Mary Wellesley. - The gilded page: the social lives of medieval manuscripts

Copyright 2021 by Mary Wellesley

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First Edition: October 2021

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wellesley, Mary, 1986 author.

Title: The gilded page : the social lives of medieval manuscripts / Mary Wellesley.

Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021004832 | ISBN 9781541675087 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541675094 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Manuscripts, MedievalEnglandHistory. | Transmission of textsSocial aspectsEnglandHistory. | English literatureOld English, ca. 4501100History and criticism. | English literatureMiddle English, 11001500History and criticism | Illumination of books and manuscripts, MedievalEngland. | MarginaliaEnglandHistory.

Classification: LCC Z106.5.G7 W45 2021 | DDC 091.0942dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004832

ISBNs: 978-1-5416-7508-7 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-7509-4 (ebook)

E3-20210921-JV-NF-ORI

For my parents and for Fred

god helpe minum handum

scribes note, British Library Cotton MS Tiberius B V, fol. 19r

Good syster of your charyte I you pray remember the scrybeler when that ye may

readers note, Lambeth Palace MS 546, fol. 56r

If you are reading, this manuscript at least will have survived.

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

A t some point in the sixteenth century a girl named Elisabeth Danes wrote a threat into the pages of her book: Thys ys Elisabeth daness boke he that stelyng shall be hanged by a croke (This is Elisabeth Daness book, he that steals it shall be hanged by a crook [meaning hook]). The note appears at the bottom of the manuscript page: defiant, a little naughty, and full of bibliophilic feeling.

I first met Elisabeth Danes through her manuscript when I was doing research in the British Library. I remember reading it and feeling the centuries dissolve. Here were the words of a fellow bibliophile from five hundred years ago; it is a reminder that there have been lovers of books for as long as there have been books to love. Elisabeth Danes treasured her book and the story it contained, and she wanted to protect it. But there was also something else poignant in her words. From her handwriting, she appears to have been young. I wondered how much control she had over the circumstances of her own life. She was a young woman, perhaps a child, in a patriarchal world; threatening potential book thieves might have been one of the few ways she could assert herself. The note has a particular pathos because, as I discovered afterwards, it appears to be all that remains of her. She is otherwise hard to trace in the historical record.

Sometimes medieval manuscripts offer up names, such as Elisabeth Danes, but more often they only allow us glimpses of anonymous figures. Some three centuries before Danes wrote her threat, a monk in Worcester Priory set about making careful notes in the margins of the manuscripts in the priorys library. This scribes handwriting was distinctive: shaky, outsized, and left-leaning. Today he is known only as the Tremulous Hand, as scholars have been unable to discover his name. He was a prolific annotatorwriting around fifty thousand glosses (explanatory notes) in as many as twenty manuscripts. The majority of his annotations were in manuscripts containing Old English (the vernacular language of pre-Conquest England), yet he wrote his notes in Latin or Middle English (the language into which Old English had evolved).

The Tremulous Hand was working in the thirteenth century, which means he was part of one of the last generations able to understand Old English without too much difficulty. Old English, a Germanic vernacular, had changed dramatically after the Norman Conquest and its attendant influx of French vocabulary. He seems to have been collecting Old English words, possibly to make a glossary. We might see him as an early linguistic historian of sorts. Nineteenth-century scholars romanticised his work, suggesting that he was an elderly man, one of the last speakers of the dying language. hard for the manuscript scholar not to feel a kinship with him, intent as he was on ferreting around in the past and decoding its remnants.

To sit in the silence of a special collections reading room and turn the pages of a medieval manuscript is to have tangible, smellable, visual encounters with the past. Parchment manuscripts have a particular scent that is hard to describe: acrid with undernotes suggesting an organic origin. They can feel stiff and buckled, soft and faintly like suede, or so finely worked as to be tracing-paper thin. Up close, ripples and imperfections become visible on a page of parchmentthe traces of hair follicles, little repaired holes, and places with discolouration. But the coloured inks and paints remain iridescent, having often been kept safely away from light damage for centuries.

A medieval manuscript is not only a text, but also a collection of human stories. Each manuscript has been made by many different hands and has passed through many different hands throughout its history. Each one bears the traces of the people who fashioned it and loved it, perhaps even of those who disdained it and those who wished to alter it, and often those who found it anew in a more recent time. Many of those who played a role in the creation of the manuscripts remain anonymousshadowy figures whose work with quills, paintbrushes, and other tools of the trade are all that survive of them. Sometimes they come into sharper focus.

The word manuscript itself is a combination of two Latin words, manus (hand) and scribere (to write). A manuscript is simply a handwritten object. The fact that they are made by hand is what makes manuscripts so compelling. And the handwriting itself tells us a great deal about the people who painstakingly produced these objects. To this day, handwriting remains a personal expression of the self, perhaps now more than ever before as we ditch our pens in favour of our keypads. Scholars talk about the script in a manuscript as the hand. A catalogue describing a manuscript might read, Written in a fourteenth-century hand, and this terminology suggests that the hand might extend towards us, might reach out to touch us. This is the magic of the manuscript.