Thank you for that introduction. And I just want to add my special thanks to Butlin for having me these past
couple of months and the RBC Foundation for generously funding my time here,
as well as the foundation which funds my time in Canada.
Without their support, it would be difficult to undertake my research.
So thank you all. All right.
Okay. Sometime before 1450 ascribe working in England copied out a medical and dietary collection called the Regime to Call in Contemporary French.
The text was originally written in the late 13th century by a Franco Italian author who claimed to be translating a Latin source,
which itself was the translation of Greek. A second Parisian scribe living in England then added a table of contents while
later reader annotated specific words in the table with their English translations.
Thus, among many words, Deprez is amended to strawberries, which is my player, and I is amended as garlic I like.
Furthermore, the opening initial of the text contains the modern muscle cell linking this manuscript.
This on Fast of the Night and landowner who would later be comically reincarnated as Shakespeare's Falstaff.
I begin with this manuscript because it provokes some of the questions it poses and provoking questions.
Why did Falstaff own a French book when he could just as well buy a middle English book?
Why did he want a copy of this text? Would readers be familiar with the older French source for this updated version?
What do the annotations show about the reading and understanding of French?
What was a Parisian scribe doing in England? The focus of my project at large I might talk today is the ways in which readers might have
encountered and interacted with French books in the long 15th century from about 1380 to 1500.
This period is often celebrated as a time of the flourishing of middle English literature from Chaucer to Skelton.
But it's still a time when readers had access to and contact with friends in French.
We know that authors like John Lydgate and Richard Russo translated the work of French writers like Christine de Pizan and Alan Chartier,
producing new work in English from French originals.
Even as writing in English increased and diversified and translated French sources,
and over the course of 15th century English people continued to read,
copy, buy and borrow writings in French, sometimes in the 15th century French and styled as irrelevant,
dying or dead as insular versions of French, which are often called anglo-norman,
become perhaps less widely used for speaking and larry composition, whereas had been very prevalent in earlier centuries.
Yet French survived in specialised areas like trade and law.
The nuns of Laycock Abbey were apparently still speaking French at the time of the dissolution.
Notably, England was engaged in an extended dynastic conflict, which we call a hundred years war.
So English people had a lot of reason to be on the continent and sometimes lived there or owned property there for several years.
England remained a vibrantly multilingual space throughout the 15th century,
where people understood not just Latin, French and English, but also variety of European vernaculars.
So in terms of reading material, English people had access to both earlier continental books and what we call old French,
older Anglo-norman manuscripts, as well as contemporary literature, and more middle French and more contemporary copies of Anglo-norman.
So in addition to the dialectical variety, the texts also ranged widely in content,
encompassing everything from medical tracks to recipes Arthurian romance lore statute, French lyric, devotional prayers and conduct advice.
Generally speaking,
there are a handful of ways to determine if and when a manuscript might have been in England in the 15th century and who might have read it.
Some of these are related to reception and some to production, so things like the script is one that's favoured by English scribes.
An English guy might have helpfully added their names. This is very rare, so happens about once or twice.
A type of French used has English dialectical features the decoration of which this is an example.
Has corresponds to those that we might find in English manuscripts.
Manuscript was made for an English patron like John Falstaff.
The text would seem to appeal to a specifically English audience like its writing about English history.
Or it seems to claim that Henry the Fifth has a claim to the French throne.
There's marginalia in an English hand or in English itself.
The text is bound with or supplemented with items from England.
This, of course, depends on the binding being medieval and not being later.
Similarly, the manuscript might have a medieval binding of an English style.
The manuscript has the names of English people. It's very helpful, but sometimes confusing.
They might be owners, or they might just have been people who had contact with the manuscript.
Find these if they're there might be supplemented with English poems or scribbles or just alphabets that are in a sort of English hand.
And then finally, there might be evidence of ownership of an institution, particularly libraries attached to monasteries.
So sometimes all these methods fail. And it's impossible to tell sort of where a manuscript might have been made or where it circulated.
For instance,
this is a history of the kind of Normandy which is lacking all of its decoration and has an extremely damaged medieval binding and has no marginalia.
