This chapter examines scribal alterations to systems of punctuation employed in several medieval works of devotional literature, including Anselm of Canterbury’s Orationes sive Meditationes and William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchés. Within such works, scribes modify marks of punctuation with striking frequency. Such modifications reveal that scribes considered themselves as having a degree of interpretive licence when punctuating a work; even if they otherwise took pains to reproduce the text of a work faithfully, scribes could provide an original ‘voicing’ or ‘performance’ of that text through their adaptations of its punctuation system. The regularity with which scribes modified the punctuation of the works they copied out, I suggest, provides valuable evidence of medieval delimitations of acceptable forms of scribal agency and reaffirms the complex multivocality of medieval works. To alter the punctuation of a work was to reshape the parameters of its textual form through the manipulation of its pauses and changes to its syntactic rhythm, thus influencing the potential voicings and interpretations of a work as it circulated in multiple copies over time.

Concentrating on v.1479–80, the point at which the knight Arveragus ‘brast anon to wepe’, this chapter offers a reading of The Franklin’s Tale that foregrounds the disruptive presence in that tale of the body as a conduit for truths about the self that challenge those that can be consciously tolerated and intelligibly uttered. When we weep, the body is speaking. Here, as it forces a sudden disruption and decline in Arveragus’s speech register and ethical focus, the voice of the body erupts in such a way as to crystallise one of the tale’s most urgent concerns with what might really constitute truth, unravelling what has gone before, putting the reader’s experience on a different footing and forcing a reappraisal of the characters’ self-concepts. And this, in turn, raises questions about the relationship between, on the one hand, the rhetoric and ideals explicitly at work within the world of the tale and, on the other, the felt presence not only of its teller, the Franklin, but also of its author, Chaucer.

This chapter sheds new light on the literary activities and preoccupations of Humphrey Newton (1466–1536) and on the materials in his manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. Misc. c. 66), an assortment of genealogical, legal, medical, religious and literary material, some of it authored by Humphrey himself. Humphrey has been seen as an inferior gentry imitator of courtly poets such as Chaucer and Lydgate, and the chapter reconsiders and revises this assessment by investigating his engagement with the trope of the parrot, traditionally seen as a mimic of the voices of humans. Focusing in particular on Humphrey’s poem I Am a Bird of Paradise and the accompanying drawings in his hand (previously dismissed as ‘doodles’), the chapter points out that, for the poet and his household, the parrot was a heraldic device that was problematic. The parrot tropes and conceits that Humphrey mimics therefore have particular local significance and value, and this reading brings sharply into focus the materials in the manuscript as traces of community literary production and exchange, relationship building and identity formation.

Shortly before Edward I’s 1290 expulsion of England’s Jews, Bishop of Hereford Richard Swinfield rebuked his flock for accepting invitations to a Jewish wedding. Chapter 2 seeks to discover, within texts preserved by Harley 2253, such trace as Hereford’s expelled minority may have left in the cultural imaginary of this borderlands region. Recent scholarship has established that Jews constitute an ‘absent presence’ central to both Christian devotion and conceptions of Englishness. Hereford has a unique profile as a frontier Jewish community, while the Harley manuscript straddles the historical watershed of 1290. This codex has not yet received Jewish studies-based inquiry. But understudied texts near its centre provide material: Anglo-Norman biblical paraphrases that feature the Levites (or priestly class of the Hebrews), and devotional travelogues attuned to the location of biblical and post-biblical Jews. Exploration of these Old Testament stories and Holy Land itineraries, wherein ancient ‘Hebreus’ and latter-day ‘Gyiws’ figure, suggests that Harley departs from period norms. Its texts (and additions) reveal a provincial copyist who is stuck in the distant past, yet perspicacious about Jews’ historical present. Jews have long been absent, but Harley 2253’s fellow clerkly traveller proves disarmingly cognizant of the challenges facing Levitican ‘captives among us’.

This chapter discusses Attic women’s friendships. It takes two contexts of female friendship – the neighbourhood, and female-dominated religious spaces and occasions – and shows how they offered women opportunities to encounter other women, spend time in their company, and construct and define their own spatial and social worlds. It demonstrates the importance of women’s friendships as a source of support, particularly when male relatives failed. It examines two cases in which women were commemorated by friends rather than kin, one of which provided an opportunity for the commemorating woman to discuss her relationship with and feelings about her friend. It concludes with a new examination of the language of female friendship, demonstrating its similarities to the verbal language of male friendship and the behavioural language of kinship. The chapter shows that women’s personal, affective relationships with non-relatives complemented and sometimes supplanted their kin relationships, and constituted a valuable support system.