Performance and the Page - · PDF file6/22/2014 · Michelle P. Brown. London, ... Burton Van Name Edwards. #e John Carter Brown Library ... most studies of even those medieval texts

Performance and the Page

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PECIA

VOLUME 16

Pecia ■ Le livre et l’écrit ■ seeks to promote bibliographic studies through the publication of articles dedicated to the history of the medieval manuscript book. Each volume is structured around a cen-tral theme. Articles are generally published in French, English or Italian.

Pecia ■ Le livre et l’écrit ■ entend promouvoir les études de bibliologie par la publication de contribu-tions dédiées à l’histoire du livre manuscrit au Moyen Âge. Chaque volume est articulé autour d’un thème central. Le français, l’anglais, l’italien, sont les langues généralement utilisées.

■ ■ ■

Comité scienti!queMarianne Besseyre. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de FrancePr. Anne D. Hedeman. Professor of Art History and Medieval Studies. Graduate Advisor, Art History. University of IllinoisMichelle P. Brown. London, British LibraryPr. David Ganz. King’s College (London). MA, DPhil (Oxford), Professor. Comité International Paléographie LatineDr Lucien Reynhout. Bibliothèque royale de BelgiquePr. Marek Derwich. Université de Wroclaw. Institut d’Histoire. Laboratoire de Recherches sur l’Histoire des Congrégations

et Ordres Religieux (LARHCOR). WroclawPr. Giuseppe Germano. Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II - Dipartimento di Filologia Classica “F. Arnaldi”Comité de lectureDr Pieter Mannaerts. Alamire Foundation. KULeuven. Musicology Research Unit. Central LibraryDr Peter Kidd. Ancien conservateur aux manuscrits de la Bodleian LibraryIsabelle Rava-Cordier. CNRS: unité mixte de recherche 5648 à LyonPr. Gemma Avenoza. Faculté de philologie. Dept. de philologie romane Université de BarceloneBurton Van Name Edwards. #e John Carter Brown Library. Brown University. Providence (USA)Directeur de publicationJean-Luc Deu$c

Couverture:Bourges, Musée du Berry, manuscrit 1924.4.1. Heures d’Anne de Mathefelon, f. 98r:Saint Yves et Anne de Mathefelon.Cliché V. Biquet, avec l’aimable autorisation de Béatrice de Chancel-Bardelot,Conservateur en chef des musées de Bourges.


Kate Maxwell, James R. Simpson, Peter V. Davies

F



© 2014, Brepols Publishers n. v., Turnhout, Belgium

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D/2014/0095/259

ISBN 978-2-503-55081-7

Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Sommaire

Kate Maxwell, James R. Simpson, and Peter V. Davies Performance and the Page 7

James R. Simpson Turning Verse Conversions? Mise en page and Metre in Rutebeuf ’s Le miracle de !éophile 17

Anne Ibos-Augé Music or Musics? #e Case of Renart le Nouvel 41

Emmanuel Melin Réécrire l’archive. Fabrication, classement et mise en page de la mémoire institutionnelle à Reims à la 5n du Moyen Âge 87

Geo6rey Roger Koineisation in the Burgundian Netherlands: A Scriptological Insight from the Cent nouvelles nouvelles? 109

Antony Vinciguerra Glasgow ms. Hunter 253 (U.4.11): A Corpus of Texts as an Introduction to Medieval Alchemical Knowledge 129

Aditi Nafde Laughter Lines: Reading the Layouts of the Tale of Sir !opas 143

Mary Wellesley ‘Evyr to be songe and also to be seyn’: #e Performing Page of the N-town Visit to Elizabeth 153

Jean-Luc Deuffic Miscellanées bretonnes. La page dans tous ses états 167

Index des manuscrits cités 235



K. Maxwell, J. R. Simpson, P. V. Davies (eds). Performance and the Page. Pecia 16 (2014), p. 07-15.

© F H G 10.1484/J.PECIA.5.105409

Kate Maxwell*, James R. Simpson, and Peter V. Davies


.e manuscript page is a site of performance. .at is the simple, common view shared by all contributors to this volume of Pecia: le livre et l’écrit. ‘Performance’, in our understanding of the term, is a broad notion, not limited to oral rendition. Rather, the term ‘performance’ seeks to encompass reception in any form, whether that be visual or oral, passive or active, silent or sounding, complete or fragmentary. .e notion of ‘the page’ is here taken to mean the page of the medieval manuscript. .is is likewise understood on all levels from the micro to the macro, whether margin, text, book, or archive. .ere are numerous diverse performers who take part in such a performance: the ‘author’ (or ‘authors’), if discernable; the scribes, those medieval performers who perhaps most of all shape our understanding of the texts that they transmit to us, the editors – surely the more modern counterpart to the scribe – and the readers, from all eras. We hereby invite you to join in the performance.