So it's difficult to place definitively as being either made in one place or circulated in one place over another.
Instead, we can only imagine the different trajectories that might have led to its creation and preservation.
Thankfully, many more manuscripts preserve some information about their origins,
reflecting the diverse roots by which French manuscripts could come to be owned in England.
Some are produced in on the continent in earlier centuries and pass through successive generations of English owners,
maybe as gifts, bequests or donations. This manuscript is a good example.
It's a combination of two old French doors on digest and chivalry, Viviane and I Skull.
The manuscript contains the names of several English people, including the mysterious Seer, to more locals who might not have been an owner.
He might have just touched or handled the manuscript or had a debt.
But we do know that one owner was. Find his name or there's an inscription here which names him as Thomas Arnold, who was a monk.
And he donated this book to St Augustine's Abbey in Kent, Spain, probably around 1410.
He might have received this book as a bequest through familiar circles, or perhaps he bought it before allowing it to enter institutional hands.
The trajectory of this manuscript from maybe a Lord to Monk to Monastery, shows how a French book can move between different circles of readers.
But English readers also bought their manuscripts directly from the continent.
This route was particularly easy for any soldiers who were there as part of campaigns in the Hundred Years War.
This manuscript is a copy of The Leaf Digitiser, a kind of encyclopaedia in prose.
It was probably created in the south, near Italy in the mid 14th century,
but it soon afterward passed into the hands of the Earl of Salisbury while he Montagu.
We know that William Montague paid 100 marks for a different French manuscript that belonged to King John.
The second which he took from him at. And it's probable that this manuscript was also bought around the same time and then matched.
You gave the book to Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, which is written right here, but it's not been erased.
And that's a photograph with a UV light, prompting further circulation in England.
We don't know what happened to Gloucester's books after he died, but they seem to have continued circulating in England.
Over the course of several centuries, English England received many manuscripts and content that then passed through generations of owners.
Those French books created in England itself, and that never left include both Anglo-norman texts and continental French ones.
Some, like John first book, which I started with, were created on behalf of a specific owner who would pay for the scribes and the illumination.
Others are a bit more modest. Since manuscript from around 1430 contains the imaginative travel guide of Mendel's travels.
But it was updated in the late 15th century with this stamped binding, which must have been after 1450.
And then some owner also added English and Latin poems to the findings.
A slightly later manuscript begins with two short texts in English and Latin, and then it is followed by a slightly longer text on heraldry in French.
Like John Fastow's book, this was actually written by a French scribe living in England named Ricardas Franciscus.
And the text mixes several different texts together to create this sort of chivalric how to manual.
We know Ricard as Franciscus also wrote entire manuscripts in Latin and French,
which demonstrates that the production of French in England was occurring alongside books in other languages.
In fact, it's not unusual at all to find all three languages in a 15th century book.
This fragment of the districts of Cato, which is the Latin moral text often used in schools for teaching,
has the Latin in red, and then there is English and French versus underneath.
So that's going up. It is a fragment. It's very damaged.
It's difficult to read, but it starts with Latin, French and English.
It's probably from the early 15th century, but the French verses, which are in Anglo-norman are actually stemmed from a 12th century translation.
So it's been several centuries old at that point. It's debateable whether we should even count these these as a French book,
because the French is actually so outweighed by the other languages on the page.
But these scraps of French are important reminders that when readers encounter French, it might be an incidental or secondary ways.
What's interesting here is that. Even in manuscripts in French produced England can look radically different from one another.
There's no typical French book from England.
So readers often altered their French manuscripts with new findings, notes, doodles and texts misspelling 264, which is a well-known copy.
The first part is the romance version of King Alexander's Life, which was created in the continent in the early 14th century.
Somehow it ended up in England,
probably through a purchase where Scribe then supplied these missing chapter titles called Rubrics and Anglo-norman Sets Blown Up.
You might see that there's a slight difference in the hand.
And then further, the manuscript was extended with a middle English poem on Alexander and Animus,
which apparently supplies an episode that's missing in the French.
Scribe, adds a helpful little note, saying what he's done even though he's actually wrong.
And this story does not belong in this first narrative.
