Medieval Manuscripts and Literary Forms by Jessica Brantley (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Manuscripts and Literary Forms by Jessica Brantley Sally Elizabeth Tozer Jessica Brantley, Medieval Manuscripts and Literary Forms (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), xiv + 346 pp., 25 ills. In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley impresses upon fledgling medievalists the importance of understanding the distinctions between encountering modern print books and encountering medieval ones. She questions what it means to physically navigate a digital edition, versus a print edition, versus the manuscript artifact in its extant form, which is to consider not only the past life of the codex as a material artifact but also its future transmission in the form of a digital facsimile. Considered as such, the life of the manuscript book is a circular one. Finding its genesis in the technological advancements that precipitated the codex form, the manuscript book presages the organizations of language and data found in the modern print book, and, in turn, how digital “books”—laptops, tablets, smartphones, and e-readers—are visually organized and virtually navigated. Rather than imagining the field of manuscript studies as one ruptured by the proliferation of online facsimiles—in which one body of scholars, versed in a dying art of tactile research, stands in opposition to a newer cohort, literally and metaphorically unfeeling in their commitment to digitization—Brantley reminds readers of the contingency of material and virtual forms. It is for this reason, no doubt, that all of the case-study texts in her book are fully accessible online, equipped with borderline-nostalgic, page-turning features and enhanced with the ease of virtual navigation. The newfound accessibility of these landmark texts can further proliferate the practice of global medieval studies and renew appetites for manuscript investigation. In the first section of the book, a vocabulary that describes the physical features of the manuscript artifact is outlined, elucidating the later section’s “heuristic categories [which are] meant to be portable, not determinative” (115). In conjunction with the glossary, this section offers readers an arsenal of terminology, a series of keys by which the entrances to the codicological surface of the manuscript can be unlocked. These terms relate variously to material support (“the material upon which the text is inscribed” [323]); inks and pigments (lamp-black, iron gall, atramentum, lapis lazuli, scarlet kermes); paleographic scripts (calligraphic and cursive hands, Gothic, textura, secretary script); codex structure and layout (collation, binding, pricking, ruling); decoration, illumination, and illustration; as well as errors, absences, abbreviations, and editorial details. Each aspect partakes in the overall impression of the manuscript and each offers scholars ample material for interpretation, comparison, and analysis. Collectively, these terms furnish the reader’s mind with a toolbox of language that allows them to more precisely describe the multisensory experience of reading, touching, and interacting with manuscripts. As such, this toolbox is not purely metaphorical. Brantley draws attention to the very instruments—styluses, calami, quills, pens, lead points, crayons—that are used to fill medieval [End Page 213] manuscripts with letters, numbers, musical notes, and visual culture. Simultaneously, she asks us to consider the subvisual aspects of the manuscript’s production: namely, the knives that have been used to scrape and adjust the texts; the awls and punctoriums that pricked the pages for ruling; and the idiosyncrasies of the hand’s themselves, which outside of the confines of broadly typified scripts, offer insight into the “performative spirit of the scribe” (316, ductus). Going far beyond the author-publisher remediations necessary to produce modern printed books, the material synthesis of the medieval codex relies on the combined works of multiple artisans, a team whose collaborative efforts are often sporadically spread across time, location, language, and culture. Underlining the physical and intellectual labor that went into producing these medieval books, Brantley reminds readers to consider the independent and collaborative roles of such manuscript producers. This contingent of authors, compilers, glossators, rubricators, illuminators, and scriveners did, in some instances, intentionally coordinate their activities and execute their textual visions within a singular scriptorium or commercial workshop; and yet in other moments they are entirely unaware of their collaborators who, on the very same folios, gloss, edit, and add to the text years, decades, and even centuries later. Citing Adam...