Flyleaf Friday, or When Is a Manuscript Finished?

  A current game in the medieval Twitterverse is to put up interesting things found on flyleaves and pastedowns on Friday under the hashtag #FlyleafFriday. My little contribution this week is a bit too lengthy and contains too much rumination for Twitter, so here is the story. 
  I once bought a scruffy, cut down flyleaf from a French book of hours containing prayers written in French. 

  It was purchased as an example of a late 15th or early 16th century Gothic cursive script in vernacular French. It has a certain formality in that it contains a rubric and a slightly scrappy illuminated capital.

  No doubt pages from the original book of hours text are gracing various collections of pretty medieval things. There is a script sample and paleography exercise for this sample in Medieval Writing. 
  Some time later the same bookseller made me an offer I could not refuse and I acquired two similar pages from the same volume with the prayers written only on one side. On the blank side of one of them, an inscription in a circle had been added in a much later hand.

  The book still had significance to somebody. There has to be a story there. The bookseller included with these some extra flyleaves from the same book, that were so little regarded by the collecting public that he gave them to me for free. These were two leaves with further prayers written in  a quite elegant, but completely different script.

  These were dated at the end to 1572.

  There are a few things to think about here. Firstly, the book could never be regarded as finished until the last addendum had been added. The scribe or the bookseller did not prescribe the total content. Owners added their own contributions. Individual volumes were evidently valued by owners, probably successive generations of owners, for a long time after the huge wave of popularity of books of hours in the 14th, 15th and early 16th centuries. Private devotions presumably did not always follow officially sanctioned religious fashion. Grandmere's old book of hours still provided solace and consolation for somebody.
  Finally, it is intriguing that in the modern collecting marketplace, these parts of the book should be considered valueless discards. In some ways they provide a closer bond to the book's former owners than the officially prescribed text. OK, it was probably falling to bits. It certainly looks that way, rather than having been cut up, but to me these are at least as interesting as the rest.
  I have a few scraps in my medieval detritus collection with personalised addenda and I thought at one stage it might be good to write an article about them. Then I discovered that a much more revered academic had written a whole book on this subject: Eamon Duffy 2006 Marking the Hours Yale University Press. It's a fascinating exposition of medieval people's relationships with their books.

Medieval Cartoon Strip and Reader's Digest

  I think my very favourite English church is All Saints, North Street in York. Unusual design, sits down there by the river, sports an angel roof and at one time constantly reeked of incense. The greatest treasure of all is the collection of late medieval stained glass windows. Like most of their kind they have been moved, damaged, restored, jumbled, but they are still an amazing collection, and that in a town which has vitreous wonders dotted around it in many churches great and small.
  Some of the windows have less than common iconographic schemes, of which perhaps the most unique is the Pricke of Conscience window, illustrating an English language medieval poem about the last days of the world. This poem was once attributed to Richard Rolle of Hampole, but has since been re-assigned to that most prolific of English authors, Anon. It is a very, very long poem, and the window illustrates one short segment of it, listing the events of the last fifteen days of the world. It reads from left to right, bottom to top, like a strip cartoon.

    Two panels are in the wrong order for the poem, the second top right and the top left. This may have occurred during restoration of the glass at some time. The bottom row represents the donors of the window, praying for their own salvation. In the tracery lights St Peter leads the blessed to heaven and demons take the damned to hell, so get praying. Sorry, I don't have a good picture of those panels.
  So far we have the standard "lessons for the illiterate" paradigm, but it isn't quite so. Each panel has two lines of the poem written beneath it in chunky Gothic script. Some of these do not survive complete, but they were there. So it is not just a picture book, but a Reader's Digest; a potted summary of the most important lessons from a very long literary work that even the literate among the congregation may have found daunting to read in full. So this is how it goes.
  (Text from version by Richard Morris, 1863 from Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse - starts on p.129. As is apparent it doesn't match on every panel, so there must be variant texts, and the thorns have all been turned into th for easier typing. The spelling checker will now proceed to explode.)

  The first day of thas fiften days

  The se sal ryse, als the bukes says,

  Abowen the heght of ilka mountayne,

  Fully fourty cubyttes certayne,

  And in his stede even upstande,

  Als an heghe hil dus on the lande

  The secunde day, the se sal be swa law

  That unnethes men sal it knaw.

  The thred day, the se sal seme playn

  Ans stand even in his cours agayn

  Als it stode forst at the bygynnyng,

  With-outen mare rysing or fallyng.

  The fierth day, sal swilk a wonder be,

  the mast wondreful fisshes of the se

  Sal com to-geder and mak swilk romyng (roryng in another ms. Much better, roaring fishes.)

  That it sal be hydus til mans hering.

  Bot what that romiyng (roryng) sal signify,

  Na man may whit, bor God almyghty.

  The fift day, the se sal brynne

  And alle watters als thai sal rynne;

  And that sal last fra the son rysyng

  Til the tyme of the son doun gangyng.

  The sext day, sal spryng a blody dewe

  On grisse and tres, als it sal shewe.

  The sevend day byggyns doun sal falle

  And grete  castels, and tours with-alle.

  The eght day, hard roches and stanes

  Sal strik togyder, alle attanes.

  An ilkan of tham sal other doun cast,

  And ilkan agayn other hortel fast,

  Swa that ilka stan,on divers wyse,

  Sal sonder other in thre partyse.

  The neghend day, gret erthedyn sal be,

  Generaly in ilka contre;

  Ans swa gret erthdyn als sal be than

  Was never hard, sythen the world bygan.

  The tend day thar-aftir to neven,

  The erthe sal be made playn and even,

  For hilles and valeis sal turned be

  In-til playn, and made even to se.

  The ellevend day men sal com out

  Of caves, and holes and wend about,

  Als wode men, that na witt can;

  And nane sal spek til other than.

  The twelfte day aftir, the sternes alle

  And the signes fra the heven sal falle.

  The thredend day sal dede men banes

  Be sett to-gyder, and ryse al attanes,

  And aboven on thair graves stand; This sal byfalle in ilka land.

  Sal dighe, childe, man and woman

  For thai shalle with tham rys ogayn

  That byfor war dede, outher til ioy or payn.

  The fiftend day, thos sal betyde,

  Alle the world sal bryn on ilk syde,

  And the erthe whar we now duelle,

  Until the utter end of alle helle.

  So there you have it; the sea rising and falling, fish gathering and roaring, the sea burning, bloody dew, earthquakes with castles and towers falling, rocks breaking each other apart and the earth flattened, people crawling out of holes just in time to see the stars falling, the bones of dead people reassembled and then everyone dies so they can rise again, after the earth has been destroyed by fire. I guess they picked those lines for their marvellous pictorial possibilities. After all, a hundred pages or so on the sayings of the Anti-Christ just wouldn't have the same visual impact. Be very scared. Pray. Be good.

  What does it say about lay literacy? The words are there for the reading in the vernacular. It even has a bit of a northern twist to it. I can hear it in a Yorkshire accent. But the assumption seems to be that the written text must be extremely abbreviated and rendered visually. Narrative, yes, but not too many words.

  The church of All Saints, North Street has applied for a Heritage grant to restore and protect these windows for future generations. Check out all their news on their own website.

Gothic Book Hands

The most recent addition to Medieval Writing is The History of Gothic Book Hands. Not exactly the most original of topics, and probably to be found in more detail in every paleography book ever written, but I guess it should be there. In fact, it should have been there a long time ago, and now it is. In the course of preparing that I kept finding lots of other things that should be there, so I guess I will have to get to work.