TIME AND PLACE

BOOK HISTORY AND diplomatic studies are areas of research into the written record that are usually treated and discussed separately and practised in hyper-specialist ways. This chapter will address the production of manuscript books and documents through the later eleventh to the first half of the thirteenth centuries to think across descriptive and analytical categories commonly in use in manuscript studies. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343—the focus of Chapter 3 from a textual perspective—here provides the opening inspiration for a discussion of script and its changing nature, modern categorization, and dateability. This will include a re-dating of the writing of the Tremulous Hand of Worcester.

Medieval material objects provide evidence for hundreds of scribes writing on behalf of their religious institutions or as participants in coteries of writers and intellectuals. In these objects it is possible to see a full range of scribal practices—from what traditional palaeographers regard as the highest-grade Gothic book hand to scribes at the vanguard of contemporary trends in writing to those whose scripts could function across textual form. These written objects throw into sharp relief the tendencies of twentiethand twenty-first-century scholars to utilize categories and hierarchies of scripts that are not reflected in the medieval materials themselves. The categories narrow the range of written records readily understood to be worthwhile studying from an aesthetic perspective. The manuscripts, rolls, and documents I discuss inspire my broader analysis of the modes and methods of writings in this crucially important period. Between ca. 1170 and 1230, especially, scripts and book production practices were in a vibrant and dynamic period of innovation and possibility of expression that cannot easily be categorized and might helpfully not be hierarchized.

As the last chapter showed, sometime in the late twelfth century, a scribe—whom few would consider calligraphically accomplished—added a poem to Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, an extensive bilingual homiliary.