Material Middle English: Resources and Further Reading
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Palaeography Resources

There are some very helpful online resources for learning palaeography and the history of the book. These include

Manuscript Resources

There are more digitizations of medieval manuscripts online every day. I still maintain a list I started many years ago (and link to it below), but it has become completely unwieldy. Here are some places you can start.

Additional Reading

What follows is a list of additional readings, keyed to the critical readings in the syllabus. The list is NOT exhaustive; it is a beginning only, but it should accomplish a few things. First, by embedding the week’s chosen reading(s) in a set of related readings, it will give you some sense of the context in which our chosen readings exist - you can use this list to begin to construct a historical background/ chronology for a particular approach, for example. Second, by offering more examples of manuscript-based approaches to particular texts, it should help to get you started on your final project. Third, it will give you some additional names to search as you do research for your final project; in most cases, the people listed below have published much more than is listed here, and if you like one piece by someone on the list, there’s an excellent chance that their other work will appeal to you as well.

January 10

The chapters by Gameson and Brown are both drawn from The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. This multi-volume set offers invaluable background for manuscript studies (and for the history of the British book more generally). All the volumes are available online through our library; access them from the overview page. The relevant volumes for our purposes are

  • Volume 1, c. 400 - 1100
  • Volume 2, 1100 - 1400
  • Volume 3, 1400 - 1557

Brown is also the author of some useful “guidebooks” to manuscripts and palaeography:

  • Brown, Michelle P. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990
  • Brown, Michelle P. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms. London: British Library, 1994

Also in the background/ overview category is

  • Alexander, Jonathan J.G. Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992

We are not looking at Old or Early Middle English manuscripts, except in the background palaeography bootcamp, but here are a few good manuscript-focused, relatively recent books and articles, should you wish to explore this period more.

  • Foys, Martin. “A Sensual Philology for Anglo-Saxon England.” postmedieval 5.4 (2014): 456 - 72
  • Foys, Martin. Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007
  • Treharne, Elaine. Living through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020 - 1220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012

Foys also has an essay (as do I, and others on our reading list) in

  • Johnston, Michael, and Michael van Dussen, eds. The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015

And Treharne’s many credits include a piece in the manuscript-aware Cambridge history of early English:

  • Lees, Clare A., ed. The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013

If you are interested in the growth of documentary culture in the post-Conquest period, the still-classic study, now in its third edition, is

  • Clanchy, Michael T. From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066 – 1307. 3rd edition. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013

January 17

We are reading only one chapter of Daniel Wakelin’s book, but the whole thing might interest you, as might the catalogue of an exhibition he recently curated:

  • Wakelin, Daniel. Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375 - 1510. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014
  • Wakelin, Daniel. Designing English: Early Literature on the Page. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2018

He is also one of two editors of a standard overview book on manuscripts in England:

  • Gillespie, Alexandra, and Daniel Wakelin, eds. The Production of Books in England 1350 - 1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011

The above book updates the still-useful classic,

  • Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375 - 1475. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989

Mouvance and variance are terms used to describe medieval textual culture. Their origins can be found in

  • Cerquiglini, Bernard. Éloge de la variante. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989. Translated as In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999
  • Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972. Translated as Toward a Medieval Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992

The terms often appear these days in discussions of the intersection of textual theory and the digital humanities. Places to look for studies of this sort include the journals Digital Philology and postmedieval

January 24

There are many articles that consider the place of medieval manuscripts in modern archives and in the digital realm. Some are written by archivists, librarians, and digital humanists; some by textual and literary scholars, art historians, and so on. A few recent examples:

  • Bamford, Heather, and Emily C. Francomano. “On Digital-Medieval Manuscript Culture: A Tentative Manifesto.” Digital Philology 7.1 (2018): 29 - 45
  • Burns, Jasmine Elizabeth. “Digital Facsimiles and the Modern Viewer: Medieval Manuscripts and Archival Practice in the Age of New Media.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 33.2 (2014): 148-167
  • Nolan, Maura. “Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation:: Reading Manuscripts in the Digital Age.” The Chaucer Review 47.4 (2013): 465 - 76
  • Stoltz, Michael. “Copying, Emergence, and Digital Reproduction: Transferring Medieval Manuscript Culture into an Electronic Edition.” Digital Philology 6.2 (2017): 257 - 87

Some of the medieval material we viewed in RBSC came from Books of Hours. A fascinating recent art-historical study of such books is