.e importance of manuscript context in any understanding of medieval ‘texts’ can be dated back at least three decades, and arguably longer. In the 1980s, thanks to the work of Paul Zumthor and Elspeth Kennedy in the previous decade,1 the time was ripe for a reassessment of the importance of mise en page in medieval manuscripts.2 .is, together with what has been termed the ‘new medievalism’3 or

* Kate Maxwell would like to thank the University of Agder, Norway, for funding the postdoctoral fellowship during which this article was written.1 P. Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale, Paris, 1972, as well as his ‘Intertextualité et mouvance’, Littérature, 41, 1981, p. 8‒16; E. M. Kennedy, ‘.e Scribe as Author’, in Mélanges de langue et de littérature du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance o!erts à Jean Frappier, Geneva, 1970, p. 523‒531.2 Sylvia Huot has perhaps been the most notable contributor to this reassessment: S. Huot, From Song to Book: "e Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry, Ithaca, 1987. For a retrospective overview of the interesting debates on editing practices in this time, see M. Speer, ‘Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties: .eory and Practice’, Romance Philology, 45, 1991, p. 7‒43.3 See the articles in "e New Medievalism, ed. M. S. Brownlee, K. Brownlee, and S. G. Nichols, Baltimore, 1991.



8 K. MAXWELL, J. R. SIMPSON, P. V. DAVIES

‘new philology’,4 inspired and fostered scholarship in which the scribe – and the scribal product, par-ticularly the variant5 – became centre stage. Some twenty years a0er Roland Barthes had proclaimed the death of the author,6 the new medievalism responded, ‘Vivent les scribes’.7

Of course, it did not stop there. In spite of trenchant interventions and re-evaluations, the cult of the author – even in medieval studies – is alive and well to this day.8 Since the early 1990s, however, most studies of even those medieval texts in which the author is particularly visible take the collective nature of medieval textual transmission into account. Current projects such as ‘Machaut in the Book’, ‘.e Online Froissart’, and ‘.e Roman de la Rose Digital Library’, among others, now bene1t from the new possibilities o2ered by the widespread digitisation of many (but by no means all) medieval manuscripts. Indeed, as ‘crowdsourcing’ becomes more common, textual transmission is arguably as plural now as it was in medieval times, and possibly even more so.9 .us, the (re-)per-formance of texts, particularly medieval ones, is increasing in the digital era.

.e notion of ‘performance’ is intended to be understood along the same lines as the term ‘musicking’, which is widely accepted in ethnomusicology and music education, and which its creator Christopher Small de1ned thus:

To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance. .at means not only to perform, but also to listen, to provide material for a performance – what we call composing – to prepare for a performance – what we call practising or rehearsing – or any other activity which can a2ect the nature of the human encounter. […] To music is to pay attention in any way to a musical performance, at whatever level or quality of attention […] the verb to music is not concerned with valuation. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. It concerns all participation in a musical performance, whether active or passive, whether we like the way

