The essays in this issue of The Chaucer Review have been gathered together in response to recent work in literary studies on form, aesthetics, and the place of the “literary” in critical theory and literary criticism.1 They are meant to address a question that has been important to work on medieval English manuscripts for some time, especially those bearing literary texts: what is the relationship between the study of medieval books and the study of medieval literature?2 We suggest that this question deserves new attention from a variety of perspectives in light of the “aesthetic turn” that has recently been taken in the wider field of literary research.In their introduction to a special issue of PMLA devoted to “The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature,” Leah Price and Seth Lerer describe a scholarly impasse between critical and literary theory, on the one hand, and the history of the book, on the other. They observe, for example, that the journal Book History, which has contributed to the development of its eponymous subdiscipline, is described by its own editors as an antidote to the “exhaustion of literary theory.”3 Literary formalism rather than literary theory has aroused the suspicions of some influential book historians (formalism is often construed in opposition to “high theory,” despite its own complex theoretical underpinnings). Seminal essays like D. F. McKenzie's 1985 Panizzi Lecture “The Book as an Expressive Form”4 and Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia's 1993 “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,”5 for example, make their case for the study of books against formalist work that disregards the fact that texts are only ever available to readers in some material form. The “sociology of texts” or study of “material texts” that they advocate is meant to counter formalism's idealizing habits, especially as these involve isolating apparently authorial or original texts from the contexts of their production and reception.6In work that has profited from the example of these essays, book history has come to fit quite comfortably with the aims of New Historicism, which likewise sought to resist both the treatment of the text as an organic, unified whole, “showing no marks of labor,” and the situation of critical practice “in some ideal space that transcends the coordinates of gender, ethnicity, class, age, and profession.”7 Books can readily be made part of how scholars think about the “textuality of history and historicity of texts,” to borrow Louis Montrose's famous formulation;8 the more so because the work of historians such as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Robert Darnton, and Adrian Johns has been so important in shaping the book-historical field.9 The scholar who pays attention to the book in which a text appears can be seen to historicize both that text and his or her criticism in the process.These general observations about literary and bibliographical scholarship overlap with but do not exactly match what can be said about work in medieval studies. Where print culture specialists have inherited “Annales” school methods of statistically grounded sociohistorical analysis from the likes of Febvre and Martin, some medievalists have responded to Paul Zumthor's theory of mouvance and Bernard Cerquiglini's “praise of the variant.” The result has sometimes been called “new philology,” a body of work that promotes the study of manuscripts as unique witnesses to the fluid status of the medieval text.10 Other work in manuscript studies remains more traditionally historicist. Wendy Scase has recently described “confidence in empirical research” as the basis for most medievalists' codicological work.11 Ralph Hanna and Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, meanwhile, have argued that medieval book history must move toward the more theorized historicism of McKenzie's “sociology of texts,”12 even as they acknowledge that the field lacks many generalizable methods that would enable such a move.Here, we recognize that medieval manuscript scholars' historical research has brought many rewards. Confident that there are facts about the past to be found in old books, those scholars have lately recovered long-lost texts; identified medieval scribes by name; and made important new arguments about the transmission of literary works.13 Nor would we dispute the idea that the study of books has more to offer to a history of medieval culture, including a history of medieval literature. In this volume, however, we wish to present some additional possibilities for the study of medieval books. Book history—much like the New Historicism with which we here loosely group it—has been set up as a foil to formalism and New Criticism. What can its role be now that questions about form and practices of close reading are of renewed interest? If book history starts out exhausted by theory, and if many medieval codicologists have rejected other methods in favor of empiricism, then what can manuscript scholars offer to a field of literary studies revitalized