Rodney M. Thomson

Identifiable books from the pre-Conquest library of Malmesbury Abbey

The Benedictine abbey at Malmesbury in Wiltshire was one of that select group of English houses which could trace its history back to the golden age epitomized and chronicled by Bede. To Bedes older contemporary Aldhelm ( ob. c. 709) belongs most of the credit for setting the recently founded community on its feet and for making it a by-word throughout the British Isles for the pursuit of divine and secular learning. 2 During his abbacy Malmesbury eclipsed the reputations of the Irish schools and of Hadrians Canterbury. At only one other point in its long history did the abbey attain a comparable reputation for learning, when it housed the monk William ( c. 1095–1143), whose career, intellectual interests and writings were consciously modelled upon the examples of Bede and Aldhelm.

William of Malmesbury as Historian and Man of Letters

As a historian and man of learning, William of Malmesbury has over the last century drawn the most diverse reactions from those scholars whose work has brought them into contact with him. On the one hand, praise has been lavished on his wide reading, critical acumen and historical judgement; on the odier, his credulity, carelessness, wilful mishandling of evidence and meandering irrelevance have been stigmatised. One group of scholars sees him as head and shoulders above, and in advance of his time, a ‘modern’ writer; others see him as the creature of his epoch and immediate environment in a pejorative sense. Yet it would surely be true to say that no-one since or apart from William Stubbs has attained such a command of Williams output as to be in a position to make an overall assessment of it. Even Stubbs did not claim to be attempting this and, in any case, he was unacquainted with several of Williams works, and misattributed others.

Handwriting in English books

Twelfth-century scribes inherited a script which had been developed by scribes on the Continent during the ninth and tenth centuries, and imported into England in the mid-tenth century.1 This script, known as ‘Caroline Minuscule’, eventually became the basis for modern type faces. Scribes on the Continent had gradually eliminated variant letter shapes inherited from Antiquity, so that by the tenth century each letter had its own constant shape. Scribes constructed these shapes with a minimum of distinctive characteristics which appear at the level corresponding to the upper segment of the letter x. These characteristics, the ‘cues for legibility’, became the essential elements which enabled readers to identify letter shapes quickly.2 The cues for legibility can be observed on this page by covering the tops of the ascenders of b, h, k and l and the bottom of all letters below the upper segment of x. At this level the reader distinguishes between different letter shapes formed with the same repetitive stroke: bp, dq, ceo and hkl. The arches of m and n, which distinguish them from i and u (for example, in the word ‘minimum’), and the essential elements which identify a, g, r, t and x itself, are all located at the same level.3 These cues for legibility have been invariable in all traditions of handwriting in the Latin West since the ninth century, but the shapes of letters – especially above and below minim-height – could be changed. Because handwriting is not a mechanical artefact like printing, different generations of scribes modified the ways in which they traced the component strokes when constructing letter shapes. In handwriting, letter shapes are determined by the ductus. This comprises a basic ductus (the repetitive traces of the pen required to construct the letter shapes of a particular script or variety of script) and the personal ductus which

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain

This is the first history of the book in Britain from the Norman Conquest until the early fifteenth century. The twenty-six expert contributors to this volume discuss the manuscript book from a variety of angles: as physical object (manufacture, format, writing and decoration); its purpose and readership (books for monasteries, for the Churchs liturgy, for elementary and advanced instruction, for courtly entertainment); and as the vehicle for particular types of text (history, sermons, medical treatises, law and administration, music). In all of this, the broader, changing social and cultural context is kept in mind, and so are the various connections with continental Europe