4 .e best-known – or perhaps most notorious – collection of essays on this topic is the ‘New Philology’ special number of Speculum, 65/1, 1990, which was guest edited by S. G. Nichols. For a notable counterblast see K. Busby, ‘Doin’ Philology While the –Isms Strut’, in Towards a Synthesis? Essays on the New Philology, ed. K. Busby, Amsterdam, 1993, p. 85‒95. For a recent re3ection on the debate and its wider context, see A. Armstrong, ‘Introduction’, in Book and Text in France 1400‒1600: Poetry on the Page, ed. Armstrong and M. Quainton, Basingstoke, 2007, p. 1‒11.5 B. Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie, Paris, 1989.6 R. Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in Manteia 5/4, 1968, p. 12‒17.7 .ere are too many scholars to name them individually here; for speci1c examples, see the 1rst chapter and bibliography in K. Maxwell, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Mise en page of Medieval French Sung Verse’, PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow, 2009.8 On the problems of speaking about authorship in relation to medieval French texts, see the various contributions in the section ‘What is a Medieval French Author?’, in "e Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. S. Gaunt and S. Kay, Cambridge, 2008 (see in particular p. 79‒135). See also S. Kay, ‘Who Was Chrétien de Troyes?’, in Arthurian Literature, 15, 1997, p. 1‒35, and M. Gri5n, ‘Gender and Authority in the Medieval French Lai’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 35/1, 1999, p. 42‒56.9 For an example of a crowdsourced transmission project, see the ‘Transcribe Bentham’ initiative at University College London: blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/, accessed 22 June 2014.

PERFORMANCE AND THE PAGE 9

it is being done or not, whether we consider it constructive or destructive, sympathetic or apathetic.10

In applying the term ‘performance’ to medieval studies, it is worth bearing in mind the words of Gunther Kress, whose social semiotics stands in contrast to the ‘authorship model’ of tex-tual reception. In the latter, interpretation does not exist; the audience simply, passively, receives the author’s message. In the former, ‘the thing is made twice. Miscommunication doesn’t really exist in my way of thinking about communication’.11 Likewise, N. Katherine Hayles, in her discussion of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information, notes the following:

In information theoretic terms, no message is ever sent. What is sent is a signal. Only when the message is encoded in a signal for transmission through a medium – for example, when ink is printed on paper or when electrical pulses are sent racing along telegraph wires – does it assume material form.12

While Shannon’s theory was not intended to apply to all human communication,13 it is nev-ertheless relevant for the (re-)interpretation of artworks from the distant past. .e ‘performance’ of – or perhaps inherent in – a medieval manuscript therefore includes creation, reception, interpretation, and all stages around and in between.

Medieval authors drew key contrasts between orality and writing: John of Salisbury, for example, spoke of letters as signs for absent sounds, things and voices:

Littere autem, id est 1gure, primo vocum indices sunt; deinde rerum, quas anime per oculorum fenestras opponent et frequenter absentium dicta sine voce loquuntur.14

[Letters, that is written symbols, in the 1rst place represent sounds. And secondly they stand for things, which they conduct into the mind through the windows of the eyes. Frequently they communicate, without even emitting a sound, the utterances of those who are absent.]

10 C. Small, ‘Musicking – A Means of Performing and Listening. A Lecture’, in Music Education Research, 1, 1999, p. 12.11 G. Kress and M. Domingo, ‘Ethnographic and Multimodal Semiotic Analysis of Digital Communication Environments’, workshop presented at the MODE Summer School, London, 19 June 2014. It should be noted that, in a medieval context at least, ‘twice’ seems to be a minimal 1gure. For an in-depth introduction to Kress’s semiotics, see his Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Communication, London, 2010.12 N. K. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago, 1999, p. 18.13 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 19. On p. 295, n. 30, she gives the following reference to Shannon: C. Shannon and W. Weaver, "e Mathematical "eory of Communication, Urbana, 1949.14 John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. J. B. Hall and K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Turnhout, 1991, p. 32. Translation cited from John of Salisbury, ‘"e Metalogicon’: A Twel%h-Century Defence of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, trans. D. D. McGarry, Berkley, 1955, p. 38.




In this respect, the letters on the page – at least until they are looked at – are only ever the mark of absence: a dead record rather than a living interpretation. Indeed, with regard to speech, John casts letters here as doubly, even triply dead – more remote from us than even the dumb but immediate character of our material environment. Although inanimate objects are more ontologi-cally remote than not merely the absent but perhaps even the dead, John nonetheless positions them as an order of being more readily translatable through perception into the possession of an internal-ized understanding. Implicitly here, absent friends are likened to the inert materiality of objects such as stones, though this also carries with it a suggestion that – through language – things may acquire a quasi-animate capacity to impress themselves upon us.15 However, the problematic agency of dead things is perhaps exempli1ed most acutely by the key component in medieval manuscript produc-tion: parchment.16

