SELCS

Medieval Poetry on and off the Page


Course code: ELCS4009
Tutor: Dr Catherine Keen
Level: advanced
Mode of Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 3000 words each
Term: taught in term 1

Course Description:
Modern readers encounter medieval poetry in standard printed formats, but what were the poetic forms known to contemporary readers? On this course we will think about the contexts in which audiences encountered poetry before the invention of printing, and about the impact that print and digital technologies have had on the presentation and consumption of such medieval texts. We will return to manuscript and other visual sources to explore aspects of textual presentation such as decoration and illumination; textual layout; paper, parchment and binding; handwriting and print fonts; survival and status of multiple/ lone copies; etc. We will look at some of the inventive forms used by medieval copyists to present texts on the manuscript page, such as calligrams or carmina figurata, or to improve the reader’s reception, such as the use of manicules or mnemonic marginalia, and discuss what non-book sources can tell us about the consumption of medieval poetry, such as painting and sculpture, textiles, modern audio-visual performances and recordings. The course provides opportunities (subject to permissions) for study of manuscripts and early printed books in London collections, such as UCL Special Collections, the British Library, the Warburg Institute. It looks towards the future in considering the impact of digitisation of texts, books and manuscripts, and new forms of reading and text consumption and circulation developing in the twenty-first century.

Primary Texts:

There are no ‘set texts’ as such on this course, but we will refer to materials from a range of medieval authors to illustrate the different topics. A collection of short text extracts will be available from the Moodle site at the start of the course, and includes material by Boccaccio, Chaucer, Dante, Marie de France, Petrarch, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and several others. The following links also offer examples of the kind of visually-oriented primary materials we will discuss:

- Micrographia and visual poetry: British Library manuscript Oriental 2091

http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/searchMSNo.asp

- Author portraits and memory devices in Pierpont Morgan Library (NY), manuscript 819:

http://www.filmod.unina.it/cdg/Canzonieri/N%20%28XIII%20ex.%29/html/album.htm

- Graffiti and material poetry in churches in Hertfordshire and York:

http://www.stmarysashwell.org.uk/church/graffiti/decode.htm

http://tinyurl.com/cofpngb

- ‘Dirty books’ – the marks that show how medieval readers handled books:

http://www.jhna.org/index.php/past-issues/volume-2-issue-1-2/129-dirty-books


Initial Secondary Bibliography:

  • G. Bornstein and T. Tinkle, eds., The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print and Digital Culture (1998)
  • Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: the Margins of Medieval Art (1992)
  • Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (2nd edn., 2008)
  • David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, An Introduction to Book History(2005)
  • A. N. Doane and C. B. Pasternak, Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages (1991)
  • Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001)
  • Raimonda Modiano, Leroy Searle and Peter Shillingsburg, ed, Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies (2004)
  • Peter Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (2006)