The recent expansion of electronic access to the manuscripts in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, adds strong incentive for scholarship that attends to Old English literature as it appears on the page. Daniel Donoghue's study of the relationship between the manuscript presentation of Old English verse and the reading practices that its early readers engaged in provides still more reason to read the manuscripts and not just the edited texts. Donoghue challenges some commonplaces about the divide between literacy and orality and effectively links a wide variety of Old English poetry with some aspects of cognitive psychology to argue that Anglo-Saxon scribes made purposeful choices in the presentation of Old English poetry, despite the inconsistencies that exist from manuscript to manuscript, and that Anglo-Saxon readers saw and understood a system of assistance on the page.

Silent reading was not unusual in early medieval England, or at least it was neither as remarkable nor as distinct from oral reading as is suggested by Augustine's widely familiar account of watching Ambrose read silently. Too, expertise in understanding oral and written poetry clearly could and did coexist. Donoghue begins with these two assertions, drawing evidence from Augustine's Confessions, Aldhelm's riddles, Cynewulf's runic signatures—and present-day written Thai, a leap that helps support a claim about continuous script. One of the fundamental questions addressed in the book is why Old English poetry on the page did not more closely follow the model offered by written Latin poetry. Donoghue's answer has to do with what readers brought to their reading: if a scribe's primary audience already possessed extensive experience with Old English verse from hearing it, what textual assistance is required for adequate reading of it?

Donoghue's second chapter, “From Orality to Punctuation,” uses Riddle 40 and the Leiden Riddle in particular to consider the paths that manuscript punctuation of Old English verse could have taken, including the path modeled in the relative regularity of punctuation in the Junius 11 manuscript of Old English poetry. The majority of the Junius 11 verse includes a point at the end of nearly every half-line. Donoghue argues, though, that such consistency appeals to us more than it would to the manuscript's first readers, who would have had other tools to help them navigate metrical units. The most important of these tools was an understanding of verse syntax, which, as Donoghue explains, would have been evident in the long-line presentation of Old English verse and without the kind of pointing that appears in Junius 11. Donoghue's interest lies in “a fundamental equivalence between a graphically rich Ælfric homily and a bare-bones Exeter Riddle” and figuring out “what allows the latter to be read much like the former.” Similarly, Donoghue explores “how the metrical punctuation in the Junius Manuscript resembles the most sparsely punctuated poems in other manuscripts, not how they differ,” and he argues that “poetic texts foreground a tension at the heart of any system of punctuation, because ‘the grammar of legibility’ both works within a closed system and depends on a reader's command of convention. In the case of Old English verse the reader's competence included a sophisticated knowledge of formulas and verse syntax” (83).

The book's third chapter, “Verse Syntax,” is both the richest and the most technical in the book, pulling together grammar, meter, Kuhn's laws, punctuation, and more to explain the interpretive tools available to competent Anglo-Saxon readers. Consistently generous in his treatment of previous scholarship and careful in his own arguments, Donoghue explains that the poems on the page offered a “complex and complementary set of cues, some graphic, some metrical, some syntactic, some formulaic, which together rendered the poems in manuscript intelligible to their first readers” (107). Donoghue's detailed explanation of such things as how clause dips function and how pointing works with what M. B. Parkes called “units of confusibles” is dense but balanced by attention to connections and to the larger argument that written Old English verse had a systematic presentation for Anglo-Saxon readers (107). Donoghue acknowledges limitations and complications in what he proposes, and he provides just enough evidence to clarify and support the system he outlines: pointing could help navigate complex syntax, and meter and word order work together, whether reading is aloud or silent. Cognitive psychology provides specific language for a discussion of the work that the eyes and brain do in reading text. The saccade, for instance, is “a quick horizontal jump of the eye” from one unit of comprehension to the next, and it plays a role in Donoghue's explanation of how Anglo-Saxon readers could have employed their understanding of metrical rules to navigate compound words (129). Eye-movement studies also help Donoghue lay out a relationship between pointing and the text after rather than before a point. Noting that Old English poetry shares no consistent page presentation, Donoghue promotes a return, with fresh perspective, to the manuscripts to explore these systems in play, including over time. In “Less a Conclusion Than an Opening Up,” Donoghue sets out areas of change between earlier and later Old English verse. Of particular note is a table summarizing his “tentative, provisional effort to sort through the different kinds of vernacular verse circulating in the late tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries” (169). The book has an impediment to some of its own readers in having the notes stacked at the end, but Donoghue's explanation of how the Anglo-Saxons read their poems provides a stimulating foundation for much more exploration, in and well beyond Old English verse studies.