A particularly salient contribution here is Sarah Kay’s examination of manuscripts contain-ing narratives of the Christian martyr St Bartholomew and the pagan 1gure of the satyr Marsyas, both of whom were 3ayed.17 In Kay’s account, the pathos attaching to the spectacle of torture – in which skin sensation is at its most acute at the point at which it separates from life and body – transforms the manuscript page into a site of exemplary sensitivity, reawakening the materiality of the medieval codex from the position of either mere inert substrate or ‘dead metaphor’. Indeed, the page is here abstracted from any surface apprehension of its 3at extensity into a linear temporality whose moving present encompasses the intersection of reading and writing in the intersubjective coincidence of a thought that is neither exclusively ‘writerly’ or ‘readerly’.18

.e suggestive intensities characteristic of such images 1nd echoes more widely in the resist-ance of medieval textual cultures (especially vernacular) to binary ‘either-or’ classi1cation, not least

15 .e question of the ‘post-human’ agency of objects and materials has been a highly productive area of discussion in recent years, spawning a wide range of re3ections on medieval relations to materiality. On stone see, among others, K. Robertson, ‘Exemplary Rocks’, in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. J. J. Cohen, Washington, 2012, p. 91‒121, and, in the same collection, V. Allen, ‘Mineral Virtue’, p. 123‒152, as well as Cohen, ‘Introduction: All .ings’, p. 1‒8. Cohen’s forthcoming monograph Stone: An Encology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, 2015) promises to continue the theme.16 For a recent and richly multifaceted overview of discussion regarding skin and touch in manuscript and reading cultures in the Middle Ages, see, in addition to references below, the contributions in Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. K. L. Walter, New York, 2013, and in Scraped, Stroked, and Bound: Materially Engaged Readings of Medieval Manuscripts, ed. J. Wilcox, Turnhout, 2013. For an albeit earlier but suggestively encompassing discussion of relations between saints, the dead, and manuscript culture in this regard, see also P. J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, 1994, p. 9‒29 (chapter: ‘Saints, Scholars and Society: .e Elusive Goal’).17 See S. Kay, ‘Original Skin: Flaying, Reading and .inking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works’, in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36/1, 2006, p. 35‒73. See also Kay, ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Medieval Ethics of Reading’, in Postmedieval, 2, 2011, p. 13‒32.18 On reading, text, and temporality in this regard, see especially I. Davis, ‘Cutaneous Time in the Late Medieval Literary Imagination’, in Reading Skin, p. 99‒118, and, in the same collection, E. Robertson, ‘Noli me tangere: .e Enigma of Touch in Middle English Literature and Art for and about Women’, p. 29‒56.


in terms of any division between ‘oral’ and ‘written’.19 For in a time when reading, even private read-ing, was a vocal activity, the dead letters on the page only came to life in the act, the performance, of reading. And yet it seems clear that manuscript cultures sought to break down the solidity of this divide between the vibrant orality of speech and the static lifelessness of the written word through reworkings and representations that emphasised life and presence: images of authors declaiming their poetry or music manuscripts as animated (even riotous) in their own, visual way as any aural musical performance, the teasingly enigmatic compilation of a text such as the N-town Plays that Mary Wellesley discusses in this volume, not to mention dramatic images of desire and trauma. .is sense of the vitality of the manuscript page, whether pleasurable or disturbing, erodes any meaning-ful divide between performance as living social fact and as metaphor. And yet at the same time, for all the emphasis on vitality, the game also implied a dissimulation that pushed subversively in the other direction: the aspiration to auctoritas. .is play could range from the comic silencing of the pilgrim Chaucer by the host in "e Tale of Sir "opas (as discussed by Aditi Nafde in this collection), to the more exuberant and macabre assumption inherent in taking on the mantle of 1gures such as (pseudo-)Augustine or Guillaume de Lorris;20 indeed, for all their apparent reverence of his author-ity, even the compilers of the magni1cent authorial codices of Guillaume de Machaut’s works were not afraid to ‘kill o2 ’ the author for the sake of coherence in ordinatio.21 All of this has to be set in a context in which, more mundanely, medieval correspondence bears witness to a quasi-prosopopoeic impulse to push back against the deadness of the page through the delight in rendering oneself both present and past: the state of being present to correspondents is achieved by means of an identi1ca-tion with past culture which is inherent in the use of writing, John of Salisbury’s voluminous and highly learned correspondence being a case in point.22 In that sense, manuscript page and text appear as a locus of constant becoming that speaks of the living trouble at the divide between life and death,

