Responses from the user focus groups and interviews
S3, on classroom visits to special collections
He would like to see more of the original manuscripts alongside the edition. He recalls there being a manuscript of Le Romaunt de la Rose in the Special Collections at his university and going to visit it. It was one of his favourite classes: “I absolutely love manuscripts. For me, it just brings you one step closer to the original time and context. It can never go amiss.”
However, he is not sure how much visiting manuscripts, no matter how fascinating they are, enhanced his understanding of the text:
“…manuscript studies is so important in terms of textual interpretation, but in terms of an undergraduate degree and where I was at with it – and trying to get this basic understanding of the text within a week, and then more so if I chose to write it – I never got to the point that I was really looking at manuscripts heavily. It’s more just really cool to see.”
S9, on viewing manuscripts and human connection with the text
She recalls visiting the library to look at manuscripts:
“They have a collection of manuscripts – I don’t know if it was specifically Chaucer – but they brought out a lot of old manuscripts and it was very interesting to see them actually in the flesh, and we could touch some of them but not other ones because some of them were older. […] just seeing old doodles, people had drawn images in the margins or did annotations […] there were even bookmarks and notations and stuff like that. I thought that […] these were real people and they used the books like we use them today.”
In the Special Collections room, she was given a rundown of the different types of texts that were in the manuscripts, what folios were, how they were made, the work that goes into discovering the dating of the manuscripts. In the session itself, the teacher would point out interesting aspects of the manuscripts.
T3, on attendance for Special Collections trips
The Medieval Literature 1 course is more focused on the text, and the culture and history around the text, but there is a trip to Special Collections in the library so students can get an idea of how the texts are transmitted, what it would have looked like to have a medieval book at that time, and how the text gets passed down to us through history. This element of the course tends to feature at the end, but the teacher has thought about whether to include it earlier in the course as there is an essay question on whether students feel the material context of the text changes how they perceive and understand people to have read or engaged with the text. He also finds that student attendance dips around the end of the course, but that the week at Special Collections drives the attendance back up.
T1, on the messiness of textual transmission
There is one session in Medieval Literature 2 where the seminar takes place in the library (Special Collections). The students look at a few early printed Chaucerian texts and original manuscripts (e.g. Le Romaunt de la Rose). The teacher also tried to make them aware of the issues with editions (e.g. what was the original text? What would it have looked like in Chaucer’s time?) and materiality, to give students a sense of what the text would have looked or felt like (a session on ‘from manuscript to print’). The library also has a blog called ‘The World of Chaucer’ which has various entries of early printed texts and commentaries on these. The teacher also makes them aware of manuscript variants, the various orderings of the tales in the manuscripts and omissions/inclusions:
“I am of the school that thinks we can never ever reconstruct the original – and it’s great that people are trying – but I just think you can never get there. I try and highlight that as an interesting feature in and of itself, of what happens when you handle medieval texts is that there is just a lot of uncertainty. […] I try to tell students that’s not your fault […] this is the nature of the material. Sometimes there are gaps or uncertainties, or messiness, so you just have to work with that. It’s not your fault. We all struggle with it.”
Codicology and interesting features
S6, on interesting features of manuscripts
He saw the manuscripts in class and discussed their reproduction:
“Generally I think lectures started with [manuscripts]. When we’re introducing a new topic, it was an image of the manuscript and then ‘let’s look at what the text says and any interesting features of it’, and then from there, onto themes and subjects. […] I think it’s fascinating and if the manuscripts are available, yes, let’s see them.”
He agrees with S3 in that analysing manuscripts as an undergraduate may not lead to a deeper understanding of the text at first glance, but adds to this idea by saying: “if we could see a writer working and making provisions, and then we see what we eventually arrived at, that would help us in this instance”.
S10, on palaeography and teaching
As both an instructor and graduate student, S10 mentioned the different things they’d want to see from an edition of the Pardoner’s Tale:
“Maybe say you choose three or four pages from the manuscript, which have particularly interesting palaeographic things about them, and then they’re annotated […] there have been a lot of New York Times articles recently too where they have a Cubist painting and then you can float through it and look at different features, those kinds of things are really helpful. […] I think as a graduate student who is learning, and as somebody who is trying to teach students who are further behind me in that process, it’s really great to have an example set up by an expert who knows what they’re talking about, and makes me feel more confident that I’m saying the right things to my students when I’m showing them a page from a manuscript.”
T2, on teaching codicology
The teacher likes teaching with manuscripts and hosting trips to the Special Collections, which are aimed as a more fun visit in the general medieval literature courses, as opposed to the book history courses. It is viewed more as an enrichment activity that students enjoy rather than being assessed on anything to do with manuscripts.
