How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Abstract

In one of the earlier narratives of Carolyn Dinshaw's story-filled How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, a monk in the fourteenth-century Middle English Northern Homily Cycle wins for himself a single moment of heavenly joy. When he emerges from this moment, three hundred years have passed, and the monk is permanently displaced from his home century (44–45). Dinshaw uses this story and other tales of temporal instability to stand for the experience of being an amateur or professional medievalist, attracted to the past, bound to the past, never quite able to touch it, and yet always within reach of it.While How Soon Is Now? focuses on the inaccessibility of (and desire to access) the past, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches, a new guide to Middle English codicology, uses manuscript images and manuscript studies as a way to reclaim narratives about the past and its literatures that are not otherwise accessible. The co-authors Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson teach the skills necessary to engage with manuscripts as books and to follow the cues the books provide about the original goals and values of the books' producers and owners. In the process, they introduce their readers to the patrons, scribes, illuminators, and glossators who participated in the process of producing and reading Middle English manuscripts. Thus both How Soon Is Now? and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts tie the past that we study as scholars to the present in which we study it.Both excellent books raise the following questions, foundational to the process of becoming medievalists: Who are we as readers, and what do we need to do or know to develop our reading skills? What do we read when we read medieval literatures, and what reading practices permit us to engage with the texts we study? How can we reach the past, and why should we try to do so?Who are we, then? As medievalists, we are people fascinated by the past. Carolyn Dinshaw's book embraces amateurs, from antiquarians and historical fiction writers to reenactors, alongside professional medievalists as part of the tribe of people who desire the past. These amateurs, in Dinshaw's argument, take up a particularly medieval stance toward the past, imagined as a space that is both separate from and adjacent to the present. Amateur medievalists resemble the fictional fourteenth-century traveler John Mandeville, whose journey eastward leads him back in time to a biblical Jerusalem, heavy with relics from Christ's era and Moses's, in what Dinshaw calls “a glorious jumble of Christian times” (79). For instance, Henry Yule, a nineteenth-century British public servant who takes on the nom de guerre of Marco Polo while exploring and mapping the world, ties himself to medieval histories of exploration as he extends the boundaries of his own era's British Empire.But even those of us who are professional medievalists are often, in some sense, amateurs. In Dinshaw's richest chapter, “In the Now: Margery Kempe, Hope Emily Allen, and Me,” Dinshaw places herself as the third of three women caught out of time. Margery Kempe, always focused on the Christological time of her visions, as well as the fifteenth-century world in which she lives, prefigures Hope Emily Allen, the first scholar to identify and study Margery Kempe's Book. Once Allen, an independent scholar working with Middle English mysticism, recognizes and begins to edit the Book of Margery Kempe in 1934, she devotes her life to Margery's story. Like Margery herself, Allen is overwhelmed by the enormity of her discoveries. And, like Margery, deeply engaged with Christ as lover, Allen is, Dinshaw implies, too in love with her subject to complete the monograph Allen would write about Margery. This is the love of an amateur, so queerly (a word Dinshaw uses with connotations of both sexual orientation and oddness) passionate about a lost world that it causes the lost world to exist in the present moment. Dinshaw herself admits to sharing both the queer desire for the past and the disoriented sense that she has not always belonged in her own world and time. As such, she shares a kinship with Margery and Allen, and she describes the kinship vividly enough to include her audience in the disoriented, displaced world of amateur scholarship.The audience for How Soon Is Now? includes those professional theorists of the medieval who want to investigate conceptions of time, and it also includes any scholars interested in the history of medievalisms. It is also well suited to amateurs of all sorts who are considering their places in the world and their devotions to their hobbies. Dinshaw has written a delightful book that takes pleasure in its subject; both professional and nonprofessional readers could enjoy and learn from it. Duke has provided a paperback edition, reasonably priced at $23.95, putting the book within reach of purchasers in both categories. While basic knowledge of the past and of the language of literary theory is useful, Dinshaw does not assume any prior reading on the part of her audience. Indeed, very few audience