Textual Bodies, the Digital Surrogate, and Desire: Guillaume de Machaut’s Judgment Cycle and his Protean Corpus

This article explores the overlapping experiences of Guillaume de Machaut’s medieval manuscript readers and modern viewers of the digitized codex to argue that they share a nostalgic desire for a multi-sensorial and intimate encounter with the textual body. This study first considers Guillaume’s disgruntled reader in the Jugement dou roy de Navarre before turning to later readers who reenacted her desires when dealing with Machaut’s manuscripts. Finally, nuancing complaints that digitization distances us from the manuscript artifact, I consider how the digital surrogate reignites a desire for the textual body that defined the late-medieval reading experience.