by aesthetic theory? And what, in turn, might formally inclined literary critics offer to students of books?Before describing some of the ways contributors to this volume have tackled these questions, it will be helpful to say more about literary study's “new” interest in aesthetics, formalism, and the literary text. Marjorie Levinson's review essay of mostly “post-2000 scholarship that lays claim to a resurgent formalism” offers a helpful starting point.14 In her opening gambit, Levinson divides recent work on form and aesthetics “along a single axis: the conception, role, and importance of form in new historicism.”15 The authors she surveys are committed to reviving the traditional aesthetic concerns of literary criticism. They broadly agree that New Historicism (however imprecisely the label is applied) too often makes works of art repositories of historical and cultural data, so that “a simpleminded mimesis replac[es] the dynamic formalism” that characterized the best early New Historicist work. Levinson then identifies a group of scholars who seek to address this problem by way of an interest in literature qua literature, and thus by a “sharp demarcation between history and art, discourse and literature, with form … the prerogative of art.” Their model of the artwork is loosely Aristotelian, she suggests: it has a “stable and generically expressive self-identity”; its form is innate. Levinson describes this as a “normative” formalism and is somewhat dismissive of it.16 As we suggest below, we have problems with her characterization of such work as naive or simplistic, but we can identify a related (and in no way simplistic) mode of formal inquiry in medieval studies. Christopher Cannon's compelling 2007 essay on “Form,” for example, takes some of its cues from Aristotelian writings.17The other critical mode that Levinson describes seeks to restore the focus on form central to a truly “new” historicism, one built on the materialist foundation laid for history by Hegel, Marx, Freud, Adorno, and Jameson. She calls this “activist” new formalism, a formalism committed to reassertion of the critical (and self-critical) agency of which artworks are capable when … they are released from the closures they have suffered through a combination of their own idealizing impulses, their official receptions, and general processes of cultural absorption.18 The model of the artwork here is dialectical: it draws heavily on Adorno, and so “sets its face against a notion—he would say ‘fetish’—of form as an inherent as opposed to interactional or historically contingent property of the work.”19 The critic who has done the most to advance this method for Middle English specialists is Maura Nolan, who argues that Making an aesthetic turn in medievalism would entail coming to grips with the possibility that there exists a privileged space … within which history itself—as an asynchronous and uneven thing—comes to be articulated in advance of, or dragging behind, empirical sequences of events and facts. What Adorno enables us to see is that privileged space is art.20 Such arguments for renewed appreciation of the dialectic between form and history lead us to ask, what place might there be for book history in this “new” historicism, subtended by a “new formalism”?Some preliminary answers to that question emerge when we pay close attention to the use of the word “material” in the scholarship that we are describing. In (old) New Historicism and in the book history promoted by McKenzie and by Stallybrass and de Grazia, the material is opposed to the ideal. Study of the material text is thus materialism in the same way as Levinson's activist new formalism: both evince an implicitly Marxian concern with “the practices, the active ideologies, and the webs of interest that are largely responsible for the author's sense of the possible significance of what he or she writes” and the applications to which each reader, entangled in other webs and invested in other practices, puts the author's text.21 So the work of book history need not be antithetical to formalism, or at least not to new formalism. Both are concerned with ideology—what Louis Althusser neatly describes as “the (imaginary) relation of individuals to the relations of production and relations that derive from them”22—and thus also with how these relations are manifest in the forms of texts that have been released from ideological closure. Such “forms” might be the spiraling ironies of a poem (to evoke the work Stephen Greenblatt) or the persistently unstable typographical impressions of that poem as found in books (to evoke the work of Randall McLeod).23And yet it is worth noticing how flatly the word “material” is used in less exemplary criticism than Greenblatt's or McLeod's. In much book history, the “material text” has come to mean the book in your hand rather than the one in your head, the one with physical as opposed to ideal form. This evacuation of its philosophical meaning risks turning the materialism of book history into its own kind of idealism. Books, like texts, are