In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Reading Codicological Form in John Gower’s Trentham Manuscript
  • Arthur W. Bahr

The broad agreement that has emerged in recent years on the relevance of paleographical and codicological evidence to literary interpretation in medieval studies has not yielded analogous consensus on best practices for such interdisciplinary endeavors, particularly when we begin thinking about whole manuscripts rather than individual texts.1 This dilemma stems largely from the “oscillation between the planned and the random” that the construction of medieval literary manuscripts so often seems to display.2 On the one hand, the fact that the great majority of them were commissioned for specific purposes or patrons makes it likely that some logic would have animated their assemblage. Yet many factors, on the other, combine to make such logics extremely difficult to retrieve. Exemplar poverty rather than thematic [End Page 219] connections may have led two texts to cohabit in a given manuscript; a short poem juxtaposed with a longer one may be there simply because it fits the space the scribe had left in the quire, and not because of the echoes of phrasing and image between the two. Literary scholars, trained to make arguments about thematic connections and formal echoes, are naturally inclined to see such ideational and aesthetic considerations at work rather than more mechanical ones, and this inescapable predisposition makes it both difficult and vital for us to grapple with the question of when it is legitimate to propose literary interpretations of manuscripts’ codicological features, using those features to support readings of texts they contain.

One possible condition of legitimacy would be the personal involvement of the author in the manuscript’s construction.3 Besides valorizing authorial intention in a way that no longer commands universal support among literary scholars, however, this criterion severely limits the range of manuscripts available for analysis, excluding a great many—such as the Trentham manuscript of John Gower, which I will take up momentarily—whose construction seems interpretably purposeful, but where the historical fact of that purpose is uncertain and irrecoverable. In this tension between interpretive impulse and factual unknowability, we can see brewing another version of the conflict between form and history that has been too readily accepted by some of the many recent studies appealing for renewed attention to questions of form or aesthetics.4 One of my main goals in this essay will be to suggest that this is a false dichotomy,5 and to propose a notion of codicological form as one way of [End Page 220] bringing form and history into more fruitful collaboration.6 I take form here to mean both the structure or arrangement of parts (here the individual texts that make up the manuscript), and their rhetoric or “style,” all the minute details and indeterminacies that invite and reward close reading.7 Applying this second understanding of form to codicology may seem counterintuitive, but we will see that the disposition of texts in a manuscript can in fact be as richly productive of aesthetic and metaphorical meaning as “words in poetry,” which Derek Pearsall, in a bracing defense of literary appreciation, regards as having “a wider range of possible meanings than they have in ordinary discourse.”8 In proposing an analogy between “words in poetry” and “texts in manuscripts,” I am not claiming that manuscripts are functionally equivalent to poetry. Doubtless the great majority of medieval manuscripts do not offer “metaphorical potentialities” in their selection and arrangement of texts. But when we are faced with the appearance of interpretively meaningful design in a manuscript, we should be open to how it creates meaning not just in individual poems but in the broader concatenation of their codicological form, even when the concrete impulses behind that form remain unknowable. Codicological form, I suggest, rewards reading as both history and art.

The Trentham manuscript—London, British Library Additional MS 59495—is an attractive test case for this proposition because it merits attention in other ways, too.9 Composed entirely of texts by Gower, it [End Page 221] includes works throughout the poet’s career in all three of his literary languages, among them the only surviving copies of In Praise of Peace and the Cinkante Balades. Its...

pdf

Share