Scholars of medieval manuscripts have long been puzzled, frustrated, and/or invigorated by the complexities of miscellanies. We struggle to catch the mystery or catch the drift of these assemblages. If a text happens to survive within a miscellany, can we then read that text alongside its fellow travelers? But when doing so, how do we avoid forcing a connection between two texts that are joined for no other reason than happenstance? Do we need to know whether a given textual combination was intended by the scribe for a pairing to have meaning? Such questions have occupied medievalists for several decades now. Into this robust, ongoing debate steps Thomas C. Sawyer’s new book, reflecting on these questions as applied to Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851.
This particular manuscript offers a brilliant test case for exploring the methodology of reading a miscellany, as it is well known to medievalists and yet has never been given critical treatment in its entirety, with its texts being read against one another in such a rigorous way. This manuscript, most of which was copied in the late fourteenth century, is so noteworthy because it contains Walter Map’s De nugis curialium (Of Courtiers’ Trifles), as well as the only copy of the Z-text of Piers Plowman, alongside a trove of Anglo-Latin satirical poetry.
This particularly copy of Piers Plowman is well known among scholars of Middle English, as it contains a version that is either a scribal adaptation of William Langland’s poem (the current majority position) or is an early authorial “draft” of the poem (the current minority position). Debates about the status of the Z-text occupied a depressing amount of scholarly energy in the 1990s, accompanied by a depressing amount of vitriol. Fortunately, as that generation of scholarship recedes into the background, we have the more measured—and, frankly, more intellectually stimulating line of thought—brought forth in Sawyer’s monograph. Most importantly, Sawyer shows us the insights that are to be gained when we read this manuscript’s Latin devotional texts next to its anti-clerical satire next to Map’s Latin zaniness next to Langland’s Middle English zaniness.
In “Introduction: How to Read a Medieval Book,” Sawyer wastes no time, wading directly into the methodological impasse his book helps us navigate. “How do you read a medieval book?” is Sawyer’s provocative opening question, and he suggests that there have been two main approaches, neither of which have been successfully synthesized. First is the codicological approach, which consists of analyzing a manuscript’s component physical parts and processes of production. Sawyer then suggests that “another way to read medieval books is to study the texts they bear” (3). But how does one bring these two approaches together?
In short, Sawyer proposes that we trace the history of a book’s compilation, and when we reach particular milestones in this process—when, that is, we can be confident that texts X and Y were placed together for the first time in a codex’s life, or when we know that the same scribe added some finishing touches to texts A and B within the same codex—we are then licensed to put these texts into conversation with one another. By isolating texts that had an identifiable codicological connection, we can avoid artificially conjuring a relationship between disparate texts.
Chapter 1, “Recomposing Bodley 851,” sets the foundation for the rest of Sawyer’s study by meticulously reconstructing the compilation of this manuscript. If today one reads Bodley 851 cover-to-cover, one is not encountering the texts in the sequence in which they were copied. The details are too complex to summarize in a review, but the main stages, as Sawyer shows, broke down into the copying campaigns of Scribe B (who copied his texts first), Scribe A (who followed Scribe B and copied much of the Latin material) and Scribe X, who subsequently added Piers Plowman, as well as some additional texts in Latin, while also putting decorative touches on the work of Scribes A and B. (A few additional scribes added material in the mid-fifteenth century, but they are not germane to Sawyer’s analyses.)
Chapter 2, “Misogamist Fragments,” considers Walter of Wimborne’s Ave virgo mater Christi alongside the anonymous De coniuge non ducenda. These are the only two texts that Scribe B copied, and they currently reside in quire ix, in the middle of the manuscript. But, as Sawyer demonstrated in Chapter 1, they were the first texts copied, and they are the only texts copied by Scribe B, and thus they merit treatment together. These two poems are seemingly disparate, with Ave virgo being a Marian devotional poem and De coniuge an attack on marriage. What unites them, in Sawyer’s reading, is “the two poems’ opposing interests in insatiability, as the word describes exemplary enactments of female desire: positively, in the Ave virgo, by way of the Virgin’s erotic union with the divine; and negatively, in the De coniuge, by way of the imagined wife’s proclivity for sexual transgression” (91). Both poems, Sawyer proposes, respond to Proverbs 30:15-16, which foregrounds female sexuality in a bafflingly mystical manner. This pairing elides easy classification into the Madonna/Whore binary: “To examine these two poems closely is to rediscover constantly the terms of their thematic unlikeness and practical disagreement, rather than to uncover some overarching conformance to a broader cultural principle” (115).
