Reading English Verse in Manuscript c. 1350–c. 1500 by Daniel Sawyer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading English Verse in Manuscript c. 1350–c. 1500 by Daniel Sawyer Joel Fredell Daniel Sawyer. Reading English Verse in Manuscript c. 1350–c. 1500. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 208. $80.00 cloth. Daniel Sawyer’s fine new book joins a host of codicological studies proliferating to the point that they begin to compete in sheer numbers with literary criticism. This state of affairs calls for new answers to an old question: what work does codicology do for the study of literature? Manuscript and textual scholars no longer lurk like trolls under the bridge of academic life, threatening unwary critics that their readings shall not pass; some of them now rank among the best known in the fellowship. Even undergraduates today are likely to attempt forays into the material culture of Middle English poetry along with their standard editions. All this exploration offers thick context and historical precision for students and [End Page 342] faculty. Yet those working in the contemporary trinity of codicology, paleography, and textual studies remain uncomfortable partners for literary medievalists who work in other areas, despite the well-known proclamations of a “new philology” for the field issued over thirty years ago (in the special issue of Speculum 65 [1990] edited by Stephen G. Nichols). Sawyer usefully questions whether codicology and literary criticism can be combined in method or work in harmony “without demanding that they do each other’s jobs” (11). He sees meaning generated from codicology to be “materially determined rather than arbitrary and . . . therefore not amenable to the semantic interpretation usual in literary criticism” (8). Many would argue that this ship has sailed, but Sawyer carves out space for his materialist study in the history of reading. He foregrounds two long poems of religious instruction that, despite their popularity in their own time, vie for the title of least read among scholars of Middle English: the Prick of Conscience and Speculum vitae. Sawyer points out that manuscript traditions and designs among these northern poems of religious instruction have received far less attention than the spectacular London manuscripts that helped to establish the poetry still dominating medieval studies. Prick of Conscience and Speculum vitae alone offer a huge body of evidence (Sawyer counts 128 surviving manuscripts of the first and 48 of the second) to understand how design decisions could reconstruct what constitutes “normal” book forms for producers and readers. After the introduction, Sawyer sets up a rhetorical structure that separates literary history from codicology: two chapters considering textual evidence bookending two chapters devoted to quantitative surveys. Chapter 1 compares his two central texts in terms of their strategies for religious instruction and methods of reading, with attention to some familiar issues. Were readers absorbing the text by means of groups reading aloud with or without a commentator, or by silent reading in private? Were readers taking on continuous chunks of text with a completist bent or locating short passages for meditation and possibly memorization? Did these texts function as “pricks” or goads as another means of internalizing their instruction in the scriptural sense of Paul’s conversion (Acts 9:5)? Sawyer sorts through the poems’ admonitions to tease out several key differences: psychic attacks pervade the Prick of Conscience but do not feature in the gentle compendium offered in Speculum vitae, for instance, prompting sustained narrative engagement or granular reading, respectively. Circulation and ownership evidence emphasize the diversity of readership, as well as the reading method, that both poems likely enjoyed. [End Page 343] The first of the codicological chapters turns to three categories of navigational aids: external, internal, and physical markers. Sawyer moves briskly through external summaries, tables of contents, and indices for his two poems. Internal navigation (sectional summaries and marginal glosses) passes by even more quickly, possibly because most of it is likely to be authorial rather than evidence of reading responses by producers and owners. Unsurprisingly, apparatus for Speculum vitae transmits much more successfully across time than apparatus for the Prick of Conscience, given the former’s affinity for ready reference. Nonetheless, Sawyer’s link between narrative type and the transmission of marginal apparatus opens up questions for all of Middle...