The ethics of reading in manuscript culture

Taking the controversial fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor as his point of departure, John Dagenais maintains that many interpretive difficulties with this text have arisen simply because concepts such as "work" and "text," which medievalists have tended to consider unproblematic, simply do not function in the medieval manuscript context.

The traditional philological practice of reducing the multiplicity of manuscript evidence to a single critical edition, founded on notions of "work," "authorial intention," and "coherent texts," inevitably distorts, and ultimately suppresses, the true nature of the medieval "scriptum" - the unique, physical manuscript text with all its glosses, marginal notes, pointing hands, illuminations, incidental scribblings, scribal errors, and lost leaves.

In relying too heavily on the critical edition, we lose our ability to grasp the way medieval "literature" managed to go on functioning in its own chaotic and error-prone world.

But Dagenais shows that medieval culture also escapes post-structuralist notions of text in another important way: through a peculiar ethics of reading. The medieval reader engaged the manuscript text rhetorically, with the idea that it would speak to him or her in a way that was not only personal but also dynamically responsive to his or her personal needs at the moment of reading.

Using the manuscripts of the Libro and of other Iberian texts, Dagenais sketches a series of methodological approaches that can lead to an enhanced understanding of the interactions among medieval authors, readers, scribes, and texts, and the dynamic process of "lecturature" in which they are engaged. In the process, he offers a critique of aspects of both traditional philological approaches and the "New Philology."