Chapter 3, “Recomposing Walter Map,” turns to the work of Scribe A, particularly his copy of Map’s De nugis. In this chapter, Sawyer makes the admittedly simple claim that one should read across the disparate narratives in Map’s text for common themes. This ought to be something of a damp squib, but as Sawyer shows, scholars of Map have tended only to lift the odd narrative out of De nugis, reading it in isolation, thereby decontextualizing Map’s text. Map is responsible for much of this scholarly practice, for he writes short, discrete narratives that lack a discernable pattern or obvious point of contact with the other narratives in De nugis. Yet, Sawyer proposes some tidiness to this chaos, particularly through setting two of Map’s seemingly disparate narratives next to one another. Both of these narratives involve a man procreating with a fairy. Sawyer argues that these are both essentially the same story, adding that this doubling reinforces Map’s interest in the role of the fantastic within the human world. In Sawyer’s reading, Map takes it as a given that the children of succubi walk among us, and the primary question driving Map is how to understand the role of such phantasms in light of Christianity. This, for Sawyer, is one way to read across De nugis.
Sawyer spends Chapter 4, “Walter Map’s Piers Plowman,” quite profitably reading the Z-text against some of the Latin that was copied by Scribe X, particularly Apocalypsis goliae episcopi, which is to be found just a few leaves before the Z-text. Sawyer suggests that the most resonant parallels are to be found between Apocalypsis and the Hunger episode (from Passus 7 of the Z-text). Apocalypsis’s figure of the Deacon mirrors, in some striking ways, the Z-text’s figure of Hunger, particularly in the way they each explore the ramifications of excess consumption. Sawyer then draws persuasive connections between some of Walter Map’s more pointed anti-marriage discourses and the figure of Lady Meed in the Z-text’s first vision. Sawyer suggests that these traditions are united in their rejection of marriage per se: “In its position against marriage, the Z-text makes an ideological move familiar from Mappean contexts: to be wed is to be corrupted, regardless of whom one weds—and especially if one is a woman” (187). I found the reading of both of these moments in Piers Plowman to be illuminating. Their primary virtue is that they do not insist on direct influence from the Latin to Piers Plowman, but, rather, they show a common interpretive field within which one might place these texts—one that is unique to this particular manuscript.
The Making and Meaning of a Medieval Manuscript is adventurous and refreshing because it seeks to do two things: to bring our attention to the overlooked complexities of a celebrity manuscript, and to propose a new method for understanding texts in their manuscript context. In my estimation, it does the former with resounding success. Sawyer’s work insists on attending carefully to both the Latin and Middle English in this manuscript. As a result, this book forces us out of traditional disciplinary siloes, asking us to read across often disparate critical traditions. And the results are well worth the effort, for his readings are executed with clarity and sophistication. Moreover, his analyses are fully engaged with the range of scholarship on, inter alia, Walter Map, Piers Plowman, Anglo-Latin poetry, codicology, paleography, and theorization about miscellanies.One leaves this book much better informed about the range of meanings to be encountered in Bodley 851, which, given this manuscript’s high-profile status, marks a tremendous scholarly accomplishment.
Where this study perhaps overstates its claims—in the eyes of this reader, at least—lies in the proposed novelty of Sawyer’s method. He suggests that what he calls the “book-historical” and the “literary-critical” (23) approaches to medieval texts have occupied separate magisteria, hitherto unsynthesized. And while he is undoubtedly correct that these approaches to miscellany manuscripts have tended not to cross-pollinate, I fear the firewall is not so impermeable as Sawyer would have it. He frames his method as “ask[ing] how individual manuscripts themselves preserve and generate knowledge about the construction of literature” (23). By looking at texts as they were compiled within a manuscript (piecemeal, across time, iteratively), and using that knowledge to cue us to reading particular texts against one another, Sawyer has definitely alighted upon a useful way to sort through complex miscellanies. But he is not the first to do so.
