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7 Style and Layout of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts
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7 Style and Layout of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts William Schipper It has long puzzled me why very nearly all extant manuscripts containing Old English texts as their primary text are laid out in “long lines,” when extant Latin codices produced in England during the same period are found in long-line, double-column, and occasionally multiple-column formats. This difference is entirely a question of “style,” a set of principles that guided the designers of medieval books, and that give them their distinctive appearance. This style, moreover, is immediately identifiable with a particular historical period or geographical area and, as the Old English manuscripts suggest, is closely associated with political and cultural factors. In effect, layout style is a cultural phenomenon in the same way that other styles—artistic, musical, literary—are carriers of cultural values . Manuscript layout style incorporates a series of choices made at the very beginning of the process of making a manuscript book that determines what the final product will look like. These choices are conditioned by a variety of practical and other considerations: intended contents, size, tradition, convention, purpose, the urgency behind a particular production, the experience of the people involved in the production, and sometimes even the desire to experiment with something new. This paper examines why the style of manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England containing vernacular texts seems overwhelmingly to have included a choice for “long lines,” so that we can in fact see an “Anglo-Saxon Vernacular Layout Style” in use from the time of King Alfred in the late ninth century to the last productions of vernacular Old English manuscripts in the twelfth century. I would also like to speculate on why this particular style emerged as the style of choice during the late ninth century, despite the presence of 151 152 William Schipper a Latin layout tradition that included both long-line and doublecolumn manuscripts. The Latin tradition of book design provides a context for this vernacular layout style. J. P. Gumbert, in a 1993 paper entitled “ ‘Typography’ in the Manuscript Book,” succinctly summarizes the way text has normally been arranged in manuscripts: Since time immemorial text has been arranged, on rectangular pages, in a rectangular space. But this principle has aesthetic, not structural reasons. From time to time one finds text in different shapes: triangles, hourglass shapes, crosses, but this also is done to achieve a more pleasant aspect, or to suggest some meaning outside of the text, and not to structure the text itself. 1 Manuscript book design is, of course, a question of “style”; every thing about the layout of a manuscript, from the size of the vellum and the choice of script to the layout of the text, is a matter of choice, limited only by current styles and traditions. The aesthetic principle that guided the designer of a manuscript in selecting one layout over another, and that prevented the selection of aesthetically unpleasing ones (Gumbert goes so far as to call them “ugly” ones)2 , was almost invariably paired with a principle of “utility.” The use to which a manuscript was to be put—whether it was to be a gift for a prominent person, as in the case of the Codex Amiatinus; in memory of a famous person, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels; a book for private devotions; a collection of homilies for publication; a collection of poems; or a book for some other purpose— the principle of utility along with aesthetics always determined what layout would be adopted for the book being designed. Manuscripts containing Latin texts are extant in a variety of formats. In size they range from the very tiny to the enormous.3 And in layout they vary from “long-line manuscripts” to multiplecolumn formats. Few if any original designers of surviving manuscript books have, as far as I know, left notes on what guided their decision to adopt one layout over another, but the principles can to a large extent be recovered from the surviving evidence.4 The process would of necessity have begun with a choice of contents and purpose, followed by a decision about size, guided by whether the book was for public use (such as a service book or a gospel book) or private (such as a school text or collection of homilies), since that [18.232.113.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:52 GMT) 153 Style and Layout of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts would determine such things as how many sheets and the...