Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c. 1350—c. 1500. By Daniel Sawyer

Abstract

Daniel Sawyer’s reading English verse in manuscript, c. 1350‐c. 1500 is a very learned book on manuscript verse texts, wide‐ranging in scope and detailed in analysis, as one would expect from this very promising young scholar of medieval English manuscripts. It breaks away from the usual concentration on canonical Middle English texts by Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, instead drawing most of its examples from analysis of the large corpus of surviving manuscripts of northern religious texts, especially Speculum Vitae and The Prick of Conscience, which were written in the second half of the fourteenth century and, he argues, influenced the structures and rhymes of the canonical texts that circulated mostly after 1400. From the many surviving manuscripts of these texts of religious instruction Sawyer finds material evidence of the expected reading habits of the medieval audience: size and shape indicate which books were intended for oral reading from a podium, which were sized and weighted for greater portability for individual or household use, which were more likely to remain in one place, possibly chained for many readers to access them. He studies navigational aids external to the text such as summaries, tables of content, and indexes, and internal aids such as running titles, marginal headings, and marginal notes. These navigational aids, he argues, were probably supplied by the authors, while the external aids, including tabs, strings, and bookmarks, were probably added by users. Most are indicators of expected reading rather than actual reader responses to the verse. There are exceptions as, for instance, where a reader supplies a summary verse to the flyleaf in one copy of The Prick of Conscience. Sawyer reports that he has found few marginal annotations in these manuscripts, and he extrapolates from this that verse texts seldom attracted marginal comments.