members would know Dinshaw's entire textual field, as she dances from Augustine and Aristotle to M. R. James and Morrissey. Because How Soon Is Now? argues that there is no fundamental distinction between amateur and professional, it welcomes both categories of reader into the book and into the field of medieval studies.Opening Up English Manuscripts does not blur the line between professionals and amateurs. Rather, it is designed specifically for researchers, although this category includes scholars of English literature from the undergraduate level upward. Kerby-Fulton and her fellow authors provide material geared toward both new students of Middle English first learning to explore manuscripts and experienced codicologists looking for recent case studies and new work in the field (xv). Priced at $45.00 for a gorgeously illuminated paperback volume, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts is affordable for undergraduates. It would be an appropriate textbook for a graduate or advanced undergraduate seminar on manuscript studies or the history of the book, especially if accompanied by digital or print facsimiles of manuscripts and, ideally, student access to an archival library. Because the authors have chosen to provide only a brief introduction to manuscript transcription and paleography, teachers of such a course would need to supplement Opening Up with Jane Roberts's Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500 (British Library, 2005) and Malcolm Parkes's classic English Cursive Book Hands, 1250–1500 (Clarendon Press, 1969; reprint, Scolar, 1979). Opening Up English Manuscripts is also especially strong for Middle English specialists who want to enter manuscript studies for the first time. Its focus on manuscripts of canonical texts, including the Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, and the Pearl-poems, alongside the most commonly studied romances and religious and mystical texts, makes it a useful resource for lecturers who wish to incorporate manuscript information into Middle English survey courses.Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts teaches its academic audience a set of methods for reaching the otherwise unreachable past. Manuscript evidence provides multiple ways to learn what contemporary and near-contemporary readers and audiences thought about the texts they read and produced, therefore permitting us as later critics to enter into conversations with earlier groups of readers. In her chapter “Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts,” Kerby-Fulton finds evidence of one attested reader of the Book of Margery Kempe. This reader, a sixteenth-century Carthusian monk who marks the book with red ink, is fascinated especially by the visionary elements of Margery's narrative. Some of these visionary elements, which he finds overly imaginative, the monastic reader crosses out in red. But elsewhere he validates Margery's practice and Margery's choices. The annotator emphasizes the virtue of Margery's husband's vow of marital chastity, writing the words vow and grace in the margin of the folio, in a scene that modern readers more commonly read as evidence of John's reluctance to swear chastity and the charming negotiation in which Margery convinces John to do so (237). By following the annotator's interest in the grace of John's eventual surrender, rather than in the mechanisms of marital debate that led to it, we can refocus our interpretations of the scene, understanding it as near-contemporary readers would have. We travel backward to enter a conversation with the sixteenth-century reader and annotator. Using the evidence of past readership, we look, as Hope Allen looked, back toward Margery's own time and Margery's own life and afterlife. The documentation of the annotator's reading practice makes his time, and before his time, Margery's time, reachable now.One of Linda Olson's chapters in Opening Up, “Romancing the Book: Manuscripts for ‘Everich Inglische,’” similarly helps us consider the scribes and patrons who produced and possessed medieval books, therefore linking the books as artifacts to their lost owners and to us as readers. The evidence Olson provides is often necessarily circumstantial. Especially in her reading of the Auchinleck MS (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19.2.1), Olson intentionally models the process of hypothesizing and testing claims about potential owners and scribes in the absence of absolute proof of provenance. Nevertheless, Olson's suggestive arguments help to contextualize the manuscripts she examines in the cultures from which they emerged, thus giving us glimpses, tantalizingly incomplete, of the lost past. If, as Olson suggests following the work of Thorlac Turville-Petre, the Auchinleck MS was originally owned by the earls of Warwick and their family, then the Auchinleck romance Guy of Warwick helps to honor that family. Conversely, if a middle-class patron-owner, perhaps from the Chaucer family, first owned the book, then we can understand Geoffrey Chaucer's educated mockery of the tropes of chivalric romance in the Tale of Sir Thopas as a response to the Auchinleck MS. But if the Auchinleck MS began as a nursery library educating and entertaining young boys and girls, Olson shows us how to imagine a third potential past. In this version of the past, children of the middle or, more likely, upper classes read, learn from, and even deface the sometimes violent, often exciting, and not infrequently moralistic romances, histories, and saints' lives in the codex. As readers in the twenty-first century, we hold these three pasts in abeyance, looking back at potential histories. We cannot reach the true provenance of the Auchinleck MS, but we can visualize, and dream of, provenances that might or might not have been.Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts is at its strongest when it models the practice and stakes of codicological research, the study of the book as object, in order to help new scholars of manuscripts craft their own arguments. The first full chapter of the book, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's “Major Middle English Poets and Manuscript Studies: 1300–1450,” displays the process and value of studying manuscripts of canonical Middle English texts. Kerby-Fulton shows, for instance, that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's famous bob-and-wheel structure is not nearly as rigorously standardized in London, Cotton Nero MS A.x as in most modern editions. Kerby-Fulton provides multiple color plates from Cotton Nero and comparisons with earlier manuscripts such as London, British Library MS Harley 2253. She uses these plates to show that the bob, or short line, in each Sir Gawain stanza is meant to float and is not necessarily adjacent to the wheel, the quatrain that closes each stanza. “Very often,” she writes, “the bob makes more sense grammatically where it is actually placed in the manuscript, as opposed to where modern editors place it, where it is often awkward, redundant or empty” (62). The case study from Sir Gawain not only helps us as readers rethink and reread the poem. It also provides a demonstration of what to look for on a manuscript page: Do the written words, and their positioning, match up with the words and their layout on the page of the printed edition? If not, why not, and what purpose does the original layout serve? Introductory lessons in transcribing manuscripts, understanding and using codicological terminology, and recognizing and judging the quality of editorial emendations teach beginning researchers the skills necessary to engage with manuscripts, and the rest of the book teaches the importance of engaging with them as a way to access the medieval past.What matters in the medieval past, and which medieval past are we trying to reach? The very different textual fields of Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts and How Soon Is Now? contribute to the books' different stances about what texts we should be reading to reach the past and why we should be reading them. Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson have designed their book around “literary texts most often taught and the manuscripts that contain them” (xv). This means solely Middle English texts, with special emphasis on Chaucer manuscripts, the works of the Pearl-poet, and Piers Plowman, accompanied by analyses of the Auchinleck, Lincoln Thornton, and Findern manuscripts as collections of romances and of medieval vernacular religious writings as collected in monastic libraries.Thus Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts primarily explores codices from the end of the fourteenth through the fifteenth century. One Latin and Old English Rule of St. Benedict from the end of the tenth century represents the entire preconquest period.1 The earlier Middle English period is represented only by one plate from the British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.vi text of the Ancrene Wisse (ca. 1230), in Olson's chapter on monastic manuscripts, and a brief discussion of and single plate from London, British Library, MS Arundel 292 (ca. 1275–1300), opening Kerby-Fulton's chapter on major Middle English poets. Notably absent are earlier multilingual collections with strong Middle English content alongside Latin and French materials. Kerby-Fulton reads London, British Library MS Harley 2253 (ca. 1330) as Opening Up's single representation of trilingual manuscripts of England. The only reference to the earliest manuscript of Laʒamon's Brut (s. xiii1), a codex that also contains the early Middle English debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale along with Anglo-Norman (French) texts including a variant of the “Seven Sleepers legend” and a prose chronicle, misidentifies the manuscript as British Library MS Cotton Caligula A instead of Cotton Caligula A.ix. (190).In other words, while Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts uses manuscript-reading skills to refocus attention on the desires and interests of the original readers and writers of the codices, it still relies on twentieth- and twenty-first-century assumptions of what texts are most important and why. The disciplinary boundaries that separate English literatures from French and Latin literatures are modern rather than medieval; the primary scribe of Harley 