And then around 1410, another scribe and several illuminators added a continental French version of the travels of Marco Polo,
which they copied from yet another continental French manuscript, plus two new pages of Illuminations.
Just in case. It's like some of the manuscripts already mentioned.
Emma's family 264 combines English and French, insular and continental parts, and represents several decades worth of augmentation and adaptation.
It's a kind of Franken French book. The manuscript was still interesting or relevant enough that 65 years later it was bought by Richard Woodville,
father in law of Edward the fourth in 1477.
Reading French is a dynamic process and one that doesn't remain static even over the course of 100 years.
This small group of manuscripts represents just a fraction of the surviving French books that were in England in the 15th century.
And they represent the different ways where how a French book might have come into English hands.
In addition to the continued use and circulation of older manuscripts, contemporary French texts could be acquired and created across Northern Europe.
Scribes, books and readers cross borders with a certain regularity for trade, education, family pilgrimage, war, diplomacy.
Those are all reasons to travel and to immigrate. Books, then move along with their makers and their owners.
I've gathered over 700 surviving manuscripts that show some evidence of reading in the 15th century in England,
a number that doesn't actually fully account for all the surviving anglo-norman manuscripts,
since those have been more extensively catalogue and examined rather than representing a waning interest in French.
These manuscripts show a diverse tradition of reading. So once we have an idea of who might have had contact with the French manuscript,
we can then begin to think about how an English person might have actually interacted with that book.
It's the study of reading in contrast to the study of maybe pellagra FT or bindings,
both of which are of course related to the process of reading is particularly difficult, not least because reading leaves little permanent record.
A manuscript with no marginalia could be interpreted as being read with pleasure, but it could just as easily never have been read at all.
If readers do put pen to parchment, their markings are, as Daniel Wakeman has argued, frequently retrospective or instructive.
Capturing the reasoning practice of medieval people then can be at times speculative peripheral.
With a close study of marginalia, layout and ownership,
we can begin to form an approximate picture of how a reader might have progressed through or been guided through a manuscript.
So I want to concentrate on just one text that was read in England in the 15th century, which is the Lancelot Grail.
It's a very long prose rendition of the stories of King Arthur and his knights in French, also sometimes called the Vulgate cycle.
The entire cycle sort of served as the basis for Malory's Morte D'arthur and is made up of five main branches, sort of like volumes.
It's hard to describe it succinctly. And these are these try to sell ground.
The astronomy Merlin, the five part Lancelot Deluxe, the cast,
the ground and the more type to you manuscripts have all of the branches and some of the later ones add extra parts of related texts.
So it's not a cohesive tradition of the 200 plus manuscripts and fragments last like least 24 were in England in the 15th century,
and they mostly date from the 13th and 14th centuries and largely were created on the continent.
That number of surviving manuscripts actually puts it on par with some of the more major middle English texts like Trials and Crusade.
Furthermore, we find allusions to Lancelot Graham regularly in wills and inventories across the 15th century.
Thomas Arnold in addition to the about the a manuscript I showed earlier,
apparently donated three copies of different parts of Lancelot Grail to St Augustine's,
which would have been that such luck astride a ground and the mortar, too.
Apparently he also owned a verse French book, which he also donated, uniting different Arthurian books in one collection.
Likewise, John Falstaff, French Liber de la Torre is likely to have been a Vulgate manuscript.
John Duke of Bedford acquired 13 Arthurian texts in French, many of which were undoubtedly the French prose version.
Although 15th century audiences would have had access to several middle English, Arthurian histories and romances,
they continued to read and circulate the French prose versions alongside the English ones.
While they combined different for different parts of the Vulgate cycle,
the surviving manuscripts allow us to examine how 15th century readers interacted with French art during material.
A focus on annotations in some manuscripts as a way to understand the value of this French text in 15th century England.
And argued that the juxtapositions of languages within these manuscripts represent
the multilingual reading experience engendered by the last thought grounds.
So of the 24 manuscripts, only a handful include any sort of 15th century annotation and three manuscripts.
Which I'll show readers made sporadic notes predominantly on this Watch Sun Grill.
Not one. That one and this one.
