3 - Manuscripts, Scribes, and Transmission

Summary

Chapter one investigated the origins of the tail-rhyme stanza itself – where it might have come from, and what kinds of texts used it initially – while chapter two surveyed the tail-rhyme poetry of Anglo-Norman and earlier Middle English literature in order to get a sense of the immediate literary context for the birth of tail-rhyme romance. This chapter focuses on a different aspect of the history of the tail-rhyme romance: the role of scribes and scribal practices in shaping the tail-rhyme romance. The study of ‘transmission’ has often been caught up with the traditional (if misleading) dichotomy between oral and written modes of transmission. Although this chapter will consider the influence that oral transmission and performance might have had on the development of the tail-rhyme romance, its main focus is on some little-studied features of the mise en page of tail-rhyme poems in their manuscripts. An examination of the use of a graphic layout for tail-rhyme poetry in some medieval manuscripts helps to clarify some aspects of the origins of tail-rhyme romance as well as explaining some features of versification and stanza-division which continue to trouble modern editors of such texts.

Graphic Tail-Rhyme

Many medieval scribes highlighted the verse form of the texts they copied through punctuation, bracketing, page layout, or a combination of these elements. The relatively common practice of bracketing rhyming lines together works well for couplets, but in more complex stanzas the brackets can overlap to the point where they obscure the pattern they are trying to illustrate.