Before proceeding any further, it will be useful to say a little more about these three manuscripts and the kinds of problems they present. All three juxtapose remarkably divergent material, and this was one of the reasons I chose them. Digby 23, as already mentioned, consists of two parts, both copied in the twelfth century. The first, Calcidius’s fourth-century translation of Plato’s Timaeus, was one of the most important philosophical texts of the high Middle Ages. The Digby version was probably copied by a Norman or northern French scribe, and it includes numerous and substantial interlinear and marginal glosses from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Later and more informal marginalia show that this copy was still in use in the fourteenth century, by which time some would have considered it something closer to a literary classic than a work of rigorous contemporary philosophy. The second part of Digby 23, the Roland, was copied either a little earlier or about the same time; most paleographers favor the second quarter of the twelfth century, although some would prefer a date as late as the 1170s. It was copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe, perhaps one working in the household of a bishop or a great magnate. There are some signs that the two parts were gathered together (that is, either bound together or kept together in the same parchment wrapper) by the thirteenth century. The first identifiable owner of Digby 23 is an Oxford scholar, Master Henry Langley, known to have been alive in 1263, who donated the book, or one part of it, to the Augustinian canons at Oseney Abbey, on the edge of town. Henry might have owned both booklets, but it seems at least as likely that the Roland was added later. However, the two booklets do seem to have been gathered together as a single person’s private collection within at most a few decades of Henry’s death, because someone has added the word “Chalcidius” to the Roland section in what appears to be a thirteenth-century hand. This would mean that the first reader of the Roland who can be even partially identified would be an anonymous canon of Oseney, possibly one of Henry’s friends. Whatever the arrangements by which the booklet came into the abbey’s possession, one thing seems clear: by the end of the thirteenth century, the Oxford Roland had become reading matter for English clerics.
This codicological information has been long known. But it has been largely, one might almost say systematically, ignored. Scholars have been remarkably slow to abandon the notion (for which there is not the slightest supporting evidence) that the Roland booklet belonged to a minstrel. Others have mounted a desperate rearguard action, assuring us that, even though the Roland booklet is found in the library of English canons, they did not actually read it and only kept it out of pious respect for their chivalric benefactors. And even now, when the idea of the minstrel manuscript has finally been laid to rest, nobody has shown more than the most passing interest in these thirteenth-century English readers. Henry Langley, it turns out, is more than just a name. There is a good deal we know about him, or at least about his father, arguably the most hated man in England in his day. But the world of thirteenth-century English clerics seems irrelevant to the prevailing understanding of what the real poem must be, an eleventh-century French sung epic. What has displaced the history of the manuscript is the modern editorial construction of La Chanson de Roland. The title of this work, which we inherit from its first editor, Francisque Michel, sums up the vision of the poem as a minstrel’s song. I have dwelt on this editorial construction at some length because it furnishes a powerful example of the way a manuscript can be effectively ignored while the words in it, or in some part of it, are treated with scrupulous care.
Each of the three manuscripts has presented different challenges, and for each I have taken a different approach. While I have grouped them in chronological order, I have also found that by good fortune they fall into a methodological order, so that the problems raised by the first are illustrated more forcefully by the second and more forcefully still by the third. In the case of Digby 23, I have from time to time indulged a certain empiricist hubris, pitting hard facts and concrete objects against the free-floating fantasies of the old philology as I call into question the very existence of the Song of Roland before its publication by Michel in 1837. My encounter with the glosses in the Timaeus, however, marks the beginning of a long erosion of that certainty, as the diversity of the manuscripts reveals the inadequacies of my knowledge. I have cast some lines from the world of Old French epic to that of the Anglo-Norman schools, but my treatment of the Timaeus remains limited and my reader must not hope for balanced coverage. If my account draws attention to some of the work that is being done in this area, work that will not be familiar to all literary scholars, it will have served its purpose.
The challenge of diversity is even greater with the second manuscript, Harley 978, a trilingual, multidisciplinary miscellany whose separate sections have almost never been considered together. Harley 978 is a small portable collection, or “manual,” to use a term current in thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman circles. Like other manuals of the period, the choice of items that were included reflects the social, intellectual, and spiritual ambitions of its owner, who would select them personally. This is a book to fashion an identity. From this single collection one reader might learn the language of amour courtois, the technicalities of hawking, various treatments for imbalances of the body’s four humors, and the arguments used against the king at the time of the Baron’s War. Harley 978 is also an important manuscript for several modern fields of study. With the exception of the lais, the fables, and a few of the Goliardic poems, most of the works in Harley 978 survive nowhere else. This is true of both “Sumer Is Icumen In,” one of the earliest and most famous of Middle English lyrics, and the Song of Lewes, the long encomium for the baronial leader Simon de Montfort, which sets out a theory on the limits of royal power, making it an important document in English constitutional history. Harley 978 is no less important for French literature. While there are numerous later copies of Marie’s lais and fables, Harley 978 is the earliest surviving manuscript of either and begins to define her canon. There are actually a number of Anglo-Norman texts attributed to a woman or women identified only as Marie and other manuscripts that contain anonymous lais in a style at least somewhat similar to those in Harley 978. The first editor, Jean-Baptiste Bonaventure de Roquefort, for example, used a thirteenth-century Picardian manuscript, BN fr. 2168, and made up a somewhat different collection.1 And only one of the Harley lais, Guigemar, actually mentions Marie by name, the eleven others being anonymous. Yet the elegant, early Harley 978 has carried the day. For modern readers, the Harley lais have taken on the stability of an authorized collection; they have become the Lais of Marie de France. Some scholars go so far as to claim the order of the lais is the very order Marie imposed in a final reworking or assembling of her work.2 Works that might be attributed to Marie but appear in other manuscripts receive far less attention.3 Despite the manuscript’s preeminence, however, there has been a staggering indifference to its full contents or to the history of its readers.
The debate on the identity of Marie de France offers a somewhat embarrassing illustration. Most scholars now accept that the author of the Lais, who at the beginning of Guigemar calls herself “Marie, ki en sun tens pas ne s’oblie” (Marie, who in her day should not be forgotten), is also the author of the translations of Aesop’s fables, who tells us in the epilogue, “Marie ai nun, si sui de France” (Marie is my name and I am from France), and is also the author of the tale of