So marked the Esquire, even though these manuscripts combine the astride a sun girl with other branches.
The Annotators also focussed on the ancestry of Arthur's Knights, as well as the creation and movement of the Grail to England.
In so doing, readers look forward to other parts of the Arthurian story, even as they limit their annotations to singular moments.
The Grail and the Knights all reappear in later branches.
The narrative, the interest in genealogy can perhaps be connected to the more general interest in royal genealogy in the 15th century.
Between the deposition of Richard the Second and the continuation of 100 Years War, English, dynastic claims or a politically and socially important.
Several genealogical tests like these here establish Henry the fist right to the
French throne while incorporating Arthur into the line of royal succession.
Such manuscripts not only demonstrate an interest in owning genealogical material in the 15th century, but also blur mythology and history.
When readers of Arthurian romance pay attention to the establishment of clear lines of succession and relation,
they read with a historical sensibility treating old French prose romance with contemporary concerns.
Some marginalia in many maps look real.
Simply just say no to or nota bene note.
Well. A common form of annotation in manuscripts of any language.
The note marks a moment of attention that also looks forward to future moments of rereading.
The note is both for the person who writes it and also for the person who opens the page later on.
They're not unlike old highlighting in used books that predetermine where your eye is drawn.
In this manuscript, there's seven noto marks and just this one folio along with two verbal annotations.
My having so many noto marks on a single folio, the annotator seems interested in specific sentences.
In addition to the page at large, they might mark places to return to or imprint in the memory,
but they also link this sort of reading practice of the laptop round to one that might be used on a Latin theological text or a middle English poem.
In this way. A reader adding notice signs to their manuscript uses the same process on an old French book they do on a more contemporary one,
whether it be in Latin, Middle, English or French. The use of a note or a manicure.
I think there's two here. One right.
There seems to imply some need to remember or revisit particular episodes, perhaps hinting at a reading practice that is discontinuous.
And that's middle English example. It follows then that annotating in the last like around England is often a
focussed practice in another manuscript containing just the Lancelot branch.
An early 15th century reader has added a stylistic manicure, which is right there,
and a note to Benny and also marginalia to describe Lancelot Steeds.
Throughout this manuscript, the Annotator is particularly focussed on Lancelot and his relationship with Guenevere.
This English reader and others are entertaining with a specific interest in mind, highlighting certain sections of the text.
This type of annotations each imagine future readings that are searching and directed rather than continuous and passive,
while also marking the narrative as something that should be read multiple times.
Interestingly, almost all these annotations are in Latin or French.
Yeah, most. Are there any manuscripts in England in the 15th century have no 15th century marginalia at all.
At least two were cut up and used to find other books, so clearly they were not interesting to readers.
Nevertheless, the more complete unmarked manuscripts are set up with devices that facilitate the reading process,
make a larger initial and an illuminated one right here at two nights and there's a larger initial,
and they break down the narrative into just digestible parts.
Some have programs of illumination that provide visual cues to readers.
Such marking might render annotation redundant.
Perhaps these unmarked manuscripts offer up the most flexibility of reading because they lack the
suggestions or instructions of previous readers to direct the progress through the manuscript.
The unmarked manuscript then can become a site of internal process where reading
remains private and ephemeral rather than indelibly shared on the page.
But I think it's also important to question whether any manuscript is actually truly unmarked.
Although the owners of this particular manuscript, some of whom added their names in the final years, didn't respond verbally to the text.
Someone added drawings of thistles in the margin. Think they're thistles?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
While this might actually be a moment of inattention rather than attention to the text, they do show that someone was opening the page for a while.
Furthermore,
this manuscript has several coloured threads at the feet of certain folios as a kind of permanent bookmark or time which have now been trimmed off.
And you can see that it's been pulled downward to actually rip the parchment.
Because the threads lack the verbal instruction or explanation and because they seem to mark an entire life rather than just a single section,
they're a bit more flexible than a note banning or the UN annotated manuscript might provide reader with orientation and direction.
They also still allow a measure of writerly freedom to choose a path through the narrative.
In one singular manuscript, which is must be 2 to 3.
