EN392 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Gluttony, Scriptorium, Defamiliarization
EN392 Lecture 11
Piers Plowman and Medieval Manuscript
Medieval Manuscripts
• The Codex
• Written in ink upon animal skins
o Incredibly labour intensive
• All written work was written by members of the clergy
• Scriptorium
• Very valuable objects as art
• Need to not only be literate to be able to reproduce a text, but also understand specific dialects
• Often bits and pieces were missing
• Some dyes were very difficult or expensive to produce
• Books often held in common and read aloud
• Many were edited, rewritten, drawn over, etc.
• People would erase books for their own use because the vellore (paper) was so expensive
Versions of Piers Plowman
• Versions A (5,000 lines), B (7,000 lines), & C (shorter)
• Guess is they were all done by Langland and these were all revisions of his work (no guarantee)
• No idea of order
• Major changes in content
• Several versions of the same text – which is the right one to have?
Dialect
• From the SW Midlands – 120 miles from London
• Weird nuances like nouns as adjectives
• Alliterative revival of the 14th century
o OE poetry has lines linked by alliteration
o Norman Conquest bombed English with French => Middle English
o RULE OF OE POETRY: The first stressed syllable in the 2nd part of a line must alliterate
with at least one stressed syllable in the 1st half of the line
o 1300s poetry starts to reuse this OE technique
▪ I the suetie, he the su as fie
o Link up words to alliteration
o Some rhyming
• Suggestive of something about English and its traditions returning but its reasoning is unknown
• Maybe because of a population crash?
• You can alliterate on consonants or vowels (all vowels count the same)
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