19 By way of illustration in this respect, with regard to medieval German literary cultures see D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: "e Primary Reception of German Literature 800‒1300, Cambridge, 1994. For comment as well as a highly useful overview of scholarship on the oral-written divide, see M. T. Clanchy’s postscript to the recent third edition of his study From Memory to Written Record: England 1066‒1307, Chichester, 2013, p. 336‒342.20 An interestingly pertinent example in this regard is the mischievous illustration in a manuscript of Peter Lombard’s gloss on the Psalms discussed by M. Camille (Image on the Edge: "e Margins of Medieval Art, London, 1992, p. 20‒22), which displays St Augustine pointing an arrow back at a passage in which he is cited with the caption ‘non ego’ [‘I didn’t say that.’]. On writing and reception in the manuscript tradition of the Roman de la rose, see of course S. Huot, "e Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission, Cambridge, 2007. 21 For a detailed examination of this, see K. Maxwell, ‘.e Order of Lays in the “Odd” Machaut Manuscript E’, in Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe 1350‒1550: Packaging, Presentation and Consumption, ed. E. Cayley and S. Powell, Liverpool, 2013, p. 32‒47. For a more detailed discussion of presence and absence in medieval manuscripts, see K. Maxwell and J. R. Simpson, ‘Page, Performance and Play in Medieval Transmission and Reinterpretation: Presence and Absence in the Oxford Roland and Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir dit’, in Proceedings of the XVIth Nordic Musicological Congress, Stockholm, 2012, ed. J. Derkert and P. K. Pedersen, Stockholm, 2014, p. 144‒153.22 On prosopopoeia as the ‘ascription of a voice or face to the absent’, see J. H. Miller, Topographies, Stanford, 1995, p. 57‒79 (cited here at p. 57). On John of Salisbury, see Y. Hirata, John of Salisbury and his Correspondents: A Study of the Epistolary Relationships between John of Salisbury and his Correspondents, PhD thesis, University of She5eld, 1992.




writing and reading, recto and verso: ‘an “I” transformed into a “we” of autonomous agents operating together to make a self ’.23

Integral to this complex nexus of life, death, and representation is memory. Memory training in the Middle Ages was more than just learning by rote (what we would today call memorising); it was an essential 1rst step to creation. .e Latin verb legĕre, which 1rst meant ‘to gather by picking up’, subsequently acquired the meaning ‘to gather words into meaningful units’ and thus ‘to read’.24 Reading, then, was a way of gathering items for one’s memory store, which one could re-use, re-create, both during the reading act (performance) and at a later date. As Mary Carruthers explains:

People do not ‘have’ ideas, they ‘make’ them. .e work (and I include both process and product in my use of this word) is no better than the skillful hand, or in this case the mind, of its user. .e complexity of this cognitive cra0 renders even more problematic, I think, the question of ‘validity’ in interpretation.25

Of course, with all of the individuals involved in its long and complex production, a medi-eval manuscript was never the product of a solitary e2ort. It is thus not just the manuscript page which is a site of performance, but the whole manuscript. .e choice of texts, their order, the size of the manuscript, its binding (or whether it is a fragment, a scroll, or unbound), the materials used (and how they were obtained) all have a part to play in the performance, and the performance that we witness today can never be the same as that of the past. In the same way that two people standing side by side in a sun shower will always view two di2erent rainbows, so it is with manuscripts and their readers – indeed, with any work of art and its receivers.

An assessment of the performance of the manuscript page presumes scribal competence, rather than its opposite. Of course, no human being is infallible, and scribes (and editors) are no exceptions to this rule. What the articles gathered here consciously seek to avoid, however, is to hold the medieval manuscript page to contemporary standards of production and proofreading. Many interpreters of manuscripts today, perhaps without even realising, still use criteria which all too o0en involve explaining away variants as errors, or assume that poor quality (whether of mate-rials, of workers, of transmission) is behind any anomalies observed. Medieval scriptoria were not so devil-may-care as to regularly leave precious materials and important commissions in the hands of incompetents. Mistakes happen, of course they do, but the intriguing questions to ask start with ‘why’: why did the scribe choose this layout, why does this page appear poorly executed (to us, today), why is the author’s name omitted, and so on.