Medieval Maps at Merton College, Oxford

One thing of which we can be sure about maps from the western European Middle Ages is that many more have perished than have survived, and that many of those now lost have left no trace. Written records of lost maps, if brief and isolated, may not be particularly informative; however, when they are detailed and form a sequence they can be illuminating. In the course of compiling a new descriptive catalogue of the medieval manuscripts at Merton College, Oxford, I was led, during February and March 2008, to search the college archives for information relating to its books and library. Merton College, founded 1262–1274, has an exceptionally complete medieval archive, with runs of account rolls almost unbroken after c.1300. The college officers most concerned with its book collections were the subwarden, the three bursars and, until the late fourteenth century, the chaplain. The information I was searching for, in the expenditure section of the rolls, was abundant, but an additional bonus was the frequent references to maps kept in the library. It is the purpose of this short note to present these references in chronological order, with sufficient introductory commentary to make them intelligible and to indicate their considerable interest. The earliest mention of a map, in the subwarden’s account for 1308–1309, records substantial expenditure on the ‘reparacio’ of a mappamundi (see Appendix, item 1). First, we must bear in mind that in the Merton College and other administrative documents of the time, ‘reparatio’ had a wide range of meaning, from minor repairs at one end, to wholesale replacement at the other. A ‘reparacio’ in the early fourteenth century that cost as much as 4 shillings must have been necessitated by a good deal of wear and tear, and must have involved substantial work. One infers therefore that the college had had this mappamundi for some time. Secondly, the date is significant, reinforcing the impression created by the Hereford, Duchy of Cornwall and Ebstorf maps, that there was a fashion for world maps in England and elsewhere c.1300. Thirdly, if we consider the references to the mappamundi in the Appendix, items 7 and 10, and the fact that the bursars and subwardens were responsible for the Library, it seems that even in 1308–1309, the Library was where the mappamundi was housed. Not many Oxford or Cambridge colleges were in existence at that date, and it is not clear how many of them already had dedicated library rooms, but it seems that Merton did. In 1276 Archbishop Robert Kilwardby conducted a visitation of the college; one of his injunctions was that its books should be kept in locked chests, the keys to which were to be in the custody of the bursars. This implies a room

The format of books – books, booklets and rolls

Two manuscripts at Westminster Abbey exemplify the extremes of format possible for books at the end of the fourteenth century. This chapter provides cite examples of manuscripts produced in Scotland and Wales as well as in England. In the Ancient world the roll was the principal format for a literary text. The roll format encouraged the creation of poems to be read as a connected sequence rather than as autonomous verses that could be read in any order. The ease with which rolls could be carried helps to account for the monastic custom of using them as the standard format for notifying other religious houses of the death of ones own head of house. Despite examples of the continued use of rolls and tablets, the codex was the usual form of book throughout the Middle Ages. A Berkshire lawyer assembled booklets containing an Anglo-Norman romance and a Bestiary along with a collection of legal works.

Middle English literary writings, 1150–1400

Any attempt to give a concise account of the history of early Middle English literature, and of the material aspects of its production and transmission, faces both quantitative and qualitative difficulties. The relative paucity of surviving materials from the earlier part of the period is striking when compared with that from the later fourteenth century during Richard II’s reign; and the extraordinary efflorescence of what has come to be termed ‘Ricardian poetry’ (to which could be added ‘Ricardian prose’) constitutes a sudden richness against which the achievement of much earlier literature looks fragmented and relatively undistinguished. To these disproportions must be added an organizational one: a significant number of works for which distinctive ‘literary’ claims have been made, most famously the Ancrene wisse, have equal reason to figure among ‘non-literary’ materials and, categorized as religious or devotional items, are discussed elsewhere in this volume. The cultural situation of English in the post-Conquest period was an extremely marginalized one that stands in contrast to the increasingly dominant status of Norman French. Throughout this period the evidence of book ownership from surviving wills and inventories indicates that cultivated readers who wanted ‘literary’ texts were likely to own these works in languages other than Middle English: that is, in French or Latin. The low status of the native tongue is a recurrent topos in writings in Middle English between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

William of Malmesbury

Although best know for his historical writings, William was also a biblical commentator, biographer and classicist; his intellectual achievement is studied here.