A late 15th century reader goes above and beyond the directed nota bene.
Instead, he or she supplements a large portion of the manuscript with English plot summaries, some of which you can see here that.
This manuscript is from Circa 1280 and was written in northern France.
It contains the last three branches of the Lancelot Brown set plans that du Lac and
the Castle grab and the march you created for the Annotator or for other readers.
The Digest provides a conceptual framework for Lancelot Grail.
The notes appear frequently in the first two branches of the manuscript, with only small sections of the first part of the manuscript going unmarked.
They comment minutely on the actions of the text in contrast to the other annotators who were focussed on specific actions.
Furthermore, the Annotator writes only in English. The difference allows him to both guide his reader and create a bilingual experience to the text.
Well, it's impossible to say for certain why this meant this Annotator chose to write in English.
Perhaps he didn't write French as well as he wrote it. The fact that he did alters the reading dynamic of the French sort grounds.
These marginal annotations provide an English guide to a familiar French text solely concerned with summarising the plot.
They don't mention sources, interpret allegories or ask readers to learn lessons.
Unlike some losses that you might find in a 15th century chronicle or a
narrative poem like Huxley's Regiment of Princes or Gouges confess your matches,
however, nor are they translations of words or passages.
Rather, the Annotator gives an overview of the major events.
Focusing on the announced block grant in isolation.
These notes model intensive, inwardly focussed rather than extensive reading reading that looks outside the text at hand.
Most of the notes take the form of how such as how going an actor saw a hand
covered with red cloth holding a rich bridle and tip or burning that top one.
Or how PELLEGRINELLI felt with Lionel for Bauhaus.
These formulations participate in a widespread tradition of beginning summery annotations with Como in French and quality in Latin.
A few of the annotations are even simpler, such as the prophecy of the siege start perilous of gallant, the beti.
None of these summaries meant any known commentary on Arthurian material in French or English.
They seem to be the Annotators invention.
Furthermore, the summaries need to be read sequentially in order to be understood because some are really vague.
Thus, the Annotator describes three passages as how Lancelot was distraught.
Another dream of the quest. Lancelot goes mad many times.
Almost every character has a dream, and the quest is pretty much the point of the whole branch.
There are so many battles that saying the beti is actually really useless if you wanted to find a specific one.
Therefore, while some of the more discursive notes could be used to locate a particular passage.
Many of them are actually not unique enough to isolate a bit of text.
Rather, the annotator seems to created them to be read alongside the French in sequence, text and glass.
English and French are to be taken in tandem. These annotations can be quite numerous.
Unlike the other French, Lancelot grounds that focus on a particular topic here, the interest is diffuse.
One just one. Page, for example, highlights how the wise man asked Lancelot whether he liked better his new life or his old.
How the wise man asked Lancelot if he had been confessed. Has the wise man made Lancelot where the hair?
How Lancelot met with the damsel in white. The English summaries at times monitor the monitor the actions of the characters very minutely.
There are several folios like this that develop a thorough digest of the events.
It would be possible if you are reading all of these annotations together to grasp a sense of the narrative and maybe even skim sections.
But such a reader would miss crucial details.
Instead, the English seems to be geared towards managing the arena experience of the French and drawing out those events,
which are most notable to the course of the narrative in order to have created this apparatus.
However, the Annotator must have read the text in full and must have also probably taken several days because it's very long.
Even if no one used the English summaries, as I have been saying, we know that at least one person, the Annotator, read carefully and sequentially.
So while the dig the Annotator is unique among readers like Graham, his reading practice mirrors those found in other 15th century manuscripts.
Similar forms of annotation, especially those beginning with how phrases appear in chronicles in Latin, French and English.
So here's an example about the children of Rochester with Tales in a Beirut Chronicle.
And then it's a Latin example. Both manuscripts have a series of summaries that run alongside the main text.
The Digby Annotator does something similar. As similar to the way that you might read the history of England.
By acknowledging the shared approach to a long and often confusing work,
we can see how the Lancelot grant is allied with texts in other traditions and languages, even as it is singular among manuscripts of the same text.
