Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers’ choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers.

Introduction

This introduction positions the book in relation to past work in the history of reading, introduces the materials and methods used, and lays out brief overviews of the five chapters. The history of reading has an established large-scale narrative which offers little detail on the reading of vernacular poetry in later-medieval England. Readers’ own marginal comments on Middle English verse cannot supply this missing detail, as they are rare at this time, and so mark their writers out as atypical. A combination of methods is proposed for examining a broader range of evidence instead, including close reading and detailed manuscript case studies, but also quantitative surveys inspired by continental European scholarship. Middle English verse does, it is suggested, constitute an identifiable topic. A working taxonomy of canonicity in Middle English poetry is offered, and widely successful anonymous religious instructional poems such as The Prick of Conscience are proposed as useful comparanda for canonical texts. The introduction closes by summarizing what follows.