Medieval English Manuscripts:

The essays in this issue of The Chaucer Review have been gathered together in response to recent work in literary studies on form, aesthetics, and the place of the “literary” in critical theory and literary criticism.1 They are meant to address a question that has been important to work on medieval English manuscripts for some time, especially those bearing literary texts: what is the relationship between the study of medieval books and the study of medieval literature?2 We suggest that this question deserves new attention from a variety of perspectives in light of the “aesthetic turn” that has recently been taken in the wider field of literary research.In their introduction to a special issue of PMLA devoted to “The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature,” Leah Price and Seth Lerer describe a scholarly impasse between critical and literary theory, on the one hand, and the history of the book, on the other. They observe, for example, that the journal Book History, which has contributed to the development of its eponymous subdiscipline, is described by its own editors as an antidote to the “exhaustion of literary theory.”3 Literary formalism rather than literary theory has aroused the suspicions of some influential book historians (formalism is often construed in opposition to “high theory,” despite its own complex theoretical underpinnings). Seminal essays like D. F. McKenzie's 1985 Panizzi Lecture “The Book as an Expressive Form”4 and Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia's 1993 “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,”5 for example, make their case for the study of books against formalist work that disregards the fact that texts are only ever available to readers in some material form. The “sociology of texts” or study of “material texts” that they advocate is meant to counter formalism's idealizing habits, especially as these involve isolating apparently authorial or original texts from the contexts of their production and reception.6In work that has profited from the example of these essays, book history has come to fit quite comfortably with the aims of New Historicism, which likewise sought to resist both the treatment of the text as an organic, unified whole, “showing no marks of labor,” and the situation of critical practice “in some ideal space that transcends the coordinates of gender, ethnicity, class, age, and profession.”7 Books can readily be made part of how scholars think about the “textuality of history and historicity of texts,” to borrow Louis Montrose's famous formulation;8 the more so because the work of historians such as Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Robert Darnton, and Adrian Johns has been so important in shaping the book-historical field.9 The scholar who pays attention to the book in which a text appears can be seen to historicize both that text and his or her criticism in the process.These general observations about literary and bibliographical scholarship overlap with but do not exactly match what can be said about work in medieval studies. Where print culture specialists have inherited “Annales” school methods of statistically grounded sociohistorical analysis from the likes of Febvre and Martin, some medievalists have responded to Paul Zumthor's theory of mouvance and Bernard Cerquiglini's “praise of the variant.” The result has sometimes been called “new philology,” a body of work that promotes the study of manuscripts as unique witnesses to the fluid status of the medieval text.10 Other work in manuscript studies remains more traditionally historicist. Wendy Scase has recently described “confidence in empirical research” as the basis for most medievalists' codicological work.11 Ralph Hanna and Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, meanwhile, have argued that medieval book history must move toward the more theorized historicism of McKenzie's “sociology of texts,”12 even as they acknowledge that the field lacks many generalizable methods that would enable such a move.Here, we recognize that medieval manuscript scholars' historical research has brought many rewards. Confident that there are facts about the past to be found in old books, those scholars have lately recovered long-lost texts; identified medieval scribes by name; and made important new arguments about the transmission of literary works.13 Nor would we dispute the idea that the study of books has more to offer to a history of medieval culture, including a history of medieval literature. In this volume, however, we wish to present some additional possibilities for the study of medieval books. Book history—much like the New Historicism with which we here loosely group it—has been set up as a foil to formalism and New Criticism. What can its role be now that questions about form and practices of close reading are of renewed interest? If book history starts out exhausted by theory, and if many medieval codicologists have rejected other methods in favor of empiricism, then what can manuscript scholars offer to a field of literary studies revitalized by aesthetic theory? And what, in turn, might formally inclined literary critics offer to students of books?Before describing some of the ways contributors to this volume have tackled these questions, it will be helpful to say more about literary study's “new” interest in aesthetics, formalism, and the literary text. Marjorie Levinson's review essay of mostly “post-2000 scholarship that lays claim to a resurgent formalism” offers a helpful starting point.14 In her opening gambit, Levinson divides recent work on form and aesthetics “along a single axis: the conception, role, and importance of form in new historicism.”15 The authors she surveys are committed to reviving the traditional aesthetic concerns of literary criticism. They broadly agree that New Historicism (however imprecisely the label is applied) too often makes works of art repositories of historical and cultural data, so that “a simpleminded mimesis replac[es] the dynamic formalism” that characterized the best early New Historicist work. Levinson then identifies a group of scholars who seek to address this problem by way of an interest in literature qua literature, and thus by a “sharp demarcation between history and art, discourse and literature, with form … the prerogative of art.” Their model of the artwork is loosely Aristotelian, she suggests: it has a “stable and generically expressive self-identity”; its form is innate. Levinson describes this as a “normative” formalism and is somewhat dismissive of it.16 As we suggest below, we have problems with her characterization of such work as naive or simplistic, but we can identify a related (and in no way simplistic) mode of formal inquiry in medieval studies. Christopher Cannon's compelling 2007 essay on “Form,” for example, takes some of its cues from Aristotelian writings.17The other critical mode that Levinson describes seeks to