23 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 6.24 .e original sense of legĕre was later reserved for its compound form conlĭgĕre, cŏllĭgĕre (> French cueillir, etc.). See J. Picoche, Dictionnaire étymologique du )ançais, Paris, 1979, p. 388, who incidentally records a di2erent semantic evolution in Greek, and A. Rey (ed.), Dictionnaire historique de la langue )ançaise, Paris, 1998, vol. 2, p. 2034. In "e Cra% of "ought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images, 400‒1200, Cambridge, 1998, p. 3, M. Carruthers refers to the two meanings of legĕre as a ‘pun’, a shorthand which is amended here.25 Carruthers, "e Cra% of "ought, p. 5.


.e call in this volume for an understanding of the performance of the page, then, is twofold. First, we ask that modern readers appreciate the page of the medieval manuscript for what it is, rather than what it is not. .is means engaging with the manuscript page – the page itself, not only the text which it contains – on its own terms. It means suspending judgment, and retaining with an open mind. It means accepting the gulf in time between today’s readership and medieval manuscripts: accepting and indeed embracing it, without attempting to eradicate or to somehow reach across that divide (attempts which are inevitably doomed to failure). Secondly, we must accept our part in the ongoing performance. .is participation involves more than merely seeking to tease out those mean-ings which were relevant at the time of the manuscript’s production and which can still be found today; it also means that, like our medieval forebears when ‘reading’ works (of whatever kind) which were for them old, we should allow any new messages which speak to us to resound, even if they cannot have done so at the time of the manuscript’s creation. .is is a bold invitation to accept that anachronism – or perhaps more accurately cultural di2erence – can and does inform interpretation and criticism, whatever our personal views on the matter. It is, in fact, all part of the enduring appeal of art. As Hayles pointed out at the turn of the last Millennium, ‘a de1ning characteristic of the pres-ent cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among di2erent material substrates’.26 Even though this notion is starting to be challenged – digitised medieval manuscripts being a pertinent case in point –, if a Shakespeare play or a Wagner opera can be set in the twenty-1rst century in order to refresh its meaning for contemporary audiences, then there is no reason to think that the same should not hold true for medieval texts, music, and image, not only in their separate incarnations, but also where they come together as one – on the manuscript page, in the performance of the page.

We live today in an age where medieval manuscripts are at once more widely available and harder to access. .is is the paradox of digitisation. A digitised manuscript that has been through the hands of o0en anonymous ‘digital scribes’ is viewable via a screen which is also a smokescreen, shielding the viewer from the sensual, particularly the tactile, elements of the manuscript. And as many readers will be all too aware, a manuscript can be even harder to view in the 3esh once it has been digitised. Yet digitisation has much to o2er in terms of viewing (zooming in to details being the obvious example here); thanks to the relative ease of seeing the digital artefact it is also a vital step in increasing manuscript reception, and as such it has become simply another act in the performance of the page.

.e time is therefore ripe for a collection of articles which addresses the wider issues of the manuscript page. .e articles in this volume cover a wide range of disciplines (literary studies, musicology, history, book history, alchemy) not in order to present an exhaustive collection, but to demonstrate the breadth of arenas for which such an approach is relevant. .e 1rst contribu-tions trace the idea of performance and the page through di2erent academic disciplines, yet are all concerned with French manuscripts still located in France (Simpson, Ibos-Augé, Melin). We then

26 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 1.




move across the ‘auld alliance’ to studies of two items from the collection of manuscripts donated by William Hunter to Glasgow University Library: the Burgundian tales presented in the unicum Cent nouvelles nouvelles (Roger), followed by its immediate bedfellow on the shelves, an alchemical miscelleny (Vinciguerra). In the next stage of our journey, we cross the border into England, where experimental and enigmatic mises en page of Chaucer and theatrical works (Nafde, Wellesley) take our collective performance to its 1nal act: a comprehensive overview of new information on the Breton performers involved in manuscript production (Deu5c).