  • Rudy, Kathryn M. Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015

January 31 - February 28: John Gower, Confessio Amantis

While it’s nothing like the overwhelming Chaucer bibliography, there is a great deal of critical work on Gower. You can find annotated descriptions of many things in The Gower Bibliography Online. There are also entries for both Gower and Chaucer in the Oxford Bibliographies Online, to which our library subscribes. For general background, see

  • Echard, Siân, ed. A Companion to Gower. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004
  • Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, Brian W. Gastle, and R.F. Yeager, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower. London: Routledge, 2017

January 31

The question of the production and revision of the Confessio manuscripts has a long history. Early versions are represented by the introductions and manuscript descriptions in G.C. Macaulay’s scholarly edition of Gower’s work, and in the early chapters of John Fisher’s study of Gower:

  • Gower, John. Complete Works, edited by G.C. Macaulay. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899 - 1902
  • Fisher, John. John Gower, Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer. New York: New York University Press, 1964

The classic essay on urban production of Gower manuscripts is

  • Parkes, Malcolm B., and A.I. Doyle. “The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century.” In Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon, 1991), pp. 201 - 48

Malcolm Parkes revisited the topic on his own:

  • Parkes, Malcolm. “Patterns of Scribal Activity and Revisions of the Text in Early Copies of Works by John Gower.” In New Science out of Old Books: Manuscripts and Early Printed Books: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doyle, edited by Richard Beadle and A.J. Piper (London: Scolar, 1995), pp. 81 - 121

The article we read by Joel Fredell summarizes more recent reconsiderations of the question of scribal and authorial revision. You might also be interested in

  • Fredell, Joel. “Reading the Dream Miniature in the Confessio Amantis.” Medievalia et Humanistica 22 (1995): 61 - 94
  • Grady, Frank. “Gower’s Boat, Richard’s Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002): 1 - 15
  • Nicholson, Peter. “Gower’s Revisions in the Confessio Amantis.” The Chaucer Review 19.2 (1984): 123 - 43
  • Nicholson, Peter. “Poet and Scribe in the Manuscripts of Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” In Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, edited by Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 130 - 42
  • Nicholson, Peter. “The Dedications of Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” Mediaevalia 10 (1988): 159 - 80

February 7 and 21

The function and impact of the different parts of Gower’s multilingual pages has often been discussed. Some examples include

  • Coleman, Joyce. “Lay Readers and Hard Latin: How Gower May Have Intended the Confessio Amantis to be Read.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 209 - 34
  • Echard, Siân.“Dialogues and Monologues: Manuscript Representations of the Conversation of the Confessio Amantis.” In Middle English Poetry: Texts and Tradition: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, edited by Alastair Minnis (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 57 - 75
  • Echard, Siân.“Last Words: Latin at the End of the Confessio Amantis.” In Interstices: Studies in Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A.G. Rigg, edited by Richard Firth Green and Linne R. Mooney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), pp. 99 - 121
  • Echard, Siân.“Pre-Texts: Tables of Contents and the Reading of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” Medium Aevum 66.2 (1997): 270 - 87
  • Echard, Siân.“With Carmen’s Help: Latin Authorities in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” Studies in Philology 95 (1998): 1 - 40
  • Emmerson, Richard K. “Reading Gower in a Manuscript Culture: Latin and English in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Confessio Amantis.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 143-186
  • Pearsall, Derek. “The Organisation of the Latin Apparatus in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: The Scribes and their Problems.” In The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya, edited by Takami Matsuda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 99-112
  • Urban, Malte. “Gower Out of Time and Place.” postmedieval 9 (2018): 303 - 17
  • Wetherbee, Winthrop. “Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition.” In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, edited by R.F Yeager (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1991), pp. 7 - 35
  • Yeager, R.F. “English, Latin, and the Text as ‘Other’: the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower.” Text 3 (1987): 251 - 67

February 28

The Trentham manuscript, discussed in the reading by Sobecki, has recently become a subject of interest; see:

  • Bahr, Arthur. “Reading Codicological Form in John Gower’s Trentham Manuscript.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 219 - 62
  • Bahr, Arthur. Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013
  • Barrington, Candace. “The Trentham Manuscript as Broken Prosthesis: Wholeness and Disability in Lancastrian England.” Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media 1.1 (2013), np

You might also be interested in another article by Sobecki:

  • Sobecki, Sebastian. “A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.” Speculum 92.3 (2017): 630 - 60

March 7 - 21: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

The Chaucer bibliography is overwhelming. There are many companions, handbooks, and bibliographical guides; here I want to list only two things that I think might be particularly helpful.