necessarily entangled in the networks of relations that constitute ideology. In some book history, however, the text's material forms do not alert us to the “active ideologies” at work in its production or use. Instead, the case for the “material text” becomes a case for the material text against the literary text. In scholarship that proceeds along these lines, old books tell us what poems cannot about the past or about themselves.24But any thoughtful manuscript scholar will tell you that a book does not simply yield up truth. A book no less than a text suffers “idealizing impulses” and distorting “receptions.” Its essence is elusive: it is “opaque,” as many medieval manuscript scholars note.25 In this sense, new formalism, conceived as a newly energized, newly theorized historicism, is a corrective to book history just as it is to an increasingly attenuated New Historicism. Its focus on form and on form's historical contingency is a way to forestall materialism's worst habit, that of ignoring the impenetrable opacity of the real and “projecting a determinism by matter.”26 We would therefore argue that new formalism deserves attention as one way of encouraging the book historian to treat manuscript “material” or manuscript “form” in careful, dynamic, and theoretically nuanced ways.Turning to another distinct, but not unconnected, trend in literary studies will further establish both this point and introduce some larger ideas about the value of critical pluralism. We are thinking broadly here—of the “thing theory” expounded by Bill Brown and Steven Connor, the work of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour on the quasi-object and Latour's argument for a “descriptive turn,” and Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy27—but we will limit our observations to Harman's articulation of the possibilities such a philosophy offers literary criticism, and to Connor's argument in favor of “things” and against aesthetics.28 Recent attention to things and objects overlaps chronologically with interest in the new formalism. It intersects with it at the point at which some critics draw on such theories to describe the thing or object that is the literary text. Here is another way, that is, that scholars have recently tried to turn our attention back to literature qua literature, and another opportunity to think about that project's relationship to book history, which has long been formulated as study of the “book as object.”29As “opaque” things—historically contingent, and often physically fragmented—medieval manuscripts would seem especially receptive to object-oriented criticism as described by Harman: [T]he objects of object-oriented philosophy are mortal, ever-changing, built from swarms of subcomponents, and accessible only through oblique allusion. This is not the oft-lamented “naïve realism” of oppressive and benighted patriarchs, but a weird realism in which real individual objects resist all forms of causal or cognitive mastery.30 The literary texts contained in manuscripts also have a place in this speculative realism when they are acknowledged as “to some extent autonomous” not only from their context, but “even from some of their own properties,” in particular “their sensual traits”—that is, their forms.31 Some of the essays in this volume propose just such a tension between literary and material form.Connor's approach is, on the one hand, different from Harman's—he wants to show that “art,” “the aesthetic,” and therefore the “literary” are untenable categories—and, on the other hand, close to Harman's in that he wants to replace the study of art with the study of things, including literary texts, but also buttons, pins, cards, and sticky tape, in all of their “brindled variety.”32 Harman shows that interest in a literary text's self-identity need not be naive: it might be fascinatingly “weird.” Connor puts pressure on the other side of Levinson's normative/active binary, by arguing that even in the Marxian aesthetics that she identifies as “new” historicism, there exists “an astonishing willingness to reinstate the numinous authority … [and] to proclaim the political promise of the aesthetic.”33 Connor suggests that critics essentialize the aesthetic when they make art a “privileged space”—as Nolan puts it—for historicist work. By this reasoning, “activist” new formalism is just as naive, consensus-gathering, and suspiciously masterful as any other aesthetic theory. For even if art does not itself possess any numinous quality, if it somehow speaks its truths through an interactive or immanent critique of culture, then it must be the critic who is authoritative, able to penetrate the ideal, reveal the material, and avoid any foolish determinism. The only idea of the aesthetic that Connor will tolerate is one that exposes the quasi-magical thinking inherent in the human habit of setting art apart from other phenomena.34We do not find this reasoning entirely persuasive, since, if that human habit of distinguishing art from other things gives it a way of countering ideology, then aesthetics might