Chapter 5 assesses the patronage and use of books in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The following case studies are discussed: two earlier Anglo-Saxon prayerbooks (the Book of Cerne and Book of Nunnaminster) to which new material was added, a new volume of Latin hagiographies (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 5574), and a Carolingian manuscript to which several additions were made by English-trained scribes (London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, fols. 170–224). Engagement with these books took place in diverse settings, some of which were more informal than one might expect. The motivations for such activity are assessed too. These case studies pave the way for a holistic assessment of the contemporary manuscript corpus. Physical qualities, texts and languages are considered, as are the possible settings in which books were produced and used. Attention is drawn to the evidence for female book use, and to the importance of international networks. Continuities with earlier decades are acknowledged, as are new developments, including a more pronounced association between books and bishops. The chapter closes with a call to remain open-minded about this book culture’s range of social contexts and participants.

Chapter 1 assesses the evidence beyond the charter corpus for literary activity in Kent, Mercia and Wessex in the mid-ninth century. This evidence comprises five categories: surviving manuscripts with contemporary English provenances, letters, inscribed objects, the events of the 850s, and Asser’s account of King Alfred’s childhood engagement with books. The importance of understanding survival patterns and the nature of the evidence is stressed, particularly because attempts were rarely made to preserve letters for posterity, and because different ways of engaging with books and inscribed objects generated varyingly large fingerprints for twenty-first-century eyes. Asser’s famous account, furthermore, needs to be approached with caution, though it does in several ways align with the impression of literary activity that one gets from mid-ninth-century sources. A good deal remains unknown about many of the contexts in which literary activity took place, but it is nonetheless clear that the written word was conspicuous in many mid-ninth-century social settings, despite the likelihood that in some contexts resources for new literary productions were limited. Much of this literary culture was fundamentally social, and it was often inspired by international exchange.

This chapter examines the ways in which speech could become entangled with non-human orders of identity in medieval texts, at once as a theoretical concept and as a concrete effect of scribal mise en texte. The first part considers encyclopedic and literary works that imagined human speech as something other than the natural possession of humanity, situating this power within a complex coordination between the human, the bestial, and the divine. The second section uses these ideas at the margins of the medieval discourse on the rational-discursive faculty as a lens to interpret the effects of punctuation in medieval manuscripts containing works of beast literature, arguing that the right conditions came together in these codices for an analogous entanglement of human and non-human meanings to arise as a literal effect in the course of reading: The identities and utterances of speakers of different species could blur together on the page, highlighting ambiguities in the relationship between speech and species identity that were encoded into the composition of the works themselves.

This chapter investigates the outer limits of the Book of Nature: the medieval concept that the world is meant to be read and interpreted by humans in the manner of a book. Authors who invoked the Book of Nature presented the act of metaphorically “reading” the natural world as a way of shoring up human identity against its conceptual outside, with non-human animals imagined as letters inked onto the world’s pages. Drawing on a corpus of allegorical, encyclopedic, and literary texts, the chapter argues that this image was also haunted by a more subversive possibility: that species identity could become as confusing as a real medieval handwritten text, full of blottings and ill-formed letters that threaten to leave the relationship between speech and species in a state of irresolution. Like written letters, non-human animals could produce meanings in the human mind – but also like letters, they could just as easily descend back into their latent status as meaningless shapes.

This chapter considers the relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity through the lens of the concepts of error and errancy. In a variety of cultural contexts, medieval audiences imagined that the act of “erring” – both in the etymological sense of wandering and the extended sense of moral fault – could function as an experience that troubled distinctions of species. The chapter uses this recurring fantasy as a lens to explore an intriguing phenomenon observable in manuscripts of the Roman de Renart: Scribes and the trickster fox whose tales they copied sometimes “err” in tandem with one another, with scribal slips of the pen overlapping ambiguously with beastly slips of the tongue. It argues that these disruptive situations enable unresolved questions about the place of the rational-discursive faculty to come to the fore, confronting readers with a surprising question: In whose subjectivity do the errors in question originate?

This chapter deals with Allen Ginsberg's enormous personal archive. It includes the history of how the archive was created, what the contents of the archive are, and how it came to be located in the Special Collections Department of Stanford University's library. It details some of the many uses of the archive today and in the future.

This chapter examines key ideas concerning the dialect and metre in which Pindar’s poems were written, as well as the story of the transmission of his works from his day, through antiquity and the Middle Ages, then down to our own times.

