Rhyming

This chapter investigates manuscript evidence for readers’ attention to one particular aspect of form, rhyme. The chapter begins by examining occasions when scribes copied Middle English verse in unusual layouts with atypical lineation, because such occasions drove scribes to punctuate the structures of poems more explicitly. The resulting punctuation reveals that scribes often read, and expected other readers to read, cycles of rhyme, not individual lines, as the basic building-blocks of rhyming verse. The chapter then turns to the evidence of rhyme braces. Manuscript case-studies show that readers were usually adept and accurate when adding rhyme braces, but did not always choose to represent the actual rhyme. Their decisions reveal an aesthetic interest in balanced and unbalanced structures in rhyme, which helps to explain the effects and pleasures offered by some unbalanced stanza forms of the period, such as rhyme royal. A systematic quantitative survey of the braces in long poems written in couplets then shows how much care and labour was spent representing rhyme accurately even in copies of poems which modern scholarship has tended to regard as essentially utilitarian texts. Readers had, it is suggested, a strong formalist interest in rhyme in all kinds of rhyming verse. The evidence also demonstrates that different readers could pursue different kinds of formalism, and that poets did not always see eye to eye with the readers who eventually absorbed and transmitted poetry.

Navigating

This chapter explores navigation in the reading of later Middle English verse, examining how readers entered books of poetry and how they moved around within poems. The chapter explores the varying fates of the navigational apparatus in different poems, and discusses the use and, sometimes, creation by readers of summaries, tables of contents, and indexes to English poems. A quantitative survey of fixed bookmarks offers a new method for recovering readers’ movements. Finally, the chapter examines how navigation could obscure the distinctions between individual texts and whole books, and could sometimes be used by later-medieval readers to manipulate attribution and canonicity. Past discussions of navigation in reading have often used a distinction between continuous and ‘discontinuous’ (out of order) reading; this chapter concludes that considerably more fine-grained gradations are visible within these two categories.

‘Diverse folk diversely they demed’

This chapter argues for the variety and vitality of the reading of Middle English verse in the period c.1350–c.1500, drawing on evidence from poems themselves and from surviving evidence of their later-medieval ownership and transmission. Since some of the successful poems used as comparanda for canonical writers in this study might be less familiar to readers, the chapter briefly introduces The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, considering their origins, organization, and internal depictions of reading. It is argued that such long, anonymous poems display interesting variety, not homogeneity. Allusions, provenance evidence from manuscripts, and records in wills and inventories all show how these texts were read in combination with many other types of material, by all kinds of readers and throughout the period, in ways which modern literary history is not necessarily capable of predicting. These findings should, it is suggested, encourage caution in the extrapolation of reading tastes and habits from individual pieces of surviving evidence.

Wider Reading

This chapter summarizes the conclusions of the book, and explores some possible implications for future study in various manuscripts and texts. The manuscript presentation of Piers Plowman for reading is compared to the presentation of The Prick of Conscience, and the resulting similarities and differences illustrate the value of studying the filtration of formal choices through habits in book production. The chapter considers the presence and absence of the marking of rhyme in copies of The Canterbury Tales, and then closes by examining the work of the compiler Robert Thornton as a case study which draws together many of the book’s themes.

Handling

This chapter asks how readers in this period physically handled books containing verse. Handling is explored through three qualities which significantly affect it: size, shape, and weight. The chapter explores some epistemological problems with the concept of size in the study of medieval manuscripts, and then offers the largest quantitative survey yet published of size and shape in manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Size evidence provides a broad overview of the ways in which particular texts might have been read. The shapes of books, meanwhile, appear to have been affected by literary form. The chapter then turns to weight, with the first ever survey of the weight of manuscripts from this period which retain period bindings. This survey reveals that the portability of poetry cannot be inferred simply from size or binding type, but must instead be worked out by considering size, shape, materials, and binding together. The chapter’s conclusions indicate how deeply embedded thought about form and the anticipation of future reading were in the production of manuscripts containing Middle English verse.

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.