be a habit worth preserving. But we have introduced Connor's work alongside Harman's for other reasons. First, when juxtaposed with Levinson's summary of the field, their work highlights the counterproductiveness of reducing current thinking about the aesthetic, form, or the literary to rigid hierarchies of methodological legitimacy. If there is no privileged way of thinking about the categories that are of concern to us here, no dominant critical method for aesthetics, no definition of the literary object or literary form that is impervious to critique—if what we find, in short, is just that some brilliant thinkers are thinking in different ways about similar problems—then the “aesthetic turn” is less an imperative than a resource for anyone interested in why manuscripts should matter to Middle English literary critics.Second, we would hazard that by foregrounding the “brindled variety” of things divorced from our urge to categorize them as art or literature, object-oriented criticism and thing theory have contributed productively to this resource. Two broad ideas connect the essays in this collection, which have a multilayered variety all their own. The first is that books and texts can be treated, at least sometimes, as interrelated or similar things (similar indeed because they are things). The forms of manuscripts can be read alongside, or as an intrinsic aspect of, the forms of literary texts. The second idea is that despite this invitation to connect text and book, the forms, the aesthetic qualities, and the sensual properties of manuscripts are not coextensive with nor finally constitutive of the meanings of the literary works that they bear. McKenzie has famously proposed that in books, forms effect literary meaning.35 Here, forms do more. They suggest, illuminate, defy, resist, augment, make, and unmake meaning as well.Our first essayist, D. Vance Smith, is explicitly concerned with some of the theoretical traditions that we have invoked, inasmuch as the forms of the books that interest him work against or in tension with what an aesthetic approach to texts might hope to achieve. His essay suggests that the book does double duty in relation to the critical agency of the artwork. On the one hand, it is in books that literary art suffers the closures of its “official receptions, and general processes of cultural absorption,” as Levinson puts it. A text like Piers Plowman, Smith argues, loses some of its meaning when scribes divide it into libri instead of passus, or “when the neatness of the various vitae cuts across the poem's recursive discussion of all three lives of Dowel, Dobet and Dobest.” On the other hand, what art “suffers” may be crucial to criticism, since it helps liberate the text from its closures. Put another way, a critic can attend to the book in order to think about the work that art (as part of the book) does in tension with those larger systems that give the book its status as empirical reality. In Smith's essay, this possibility—that the book that obviates the text's immanent form is also a powerful platform for immanent critique of that text—unfolds in a series of close readings of figures of the dead and suffering Christ in medieval manuscripts. The logic of affective devotion and the identification of the body of Christ with the book, the Word made flesh, together demand the same sort of active engagement from the meditative as from the “close” or formalist reader. Such a reader must “look further” than the book's fleshly or sensuous dimension, and yet paradoxically see that it is in flesh and the suffering of flesh that meaning lives.Smith's argument that the book can occlude the work of the literary is borne out by data that Simon Horobin assembles from some famous Middle English manuscripts. Horobin uses the variant forms of endlinks and prologues from copies of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to show that there is “no reason to endorse” theories that posit privileged access to exemplars on the part of some scribes (Adam Pinkhurst, for example), or the circulation of the text at various stages of authorial revision. As he makes this case, Horobin shows us that the space opened up by the incomplete form of the Tales—one that has long been attractive to critics, who have seen such incompleteness as a sign of Chaucer's “habit of mind, artistic motives” and so on36—is subject in manuscripts to the “concern scribes had to conceal gaps and to create an appearance of completeness.” In other words, while Chaucer's manuscript corpus as a whole is shifting, complex, and elusive in ways that both evoke and produce canonizing characterizations of its author, individual scribes of the Tales often sought to eliminate such open-endedness. A historically sensitive and formal approach to the Tales in their manuscripts must therefore recognize that such phenomena as ambiguity, nuance, and complexity, which have long been objects of value to formalist criticism, and which may likewise have been valuable to Chaucer, may not have been comparably valued by the medieval textual producers