Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book
Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'.
The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts.
About the Author
I’m a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. I teach core courses in British Literary History, on Text Technologies, and Palaeography and Archival Studies. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and I am committed to providing a supportive and ethical environment in all my work. My current projects focus on death and trauma, on manuscripts and on the history of writing systems. I’m currently working on a new book that focuses on contemporary European Manuscript Studies, its debt to Neil Ripley Ker, and his methods and impact as a scholar. I recently published Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts (ARC Humanities Press, 2024); Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with OUP in 2021; A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2015); Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (OUP, 2012). Also recently published is the two-part issue 13 (2024) of Digital Philology on “Fragmentology” (with Ben Albritton and Shiva Mihan); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for CambridgeUP in 2020.
Since 2013, I have been the Director of Stanford Text Technologies, and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019 (StanfordUP). A new initiative is HANDMADE (Handwriting Analysis through New Directions in Manuscript Studies with AI and Digital Environments). This will be hosted by CESTA at Stanford and seeks to describe, evaluate, and refine handwriting recognition tools for textual objects of all periods. Other projects include Digital Ker—an online digitization and updating of Neil R. Ker’s 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, together with newly published archival materials of Ker’s; and, with Stanford undergraduate RAs, Stanford Ordinary People Extraordinary Stories (SOPES), which investigates the complex subject of personal and community archives. With Mateusz Fafinski, Medieval Networks of Memory analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls, upon which I am writing a short book tracing the footsteps of the roll-carriers around Britain. With Benjamin Albritton, I run Stanford Manuscript Studies, where we highlight Stanford University Libraries’ world-class manuscript collections for students and community members. I am also the Co-PI of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' and of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010; version 2.0).
I work a great deal with, and for, the Stanford Alumni Association, leading Study Tours and seminars; and in 2023, I was delighted to win the Lyman Award for this. I’m the current President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI); I’ve been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow, a Princeton Procter Fellow, a Fellow of the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Studies, and a Stanford Impact Labs Fellow. I’m a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Association (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.