The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches ed. by Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (review)

This volume, a worthy addition to the series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, contains twelve new essays (plus an introduction) by a diverse group of scholars. Focusing on the High Middle Ages and scholastic and nonmonastic manuscripts, they seek to bring the insights of recent work on print culture to the study of manuscripts, putting "manuscript studies into dialogue with cultural history" (p. 2). In an introductory essay, the editors urge that the study of manuscript culture, while it must arise from a close consideration of the material properties of manuscripts, must rise above the narrowly focused analysis of individual manuscripts. What they are urging, of course, is for scholars to consider the human agents who made and used these material objects, in the spirit of Donald F. McKenzie and other pioneers of modern bibliography. They present a series of "theses" that sketch out how a new, culturally aware manuscript study might imagine itself: a manuscript is a process as much as a product; manuscripts underwent constant evolution, and their post-production history is as important as their moment of origin; and the "constantly shifting nexus of agents involved in manuscript production" (p. 9) served to decentralize literary and textual authority. The essays in the collection offer examples of how these guiding ideas might inspire new insights into familiar manuscripts; more than a set of case studies, they are a series of arguments for the central place of paleography, codicology, and the other traditional arts of medieval manuscript studies in cultural history, and vice versa.

In "Bibliographical Theory and the Textuality of the Codex: Toward a History of the Premodern Book," Seth Lerer discusses some early modern Sammelbände (bound collections of originally separate works), which, both in their binding together and their disassembly, have stories to tell about "the human hand" (p. 20) visible even in surviving printed books. Looking primarily at Aldus Manutius's edition of Catullus (1502), Lerer calls attention to the hand-made quality of the book—the hand of the printer and type-maker, the hand of the editor, even the hand of the owner and user, are evident in the surviving codex.

The lack of uniformity and idiosyncratic circumstances of production of manuscript books have generally led scholars to regard them as primitive and imperfect modes of publication; Stephen G. Nichols's "What is Manuscript Culture? Technologies of the Manuscript Matrix" argues instead that by considering the "manuscript matrix" (p. 39)—the interactive space of dynamic interplay of text, rubric, image, insertion, interpolation, and so on—we can read "the story of a moment when poets, artists, scribes, readers, and all those responsible for producing parchment, ink, and colors, lived and worked in closer collaboration with one another" (p. 57). Manuscripts can be read not as imperfect modern books but as vivid multimedia social portraits, self-referential and self-representational.

A manuscript is more than just a container for text, and careful scholars have long been attuned to the information contained in hands, bindings, marginal scribbles, and other features. These can offer information about the object's makers and users; in "Decoding the Material Book: Cultural Residue in Medieval Manuscripts," Erik Kwakkel looks at the "data embodied in the physicality of the object itself" (p. 60). Idiosyncrasies of script and hand can reveal the date and often the origin of the scribe's work; quiring and page design, ruling and pricking, can also reveal details of the book's milieu of production. The manuscript's reader or patron could also influence a manuscript's physical form; we may at times "read the reader" and "uncover the motivations that hide behind the material features of the manuscript" (p. 67).

In "Organizing Manuscript and Print: From Compilatio to Compilation," Jeffrey Todd Knight considers "the complex entanglement of print and manuscript … in the reading and writing cultures of late pre...