8 - Ordinatio, Apparatus, and Annotation

Summary

Ordinatio (broadly speaking, the basic presentation and organization of a work), apparatus (elements provided to aid navigation and interpretation of the text), and annotation (by which I will mean marks made by users after a manuscript's initial production) are almost always attenuated or invisible in modern editions of medieval texts, but they are of course a fundamental part of the experience of reading in manuscript. Each of the major versions of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut has a characteristic ordinatio.

Although the manuscripts are far from uniform, all tend to be designed to have larger initials separating sections of text. Even this basic guidance was not so basic that it could not be foregone, since in many manuscripts the initials were never put in, and the reader navigates via blank spaces. The chronicle's fundamental organizing principle is the reign of a king, and for the many reigns that are briefly reported, the reign is also the basic narrative unit. When accounts of single reigns run longer – as with Brut, Arthur, and the kings from Edward the Confessor on, and especially in the continuations – the unmanageable length of the sections elicits a range of responses from bookmakers. Their choices about if and how to divide text within reigns reveals something about how they make sense of the narrative.

In the Oldest Version, four of the five surviving manuscripts have brief rubrics heading each section, usually identifying the king in question and perhaps mentioning an outstanding feature of his reign (see Plate 9). Among the manuscripts, these headings appear to be related to one another, but also to be adapted by individual rubricators to, for example, fit the space available. The majority of Short Version manuscripts have headings only at the beginning of the prologue and main text, if even then, the result being a set of manuscripts that are not easy to navigate without the addition of supplemental apparatus (see Plate 11).