2253 moves easily among the three languages. When Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson repeatedly return to the manuscripts of Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, they value these texts above much more commonly circulating and frequently read didactic and religious works such as the extremely popular South English Legendary collection of Middle English saints' lives, which circulated in more than sixty manuscripts from 1280 onward.2 Although Opening Up's focus on Chaucer and Piers could be justified from medieval readers' perspectives by the great fifteenth-century popularity of these texts, Sir Gawain, while magnificent, exists in exactly one manuscript. To say that a thousand times more readers have encountered Sir Gawain in the last 150 years than in the 150 years after the poem's production would be a conservative estimate. By concentrating on the established Middle English canon, the writers of Opening Up maintain present-day conceptions of the literatures of the past, even while using manuscript readings to destabilize these conceptions.How Soon Is Now?'s textual field is much wider than that of Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts, encompassing multilingual, multigenre primary and secondary sources and also, importantly, including critical works and responses to medieval texts as primary sources in themselves. Dinshaw considers Greek and Latin philosophical texts such as Aristotle's Physics and Augustine's Confessions for their theories of time and Middle English homilies and Anglo-Latin story collections for their connections between pasts and presents. But Washington Irving's 1819 Rip Van Winkle is as important to Dinshaw's analyses of lost time as the temporally displaced monk of the Northern Homily Cycle, and the tales of Dinshaw's own visits to Hope Allen's archive at the Bodleian are as worthy of close reading as Allen's work on the Book of Margery Kempe and Margery Kempe's book itself. Dinshaw cannot and does not attempt to handle any of these materials exhaustively. She rarely handles archival material (her work with the letters of Hope Allen is a rare exception) and almost never studies the entirety of a given work. The texts of Aristotle listed in Dinshaw's bibliography are all translations rather than original Greek texts.Dinshaw acknowledges these absences, for instance, noting her discomfort with manuscripts and archival studies as she describes the process of reading Allen's papers (124). She builds her book around a truth that Kerby-Fulton and her colleagues only briefly acknowledge: as much as we try to achieve an authentic record of the past, basing our discoveries on the surviving documentation rather than on our own preoccupations, we cannot fully distinguish our own desires about the past from our discoveries about the past. Dinshaw does not advocate trying to create this distinction. She is particularly interested in the enmeshment of professional and amateur scholars with their objects of study; the moments in which readers in one time observe writers in a different time are productive spaces for Dinshaw's analyses.As she examines this enmeshment, Dinshaw explores the pleasure of moving between the present moment and the past as a medievalist or as an amateur scholar/performer of the Middle Ages. She construes it as a particularly queer pleasure, in that being out of step with one's peers makes one unusual and thus queer. I follow Dinshaw's argument that being caught out of one's own time and therefore out of sync with a “mainstream” human culture is odd. I also see how she argues that being caught out of time is pleasurable and how desiring an inaccessible time is a troublesome desire akin to forbidden or unreachable sexual desires. But using the terminology of queerness to describe these phenomena seems, on one level, appropriative. Dinshaw clearly notes throughout the book that she belongs to queer communities in the sense of sexual orientation, so she is not closing off the meaning of queerness as attraction to members of the same sex or to people who do not fit neatly into sex and gender divisions. By defining desire for another time or space as a form of queerness, Dinshaw stretches the definition of queerness broadly enough to incorporate almost everyone.In the context of Dinshaw's discussion of encounters with the past as pleasurable, I want to mark the sheer aesthetic pleasure of reading Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts. The book includes 353 full-color plates from manuscript pages, whose high quality makes the pages not only legible but stunningly beautiful. We see the glint of gold leaf on illuminated capital letters. We see medieval scripts from the fifteenth-century informal cursives written by a female scribe of the Findern MS (Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.6) to the Anglicana formata of the Trinity Gower (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2). Maidie Hilmo, while contextualizing images from the Vernon MS (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet.a. 1), the Auchinleck MS, the Douce 104 Piers Plowman, and the Pearl manuscript against the rich visual art traditions