Manuscripts can bear a deceptive resemblance to printed volumes, but by their very nature the first are handwritten (Latin manu “by hand,” scriptus “written”).
Consequently, all such products are unique. No mass-produced items of this sort exist, any more than do assembly-line medieval cathedrals. No two styles of penmanship are the same. These objects, each one of a kind, pump the lifeblood of medieval studies, or at least fill the circulatory system for that vital force. In many respects, they were the vascular network of the Middle Ages themselves. They constitute the veins and arteries of the bloodstream through which medieval folk, especially the educated, have been best able to reach across the centuries and millennia and to communicate with us—and we with them. For all the skewing that results from their being the output of literate elites, such codices have always offered a sweet spot for access to the minds and hearts of many medieval people. By metonymy, they present medievalists an illusion that the era in which they specialize is remote but not intangible. Parchment leads to poetry and prose. Poems take us all the way to poets.
Books made of vellum and its kin embody a massive societal commitment. The investment came partly in what might now be called “staff time.” Preparing an animal skin to create a proper writing surface, penning texts upon it by hand with quill and ink, and binding it into a codex were all labor-intensive processes, often requiring teams of specialists. This cursory conspectus elides many steps in the production of even the plainest of plain-vanilla manuscripts. The economic costs of materials were also real and mounted high. The pelts employed for parchment could have been used instead for fabricating clothing, buckets, harnesses, or any of the thousand other functions that leather fulfilled in the Middle Ages, which plastics or synthetic fabrics might serve today. Although the parchmenting process often renders the hide soft and smooth, the resultant material is tough. It may be scuffed, scratched, and snipped, but it can stand a lot.
Where manuscripts now reside holds interest, but far more consequential than the libraries in which they sit today is where they originated and how they relate to one another. In total, five codices of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries preserve the verse work Our Lady’s Tumbler. The original, at least as it has been handed down to us, is recorded in a form of French marked with many features of the language spoken and written in Picardy, a territory in the northern part of France. It could be termed Franco-Picard. The relationship between the literary idiom now customarily called Old French and the living colloquials or dialects grouped under the name Picard remains heatedly debated. When the poem was composed, the pecking order of languages within France was not yet established. Picard has devolved into a regional tongue or dialect under the overall umbrella of langue d’oïl, the language employed in the northern half of the country and other nearby areas, but in the early thirteenth century, the linguistic and dialectal spectrum looked very different. Whatever label we attach to what is now a patois, the important thing is that the text is, and had to be, in the vernacular. It tells of a leading character who is nonclerical, illatinate, illiterate, and unlearned. Without making a conscious effort, he contests the world that belongs to his Latin, literate, and learned confrères. Thus, it juxtaposes very deliberately at least two or three discourses and sets of values.
The text’s prototypes have vanished. We do not have a rough draft that the poet wrote out himself or that he dictated to a scribe. We lack even the next stage of a clean and corrected version. But we possess one manuscript closely related to the lost original. The other four all seem to stand at two or more additional removes from the hypothetical author’s original, or holograph. The unconfirmed authorial fair copy is sometimes designated the urtext, a term taken from German. The affiliation of the handwritten versions has been set down graphically in a genealogical chart that is known as a stemma (see Fig. 1.1).
Fig. 1.1 Stemma of Our Lady’s Tumbler. Vector Art by Melissa Tandysh (2014) after Hermann Wächter, “Der Springer unserer lieben Frau,” Romanische Forschungen 11.1 (1901): 299. Image
courtesy of Melissa Tandysh. All rights reserved.
This kind of diagram is meant to isolate what is styled an archetype. This primogenitor sires a lineage of descendants, whose relative purity and propriety are to be spotlighted. Low-quality codices are black sheep (or cows, if the writing surface is vellum). We could take the metaphor further to call them bastards in the family tree. The propinquity of copies to the real or hypothetical original is determined by detecting what are called fallacies. Editors of texts, following the procedures of stemmatics, hunt down common errors that are shared by different manuscripts. By doing so, they narrow down how the varying texts preserved in the medieval books are related to one other.
Textual edition and criticism prioritize the identification of supposed misapprehensions by those involved in writing out words by hand. To a degree, these two arts rest on an assumption that manuscripts and the scribes who produce them are error-prone. Consequently, they are often not enterprises that nurture positive and charitable thinking about the work of others. Philologists committed to such pursuits may go to great lengths in tallying errata. Over the centuries, the medieval copyists who have been put under the microscopes of these scholars have been on the receiving end of much obloquy for their real or alleged blunders. Helpless to defend themselves, they have been excoriated over and over again as stupid and slovenly bunglers. They have been taken to task especially for luckless efforts to make changes on the fly when they encountered wording that made no sense to them.
Another consideration important for us to recognize is that the processes of editing and criticizing texts were held in the highest regard in the late nineteenth century, when nation-states were created and coalesced in Europe. Researchers contributed to the construction of nationhood by delivering to the public through the educational system the earliest literary expressions of national identities. First, they identified and
concurred about texts worthy of being considered foundational. Then they located and validated the manuscripts most faithful to their originals so that they could constitute reliable editions.
In the sort of genealogy that a stemma provides, letters from the Greek and Roman alphabets customarily serve to signify individual manuscripts. Each such designation is called a siglum. In this case the letter O represents the lost original or archetype, which transmitted the urtext. The letter a stands for an early exemplar that was made as a copy of the archetype, although it, too, has not lasted. The alpha and beta, α and β, that come below the Roman letter are two further exemplars that were copied from it. Neither of these is extant either; they also are hypothetical. Tangible and legible reality arrives in the next stage. From each of α and β, two handwritten versions were copied that survive. In each pair, the text of one shows signs of having been affected by consultation of one in the other couple. To indicate this crossover, the sigla of these two are joined by the dashed line that traces an arc between them.
Of the five manuscripts that are not merely hypothetical but indeed exist, one has been deemed higher-ranking by all editors to date for the text it transmits. Its shelfmark, a notation that indicates its place in a collection, refers to the Arsenal library. Although far from infallible, the folios in this codex lack the major errors that are common to all the other codices that descend from the lost archetype, a. This text is largely without the omission or inversion of verses, faults in rhyme, mistakes in diction, and so forth that mar the other exemplars. This five-star copy has been assigned the letter F as its siglum in the stemma. In recognition of its superiority, it has been accorded a fork in the family tree all to itself. Alas, the prime quality of the text does not mean automatically that the manuscript has been passed down to us intact or even in sound condition. Fourteen folios have been vandalized. Most of the miniatures have been cut out, with attendant damage to many texts in the codex. What lingers of the art is the sad equivalent of the chalk on asphalt that outlines where the body of a homicide victim was found. But by exceedingly good fortune the image accompanying our tale remains mainly undamaged. The year in which the manuscript was written and assembled can be inferred from a piece of internal evidence. A perpetual calendar at the beginning commences with the year 1268. For readily recognizable reasons, we can conclude that the poem was composed before then—but by how long? To take on a still more intriguing question, by whom?