Following Lydgate: Troy Book to Siege of Thebes

Here is another post by Medieval Codes researcher Hailey Mullock on decoration in a Lydgate manuscript.

London, British Library MS Royal 18 D II, fol. 147v.

Medieval manuscripts are often miscellanies of several works. British Library MS Royal 18 D II contains several works along with John Lydgate’s Troy Book. Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, also included in Royal 18 D II, is the complement to Troy Book. Siege of Thebes was written to be the last tale of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with Lydgate himself inserted as a pilgrim on the Canterbury pilgrimage. Unlike Troy Book, Siege of Thebes was not written for a patron, but was still a very popular and widely circulated text. It was a continued presence in English Renaissance literature because of John Stow’s 1561 edition of The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer. Stow included Lydgate’s poem among his ‘divers addicions’ to Chaucer. Lydgate’s work as the last tale of the Canterbury Tales balances out the Knight’s Tale by providing the story of the siege of Thebes, ending where the Knight’s Tale begins.

Merry Christmas 2016

Manchester, Chetham's Library MS Mun.A.4.99, fol. 16r, detail.

It's time for our annual Christmas post. And this year it seemed appropriate to give a sneak preview of a manuscript on which Medieval Codes researcher Melissa Reid has been working: a fifteenth-century astrological/astronomical/calendrical/medical manuscript, Manchester, Chetham's Library MS Mun.A.4.99. The image above is the top of the calendar page for December. The roundel on the top left shows the Image of the Month, a rather expressionless individual wearing a festive red hat and socks, holding a substantial goblet. On the table before him are some unidentifiable dishes, what looks to my wistful eye like a large hexagonal Wensleydale cheese, a knife, and a covered cup. And the seasonal heading for the month, to accompany this image, is 'Welcome cristemasse wyth ale and wyn'. Merry Christmas from fifteenth-century England. Cheers!

Yin Liu

What is a Gloss? Part 1

Here's the first of a series of posts from Medieval Codes researcher Tristan Taylor:

Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Latin 7980, detail of fol. 5v.

What is a gloss? The term appears with relative ubiquity in scholarship but there is little consensus on what constitutes a gloss. Is a gloss simply a string of text that appears beyond the borders of what modern readers consider the primary text? The primary concern when defining such a term is the beginning. But where do we begin? Can we simply examine historical usage as the foundation, or should we look at the etymological roots of the term? Alternatively we can examine how scholars have labelled glosses functionally; that is, can we categorize glosses based on what value they add to a text? Another avenue of exploration still is the spatial dimensions of glosses: where do they appear on the page? To define such a ubiquitous term, we more likely need to examine all of these dimensions and explore their relations to each other.

Hierarchy of Decoration

London, British Library MS Royal 18 D II, fol. 6r, top margin

A post from Medieval Codes researcher Hailey Mullock.
 
Many medieval manuscripts contain elements of decoration, from single-coloured capital letters to fully illuminated pages with illustrations and elaborate borders. The decoration was not only for visual appeal but also worked to organize the text and convey information. Medieval manuscripts were often written in black with few page breaks or divisions, and decoration helped to divide and highlight aspects of a text. In order for the decorations to convey information to the reader, each manuscript, and sometimes text, has its own hierarchy of decoration. The decorative elements often change in size and colour depending on their position and function.

Seeing the Forest

A frosty web, courtesy of a spider in my back yard. Image: Yin Liu.

The year 2014 was the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web. There has been, understandably, a great deal of reflection on the significance of this invention, which is generally accepted to have come into existence when Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer at CERN, the physics research facility in Switzerland, proposed a hypertext solution for information management there. The original proposal is available on the Web, and it’s quite readable: ‘Vague but exciting,’ in the words of Mike Sendall. I’d like my grant adjudicators to say that about my research.

Line-fillers

It's very difficult to do research on line-fillers in medieval manuscripts. When we searched for 'line filler' on the Web, all we got were advertisements for wrinkle creams. (Try it yourself.) But a line filler, for a manuscript scholar, is a decorative element that continues a line of text to the right margin:

University of Saskatchewan MS Ege 10 (detail)

Line-fillers in medieval manuscripts have a couple of functions. One of these purposes is to create complete lines that reach to margins to create an appearance of balance on the page. Another purpose of the line-fillers was to act as a mnemonic device, to help differentiate pages and mark passages. Christopher de Hamel notes that 'People in the Middle Ages loved to see order and patterns in things, and readers of manuscripts were probably more visual than we are' (de Hamel 2001, p. 28).