restore the focus on form central to a truly “new” historicism, one built on the materialist foundation laid for history by Hegel, Marx, Freud, Adorno, and Jameson. She calls this “activist” new formalism, a formalism committed to reassertion of the critical (and self-critical) agency of which artworks are capable when … they are released from the closures they have suffered through a combination of their own idealizing impulses, their official receptions, and general processes of cultural absorption.18 The model of the artwork here is dialectical: it draws heavily on Adorno, and so “sets its face against a notion—he would say ‘fetish’—of form as an inherent as opposed to interactional or historically contingent property of the work.”19 The critic who has done the most to advance this method for Middle English specialists is Maura Nolan, who argues that Making an aesthetic turn in medievalism would entail coming to grips with the possibility that there exists a privileged space … within which history itself—as an asynchronous and uneven thing—comes to be articulated in advance of, or dragging behind, empirical sequences of events and facts. What Adorno enables us to see is that privileged space is art.20 Such arguments for renewed appreciation of the dialectic between form and history lead us to ask, what place might there be for book history in this “new” historicism, subtended by a “new formalism”?Some preliminary answers to that question emerge when we pay close attention to the use of the word “material” in the scholarship that we are describing. In (old) New Historicism and in the book history promoted by McKenzie and by Stallybrass and de Grazia, the material is opposed to the ideal. Study of the material text is thus materialism in the same way as Levinson's activist new formalism: both evince an implicitly Marxian concern with “the practices, the active ideologies, and the webs of interest that are largely responsible for the author's sense of the possible significance of what he or she writes” and the applications to which each reader, entangled in other webs and invested in other practices, puts the author's text.21 So the work of book history need not be antithetical to formalism, or at least not to new formalism. Both are concerned with ideology—what Louis Althusser neatly describes as “the (imaginary) relation of individuals to the relations of production and relations that derive from them”22—and thus also with how these relations are manifest in the forms of texts that have been released from ideological closure. Such “forms” might be the spiraling ironies of a poem (to evoke the work Stephen Greenblatt) or the persistently unstable typographical impressions of that poem as found in books (to evoke the work of Randall McLeod).23And yet it is worth noticing how flatly the word “material” is used in less exemplary criticism than Greenblatt's or McLeod's. In much book history, the “material text” has come to mean the book in your hand rather than the one in your head, the one with physical as opposed to ideal form. This evacuation of its philosophical meaning risks turning the materialism of book history into its own kind of idealism. Books, like texts, are necessarily entangled in the networks of relations that constitute ideology. In some book history, however, the text's material forms do not alert us to the “active ideologies” at work in its production or use. Instead, the case for the “material text” becomes a case for the material text against the literary text. In scholarship that proceeds along these lines, old books tell us what poems cannot about the past or about themselves.24But any thoughtful manuscript scholar will tell you that a book does not simply yield up truth. A book no less than a text suffers “idealizing impulses” and distorting “receptions.” Its essence is elusive: it is “opaque,” as many medieval manuscript scholars note.25 In this sense, new formalism, conceived as a newly energized, newly theorized historicism, is a corrective to book history just as it is to an increasingly attenuated New Historicism. Its focus on form and on form's historical contingency is a way to forestall materialism's worst habit, that of ignoring the impenetrable opacity of the real and “projecting a determinism by matter.”26 We would therefore argue that new formalism deserves attention as one way of encouraging the book historian to treat manuscript “material” or manuscript “form” in careful, dynamic, and theoretically nuanced ways.Turning to another distinct, but not unconnected, trend in literary studies will further establish both this point and introduce some larger ideas about the value of critical pluralism. We are thinking broadly here—of the “thing theory” expounded by Bill Brown and Steven Connor, the work of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour on the quasi-object and Latour's argument for a “descriptive turn,” and Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy27—but we will limit our observations to Harman's articulation of the possibilities such a philosophy offers literary criticism, and to Connor's argument in favor of “things” and against aesthetics.28 Recent attention to things and objects overlaps chronologically with interest in the new formalism. It with it at the point at which some critics on such to describe the or that is the literary text. is another that that scholars have recently to turn our attention to literature qua literature, and another to think about that relationship to book history, which has been as study of the as and often manuscripts would especially to object-oriented criticism as described by objects of object-oriented philosophy are built from of and only through This is not the of and but a in which real objects resist forms of or The literary texts in manuscripts also have a place in this when they are as some not only from their but from some of their own in their of the essays in this volume just such a between literary and material on the one hand, from to that “the and therefore the “literary” are on the other hand, close to Harman's in that he to the study of art with the study of including literary texts, but also and in of their that interest in a literary text's need not be it might be puts on the other of Levinson's by that even in the Marxian aesthetics that she identifies as “new” historicism, there exists to the … to the of the that critics the aesthetic when they make art a puts work. this “activist” new formalism is just as and as any other aesthetic even if art does not any if it its through an or of culture, then it must be the critic who is to the the and any The only idea of the aesthetic that will is one that the thinking inherent in the of art from other do not this if that of art from other things it a way of then aesthetics might be a worth we have Connor's work Harman's for other when with Levinson's of the their work the of thinking about the form, or the literary to of If there is no