Who Glossed the Canterbury Tales?

Portrait of the Wife of Bath from the Ellesmere MS

In the last post, we discussed how the Latin annotations present in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in various manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales allowed readers the potential for multiple different readings. Many scholars have suggested that Chaucer himself may have been responsible for adding the glosses, and thus also providing these layers of meaning. If this is true, the depiction of the Wife of Bath that most undergraduate students encounter may be very different from the one Chaucer had intended. Chaucer may have viewed the Wife of Bath as more than a bold and independent woman who, perhaps rightfully, refuses to be subservient to her husband. He may instead have intended to create a less flattering picture of the Wife of Bath. Thus, for those seeking authorial intention in the Canterbury Tales, the question of “who wrote the Latin glosses” can become quite important.

Latin Glosses to Chaucer's Tales

San Marino, Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9 (Ellesmere Chaucer), fol. 63v

Most people interested in a medieval work will turn to a modern edition in order to read a text. Modern typefaces are easier for most modern folks to read than medieval scripts. Explanations provided by editors of these editions can prove invaluable for attempting to understand parts of the work that use archaic vocabulary or refer to practices or events no longer typically in use. Unfortunately, many of these editions relegate marginal annotations found in the manuscript to footnotes, endnotes, or appendixes – if they are included at all.

User-friendly devices and device-friendly users

This 2000 sketch from the Norwegian television program Øystein og jeg has been a classic since it was posted on YouTube. One reason we (including medievalists) like it is, probably, that it reminds us that information and communication technologies we take for granted today – such as the codex – were once ‘new media’. In other words, reading a book is not learned naturally, like learning language; people have to be trained to use technology.

Books and bones

I’ve already written about the survival of the St Cuthbert Gospel (London, British Library MS Additional 89000), an eighth-century copy of the Latin gospel of John with its original binding, preserved in excellent condition because it was kept in the coffin of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne for centuries and afterwards treated as a relic. But the coffin and its history are at least as interesting as the book itself.

London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 26, fol. 83r. Image: British Library.

[Image: London, British Library MS Yates Thompson 26, fol. 83r, 12th century. This miniature, illustrating Bede’s prose life of St Cuthbert, shows Cuthbert’s arm emerging from his coffin to touch and heal a paralysed man.]

Take the activities of Alfred Westou, an eleventh-century sacristan of the church in Durham. The monastic community of Lindisfarne had relocated to Durham in 995, bringing with them the coffin of their beloved saint, Cuthbert, and the reputedly incorrupt body inside.

Asterisks in the Middle Ages

Astérix and Obélix. Image: the Indomitable Blog.

One of the jokes of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Astérix comics is that the names of the two main characters, Astérix and Obélix, are typographic puns: the asterisk and obelus (also obelisk, thus a double pun referring both to the punctuation mark and to the menhirs that Obélix carries around) were used since Aristarchus of Samothrace edited Homer in the 2nd century BC. The origins and early use of both punctuation marks are described in a chapter of Keith Houston’s cheerfully readable Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks (2013), practically the only reasonably informative book in English about the history of punctuation since Malcolm Parkes’s more scholarly Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1993). For more about the obelus (which became the modern typographic dagger), read Houston’s book. Here I will focus on the asterisk.