Odd Texts and Marginal Subjects: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Book in Late Medieval English Manuscript Culture.
- Author/Editor
- Rust, Martha Dana.
- Title
- Odd Texts and Marginal Subjects: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Book in Late Medieval English Manuscript Culture.
- Published
- Rust, Martha Dana. Odd Texts and Marginal Subjects: Towards a Hermeneutics of the Book in Late Medieval English Manuscript Culture. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2000. v, 376 pp.; illus. Dissertation Abstracts International A62.01. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- Rust's dissertation explores "the bibliographic sensibility that characterized late medieval English manuscript culture," analyzing "the dialectical interaction between literary representation and its material support in a selection of late Middle English poems," focusing on how each poem "calls attention, self-reflexively, to a feature of its own material instantiation, in this way extending the boundaries of its poetics to include its physical frame." She considers medieval alphabet poems, literary epistles in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" and elsewhere, the dynamics of text and marginal apparatus in Gower's "Confessio Amantis, and "the calligraphic oeuvres of three late-medieval scribes, John Shirley, Ricardus Franciscus, and John Lacy," finding that, to best approach these poems and their books, we must inhabit the "eye of a beholder" that characterizes medieval reception. Mirrorings between text, marginal commentary, and illustrations are Rust's concerns in her discussion of Gower. She argues that "prismatic refraction enabled by the technology of manuscript commentary is one of the topics of Gower’s 'Confessio amantis' and one that is presented with especial vividness in Morgan M.126" (173). She focuses on specific aspects of folio 9 of the manuscript and then moves to various features of its presentation of Book 4 on Sloth, including the "scribal laziness" of its copyist, and how "certain 'slothful' aspects" of the illustrations to and commentaries on three particular tales in this book--the "Tale of Rosiphelee," the "Tale of Nauplus and Ulysses," and the "Tale of Iphis and Araxarathen"--"reflect both unnoticed perils in the text of 'honeste love' and possible lines of resistance to it" (179)--concerns that mirror those of the CA at large, evident in and magnified by Venus's mirror at the close of the poem. In several intriguing and complicated moves, Rust reads the "vision" of CA to be "Gower depicting a bibliophile’s fantasy of journeying through the looking glass of his own book" (206), not only a meta-commentary on his book about love, but also a meta-meta-commentary that reflects it through dense, even Wonderland-ish techniques of construction. [MA]
- Date
- 2000
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Manuscripts and Textual Studies