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Chapter 5 - ‘Rede … and ʒe may se’

Reading Plain Text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2022

Daniel Wakelin
Daniel Wakelin
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 5 examines the annotations by scribes and marginalia by readers in manuscripts of the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A quantitative survey of the treatment of margins shows that, although poets planned elaborate paratexts for their works, scribes and readers seldom used the page for annotation or marginalia. From this survey the author deduces that scribes and readers in the fifteenth century were more interested in reading the poem continuously and for kinds of reading aloud or for pleasure, in ways that do not lend themselves to written record in margins. The poem lives in an immaterial dimension of cognition and feeling, beyond what appears on the material page.

Keywords

pagelayoutmarginmarginaliaannotationpoetryreadingChaucerLydgate
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Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England
Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400–1500
 , pp. 154 - 191
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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