March 7

Linne Mooney’s connecting of Scribe B, the scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts, with Adam Pinkhurst, led to a great deal of attention to these manuscripts, to Adam Pynkhurst, and to the question of Chaucer’s relationship to the manuscripts of his work. See, for example,

  • Edwards, A.S.G. “Chaucer and ‘Adam Scriveyn’.” Medium Aevum 81.1 (2012): 135 - 38
  • Gillespie, Alexandra. “Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam.” The Chaucer Review 42.3 (2008): 269 - 83
  • Horobin, Simon.“Adam Pinkhurst, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.” The Chaucer Review 44.4 (2010): 351 - 67
  • Horobin, Simon. “Compiling the Canterbury Tales in Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts.” The Chaucer Review 47.4 (2013): 372 - 89
  • Horobin, Simon. “The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College MS 244 Reconsidered.” Review of English Studies 60.245 (2009): 371 - 81. There is a response to this article: Fletcher, Alan J. “What Did Adam Pynkhurst (Not) Write?: A Reply to Dr. Horobin.” Review of English Studies 61.252 (2010): 690 - 710
  • Mooney, Linne R., and Estelle Stubbs. Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375-1425. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2013
  • Roberts, Jane. “On Giving Scribe B a Name and a Clutch of London Manuscripts from c. 1400.” Medium Aevum 80.2 (2011): 247 - 70
  • Warner, Lawrence. “Scribes, Misattributed: Hoccleve, Pinkhurst, and Manuscript Production beyond the Guildhall.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 55 - 100
  • Warner, Lawrence. Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384 - 1432. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. (We read one chapter of this book, but the whole thing addresses these issues)

The question of urban production of manuscripts of Chaucer and his contemporaries was already a focus of scholarship before the identification of Scribe B. In addition to the work by Parkes and Doyle listed above for Gower, see, for example,

  • Bowers, John M. “Two Professional Readers of Chaucer and Langland: Scribe D and the HM 114 Scribe.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 113 - 46
  • Hanna, Ralph. London Literature, 1300 - 1380. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005
  • Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn and Steven Justice. “Scribe D and the Marketing of Ricardian Literature.” In The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, edited by Maidie Hilmo and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Victoria: English Literary Studies, 2001), pp. 217-237
  • Stubbs, Estelle. “Here’s One I Prepared Earlier”: The Work of Scribe D on Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 198.” Review of English Studies 58.234 (2007): 133 - 53

March 14

The piece on gaps in manuscripts connects to discussions of the order of the Canterbury Tales. There is a long bibliography on the ordering of the Tales, going back centuries. I’ve limited myself here to a few older pieces that exemplify or offer useful summaries of the state of the debate in the past, and to some newer pieces that revisit the issue through attention to particular manuscripts.

  • Baker, Donald C. “The Bradshaw Order of the Canterbury Tales: A Dissent.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 63.4 (1962): 245 - 61
  • Benson, Larry D. “The Order of the Canterbury Tales.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 77 - 120
  • Dempster, Germaine. “The Fifteenth-Century Editors of the Canterbury Tales and the Problem of Tale Order.” PMLA 64.5 (1949): 1123 - 42
  • Hammond, Eleanor Prescott. “On the Order of the Canterbury Tales: Caxton’s Two Editions.” Modern Philology 3.2 (1905): 159 - 78
  • Higl, Andrew. Playing The Canterbury Tales: The Continuations and Additions. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012
  • Horobin, Simon. “Additional 35286 and the Order of The Canterbury Tales.” The Chaucer Review 31.3 (1997): 272 - 78
  • Partridge, Stephen. “Minding the Gaps: Interpreting the Manuscript Evidence of the Cook’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale.” In The English Medieval Book: Essays in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, edited by A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 51 - 85
  • Partridge, Stephen. “Questions of Evidence: Manuscripts and the Early History of Chaucer’s Works.” In Writing After Chaucer: Essential Readings on Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, edited by Daniel Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 1 - 26
  • Pratt, Robert A. “The Order of The Canterbury Tales.” PMLA 66.6 (1951): 1141 - 67
  • Spencer, Matthew, Barbara Bordalejo, Li-San Wang, Adrian C. Barbrook, Linne R. Mooney, Peter Robinson, Tandy Warnow, Christopher J. Howe. “Analyzing the Order of Items in Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales.” Computers and the Humanities 37.1 (2003): 97 - 109

March 21

Here are a few pieces on the glosses in manuscripts of Chaucer’s work.

