Four Things You Didn’t Know About Medieval Manuscripts
Author: Ronni Phillips
1. Keep your hands off them!
When I first came to Cambridge to study medieval literature, I had a romantic vision of myself sitting tucked away in quiet corners of the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the library at Trinity College, Dublin, turning the pages of yellowing manuscripts with gloved fingers. However, when I attended a course on manuscript-handling organised by my faculty, I was shocked to hear the first words out of the lecturer’s mouth: ‘If at all possible, try not to use the manuscripts themselves.’
Most libraries guard their medieval manuscripts jealously, and limit the number of times a researcher is allowed to request to work with the manuscripts. And they tend only to let people look at the manuscripts with very good reasons; wanting to see the work first-hand is not an adequate reason. What’s a medieval studies student to do? Well, in recent times this is less of a problem because…
2. Many manuscripts are now online
Libraries such as the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge are increasingly open to providing the entirety of their manuscript collection online. Parker Library Online is a project run jointly by Corpus Christi College, Stamford University in the US and the Cambridge University Library to make available every page of every manuscript in the Parker Library for scholarly use.
The National Library of Wales has an extensive collection of manuscripts online for scholarly research, as do various libraries at Oxford University.
The increasing willingness of universities and other institutions to make manuscripts available on the internet makes it easier for more people to access such works. Sure, it’s lovely to be able to see all that ink and vellum in the flesh, so to speak, but as travelling across the world to view manuscripts is quite difficult for some scholars, having works online is of incaculable value to medieval research.
3. The date the manuscript was written has little connection with the age of the texts it contains
I’m sure that most people are aware that manuscripts don’t have publication dates handily written down on their opening pages. But even without such clues, dating the texts in manuscripts is a much more difficult task that most people would think. The average manuscript contains multiple texts, usually composed at different times, and often written down at different times too. Most texts are anonymously composed, so authors’ names cannot be used to provide chronological information. The order of the texts within the manuscripts is often complicated, with many manuscripts having been rebound at various times during their history, and thus potentially losing their original order of composition.
Medieval scholars thus tend to rely on linguistic and paleographical (script) analysis to provide a rough date for each text, although this, too, is fraught with difficulties, as later scribes sometimes rewrote older stories with more modern spelling and grammar. Sometimes there are clues in the text – references to battles or other historical events, or to technological advances – which can help provide evidence for dating a text to a particular era, but these, too, can be problematic, as later writers may have inserted them into an older text in order to provide it with contemporary relevance.
4. What you see is not necessarily all that existed
When I tell people I study medieval Irish literature, the second question they tend to ask (after asking ‘why?’) is ‘Did people write a lot in medieval Ireland?’ I never know how to answer them, because there’s no way of ascertaining whether the manuscripts that survive represent the bulk of the medieval Irish literary corpus, or simply a fraction. The survival of manuscripts owes a lot to luck and the quirks of history.
For example, our knowledge of medieval Scandinavian literature is based almost exclusively on manuscripts composed in Iceland, because the early Icelandic church was particularly keen on literacy. Even pre-Christian, pagan tales were written down in Icelandic ecclesiastical centres.
To give another example, the Nowell Codex, one of the four main Anglo-Saxon literature codices, is the only manuscript which contains a copy of the epic poem Beowulf, which is considered one of the key works in Old English literature. That we have knowledge of this poem today is due to extreme luck: the manuscript was almost destroyed in a fire in 1731 which destroyed many other manuscripts in the same collection. It is amazingly fortunate that this precious text survives today.
Tags: Beowulf, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University, medieval manuscripts, medieval studies, Oxford University
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