An overview of Hipparchus’ only surviving book, the Commentary on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus (CPAE), is presented. A brief description of previous editions up to and including that of Karl Manitius (1894) is given. Themes discussed are the work’s cultural and historical setting, and possible motivations for its creation. Also described are its structure and its underlying mathematical basis, together with some aspects of its translation from the Greek text of Manitius into English.

The introduction sets out the book’s main arguments and interventions, methodology, and structure. It details how the book applies the concept of ‘active reading’ to classical translation while challenging the idea that translators had a unified political agenda that reflected that of their patrons. It also outlines how the book reinforces the centrality of the concept of counsel and the agency of translators in producing diverse interpretations and applications of ancient Greek and Roman texts. It draws on the concept of the public sphere to conceptualize the shared political import of classical translations. The book’s innovative methodology combines literary-textual, book historical, and historical-contextual approaches and expands the canon to bring out the full range of applications and interventions of early modern translations of the classics while connecting them to larger developments. It ends by explaining the organization of the book according to the main genres of ancient Greek and Roman prose in translation between 1530 and 1580: moral philosophy, history and biography, military manuals, and oratory.

This chapter addresses the complex theme of the penetration of the Arthurian subject in Italy through the circulation of manuscripts; the various forms that characterised this specific reception, ranging from narrative works adhering to French models to more autonomous reworkings, such as compilations (Rustichello da Pisa) and the cantari in octaves, truly anticipated the great epic poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. For a long time these texts, especially the vernacular versions, have been known among scholars by virtue of their linguistic relevance as the earliest witnesses in Italian literary prose, but it should not be forgotten that they saw the light thanks to the intensive Italian production and transcription of manuscripts in their original language. This phenomenon characterised most of the manuscript tradition of Arthurian romances in Italy (Tristan en prose, Guiron le Courtois cycle), and imposes today the use of refined and complex codicological, historical and palaeographical analyses.

This chapter discusses the long Arthurian section of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Latin history of Britain, the De gestis Britonum (or Historia regum Britanniae). It sets Arthur in the context of Geoffrey’s focus on the strengths and weaknesses of a long line of British kings, starting with Brutus, the Trojan refugee who follows the goddess Diana’s prophecy to settle the island of Britain. The Britons are shown to be imperial and formidable, but also subject to internecine strife. British kings sometimes make disastrous decisions because of their own desires. Arthur is a paragon, a perfect king, and the narrative’s lingering over his reign and his victory over the Romans can make readers forget the larger pattern that governs Geoffrey’s history. But at the height of success, he is betrayed by his nephew, and while he wins his final battle, he is fatally wounded: all kings must, in the end, die.

This chapter investigates how local priests related to their superiors by examining a set of handbooks for bishops that were made in the Rhineland and surrounding regions. These handbooks have been overshadowed in the historiography by Regino of Prüm’s well-known Sendhandbuch. However, Regino’s handbook was not the only collection of material available, and this chapter highlights nine manuscripts that – it argues – were composed for the organisation of the episcopal Sendgericht. Through these itinerary courts of law that these manuscripts point to, bishops imposed discipline on priests in their diocese, who during the tenth and eleventh centuries experienced an increasing degree of control that they had not known before.

This chapter provides an overview of web-based resources for the study of the history of English and varieties of English around the world which have been developed in the two decades since the completion of The Cambridge History of the English Language (Hogg 1992–2001) as well as materials in preparation now. Topics cover online versions of reference works like manuscripts and facsimiles, editions, dictionaries/concordances and maps; corpora and databases which can be searched on the web; multimedia learning tools which supplement traditional classroom teaching, for example companion websites for textbooks, TED and YouTube; and communication platforms which help develop the field beyond academia, such as blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook. The chapter also discusses some desiderata in the currently available resources.

This chapter provides an overview of manuscript production and reception in the OE and ME periods. It focuses on how manuscripts were produced, the cognitive copying practices of its scribes, the subsequent use of manuscript texts by their readers, and the implications these issues have for the texts and data that survive. It considers the methodological issues arising from working on manuscripts in both their physical and edited forms. The chapter argues for the importance of considering manuscript evidence – including material aspects of the text – when using such texts as data for linguistic enquiry, and the value of this overlooked material for increasing our understanding of diachronic change. Finally, the chapter highlights and demonstrates some fruitful approaches to medieval textual material from the disciplines of historical sociolinguistics, dialectology, pragmatics and philology.