James R. Simpson analyses of the importance of the layout of the Old French alexandrine, the use of which varied between full-line and split-line presentation depending on context – some-times in the same manuscript. In the overwhelming majority of instances, this is nothing more than a matter of neatness: the lines of shorter works could be split to 1t in with other texts in metres such as octosyllabics. However, taking as its central focus the complaint and prayer that form the crux of Rutebeuf ’s Le Miracle de "éophile, Simpson’s article explores how Rutebeuf ’s use of verse form here may play o2 a metrical ambiguity foregrounded by mise en page, and so draws out the implications of this di2erence for the contemporary reception of such works, for their performance and the loca-tion of their metrical form in a horizon of expectation as well as for modern editorial practice and interpretation.

.e musical refrains of Renart le nouvel are the subject of Anne Ibos-Augé’s article. Here she not only demonstrates the di2erences in page layout between the four manuscripts in which the refrains appear, but also asks what the di2erences in the refrains themselves might signify. Her article includes a detailed appendix of all the refrains.

Moving into the domain of history and book history, Emmanuel Melin considers the rewrit-ing of the Reims archives in the 10eenth century, as the complex power relations in the town shi0ed between political factions. .rough his study of two cartularies, both of which were recopied at this time, Melin demonstrates how the manuscript page was used as a site of play in the power politics of the period.

Geo2rey Roger’s contribution considers the hundred tales of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles from a dialectological perspective. .ese tales, allegedly performed orally at the court of Burgundy and today preserved in a single manuscript (Glasgow University Library ms. Hunter 252), purport to be from thirty-six raconteurs of varied geographical backgrounds. Roger’s analysis of expressions, morphology, syntax, and spellings, with particular attention to pronunciation in oral performance, investigates whether or not the mise en scène of the collection can be authenticated, and sheds light on linguistic practices at the court of Burgundy at a time of dramatic territorial expansion.

Another manuscript from the same collection (Glasgow University Library, ms. Hunter 253), is the focus of Antony Vinciguerra’s article on medieval alchemy, a subject whose signi1cance for modern science has only recently become more widely recognised. He o2ers a comprehensive account of the relationship between this manuscript and other Latin alchemical manuscripts in Italy and England from the turn of the fourteenth century, studying their textual and iconographic rela-tionship to earlier works translated from Arabic.


Our penultimate scene change takes us to England for Aditi Nafde’s consideration of the intri-cate performative relationships in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir "opas. She demonstrates how the layout of some of the manuscripts transmitting the work plays into the performative aspect of "e Canterbury Tales: the tale which is purportedly recounted by the poet is self-consciously badly ‘made’ (in the medieval sense of the term). While this ‘drasty rymyng’ can be heard in an oral performance, some manuscripts highlight the rhyme scheme through their mise en page. Such a layout highlights the importance of orality in both reading and writing practices.

We then move to the enigmatic space of the N-town Plays, preserved in a unicum London manuscript (British Library, ms. Cotton Vespian D.VIII). Mary Wellesley shows how the scribe-com-piler displays reverence for sacred texts through his use of Latin and formal bookhand. As she demon-strates, in this theatrical manuscript, which is of curious origin and of uncertain use, the page does indeed also serve as a site of performance on many di2erent levels.

We end our performance in Brittany, an area which has long been the subject of Jean-Luc Deu5c’s meticulous paleographical attentions. Here, he continues his thorough exploration of medieval Breton manuscripts, their production and purchasing, with a look at some of the people – the performers – involved. Putting names and sometimes faces to personae ranging from the famous ( Jean de Laval) to the o0en overlooked (scribes and students), we gain insight not only into a diverse spectrum of the Breton book-producing population, but also into the work (and buying power) of those who actually created, ordered, purchased, and used the artefacts with which we work.

It remains only for us to thank the contributors for their support and enthusiasm for the project from its origins to its current form. .anks are also due to Jean Luc Deu5c at Pecia, for embracing the project and providing us with a medium of publication. Last and certainly not least, we would like to acknowledge you who are reading this volume. You are not silent, you are not pas-sive: you are creating meaning as you go, you are taking part, and you are most welcome in this col-lective performance.



Documents

Performance and the Page - · PDF file6/22/2014 · Michelle P. Brown. London, ... Burton Van Name Edwards. #e John Carter Brown Library ... most studies of even those medieval texts