New Medieval Literatures

During Leofric’s episcopacy, there was an organized programme of manuscript copying in Exeter, for which scribes were trained to write in a similar style. The main scribe of a gospel book, Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii. 2. 11 + Exeter Book folios 0, 1-7, seems to have been a leading figure amongst these scribes. When producing another manuscript, for example, he seems to have written exemplary script for his colleague. This essay also illustrates that a diverse English scribal system was still alive after Leofric in twelfth-century Exeter. The gospel book was designed to function as a record book. Documents added to the beginning and the end of the gospel book display significant variety in the characteristics of the hands. One of the hands suggests possible scribal connections between Worcester and Exeter.

It is often asserted that writing in English had lower status than Latin during the twelfth century. However, palaeographers have generally established the characteristics of lower-grade script by looking at Caroline minuscule used for Latin, and this has lead to vernacular script seeming lower-grade than it probably was. This article seeks to establish new criteria for formality in vernacular script by studying cartularies with charters in Latin but boundary-clauses in English. Differences in scribal practice when writing each language are analysed, and the relationship between the (Latin) bodies and (vernacular) bounds are addressed, particularly in a twelfth-century cartulary from Evesham in which many of the Latin portions of the texts were erased, leaving just the English.

As a feature of manuscript layout, running titles play an important part in restructuring and improving accessibility for English manuscripts at the turn of the eleventh to the twelfth century. The phenomenon seems to be related to the Worcester scriptorium. This article discusses the motivations and procedures used for adding the first running titles to books in English. The evidence shows that, despite the backdrop of Latin books, the development of this new peritextual feature was a learning process, as early running titles still mixed features of proper headings, subtitles or marginal comments, and show uneasy relations with tables of contents.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383 comprises an early twelfth-century collection of Anglo-Saxon law-codes and related texts, including a copy of Cnut’s law-code commonly known as I-II Cnut. This article demonstrates how the supply of red, pen-work initials by the miniator was used to emend the mise-en-page as originally anticipated by the main scribal hand, shows developments in the production methodology throughout the copying and decoration, illuminates a point where the scribe and miniator communicated with each other, and shows how the production and emendation of I-II Cnut were incorporated into the broader contexts of the manuscript and its mise-en-page.

This essay investigates the various influences on how scribes copy charters, focusing in particular on how a scribe’s treatment of the repeated, formulaic noun phrases in charter bounds can provide insight into these influences. The scribes’ treatment of these noun phrases shows that the chief motivation that informs how they copy charter bounds is the purpose for which the copy is being produced. Contrary to the opinion expressed in much scholarship on charter copyists, these scribes’ changes have not resulted in an illegible or unusable text, but have intelligently adapted the bounds to suit the individual purpose of each copy.

London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius C i is a composite manuscript containing scientific and religious texts, made up of two independent elements. The manuscript is predominantly Latin, but each of the elements contains a small amount of Old English: the first contains glosses of the names of the winds; the second, some short homiletic texts, the Pater Noster and an Old English Creed. This essay explores the Old English instances and discusses possible explanations for their presence, arguing that their production may have been of more use to the writers than to any imagined audience.

This article investigates the competition between the two main words for ‘law’, oe and lagu, at the ‘transition’ between Old English and Middle English. Its focus is on five important manuscripts copied from the mid-twelfth century to the turn of the thirteenth: London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D xiv, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Bodley 343 and Junius 1 (The Orrmulum), London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A xxii, and London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487. The study explores the contexts of all the occurrences of oe and lagu in these manuscripts, and asks whether their attestation can be accounted for in terms of processes of textual transmission and/or preferences for particular collocations or stylistic effects, sense, metre, etc.

Although the dialect atlases of late Middle English (LALME) and early Middle English (LAEME) are an essential resource for researchers working on manuscripts containing Middle English, they need to be used with care as a guide to the provenance of these manuscripts; the orderly continuum of dialect features that they represent cannot always be mapped precisely on to the more uneven - and sometimes unpredictable - geographical distribution of actual manuscript production. The paper examines three case studies from the West Midlands where there is an apparent tension between dialect mapping and the probable site of manuscript production.

The analysis of manuscripts in their physical appearance often provides useful evidence for interpreting and reconstructing ways in which books were used in certain contexts. This essay sheds light on the life and activities of the religious community based at Exeter Cathedral in the eleventh century through an examination of books in their form rather than their contents. Many manuscripts were compiled at Exeter in the 1050s, arguably to supply the pastoral and intellectual needs of the cathedral chapter in their support of the bishop’s reforming administration of a since-marginalized diocese. This article explores the life of the Exeter cathedral community in relation to the production of books and related processes. In doing so, it argues that book production at Exeter supported major pastoral and evangelizing actions in which the cathedral community actively engaged.

Oxford, St John’s College, MS 17 is an elegant computus anthology created at Thorney Abbey in Cambridgeshire between about 1100 and 1110. Its content, for the most part, follows a classic template. However, two features offer clues about the motivation behind its production. Contemporary annals in the Paschal tables describe how Thorney Abbey church was being rebuilt during a period of danger and tumult. Its survival and renewal were epitomized by the solemn translation of its Anglo-Saxon relics and the simultaneous arrival of new relics from the East. The manuscript also contains a mappamundi of a distinctively crusading character, but which positions England as entering the orbis terrarum from without. This exceptional manuscript, at once so conservative and so contemporary, reveals how the ‘monastic spiritual encyclopedia’ could be deployed to ‘write England’ at the turn of the twelfth century.

A single manuscript (Oxford, Jesus College, MS 37) from the collection formerly held at St Guthlac’s Priory, Hereford, presents limited evidence (in both its content and its structure) for an ongoing interest in medicine and cures on the part of the priory monks. It is suggested that the manuscript was adapted over time to meet practical considerations arising from the active engagement by the monks (or others acting on their behalf) in ministering to the wider Hereford community. These conclusions, arrived at via an analysis of the manuscript’s key texts, are supported by a consideration of trends in the provision of pastoral care in medieval Hereford.

This article examines the production of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, a manuscript written in the second half of the twelfth Century and comprising Old English and Latin works originally composed before the Norman Conquest. In examining the practices of the two scribes, it is suggested that the process of compilation, accumulation, and aggregation represents an active archival endeavour, an effort that not only preserves and protects but also opens material up to disparate uses. The manuscript’s production, which implies a textual community and institutional support, stands in marked contrast to contemporaneous efforts to produce book collections conforming to dominant Norman or continental models of repositories.

This paper analyses the codicology of post-Conquest manuscripts, with particular reference to the structural make-up of medieval English books.

This essay’s focus is the annotations and marginalia added to three items in Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii. 1 33, which provide traces of reading, response, and reuse. The layering of annotations in this manuscript raises important questions about the boundaries between, and relative status of, the different languages available for writing in England in the second half of the twelfth century. It highlights the centrality of Old English to continuing traditions of writing, reading, and preaching, and its place in developing scholarly traditions.

This paper analyses the script of post-Conquest manuscripts and the scribal traditions evinced in English texts.