Introduction Reading Medieval Books And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet''s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. -- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night''s Dream (5.1.14-17) Theseus''s well-known words from A Midsummer Night''s Dream offer a theory of literary creation precisely balanced between the transcendent and the physical. They describe the ongoing materialization of "things unknown" into "bodies" and "forms," and thence into "shapes." The initial mechanism for this embodiment is imagination, the faculty of mind whereby, according to premodern explanations of the physiology of the brain, sensory impressions create images that can be combined and recombined through the aid of memory. But the immaterial forms of unknown things are embodied equally in another way. By virtue of the "poet''s pen"--that is to say, literary language realized through the instrument of its recording--new ideas become enmeshed in words, and they take up a position in space: they are given a tangible presence.

Moreover, written language gives to "airy nothing" a particular kind of "local habitation" in books, which provide the material context for literary expression. The pens of poets not only provide a language for the communication of ideas; they also give these ideas a powerful physical existence in the world. Medieval texts, in particular, are not disembodied but take their meaning in part from the physical forms in which their original readers encountered them. These physical forms are manuscripts : literally, texts written by hand (Latin, manu scriptus ) on any kind of surface. Unlike the productions of print culture, each manuscript is a unique creation of human hands, visibly distinct from any other in its material and textual embodiment. This uniqueness makes it easy to see that a medieval book is not merely a transparent container for the text it represents; instead, such a book is evidently an artifact, an individually created object whose physical characteristics contribute to or even structure the ideas it transmits. This insight--important for the history of the book in all periods--has particular purchase on manuscript study, for although any book is a material object, whose physicality participates in ways large and small in the creation of its meanings, the singularity of the handwritten manuscript makes the consideration of its forms a necessity. The material forms of the manuscript book carry meanings different from those of print culture.

On the one hand, the physical features of a specific volume seem to mean less than they would in the twenty-first century: Middle English scribes, for example, typically concern themselves so little with conventions of standardized spelling that they may write a word in two different ways on the same page. On the other hand, physical features that seem incidental might mean immensely more: in the absence of a universally agreed-upon critical edition, the particular way in which a poem and its glosses were laid out on a page, or the interactions among different texts contained in one manuscript miscellany, could significantly shape a medieval reader''s experience. Such contextual information is often lost or suppressed in modern printed editions of medieval texts, but recovering it can augment or even change our critical perception of those texts. The study of manuscripts is essential both to understanding the reading culture of the Middle Ages and to interpreting that culture''s productions. Recovering the readings implied by medieval manuscripts is a necessarily interdisciplinary project, including a vast range of different subjects that might be relevant to any particular book: methods of making parchment , the iconography of St. Jerome, the locations of bookshops in Paris, the transformations of royal seals, and foreign influences on Chaucer''s vocabulary--just to name a few. Topics in codicology (or the study of the codex ) include the making of parchment and paper, the sewing of quires , the construction of bindings, and the layout of the page. Paleography sometimes refers to the study of all aspects of old books, but even in its strictest and most literal sense of "old writing," it encompasses a crowd of different scripts extending from Roman capitals in stone inscriptions to the Bastard Secretary common in fifteenth-century manuscripts, not to mention widely divergent habits of abbreviation and correction.

Painstaking editorial and textual criticism are required to present a medieval text in a modern form, for manuscript witnesses often provide conflicting testimony to the work itself. Historical documents and legal instruments such as charters, bulls, or letters can be authenticated through specialized knowledge from the field of diplomatics . The many types of manuscript decoration and illumination require art historical attention to the ways in which medieval books construct meaning through visual means, and the history of musical notation can help to reconstruct performance cues. In short, manuscript studies require the collaboration of many scholarly fields, including but not limited to linguistics (what might in a slightly antiquated mode be called philology ), history, art history, musicology, literature--and even scientific fields such as chemistry and computer science, which have contributed to the compositional analysis of parchments and inks. Each of these disciplines brings its particular skills, its hard-earned knowledge, and most of all its own questions, assumptions, and methodologies to the objects at hand. This book aims to provide a general introduction to manuscript studies for readers whose particular interests lie in medieval literature. The field of medieval literary studies has long depended on manuscripts, of course. The nineteenth-century editions that facilitated the widespread study of medieval texts made explicit their dependence on manuscript evidence.

But that scholarly tradition was primarily textual and philological, concerned with how to reconstruct readable texts from fragmentary remains in order to develop histories of literature and language. More modern editions have typically moved farther from considering the original forms of the texts they encounter. But it is clearer than ever that manuscripts are important to literary analysis. Medieval books provide indispensable contexts for understanding literary culture, and even for establishing (or questioning) the historical parameters of the "literary" itself. Bringing the traditional archival strengths of medieval manuscript studies together with the larger, more synthetic, and theoretical achievements of recent approaches to material texts, this handbook aims to ask such big questions. Reading Medieval Books: Manuscript Studies in the Twenty-First Century What does it mean to read medieval books? To answer this question, it will be helpful to unpack its polyvalent terms, beginning with the first one: What does it mean to read ? On one level, this book is concerned with reading medieval books as their first users did, in a simple effort to learn what is written down on their pages. Given unfamiliar scripts, myriad scribal idiosyncrasies, and the potential for damage over time, it is not always straightforward in the twenty-first century even to decode the letters on the medieval manuscript page. Even less straightforward is the effort to recapture the experiences of medieval readers.

The present participle in my title-- reading --emphasizes the importance of process to the activity of looking at and interpreting medieval books; a manuscript is not an inert object, but one that comes alive in an interaction with a human mind. The practice of reading may seem uncomplicated at first glance, but wide variations both synchronically and diachronically require careful attention. Any book reads (and thus means) differently at different moments depending on the circumstances under which it is read, differences registered in various modes of engagement we might describe as "perusing," "consulting," "skimming," "scanning," "reciting," "examining," "inspecting," "meditating," "deciphering," "studying." Moreover, medieval encounters with books, as scholars have worked to discover, were sometimes shaped by cultural expectations and habits different from those that shape modern reading. When a medieval "reader" is not a person sitting still in a quiet room alone, but rather a listener moving through a crowded and noisy hall, we have to reconsider how broadly the activity can be defined. As modern readers of medieval books, we must interest ourselves in reconstructing the historical encounter with a text, even if we will never be able to replicate it in every way. With necessary respect for the historical distance that separates us from medieval readers, this book is also concerned with "reading" medieval books in the sense of "interpreting" them: what do manuscripts tell us fundamentally about the meanings of texts? If it is true that medieval texts cannot be properly understood without recourse to their physical contexts, what do those contexts reveal? Historical processes of interpretation are even more difficult to imagine and reconstruct than modern ones, but the physical shapes of manuscripts can provide some clues to how their original readers used them. Manuscripts shape their readers'' understanding through paratexts that might include indexes, explanatory glosses , or visual elements such as layout and decoration.

Manuscripts also reveal their readers'' understanding through marginalia , corrections, notes, and other physical traces of medieval reader.