economy that provided these resources.   

Friday 17 May 2019  ‘Unpublished Descriptions of the Western Medieval Manuscripts at Cambridge University Library’

Dr James Freeman (Cambridge University Library)

James Freeman draws attention to the numerous largely unpublished cataloguing initiatives of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (by Charles Sayle, M.R. James, B.F.C. Atkinson, H.L. Pink and R.A.B. Mynors), the products of which remain largely unpublished but which are now being formally accessioned into the Library’s archives and made available for consultation by readers.  As well as offering better information than the 19th-century catalogue, these descriptions and their fate prompts reflection upon the role of the librarian as cataloguer in the face of evolving standards of manuscript description.

Friday 24 May 2019  ‘Technologies of Written Communication: The Pragmatics of The Page, East and West’

Dr Imre Galambos (AMES), Prof. Máire Ni Mhaonaigh (ASNC) and Prof. Teresa Webber (History)

This workshop outlines and invites feedback on plans for a project to explore the development of scribal conventions in books produced between the ninth and thirteenth centuries in regions at either end of Eurasia. These two regions and the written artefacts produced in this period present a number of surface similarities which may permit frameworks for comparison. Understanding the differences as well as the similarities in the strategies adopted and transmitted by scribes, and shaped by their particular historical contexts and circumstances, both within and between the two regions may broaden and deepen our understanding of written culture and the dynamics of its development.  

All meetings take place 2-4pm in the Milstein Seminar Room, Cambridge University Library.

Convenors: Teresa Webber, Sean Curran, Orietta Da Rold, David Ganz and Suzanne Paul. 

For further details, email mtjw2@cam.ac.uk

The London International Palaeography Summer school 2019

The London International Palaeography Summer School (LIPSS) at the Institute of English Studies, University of London is now accepting applications for its summer programme. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis until a course is full.

The London International Palaeography Summer School is a series of intensive courses in Palaeography and Manuscript Studies. Courses range from a half to two days duration and are given by experts in their respective fields from a wide range of institutions. 

Courses fees range from Half-Day fees of £50 (standard) and £45 (student), to Five-Day fees of £450 (standard) and £400 (student). The full breakdown of fees can be found here.

Available courses:

10 June 

Introduction to Arabic Scientific Manuscripts (Dr Bink Hallum)

The Development of Penflourishing in late Medieval Manuscripts (Drs Lynda Dennison and Cynthia Johnston) Half-day course AM

The Development of Border Decoration in English Late Medieval Manuscripts (Drs Lynda Dennison and Cynthia Johnston) – Half-day course, PM.

Introduction to English Palaeography, 1500-1900 (Mr Christopher Whittick)

Reading and Editing Renaissance English Manuscripts I (Dr Chris Stamatakis)

11 June 

Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Palaeography (Dr Debby Banham)

Introduction to Middle English Palaeography I (Professor Anthony Edwards)

English Palaeography: the records of criminal justice, 1650-1800 (Mr Christopher Whittick)

Reading and Editing Renaissance English Manuscripts II (Dr Chris Stamatakis)

12 June

Women Patrons, Scribes, and Makers of Medieval Manuscripts (Prof. Clare Lees)

Introduction to Middle English Palaeography II (Professor Anthony Edwards)

1000 Years of Manuscript Production (Patricia Lovett)

Probate records and the historian, 1500-1858 (Mr Christopher Whittick)

An Introduction to Greek Palaeography I (Dr Laura Franco) 

13 June 

The Insular System of Scripts to A.D. 900 (Prof. Julia Crick)

Liturgical and Devotional Manuscripts I (Dr Jenny Stratford and Dr Rowan Watson)

Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Italian Palaeography (Dr Irene Ceccherini and Dr Laura Nuvoloni)

Quills and Calligraphy – a Practical Course (Ms Patricia Lovett)

An Introduction to Greek Palaeography II (Dr Laura Franco)

14 June

Bilingual Manuscripts in England, c.950-1200 (Dr Francisco J. Álvarez López)

Cognitive elements of medieval manuscript layouts: designing and using the folio space (Dr Anna Somfai)

Liturgical and Devotional Manuscripts II (Dr Jenny Stratford and Dr Rowan Watson)

Reading and Editing Medieval Latin Texts (Dr Emily Corran) 

German Palaeography (Dr Dorothea McEwan and Dr Claudia Wedepohl)

The Book of Durrow and the Lindisfarne Gospels in the Context of Early Medieval Europe (Dr Carol Farr)

Further information about the LIPSS can be found on the School’s homepage or through the linkhttps://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/lipss. The application form is available here.

Questions can be directed togeorgia.reeves@sas.ac.uk.

GEORGIA REEVES

POSTGRADUATE ACADEMIC SOCIETIES AND EVENTS ADMINISTRATOR

The Institute of English Studies
Senate House, Malet Street | LONDON WC1E 7HU

georgia.reeves@sas.ac.uk