In my own field of Middle English manuscript studies, I would point to work by George Keiser and Ralph Hanna on the Thornton manuscripts, showing how different pieces in Robert Thornton’s two manuscripts were joined at particular moments in their history, yielding particularly provocative textual pairings. The same could be said for Susanna Fein’s work on the three manuscripts affiliated with the Harley Scribe. Fein has quite astutely drawn our attention to how these manuscripts developed sequentially, with particularly fruitful moments of conjuncture along the way. And much of the scholarship on so-called “household books” revolves around the sorts of ideological commitments that result from the pairing of texts within manuscripts. Compared to Sawyer’s book-length excursus here, most of these examples are much less developed, but that boils down to a difference in degree, not kind. Yet, Sawyer may well be the first to employ this method in such a protracted and detailed manner.
What Sawyer sees as the innovation of his method is that he eschews scribal intention and instead reads texts—whose pairing the codicological record would license—against one another. Sawyer’s method “allows scholars to consider interactions between medieval texts according to how those texts were constructed—and as they are now preserved—within the context of the production of their extant medieval manuscripts. This critical mode, as I propose it, is neither exclusive of considerations of agency nor dependent upon the recovery of authorial, scribal, or readerly intention” (24). But in positing that previous approaches to miscellanies have relied upon reconstructing the intention of scribes, I begin to sense a slight whiff of straw. Sawyer wants, for example, to sidestep questions about the intention of Scribe X in Bodley 851. We should not ask whether Scribe X intended to conjure meaning by yoking Walter Map toPiers Plowman, as that would delve into intention: “The texts Scribe X collected together under the (false) auspices of Mappean authorship need not be taken as sources or analogues of Piers in order to be understood as informing the meaning of Piers, either locally, for any attentive readers of MS Bodley 851 (like Scribe X) or broadly, for inquisitive readers of the poem’s tradition” (194). A few pages later, Sawyer clarifies this aim even further: “Crucially, this critical mode does not attempt to recover private motives, opinions, or mental states. The question is not, ‘what exactly was some historical agent thinking in producing this book in this way?’” (196).
But it strikes me that not even the most blinkered positivist would assert that we can recover “exactly” what a fourteenth-century scribe meant to accomplish by some act of compilation. Intention, when used responsibly in scholarship, functions more as a short-hand for how acts of manuscript compilation effect meaning. We know that a certain scribe copied a certain text next to another text. We, as twenty-first-century scholars, glean meaning from studying that historical action. But in doing so, most of us (I hope!) are not claiming to know that the scribe put those texts together with the intention of creating the very meaning we happen to have extracted from this sequence. Sawyer insists that “we cannot recreate any medieval experience of reading this medieval book” (159). And of course, he is right. But, at the same time, this is not quite the right diagnosis of what scholars do when assessing miscellanies.
My criticism of Sawyer’s work on intentionality is certainly not a disabling one. Indeed, I spend so much time on it in this review because it is so provocative and so muscular. But I here register my doubts that we have been overly reliant on a naïve view of intentionality because I found the rest of this book so learned and convincing that I fear the emphasis on methodological novelty may blunt its impact. As Sawyer writes, “I offer my method as one among many: as an approach to be adopted, improved, and critiqued in turn by book historians, literary critics, and researchers in the material cultures of the Middle Ages and further afield. Crucially, however, I do not claim exclusivity. The generation of one critical and analytical method need not preclude others, nor need the interpretations I develop throughout this study exclude alternative conclusions in terms of book, text, or method” (24). I am certain the Sawyer has here given medievalists of all stripes a great provocation to think more deeply about what we do when we read across texts within a manuscript, and he has modeled for his readers one fruitful way to enact this through his careful and stimulating close readings of the texts in Bodley 851.