Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Brantley, Jessica
Abstract
In the fifty or so years between 1370 and 1425, medieval scribes developed and used three distinct scripts—anglicana, secretary, and textualis—in dynamic and visually striking ways right as Middle English was becoming a more attested literary language alongside French and Latin. A high level of care in the maintenance of visual distinctions between the three scripts defines this period in book history. The literary manuscripts produced roughly within these dates are thus the products of a moment when scripts in their separated multiplicity interact with texts in ways that particularly lend themselves to literary meaning. I argue in this dissertation that scripts are media that serve literary interpretation. Traditional paleographical understandings of scripts see them as sources for the date and geographical origin of individual manuscripts, the identities of scribes, and other bibliographical information. Departing from this, I argue that scripts’ visual qualities and terminologies can be read into the texts they preserve. I contend that hermeneutic power of late medieval scripts are informed by their status as plural commodities with multiple grades that were assigned distinct values based on subtle elements of craft, such as the amount of labor one script required, or the prestige of another’s place of origin. “Scripts and Literature” finds literary power in these elements which produces readings of medieval literature informed by the graphic artisanry of letterforms. My four chapters track late medieval scripts thematically, exploring how cultural expectations and scribal design inform readings by interacting with various genres, forms, and languages in distinct contexts. The first two chapters consider script through the lens of production. Chapter 1 how how scribes’ professional identities access medieval cultural views of scripts. Using a wide variety of archival material, including rarely surviving but uniquely informative writing models, Chapter 1 finds that scribes heavily relied on artful, creative, and often rhetorically powerful language to communicate about scripts to the broader world. In other words, literary language was used to bring the graphic shapes of scripts out of abstraction and into human communication. This conclusion shows that scripts are not mere containers of literary writing and transmission but were fundamentally indivisible from literary writing and transmission. Building off Chapter 1’s findings, Chapter 2 focuses on one example of the figurative language scribes use to label and think about script: the term “bastard.” Exploring the use of “bastard” to describe different medieval commodities that were adapted for more versatile use, I find that “bastard scripts” are those which exhibit the careful combination of “high” calligraphic features with “low” cursive ones that can be read for particular literary effects. Analyzing the variously rendered “bastard scripts” of the early manuscripts of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Chapter 2 ultimately finds that the different ways scribes “bastardized” scripts uncover a medieval “bastard poetics,” aided by the poem’s own “bastard” combination of “high” Latin verse with “low” English couplets. “Bastard” processes of crafting scripts help enhance reading “bastard” principles of poetic composition. Moving from production, the second two chapters more closely consider scripts’ literary receptions. Chapter 3 investigates how scripts can portray the affective stances their literary texts assume, more specifically intimacy. Focusing on secretary, a script imported to England from French-speaking territories of Europe, I examine its uses in three case studies: a manuscript of Guillaume de Machaut’s multi-form poem Le livre dou Voir Dit, John Gower’s ballade sequence the Traitié, and several early manuscripts of Christine de Pizan. Chapter 3 finds that secretary, in both French and Anglo-French contexts, when it triangulates with language (French) and form (epistolary lyrics or prose), facilitates what I call “secretarial reading,” wherein the reader is encouraged by the apparent simplicity of secretary’s cursive aspects to recognize and engage with intimacy in the texts at the level of content, genre, or the author’s literary persona, as each case study explores. Chapter 4 argues for the possibilities of script as a facilitator for reading in a continuous process. It focuses on a single case study, an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Piers Plowman, copied by an apparently "amateur" scribe, Thomas Tilot. Tilot’s script starts out as a highly formal textualis, but slowly decreases in calligraphic effort until it fully becomes a rapid cursive. This calligraphic diminuendo epitomizes scribal "amateurishness" through its disinterest in absolute uniformity and consistency, which I argue offers a visual reading of the many moments of upheaval, destabilization, and narrative unraveling in Piers Plowman itself. Chapter 4 ultimately offers a method of close reading medieval texts that takes script more fully into account alongside lexis, diction, and meter, concretizing this dissertation’s arguments about the interpretive power scripts hold for literature.
Recommended Citation
Dwyer, Seamus, "Scripts and Literature in the Manuscripts of England and France, 1370-1425" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1295.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1295