of French and Latin manuscripts, supplies and closely reads a glorious series of images for readers to enjoy. The image associated with the Vernon MS's story of the priest who lies with a nun, which, as Hilmo points out, actually depicts a black-robed monk seducing a naked man with a tonsure, inspires readers with all of the varieties of queer pleasures recognized by Dinshaw.3 While Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts teaches the serious work of manuscript studies, it permits and encourages its readers to take delight in manuscripts as material records of the past.As both books are focused on moving the past to the present, they inspire this question: How do we reach the temporality of the future? Dinshaw's book, intensely focused on then and now, never attempts to project forward into the future. This is a troubling gap in a book so concerned with theorizing time. When the monk of the Northern Homily Cycle moves into his future, that time becomes the now, and his moment of origin becomes the past, but Dinshaw does not analyze that moment as an experience of the future. How Soon Is Now? looks at the present and backward at the past but never considers what it might mean to desire, or to reach, the future.Kerby-Fulton and her co-authors, as they focus on the materiality of the manuscript and what it can teach us as scholars in the present, do begin to engage with present and near-future technologies of bookmaking along with the past technologies they examine. As Kerby-Fulton notes in her preface, teaching manuscript studies is becoming especially useful because of the increasing access to manuscript images in the digital age: “Even geographical distances are being minimized as digital images of entire collections of manuscripts are mushrooming on the web” (xv). Nevertheless, none of the authors of Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts consider the process of digitizing manuscripts and manuscript collections. When they teach editing theory, as in the mini-essay “Bare Essentials 1: A Transcription Is Not an Edition,” they define editing as “creat[ing] a readable text” but do not examine the work necessary to create and publish such a text (4). The most creative theoretical work in editing in the twenty-first century falls under the field of digital humanities. Recently developed encoding and metadata standards permit editors to link textual transcriptions and manuscript images to additional glosses and background information.4 Meanwhile, easy and relatively inexpensive online publication means that editors can provide digitized manuscripts, in tandem with textual editions, to a much wider array of readers than have ever been able to access the manuscripts before. While Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts does briefly mention the existence of digital facsimiles and digital editions, it would benefit from further exploration of the paradoxical connection between digital models of the book and handmade manuscripts. As Kerby-Fulton and her colleagues do not quite say, the future in which we live makes the materiality of the past accessible.“How soon is now?” asks the title of Dinshaw's book, in the words of a Smiths song. The past, the present, and the future are always “now” for us as scholars. For a further case study linking the past to the present, see Professor Brantley Bryant of Sonoma State University, better known as (on Twitter) @levostregc, the blogger “Geoffrey Chaucer.” In “I Can Hath Cheezburger,” one 2007 blog post, “Chaucer” revisits the Ellesmere illustrations that Maidie Hilmo would read, in 2012, as signs of the growing importance of authorship in the early fifteenth century.5 For Hilmo, the pilgrims' portraits in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library, MS Ellesmere 26 C9) are notable insofar as they identify the narrators of the stories. The pictures serve as author portraits of fictionalized authors and are thus parallel to the actual author portrait of Chaucer himself at the opening of the Ellesmere Tale of Melibee. But the blogger “Chaucer,” whose entire oeuvre plays with the concept of fictionalized authorship, is using the illustrations to play even more complex games with the intersections of the past and the present and of amateur and professional scholarship. Using the trope of the LOLCAT, a meme popular in the late 2000s in which humorous phrases, written in a supposedly feline English grammatical system, are pasted on pictures of cats, “Chaucer” modifies the Ellesmere portraits. On the picture of the famously queer Pardoner, “Chaucer” prints, “im in ur essay / next to judith butler block quote.” This invocation of the scholar Judith Butler, whose work in gender studies is central to queer theory, and of the student essays that use Butler's work to interpret the Pardoner's visual and textual portraits brings professional scholarship together with the amateur field of the Internet meme. It prints the language of the year 2007 on the images of the early fifteenth century. The art of the manuscript is alive and well and living on a blog post, reminding us all of the queer desire that links us, as amateurs and professionals, to the medieval past.