and readers who grappled with the author's work.This is not to say that valuing such phenomena today is therefore illegitimately anachronistic. As Maura Nolan points out in her essay, the truth that medieval books offer is “as fragmented and subjective as any other truth claim; scribes are not necessarily better literary critics than modern editors.” Instead, what Horobin's essay and all the contributions to this volume show is that knowledge of book history generally, or of the history of a particular book, can yield an additional set of “data points that literary critics use to parse medieval texts,” as Nolan puts it. The greater knowledge provided by such data points need not delimit a text's interpretive potential; it may instead complicate it, augment it, or just make it a little weirder.37In this sense, the newness of the formalism practiced by some of our contributors lies not so much in its method as in its object. It expands the kinds of material receptive to such interpretation, much as the New Historicism of earlier decades broadened the range of what might be considered a legible text to include the archive and the anecdote. It works, rather like object-oriented criticism, to direct our attention to the text as a thing among other things, including the things—pictures, pages, scripts, rubrics, bindings, catchwords—that we must deal with when we notice that our object is a book as well as a text. Martha Rust's essay is especially pertinent here. She is interested in the “flow” of meaning between images and text on the page, and her way of thinking about manuscripts unsettles some ordinary ideas about the things from which they have been confected. She argues, for example, that in certain books red ink has two uses, “as a writing medium and as a representation of blood,” and that these two uses of ink “threaten to breach the conventional boundaries between writing and pictures; indeed they muddy the boundary between a medium and the thing represented in a medium as well. Where on the page does the picture end and the writing begin?”Like other contributors, Rust is concerned with how our experience of books is informed by “aesthetics” in the word's original, etymological meaning of sense-perception, and how codicological phenomena such as illumination and page layout can engage more than just our eyes. She suggests that initials drawn as sorrowful faces in the Troilus manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B.24, for example, intimate the sound of weeping that the first stanza of the poem memorably imputes to the verses themselves, “that wepen as I write” (Tr, I, 7). In Nolan's essay, manuscript digitization provides a context for this turn from the visual to the more broadly sensual. Digitized versions of medieval books enable us to see them in ways that the physical artifacts themselves do not, but the purely visual stimuli that they offer remind us time and again of the centrality of other senses to the experience of reading books. Working with digitized facsimiles, we become aware of what is lacking: “feeling the sharp or subtle edges of the pages, hearing the rustle of each leaf as it is turned, smelling the scents of paper and ink, even tasting the book by touching tongue to finger and finger to page and back again.”Perhaps, then, it is the increasing availability of digitized manuscripts that has inspired some of our contributors to read for what they hear. Noelle Phillips argues that we hear Piers Plowman as a fundamentally oral, even conversational production when occurrences of the word quod in the manuscript are regularly rubricated; the extensive marginal commentary and authoritative citations of other manuscripts, by contrast, yield a mise-en-page that presents the poem as a more learned and more visual object. Jessica Brantley's essay on the infamously eccentric layout of Sir Thopas in some of the most important manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales takes this connection between layout and speech, form and performance, even further. She argues that the displayed-rhyme format, though often associated with romance manuscripts, “has its origins in a genre and a mode of reading very distant from tail-rhyme romance: the liturgical performance of hymns.” The format is thus, paradoxically, an inaudible cue that we should be listening especially closely to what we are reading. It may even help us perceive a counter-intuitively “devotional” Sir Thopas—a formal link between liturgy, private piety, and popular romance, reinforced by the position of Chaucer's tale after that of the Prioress.But Brantley's final move is to intuit that there may be difficulties with this reading. After demonstrating that “the most strikingly consistent” use of the displayed-rhyme format in the later Middle Ages is in fifteenth-century dramatic manuscripts, and that in those manuscripts “tail rhyme adorns simultaneously both the speech of devils and tricksters … and the most significant moments of Christ's Passion and Resurrection,” she turns our attention back to Smith's argument. The