On the other hand, in the ‘Reading the Past’ course, there is a trip to Special Collections but they are asked to think of the codicological structure of the book, including how a group of scribes might collaborate together and the particular order of copying, understanding what a catchword is or what a folio is, and zooming in on the finer details and interpreting the terminology. As part of their assessment, students are required to develop their observational skills and understand what they are looking at and be able to describe it, honing in on issues of production, reception and interpretation:
“The trip then to Special Collections is getting them away from the digital images and tuning them into applying those observational skills to some real books.”
One of their assessments is a 1000-word proposal of an edition they would like to edit, which they send to the teacher, including an image of the text they want to edit and an archive reference, justifying why out of the millions of pages they would like to pick this particular extract. The teacher facilitates this by giving them a list of archives and libraries (either physical or digital), and she finds this to be a stimulating project to get them thinking about their reasonings behind selecting specific texts and extracts:
“I’m trying on that course to get them thinking about how history is constructed, how some voices are there and they’re more visible, and other voices are much less visible. And saying what you want to choose to edit is a big decision. It’s not a neutral decision. That’s the thematic or more theoretical conversation.”
The teacher mentioned that one really good topic by a student was a proposal on editing the #MeToo outputs:
“It’s saying you’re an editor, you can edit anything. You learn the skills of editing but you can do a medieval text, or Twitter—then all that could merge, it could be ‘Chaucer on Twitter’ or it could be a 19th century set of letters by a Chaucer editor.”
T5, on engaging with the ‘original text”
He always tries to engage with the manuscripts in class, even if just briefly, either in the form of facsimiles or images of the manuscripts. He would like to bring in more discussion of palaeography (primarily reserved for postgraduates at this stage). He is aware that these resources are now readily available by way of online repositories for archives and it becomes increasingly more difficult to legitimise new work in terms of digital editions. He believes that when students see manuscripts, it does not necessarily make it easier, but that it can be quite attractive to gain a sense of what the text actually looks like, versus an edition. Like T4, he believes that the modernisation of editions can often lead to the reappropriation of structures which do not reflect the medieval record.
Flexibility of The Canterbury Tales
S11, on the ordering of the tales in manuscripts and flexibility
She believes the ordering in which the tales are taught is important, and how this might affect our own opinions of the characters:
“My first instructor had a very specific opinion of the Pardoner, that they were not a fan of the Pardoner. And they think one of the things they did to compound that was we read the Wife of Bath before the Pardoner’s Tale. So we had this empowering person who’s living outside the norms and then you have the Pardoner, who maybe, at least in this instructor’s opinion, didn’t appear as good next to the Wife of Bath. So I think also, giving the students the flexibility with the tales and how you put them together [is important] because that will completely change interpretations of who’s ‘a nice guy’ in the Canterbury Tales and who is not, and who is being satirised into a straight player. It’s something I really like about digital editions.”
T4, on the flexibility of the ordering of tales
She finds that students tend to stay clear of engaging with manuscripts in assessments but do like engaging with them in class. She believes students do need to have an awareness of editorial intervention, the material form in which people might have experienced literature at the time and how what they are reading is not an original. She also stresses the importance of not viewing the text in the order of the edition but that it is important for students to recognise that there is more fluidity with manuscripts as to the ordering.
Digitisation
S12, on the Ellesmere manuscript and digitisation projects
She is interested specifically in the Ellesmere manuscript because she believes it is one of the best preserved manuscripts and is accompanied by many illuminations, which may also have an impact on how the tales are interpreted. She asks:
“To what extent do the illuminations of the characters inform our interpretation of the characters? So you brought up the issue of the Pardoner, which is really interesting because if you look at the Ellesmere illumination of him, I’d argue that this androgyny that’s implied in the text is actually not represented in the illumination at all. I think it’s interesting because it was completed in 1410, after Chaucer’s death, so whether or not Chaucer had any say in the illumination process is actually highly unlikely. And so then we can interpret the illuminations themselves not as a direct part of Chaucer’s creative process or representations of his characters, but rather, as someone else’s interpretation of his work.”
She mentioned an example of a large digitisation project which brought in helpful pointers for users at the Walters Art Museum, called ‘The Walters Ex Libris’:
“They’ve gone through and they’ve indexed a lot of the illuminations, which is really helpful to people who don’t know what they’re looking at. […] if you’re looking at Ellesmere and you’re looking at the illuminations […], having those descriptors when you hover above it with your mouse and a little side box pops up and it tells you what you’re looking at, I think it allows people to interact with the text in a more equitable way. So even if they don’t have the background knowledge, they’re not barred from participating with the text or interacting with it.”
T6, on the importance of digitised images
She believes discussion of textual variants would primarily be suitable for a Masters/advanced course, but that she always uses high resolution images of the Ellesmere or Hengwrt manuscripts alongside a section of the General Prologue, asking students to think about the differences in vocabulary and meaning as a result. It gets students thinking about the editorial decisions made about choosing one word over another.