Manuscript Organization and Female Readership: Reading the Naples Manuscript

Abstract

This article examines the layout and organization of the Naples manuscript “Vittorio Emanuele III,” MS XIII.B.29 to argue not only that the intended readership of the manuscript was predominantly female but also that it deliberately guides those readers towards the themes of various kinds of healing. The medieval recipes at the beginning connect to the medical sub-themes in the romance and the saint’s life that follow. These tales and the recipes also contain themes of childbirth, marriage, and family, and this is continued with the trials of the illegitimate son of Gawain, Libious Desconious, and the broken families of Sir Isombrase and Grisilde in the following texts. The opening medical recipes, which to modern sensibilities seem generically anomalous in a book containing romances and saint’s lives, in fact “anticipate the kind of female agency which the subsequent narratives exemplify.”