  • Baechle, Sarah. “Multi-Dimensional Reading in Two Manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde.” The Chaucer Review 51.2 (2016): 248 - 68
  • Benson, C. David, and Barry Windeatt. “The Manuscript Glosses to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” The Chaucer Review 25.1 (1990): 33 - 53
  • Caie, Graham D. “The Significance of the Early Chaucer Manuscript Glosses (With Special Reference to The Wife of Bath’s Prologue).” The Chaucer Review 10.4 (1976): 350 - 60
  • Partridge, Stephen. “Wynkyn de Worde’s Manuscript Source for the Canterbury Tales: Evidence from the Glosses.” The Chaucer Review 41.4 (2007): 325 - 59
  • Tinkle, Theresa. “The Wife of Bath’s Marginal Authority.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32 (2010): 67 - 101

Here are two more pieces on the manuscript presentation of Sir Thopas:

  • Brantley, Jessica. “Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas.” The Chaucer Review 47.4 (2013): 416 - 38
  • Tschann, Judith. “The Layout of Sir Thopas in the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge Dd.4.24, and Cambridge Gg.4.27 Manuscripts.” The Chaucer Review 20.1 (1985): 1 - 13

And here is a piece that works through the role of manuscript studies in Chaucer studies:

  • Meyer-Lee, Robert.“Manuscript Studies, Literary Value, and the Object of Chaucer Studies.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 30 (2008):1 - 37

March 28 - April 4: Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur

The discovery of the Winchester manuscript in 1934 - with the concomitant realization that its text differed from that of William Caxton’s printing - began a conversation/ controversy over the state of the text that continues to this day. Here are some more studies that focus on the Winchester manuscript, and/ or the early printings of the Morte.

  • Clark, David C. “Hearing and Reading Narrative Divisions in the Morte Darthur.” Arthuriana 24.2 (2014): 92 - 125
  • Eddy, Nicole. “Annotating the Winchester Malory: A Fifteenth-Century Guide to the Martialism, the Marvels, and the Narrative Structure of the Morte Darthur.” Viator 42.2 (2011): 283 - 305
  • Evans, Murray J. “The Explicits and Narrative Division in the Winchester MS: A Critique of Vinaver’s Malory.” Philological Quarter 58.3 (1979): 263 - 81
  • Field, P.J.C. “Malory and his Scribes.” Arthuriana 14.1 (2004): 31 - 42
  • Hellinga, Lotte, and Hilton Kelliher.“The Malory Manuscript.” British Library Journal 3 (1977): 91 - 113
  • Kato, Takako. “Towards the Digital Winchester: Editing the Winchester Manuscript of Malory’s Morte Darthur.” International Journal of English Studies 5.2 (2009): 115 - 32
  • Lumiansky, R.M. “Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, 1947-1987: Author, Title, Text.” Speculum 62.4 (1987): 878 - 97
  • Salda, Michael N. “Caxton’s Print vs. the Winchester Manuscript: An Introduction to the Debate on Editing Malory’s Morte Darthur.” Arthuriana 5.2 (1995): 1 - 4. This is a special issue of the journal, dealing with the debate, so all the pieces are relevant
  • Wade, James. “Malory’s Marginalia Reconsidered.” Arthuriana 21.3 (2011): 70 - 86
  • Wheeler, Bonnie, Robert L. Kindrick, and Michael N. Salda, eds. The Malory Debate: Essays on the Text of Le Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000
  • Withrington, John. “Caxton, Malory, and the Roman War in the Morte Darthur.” Studies in Philology 89.3 (1992): 350 - 66
  • Whetter, Kevin. “Inks and Hands and Fingers in the Manuscript of Malory’s Morte Darthur.” Speculum 92.2 (2017): 429 - 46
  • Whetter, Kevin. The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory’s Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2017. Our library does not own this book, which is why we are reading the piece on the syllabus from Arthuriana, which Kevin tells me is a sort of précis of the argument
  • Wuest, Charles. “Closure and Caxton’s Malory.” Arthuriana 27.4 (2017): 60 - 78
Siân Echard’s home page