Presented with the parent text and the deeply manuscript Lancelot Grail is remade a new so that the reading
the narrative so the reading of the narrative here is one that is different from reading it elsewhere.
The Annotator conceives of of the narrative and the annotations of a whole that flowed together.
The notes notes make the most sense, not as nota bene funding aids,
but as a way of extracting and anticipating major plot points and providing a check of comprehension.
But not a translation of Annotators French is just fine, but a helping hand for a long and complex narrative.
The placement of the marginalia on the page further highlights the guiding role of the English over the French.
They sometimes occur alongside the illuminated initials like sir, but they also occur in the middle of passages like.
This placement competes with the scribal arch, not an auto displaying a different logic about where a textual break should occur.
Furthermore, many summaries occurring at the start of new sections are placed within the text
column itself in the blank space at the end of the last line of the previous section.
Dig three. This location actually resembles that of rubrics or chapter titles,
which appear in some but not all manuscript plants like Ground Dig B2 three has just 11 to accompany the illuminations.
But some manuscripts like this one, which was never in England, have many more.
These are because there are also similarities and begin with sycamores here begins.
When the annotator places a note like this one. How Gallard got his sword in the blank space inside the columns rulings.
Before the start of the next section, he's mimicking the placement of the more official rubric hated headings.
Perhaps the day the Annotator saw other Arthurian manuscripts with more rubrics and corrected his manuscript accordingly.
Unlike the Raymond Alexander manuscript, where the Anglo-norman scribe filled in the missing headings with reading,
the Digby Annotated doesn't have the space. Instead, he's just making do with the space that's available to him.
By situating notes in this way, the annotator not only links the end of one section to the start of the next,
but he also divulges what he thinks is most important. Accordingly.
The section below this goes on at length about how Callahan pulls a sword from a block of red marble.
The engineer seems to expect readers to use the English plot points as a preview or spoiler
of the French in the next section in order to aid cover to cover reading of the book.
By placing some of these summaries within the text itself, the ANNOTATOR asserts visually the authoritative position of his end of his editions.
The extensive power text provides a guide to the Arthurian material.
Yet the Digby Annotator also intervenes in readers understanding of the structure of the text itself.
Some summers are marked with crosses that connect the marginalia to specific sentences, not just general areas on the page.
The note how the white knight, which is spelled wrong, sent the White Shield to Galahad.
Keys to the White Knight's instructions.
This fire after the death of Batu Magus by linking the glosses to extremely specific places within the text.
The Annotator directs his readers at a precise level rather than clarifying the meaning of a sentence.
The Annotator uses the English to manage on a minute scale interpretation of the events that might be hidden by scribal layout.
In so doing, he also for a plot driven reading of the texts and glasses,
those events which he determines most actively contribute to the progress of the narrative.
Looking closely at the language of marginalia also reveals how the Annotator challenges the French because he anglicised his proper names.
Perhaps emphasising the Englishness of the notes.
He changes Antichrist in the text to Whitsun Tide, but more pervasively its the names of characters that he's changing.
Madame de Loch becomes Madame de Lake. Take a rain festival.
Pause. Sorry. Those are supposed to be in English, not French.
Kate Gwyn, Arthur Prince of all boys. And Lionel supplant the texts.
French school. There are cheaper school boards and unions.
So there is some English right here. In so doing,
he reveals a multi-lingual context of our three literature in the 15th century and the wider popular knowledge that reading
this manuscript relies on and relates to the reader has to recognise that key and text books and bought are the same.
The annotation the of the engine seems not sorry.
Proudest of annotation seems related not only to tracking the plot but also translating the characters and names
for particular the English speaking audience already familiar with Arthurian characters from other sources.
These subtle changes and glosses that require readers to toggle between two languages disclose that
such multilingual contact might be an inherent part of the experience of reading our literature.
The pre-existing familiar with our theory on it might also explain why the annotation ends abruptly to folios into the mortar too.
Perhaps the project of reading and summarising was just too arduous.
Or perhaps the Annotator was not interested in this text.
Historical and romance sources narrating the end of Arthur's Kingdom exist in numerous English versions,
which might have been preferred to the French. The French more torture centres,
more on L'Enfant and foreign affairs affair than any English version in the
last annotation is actually how aggravated told the King Lancelot loved Queen.
