The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture

by John Dagenais

Reexamining the roles played by author, reader, scribe, and text in medieval literary practice, John Dagenais argues that the entire physical manuscript must be the basis of any discussion of how meaning was made. Medievalists, he maintains, have relied too heavily on critical editions that seek to create a single, definitive text reflecting an author's intentions. In reality, manuscripts bear not only authorial texts but also a variety of elements added by scribes and glosses, marginal notes, pointing hands, illuminations, and fragments of other, seemingly unrelated works. Using the surviving manuscripts of the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor , a work that has been read both as didactic treatise on spiritual love and as a celebration of sensual pleasures, Dagenais shows how consideration of the physical manuscripts and their cultural context can shed new light on interpretive issues that have puzzled modern readers.

Dagenais also addresses the theory and practice of reading in the Middle Ages, showing that for medieval readers the text on the manuscript leaf, including the text of the Libro , was primarily rhetorical and ethical in nature. It spoke to them directly, individually, always in the present moment. Exploring the margins of the manuscripts of the Libro and of other Iberian works, Dagenais reveals how medieval readers continually reshaped their texts, both physically and ethically as they read, and argues that the context of medieval manuscript culture forces us to reconsider such comfortable received notions as "text" and "literature" and the theories we have based upon them.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published February 18, 1994

Reviews

[Austin Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Medieval readers skim across the surface of the text. They miss, or are uninterested in, the riches we like to find there…Medieval readers read piecemeal, in patches, like scavengers combing our master text for whatever they can use. They are self-centered, greedy, disrespectful. They are reductive” (213).

Medieval readers were grad students, apparently

[Roderick Brunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, I’ll say the title of subject here is an appropriate choice for such an ambition. Given the decent effort made by the author I’d like to see his interpretation of works like the Voynich Manuscript or the quatrains of Michel de Nostredame. Still, as a study into terminology and the basic foundation of modern philology, this book is a must read. After all, the period in which it was penned is somewhat responsible for the carved in stone boundaries of contemporary literary perceptions; an ultimately disappointing destination, what with the potential it had those seven hundred years ago.