Pages from the Past: Medieval Writing Skills and Manuscript Books by M. B. Parkes (review)

The student of medieval manuscripts is always conscious of his debts to Malcolm Parkes. In the course of his long career as palaeographer, Parkes has offered numerous object lessons on the sensitive questioning of manuscripts and all that they can open up for the scholar. His attentiveness to the details of script can be forensic when applied to the variations of an individual hand, or synthesizing when his experience of many individual hands is used to construct the history of a particular style of writing (in this case, Gothic cursives). The historical study of punctuation, what Parkes calls the ‘grammar of legibility’, is something he has made his own. Recently he has made a conceptual contribution that is entirely new in Their Hands Before Our Eyes: a Closer Look at Scribes (2008), based on his Oxford Lyell Lectures given in 1999, which treats scribal preoccupations with an intuitive insight; Parkes himself has described the book as his palaeographical testament. There has already been one volume of collected essays: Scribes, Scripts and Readers, published in 1991. This present volume is the sequel, gathering the articles published between 1992 and 2007. The editors, Pamela Robinson and Rivkah Zim, have sensibly divided the material between four sections: Scribes and Scripts, Punctuation, Readers, and Book Provision. The essays range, in familiar style, from the particular to the commanding overview.

In the first section Parkes shows what the handwriting of individual scribes and the evidence of script can say to the circumstances of a manuscript’s production. He performs this trick plausibly in his meticulous examination of the handwriting of the unnamed scribe of the famous Hereford Map, whom he shows to have been a local man writing between about 1290 and 1310. Similar attentiveness to the personal ductus in the hand of Richard Frampton, a commercial scribe working at the turn of the fifteenth century, enabled Parkes to identify further, unsigned specimens of his hand and then to arrange them chronologically. The most important essay in this section relates to the transmission of John Gower’s works through the hands of scribes whom Parkes takes to be neighbourhood scriveners used by the poet’s friends and earliest readers, since the same hands can be seen operating in five early manuscripts where additions and revisions to the text reflect Gower’s reactions to contemporary events between 1383 and 1403. A final essay in this section analyses archaizing hands in a sweep from the eighth to the eighteenth century. The essays in the section on punctuation are perhaps somewhat less useful taken en bloc, being based on conference papers that recapitulate the ideas in his chief work on the grammar of legibility, Pause and Effect (1992). But the value of his approach to textual studies is particularly well brought out in two of these essays: ‘Punctuation and the medieval history of texts’, which examines the different ways particular passages were punctuated from the early to the late middle ages, revealing nuances in the scribe’s understanding of what he was reading; and then an extension of that theme, ‘Medieval punctuation and the modern editor’, arguing for a delicate, noninterventionist approach.

The common thread of the essays in the third section, Readers, is the way in which understanding of the text is assisted not only by punctuation but also by mise-en-page, and how developments in the way the text was laid out reflect broader currents in the history of reading. The first essay, drawing together the evidence for the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons first learned to read and then thought about reading, leads happily into the second, ‘Folia librorum quaerere’, which explores practices in later centuries when reading trends had turned more towards the needs of scholastic enquiry. This article explores the coming of a standard arrangement of text and gloss, diagrammatic presentation, and the birth of the...