privileged way of thinking about the that are of concern to us no critical method for aesthetics, no of the literary or literary form that is to what we in is just that some are thinking in ways about the “aesthetic turn” is less an than a for in manuscripts to Middle English literary we would that by the of things from our to as art or literature, object-oriented criticism and theory have contributed to this ideas the essays in this which have a variety their The is that books and texts can be at least as or things because they are The forms of manuscripts can be or as an of, the forms of literary The idea is that despite this to text and book, the the aesthetic and the of manuscripts are not with of the of the literary works that they McKenzie has that in books, forms literary forms do They and meaning as D. is concerned with some of the theoretical that we have as the forms of the books that interest work against or in with what an aesthetic to texts might to essay that the book does in relation to the critical agency of the the one hand, it is in books that literary art suffers the closures of its receptions, and general processes of cultural as Levinson puts A text like some of its meaning when scribes it into of or the of the the of of and the other hand, what art be to criticism, it the text from its another a critic can to the book in to think about the work that art part of the does in with those larger that the book its status as empirical In this the book that the text's form is also a for of that in a of close of of the and in medieval The of and the of the body of with the book, the made together the same of active from the as from the or formalist Such a must than the or and yet see that it is in and the of that meaning argument that the book can the work of the literary is out by that from some famous Middle English the forms of and from of to that there is to that privileged to on the part of some scribes for or the of the text at of authorial As he makes this us that the space up by the form of the that has been to who have seen such as a of of and so in manuscripts to the scribes to and to an of In other manuscript as a is and in ways that both evoke and of its scribes of the often sought to such A historically and formal to the in their manuscripts must therefore recognize that such as and which have been objects of value to formalist criticism, and which likewise have been to not have been by the medieval and readers who with the author's is not to say that such is therefore As Maura out in her the that medieval books offer is and as any other scribes are not necessarily literary critics than Instead, what essay and the to this volume is that of book history or of the history of a book, can yield an additional set of that literary critics use to medieval texts,” as puts The by such need not a text's it or just make it a this sense, the of the formalism by some of our contributors not so much in its method as in its It the of material to such much as the New Historicism of the of what might be a text to the and the It rather like object-oriented criticism, to our attention to the text as a other including the we must with when we that our is a book as as a text. essay is especially She is in the of meaning between and text on the and her way of thinking about manuscripts some ideas about the things from which they have been She for example, that in books has a and as a of and that these of to the between and they the between a and the in a as Where on the does the and the other is concerned with how our of books is by in the meaning of and how codicological such as and can more than just our She that as in the manuscript for example, the of that the of the poem to the as In manuscript a for this turn from the to the more broadly of medieval books enable us to see in ways that the physical do but the that they offer us and of the of other to the of reading books. with we of what is the or of the the of each as it is the of and even the book by to and to and it is the of manuscripts that has some of our contributors to for what they argues that we as a even production when of the word in the manuscript are the and of other by yield a that the poem as a more and more essay on the of in some of the most important manuscripts of the takes this between and form and even She argues that the often with its in a and a mode of reading from the of The is an that we be especially to what we are It even us a formal between and by the of that of the move is to that there be with this that “the most use of the in the Middle is in and that in those manuscripts both the of and … and the most of and she our attention to The literary form of the text simply be to the material form of the she to be and yet it so many volume that because form so many books as as texts close that a and to of the It does not us as that of Middle English of formalist close and also have been its most editors and manuscript it that just as it is to between material production and literary in the manuscript culture of the Middle so too medieval codicological and literary scholarship and wider than has often been especially in analysis of “The of of Middle English in which he his response to manuscript as as he with the both are and and he both book and poem like a literary is that the literary must his or her of codicological and thus the of the The essays of this volume that other of codicological data, which we might describe more as can be the for literary close their own of the to which our authors turn their manuscripts might be as and in “the can be The often in scholarly as a for or a one for We do not such The an a an and these are they are also and is not to but rather to both and to see the as as and in of what that has and cannot Literary appreciation both of these forms of of, and the texts and objects of the of will be but the of the there is no space for only The forms of medieval books both of They offer an to see (and and and and to but they also present that In this we the attention to of form and aesthetics as an not just for renewed appreciation of “the found in and the but also for and of just how medieval forms and of how many critical they would the that the essays in this the idea of “the literary of its is to so any of some of its will yield only a offers a however, in an essay that the past “aesthetic as a form of in especially that are not by other forms of in in the way they are and have a wider of possible meaning than they have in and not in any way to the is more more more meaning can be and can emerge in the of there but newly The literary in this from other of even this “normative” to literary form the wider and to The is close to that of when she identifies as a of the of the the of medieval objects to in and been brought to of manuscript studies. The essays argue for more of the forms of books in literary and yet more critical to those

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