literary form of the text may simply be “inimical to the material form of the text.” Form, she concludes, “demands to be interpreted, and yet it means so very many different things.”This volume shows that precisely because form “means so very many different things,” books as well as texts deserve close reading, that is, a “multilayered and integrative responsiveness to every element of the textual dimension.”38 It does not strike us as coincidence that two of Middle English studies' greatest practitioners of formalist close reading, E. Talbot Donaldson and Derek Pearsall, should also have been among its most productive textual editors and manuscript scholars.39 Rather, it suggests that just as it is difficult to mark clean boundaries between material production and literary composition in the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, so too may medieval codicological and literary scholarship share deeper and wider sympathies than has often been acknowledged. These affinities become especially visible in Donaldson's analysis of “The Psychology of Editors of Middle English Texts,” in which he embraces his subjective response to manuscript variants as viscerally as he elsewhere did with the enigmatic Criseyde.40 For him, both are enticing and difficult, maddeningly and rewardingly un-put-down-able; he approaches both book and poem like a literary critic.41 Donaldson is right that the textual editor's literary sensibilities must inflect his or her interpretation of codicological data and thus the shape of the resulting edition. The essays of this volume demonstrate that other aspects of codicological data, which we might describe more inclusively as “manuscript forms,” can be the occasion for literary interpretation—for close reading—in their own right.Some of the literary-critical purposes to which our authors turn their manuscripts might be regarded as speculative, and in academic study, “the speculative” can be problematic. The adjective often features in scholarly reviews as a genteel euphemism for unconvincing, or a withering one for ungrounded. We do not concede such equivalences. The Latin speculator was an investigator, a scout, an intelligence-gatherer; and while these are all risky professions, they are also rigorous and valuable ones. To speculate is not to guess, but rather to look both carefully and imaginatively: carefully to see the surviving picture as fully as possible, and imaginatively in due recognition of what that picture has lost and cannot include. Literary appreciation depends upon both of these forms of looking. Without careful regard of, and for, the texts and objects of the past, interpretations of them will indeed be ungrounded; but without embracing the creative potential of the not-fully-knowable, there is no space for interpretation, only demonstration. The surviving forms of medieval books encourage both modes of productive speculation. They offer an immense amount to see (and touch, and smell, and hear) and to learn, but they also present lacunae that create interpretive spaces. In this collection, then, we take the recent, broader attention to matters of form and aesthetics as an occasion not just for renewed appreciation of “the literary” found in unlikely places (rubrication, page layout, and the like), but also for reminding ourselves and others of just how invitingly variegated medieval manuscripts' forms are, and of how many different critical moves they reward.We would notice, finally, the interrogative approach that the essays in this collection encourage towards the idea of “the literary text”. One of its chief characteristics is resistance to denotative definitions, so any list of some of its others will yield only a partial picture. Pearsall offers a powerful sketch, however, in an essay that anticipated the past decade's “aesthetic turn.” He writes, Poetry, as a form of “literature,” exploits potentialities in language, especially metaphorical potentialities, that are not exploited by other forms of discourse. Words in poetry, in the way they are chosen and arranged, have a wider range of possible meaning than they have in ordinary discourse, and not in any way confined to denotation; the language is richer, more suggestive, more elusive, more open; meaning can be dwelt upon, and fresh meanings can emerge in the process of rereading, already there but newly discovered.42 The literary may seem stable in this account, demonstrably different from other modes of discourse. Yet even this traditional, “normative” approach to literary form embraces the plural: multiple potentialities, wider and extra-denotative meaning, openness to rereading. The position is close to that of Nolan when she identifies “excess” as a key component of the literary.43 Appreciations of the plural—of the refusal of medieval objects to “mean” in stable and singular ways—have already been brought to particular subsets of manuscript studies. The essays below argue for more: more discussion of the forms of books in literary criticism; and yet more: more imaginative, critical approaches to those forms.