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Medieval Authors? • What is an author? The medieval understanding of this concept comes from the Latin word auctor, which means founder, master, or leader.So, for medieval people, an author is not only someone who writes but someone whose writings carry authority—what Middle English writers call auctorite.
Medieval Authors? • Middle English writers refer to themselves not as “authors” but as “makeres”; they style themselves as translators and purveyors of the auctorite of earlier authors (primarily classical poets and philosophers, the Bible, and Church Fathers). Alternately, they present themselves as entertainers—bards, court poets, intending to delight and to instruct from a position subordinate to the royalty and nobles they serve. • They do not consider themselves as originators of stories or ideas. They do not aim to be original, to invent anything new, but to record, preserve, and re-present.
Medieval Authors? • Rather, they write for small and specific audiences: for a specific patron (like John of Gaunt or some other wealthy nobleman); the king himself; perhaps a circle of other literary figures. • In these cultural roles (court poets, translators, entertainers), Middle English writers do not publish books in a modern sense or have in mind a general public audience. 16th century painting of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster
Scribes • A scribe is a professional writer or copyist; in the Middle Ages, scribes were often also artists responsible for illuminating (decorating) and illustrating manuscripts. • For much of the medieval period, scribes worked within a scriptorium (a writing room) in a monastery or church, as part of a team of monks (or nuns). • Law courts and chanceries (record offices) also contained scriptoria and employed professional scribes, as did a few wealthy households.
Scribes • From about 1200, and the rise of universities such as Paris and Oxford, scribes began to function independently of the church, living in urban centres (although some continued to join minor clerical orders). • By the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, book production had largely moved out of the monasteries and had become a professional field, governed by guilds (a kind of medieval trade union): scriveners, bookbinders, and parchmentmakers all their own guild. • As book production became increasingly secular (separated from the church and church control), scribes, bookbinders, stationers (the suppliers of writing materials), and parchmenters were also, increasingly, members of the laity (not clergy).
In addition to scribes and artists, the scriptorium team would include a binder who was responsible for sewing the codex (a book that opens, as opposed to a scroll) together and putting it in a cover. This is a mid-fifteenth century book from Italy. Note the leather straps and metal bosses and endbands.
Materials of medieval book-making: • Parchment (made from sheep or goat skin) or vellum (made from calf skin) • Ink, made from gall (from gallnuts) and gum, coloured by carbon or iron salts.
Scribes • Chaucer’s words to Adam suggests a personal relationship between author and scribe, but this was not always, or often, the case. Many medieval manuscripts that survive were copied by scribes years or even centuries after the author originally composed the text. • Scribes had enormous power over the text: the organization of the page (“codicology”), the inadvertent changing of a word or phrase--these factors could radically alter the meaning or reception of a text. • The variation between English dialects in the Middle Ages was significant enough that scholars today can decipher which region in England the author came from AND which region the scribe came from: the text always bears traces of the scribe’s “voice” as well as the author’s.
Authors and Scribes • How might the collective production of a medieval book affect our reading of the text we have received? • How should this change the way we approach medieval texts, as compared to modern texts?
English Authors? • Why did English have a “second class” status for much of the Middle Ages? • We need to understand a little bit about the broader linguistic situation in order to understand fully the novelty and challenge facing Middle English writers.
The Romans ca. 45-410 Latin was introduced to the region when Britain became a province of the Roman Empire. AD 43-46: Emperor Claudius, with an army of 40,000, conquered the Celtic peoples of central and southeastern Britain. Subsequent campaigns brought almost all of what is now England under Roman rule . Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon, southeast England (AD 90).
The Norman Conquest of 1066 • French (“Anglo-Norman) the language of English court and literary culture for c. 250 years. • English is transformed from an inflected, Germanic language to an uninflected language with a huge number (~40-60% of its vocabulary) of words imported from French. Scenes from the Battle of Hastings in the Bayeux Tapestry. The spectacular, 70 m-long embroidery was made in the 1070s in England and has survived intact for almost a millennium.
1340until his death in 1349 English mystic Richard Rolle, who had written only in Latin, begins writing religious treatises in English • 1367-1389 William Langland writes Piers Plowman • 1373-93 English mystic Julian of Norwich writes her Book of Shewings • c. 1375-1380 an anonymous poet in the West Midlands of England writes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness • 1380 followers of theologian John Wycliffe begin translating the Bible into English • 1370s-1390s Chaucer writes his masterpieces, including Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales • 1390 John Gower writes ConfessioAmantis • Throughout the century: significant number of verse romances, usually anonymous, often featuring King Arthur and his knights…
Why does Middle English sound different than Modern English? • The Great Vowel Shift: a change in the pronunciation of especially long vowels that unfolded from the 15th to the 17th century. Modern English is the anomaly here: Middle English vowels are pronounced much the same as they are in French and other European languages. • Standardization of the language due to • invention of the printing press • gradual spread of literacy (eventually mass education) • language and literature as tools of empire and colonization • social mobility (eventually democratic ideals of citizenship)
Why does Middle English look so different from Modern English? • The idea of "Correct" spelling: • Until the Early Modern period, written English was (more or less) spelled as it was pronounced: there was no "correct" spelling that had to be learned. • Part of the process of standardization was the invention of the idea of correct spelling, so that spelling could be taught. Spelling, thus, becomes a matter of tradition, and correct spelling is a mark of having a "good education.” • Modern English spelling preserves many words in their fifteenth-century forms, reflecting fifteenth-century pronunciation. This is the reason that Modern English spelling is so out of step with Modern English pronunciation, making English spelling so difficult to learn. • Modern English spelling does not generally reflect the Great Vowel Shift: the reason that the values of the long vowels in English spelling are different in Modern English than in OE, ME, or the European languages which use the Roman alphabet, is because pronunciation changed but the spelling of the words stayed the same.
Pronunciation of ME • Some rules of thumb: • Be not afraid! You won’ be able even to begin reading ME aloud, let alone improve your pronunciation, if you don’t jump right in and start trying out those funny sounds. Remember, too, that scholars’ rules of thumb for pronouncing ME are best guesses: there are no recordings and no living examples to prove with certainty how English sounded in the 13th or 14th centuries. • Use your knowledge! If you have studied French, German, or any other Continental European language, you already know how to pronounce (roughly) the long vowel sounds of Middle English.
Pronunciation of ME • Rrrrrroll your Rrrrrrs! • Pronounce final “e” (sounds like China) unless the word that follows begins with a vowel. • Pronounce both vowels in a set: • cause = cows • day = da-ee • There are no silent letters, even consonants: • knight = kuh-nicht • gnaw = guh-naw
