The internal diversity of these manuscripts also creates stylistic problems. Moving from one genre to another, and from one discipline to another, I have shifted tone and acknowledged different levels of proof. The voice used to discuss whether William of Winchester commissioned all of Harley 978 from the booksellers of Oxford and the voice used to discuss how he might have read one of Marie’s lais cannot really be the same. Once more, the conclusion I draw from this is that for some kinds of scholarly project, including most of those that might wish to be considered historicist, single authorship has severe limitations.
The field of manuscript studies has often been seen as an intensely conservative one, not least by its practitioners, who are much given to presenting it as a bastion of certainty against the rages of modernity and the over ingenuity of literary critics. But this is not how I would choose to justify my interest. The three manuscripts I examine offer not some absolute origin but rather a testimony to the complexity of textual production and a measure of the difference between our cultural categories and those of earlier times. They offer us, too, a measure of the gulf between the lives of medieval people and the roles their culture assigned them, whether as those who fought, those who worked, or those who prayed. By preserving traces of the activities of actual readers, who often did a little of all three, the manuscripts take us back to the complexities of human behavior and human desire, bringing us not firm answers but new questions.
Occluding the Material
In the last two decades there has been a renewed attention on the part of philosophers, historians, and literary and cultural critics to the material state in which texts are preserved and disseminated.7 Once largely relegated to an ancillary discipline whose obscure calculations could be dispensed with the moment it had fulfilled its duty and produced an accurate version of the author’s final intention, editing is now widely recognized as a field in which the historical construction of a work is brought to light. Texts, it is argued, exist only in specific material forms, or, to borrow Chartier’s phrasing in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, they exist only in specific kinds of material support. Although the phrase “material support” is cumbersome, it has the advantage of leaving as open as possible the question of exactly what this support is. “Material support” can refer to a good deal more than just the physical book. It might, for example, be applied to the sounds of a text that is sung or to the singer’s voice. It is to the physical book, however, that the term has most often been applied, and it makes sense to begin here, with the argument that the precise physical form of a particular manuscript or edition is a vital part of any given text’s meaning and social function.
An early and influential statement in the field of print bibliography is that of D. F. McKenzie, who compares two early editions of William Congreve and argues that it is impossible “to divorce the substance of the text on the one hand from the physical form of its presentation on the other.”8 According to McKenzie, the physical format of the 1710 three-volume octavo collected works, which was printed under Congreve’s personal supervision, provided fundamental evidence of Congreve’s vision of himself as a respectable neo-classical author. When in the same article McKenzie explained that the original 1678 edition of Pilgrim’s Progress “was a duodecimo, set in pica roman, to a measure of only 14 ems” and therefore had a short prose line suited for the less literate reader, he demonstrated how the fine detail of textual criticism could feed into social history.9 Historians have advanced similar arguments for the social significance of particular formats.10 Robert Mandrou’s study of the bibliotheque bleue established a fundamental link between the material support—in this case, cheap pamphlets suitable for sale by peddlers—and its social dissemination.11 Robert Darnton’s work on booksellers’ lists and indices of proscribed books in eighteenth-century France established a surprising connection between political radicalism and pornography, both falling under the heading of libertinage and frequently being sold and condemned together.12 The effect of cheap printed forms such as serials or mass-market paperbacks on popular reading patterns during the last two centuries has been investigated extensively.13
These claims for the fundamental importance of the material support are neither trivial nor mere commonsense; indeed, they represent a major disruption of certain fundamental assumptions subtending much of the close reading of literature and even the very category “literature” itself. Social bibliography, history of the book, textual materialism—these overlapping approaches all call into question the self-contained, self-referential, and stable literary artifact, whether the well-wrought urn of New Criticism or the closed semiotic system of structuralism. Thus Jerome McGann objects to “the contemporary fashion of calling literary works ‘texts’” on the grounds that it “suggests that poems and works of fiction possess their integrity as poems and works of fiction totally aside from the events and materials describable in their bibliographies This usage of the word text does not at all mean anything written or printed in an actual physical state; rather, it means the opposite: it points to an Ur-poem or meta-work whose existence is the Idea that can be abstracted out of all concrete and written texts which have ever existed or which ever will exist.”14 Roger Chartier’s rejection of the “ideal, abstract text” cited above runs along similar lines.15
If the ideal text is stable and unique, the material text is multiple. So far the implications of this insight for literary criticism have had perhaps their greatest impact on the study of Shakespeare. Bibliographic minutiae, once valued as evidence from which one could reconstruct a stemma and recapture “what Shakespeare actually wrote,” have now become a mark of textual multiplicity. As Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass observe: “For over two hundred years, KING LEAR was one text; in 1986, with the Oxford Shakespeare, it became two; in 1989, with The Complete King Lear 1608–1623, it became four (at least). As a result of this multiplication, Shakespeare studies will never be the same.”16 De Grazia’s and Stallybrass’s collaboration with Randall McLeod/Random Cloud/Random Clod demonstrates how apparently minor bibliographic details can problematize the categories of author, character, and work. If we return to the early printings of the folio and the quartos, we find no fixity but instead an almost scribal fluidity in which the famous “weird sisters” of Macbeth are more often “wayward” and the very identity of works such as Lear or Hamlet is in question (a fluidity McLeod extends to his own name). The bibliographic details of the early printings ultimately bring us back from “the solitary genius immanent in the text and removed from the means of mechanical and theatrical reproduction” to “the complex social practices that shaped, and still shape, the absorbent surface of the Shakespearean text”17 While strong claims for traditional recensional editing can still be made, the ultimate goal of recapturing a single authorial origin, whether of Shakespeare or anyone else, is increasingly recognized as a chimera. Fredson Bowers’s hope that in the case of Shakespeare “in the end, one man may be able to digest the widely assorted technical and critical problems and unify them into a single great work of scholarship,” leaving us a text “as close as mortal man can come to the original truth,” seems to belong to another age.18
A similar confluence of “conservative” editing (which values the unique qualities of each manuscript rather than attempting reconstruction of a lost original) with structuralist and poststructuralist critical theory has flourished in romance philology.19 Here the crucial early study is Paul Zumthor’s famous Essai de poétique médiévale of 1972. Zumthor argues that the high degree of variation between manuscript copies is an essential quality of the medieval vernacular tradition and that the differing versions of a medieval poem, whether minstrel recitations or manuscript copies, should be seen not as corruptions of one original true version but as part of a continual process of recreation and modification he terms mouvance.20 This view has led to a new respect among manuscript scholars for the work of individual scribes, glossators, and correctors.21 Since manuscripts are inherently more open to alteration than printed books, they are also more likely to be polyvalent or dialogic, so that diverse forms of representation, both