Les Manuscrits médiévaux, témoins de lectures

Catherine Croizy-Naquet, Laurence Harf-Lancner, and Michelle Szkilnik, eds. Les Manuscrits medievaux, temoins de lectures. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2015. Pp. 258. As its title suggests, this collection of essays asks what manuscript evidence can tell us about how medieval texts were read. Whether in annotations commemorating an individual act of reading or in conventions of illumination, formatting and glossing seen across large manuscript corpora, medieval manuscript books frequently bear signs of readers' engagement with the texts they contain, beginning with the scribes and artists responsible for giving form to the texts they read and reproduce. While many of the essays are narrowly focused in their subject matter, the collection as a whole contributes in important ways to manuscript studies by applying detailed codicological research to larger questions of authorship and readership, building upon several decades of work in reader response criticism and material philology, taking special inspiration from scholars such as Sylvia Huot, whose important work on Romance of the Rose manuscripts is held up as a model in Michelle Szkilnik's preface and cited by at least two other authors in the collection. Defining their corpus as manuscripts in French and Latin from the ninth to fifteenth centuries, the eleven essays contained in the collection, along with a preface by Michelle Szkilnik, offer a range of approaches to the question based on different kinds of manuscript evidence, including library records, interventions and annotations by translators, scribes and other readers, authors' reflections on their own readings as well as those of their imagined or ideal readers, and the readings performed visually by artists. The book is divided into four sections, organized into four spaces or contexts in which reading occurs: Le lecteur dans sa bibliotheque (The Reader in his Library), Le lecteur dans le scriptorium (The Reader in the Scriptorium), Le lecteur dans le cabinet de l'auteur (The Reader in the Author's Study), Le lecteur dans l'atelier de l'enlumineur (The Reader in the Illuminator's Workshop). The first section, Le lecteur dans sa bibliotheque, is comprised of two chapters, each of which uses codicological and other documentary evidence to assess the social or political function of a particular kind of library and the ways in which readers may have used and interacted with books in libraries. The first chapter, by Gilbert Fournier, is titled "Lecteurs etrangers et lectures etrangeres au college de Sorbonne au XVesiecle" ("Foreign Readers and Foreign Readings at Sorbonne College in the Fifteenth Century"). Fournier first outlines borrowing practices at the Sorbonne, which allowed community members not affiliated with the Sorbonne to take out books as long as a fellow (boursier) at the college accompanied them and vouched for them. Fournier makes a convincing case for the borrowing habits of Parliament member Simon de Plumetot (1371-1443), whose personal library, he argues, contained an unmistakable copy (Paris, BnF MS lat. 14644) of a miscellany in the Sorbonne's collection (Paris, BnF MS lat. 15690). Based on the contents of the collection, especially some treatises by Richard Fitzralph, Fournier speculates about how these readings might have informed political debates of the period even as English influence was expressly repudiated. The chapter makes notable contributions to our understanding of medieval lending libraries as well as to larger debates surrounding the impact of texts and readings on the political reality of fifteenth-century France. In the second chapter of the section, author Marie-Helene Tesniere of the Bibliotheque nationale de France asks a simple question as expressed in her title: "Les manuscrits de la Librairie de Charles V ont-ils ete lus ? L'enseignement des tables" ("Were the Manuscripts of Charles V's Library Read? What the Tables of Contents can Teach Us"). …