There could be a whole variety of reasons, like maybe the book was borrowed and never returned, or maybe the annotator died.
Whenever the reason the disappearance of the integrated French and English presentation means
that the reading experience changes suddenly and the reader is left without the managing force.
Although the more Tartu ties together many of the narrative threads by appearing without its English class in this manuscript,
this final text becomes separate from the preceding two branches of the Lancelot Brown.
The Annotator and prospective readers of Dig B 2 to 3 were most interested in the entire action of Lancelot du Lac and the cast.
Rather than reading these stories to extract some lesson or particular theme,
although these summary annotations may have reassured English readers facing a French text,
they may also reveal the deep familiarity of French Arthurian narratives to the prospective English audience.
Rather than helping with the difficult word or sentence.
The annotations encourage people to actually read the narrative because they're interlinked with one another,
while also helping reading by highlighting certain events and dictating places to pause and regroup.
Each language has a defined role. The English provides the structure, while the French provides the details.
The manuscript currently begins in the middle of a sentence about midway through as the series of extended conflicts with King Claudius of France.
A tiny eight in the lower right hand corner is a quieter signature,
which would have been a march to the finder to say what order to put the quires in.
Little choir signatures like this one appear in alphabetical order throughout the manuscripts.
There's the B. Indicating that an early rebounding stage.
This for you was the start of the text, even though we're missing probably 100 folios, if not more.
A second set of quire signatures in red were probably the original ones, which I haven't shown you here.
These later quite signature is compelling graphical features resembling the annotating hands and perhaps
the person who added the English summaries also rebound the manuscript without an intact medieval binding.
We can't know much more, but these signatures might indicate the period at which the annotation took place.
It seems fitting that the outside of the manuscript might have been renewed as the insides were being changed as well.
It might also indicate if it happens to be the same person or working to get two people working together,
that the ANNOTATOR was working on behalf of someone else as a kind of professional reader.
Apparently neither Annotator nor owner shared that the manuscript begins and also ends mid-sentence.
Perhaps the Arthurian story was so well-known that a reader could pick up midway through an extended story and orient themselves within the text.
A different copy in Lancelot Grail back several folios in the middle.
But in that case, the missing sections are actually supplied by a 15th century scribe here has put in old French,
but in a 15th century hand the section that is missing so that linguistically,
if not visually, similar in contrast to the visual hybridity, the reading experience provided by the Digby manuscript.
But it's missing beginning and end, and its plot summaries is an immersive, multilingual one, asking readers to pick up and start reading.
By way of conclusion, I'd like to offer some thoughts on the ways in which other copies of Lancelot Grail
from England also gesture towards the multilingual experience of Arthurian literature.
At least two readers added English summarising notes to the findings of their manuscripts.
So here, Richard Bruce, who you might know as the translator of QWERTY,
is built on some messy sorry advertising as the contents of his book with a kind of mini English summary,
which that's the transcription of it, much more legible. He records the contents of the manuscript and helps locate the beginnings of
each branch within the codex by describing the material on which it's written.
Yet Bruce also seems to assume that future readers will know what the first book of Sun,
Gro and the Book of Tristram and Lancelot are to want to find these sections.
You already have to know what they're about. A different reader describes this manuscript as The Chronicles of England,
beginning at Joseph and so forth of Arthur and his knights called the ST Group.
This description is actually vague, as if expecting readers to know who Joseph is and how they aspire to send out connects to later branches.
A glancing round for the title Chronicles of England seems to demonstrate a particularly generic alignment, along with a glimpse of the narrative arc.
Both English believe notes distil a sprawling narrative into just a few words, providing future readers with a conception of the organisation.
Each manuscript by equipping others from a tool that grasps the content of these two Arthurian manuscripts.
The Flyleaf notes. I like the Digby glasses, but on a very edited scale.
Written in English, the two inscriptions make visible the multilingual readers of our material in England.
They reflect a convergence of languages where English can digest French.
Further, if we return to those manuscripts of Glenn Sacra with annotations, we find glimmers of multilingualism there as well.
