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1 Among the rare books in Yale Law School’s Lillian Goldman Library is a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Nova statuta Angliae or New Statutes of England, covering the period from 1327 until 1484.1 While significant as a record of medieval laws, the manuscript is even more important for the unique decoration and illustration it contains and for what they suggest about the framing and interweaving of discourses within and among texts in the fifteenth century. Although published references to the Yale copy of the New Statutes of England go back to the nineteenth century, scholars have only begun to analyze this manuscript and its relationship to other visual and verbal texts in the late Middle Ages.2 Thus far, more art historians have published research on the manuscript than legal historians or other scholars, and there has been little consensus on the manuscript’s origins or significance. As I hope to show, the manuscript’s visual and verbal texts are most productively read from more than one disciplinary perspective. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the following study brings together research in several fields to present a new reading of the Yale Law School Nova statuta. This study is the first to offer a full codicological analysis of the manuscript, as well as a detailed discussion of its significance as a cultural artifact.3 My project in the following chapters is to explore how the discourses found in the centers and margins of this manuscript contribute to its constructions of English law and history, kingship and queenship, justice and grace. In more general terms, the goal of this study is to offer a new exploration of what kind of “work” a fifteenth-century legal manuscript might do and what forms of representation IntroductIon The Margin and the Center FramIng a readIng oF a LegaL manuscrIpt • A Lancastrian Mirror for Princes 2 and rhetorical strategies it might share with medieval manuscripts in other genres. Such an analysis is necessary for understanding the true importance of the Yale manuscript, and others like it, now as well as in the past. Many images of royal power, grace, and justice appear in the Yale Nova statuta manuscript – some verbal, some visual, some in the central text, some in the margins. The relationship between the margin and the center has become an important focus of inquiry for scholars in many disciplines, including the study of medieval manuscripts, for the margins and centers of the leaves of medieval manuscripts, in addition to the flyleaves and pastedowns that surround a manuscript’s central leaves, can be read as cultural space, as well as textual space. Like other margins, the margins of medieval manuscripts have been theorized as locations of difference or otherness, frames that both define and challenge centers. Michael Camille has argued, “Things written or drawn in the margins add an extra dimension, a supplement, that is able to gloss, parody, modernize and problematize the [central] text’s authority while never totally undermining it. The centre is . . . dependent upon the margins for its continued existence” (Camille 1992, 10). The margins of medieval manuscripts may also be theorized as thresholds or locations of mediation between others, inside or outside an individual manuscript book. Images or texts that recur in the margins at different points in a manuscript can serve to highlight links between the texts on those leaves, even when the texts come from different genres or treat different subjects. Margins are often the spaces where we find a mixture of images and texts that come from categories traditionally considered different or even opposed (public vs. private, religious vs. secular, courtly vs. popular). The margins of a manuscript are also where we often find images that cross boundaries in such a way as to create imaginative or even “monstrous” scenes or creatures, as well as texts that do not fit into traditional categories of literature (such as fragments of other texts, informal commentary on the central texts, recipes, mottos, curses, prayers, and civic or family records). Often, these texts have been added by a manuscript’s owners, rather than inscribed by the artisans who originally produced it, and these texts have traditionally been considered marginal to a manuscript’s central texts; yet these additions highlight the “open” nature of the textual and cultural spaces of medieval manuscripts, which were often constructed in pieces over the course of years or added to by different owners. The margins of medieval manuscripts can thus be read as spaces of...

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