The 15th century English French used by the Annotators is quite different from the 13th century continental French.
The text to highlight just one glass.
This is Richard Ruse again. His comments come on, Le Mans.
They decided to do the reading. And then you can see.
He's ignored. The gender of nouns here, mayor should not be there.
So his anglo-norman is different from what we find below.
The extent to which Bruce's French differs from the other continental French
allows us to perhaps see these French annotations as a sign of multilingualism.
At such moments when Anglo-French Latin or English words appear on the page, the monolingual reading experience is disrupted.
The visual reminders that reading the Lancelot Grail in England must always already be multilingual.
For a 13th century French in 15th century England requires a process of internal translation.
Even if that translation is just from one variety of French to another, 300 year old language is no one's native tongue.
And then there are times where it's hard to tell what language a reader might think of the Lancelot Grail in.
One owner marks the manuscript as Lancelot in Gallico, Segundo, Folio Canoe, Manafort and Folio Second Folio Canoe,
which is a library shelf marking to help you identify which book is being described.
But what language is this phrase? Actually, in Kundu quotes the first two where it's the second folio.
But is that a quotation in 13th century French, or is it a 15th century French adaptation?
The word gallico seems straightforwardly Latin, but what about in?
Is that? Is that the Latin or the English preposition?
Is it Lancelot or Lost? No. These words require a kind of linguistic double vision taken singly.
It's completely nonsense. But together they make perfect sense, even as we cannot pinpoint what the languages are that are making up the title.
This slightly forced confusion over single words which nonetheless can be deciphered without any conscious recognition of one language or another,
allows us to see that sometimes reading can occur in multiple languages at once and maybe in no language at all.
There's no firm boundary for where we might call words French, Latin or English.
But reader doesn't need to know that information in order to understand that this is
talking about a book of French Arthurian romance and to have an idea of its narrative.
The reading of any particular Lancelot Grail manuscript operates alongside pre-existing knowledge of
Arthurian characters from sources in multiple languages that we find in so many of the annotations.
At least one reader made a direct comparison between French and English Arthurian narrative.
Commenting in the middle of the astronomer Anna that here begins the book that
Sir Thomas Malory brought into English and was printed by William Caxton.
By creating this bibliographical link between the English and French texts,
the annotator may explain the reading of one Arthurian text being is read in relation to its counterparts, even in other languages.
They hope to have shown reading Arthurian literature in French in the 15th century is not an isolated experience of a French text,
but one that draws on and is connected to the reading of other texts, other genres and other languages.
Even at moments when reading in French, seems most inwardly focussed on the particular actions of a particular night.
There are ways of associating that reading with larger modes of reading in England at the time.
Reading French in the 15th century isn't an oddity. But there are odd readers of French like the Annotator of Dignity 83,
who nevertheless draws on a general experience of reading in order to represent a manuscript for contemporary English audience.
With the various types of multilingual contact might show is a society where certain types of literary knowledge
are embedded cultural phenomenon such that characters and stories can work across and maybe even out of language.
For the 15th century, English reader or three, literature is always already multilingual,
and the experience of reading it forces language, contacts and manuscripts that we might not always be able to see or capture.
Reading a French book in England is an experience that's difficult to sum up here, not only because of the diversity of the manuscripts,
but also because the diversity of readers and the experiences they bring to the page.
Well, I focus on the last thought, Brown. We can think more broadly about the many other texts in England that exist in multiple languages,
like translations of Christine de Pizan or something as simple as the Paternoster might have in common with this type of reading.
Such texts are bred against a background of translating activity and multilingualism.
Even those works that exist in a single language also exist in this environment and are influenced by it.
Such that you get little translations. Alongside a monolingual text.
Reading French and England seems to necessitate a negotiation between text and reader,
not only about what language to bring in, if that is even a choice, but also about how that language will be internalised.
English readers like the reader who adds notes on fruits and vegetables here,
and John Phastos manuscript reform and recreate their manuscripts both physically and internally.
Perhaps it's best then not to think of these manuscripts as French books, but rather books that are in French that are being read in an English way.
Thank you.