This thesis responds to a lack of information regarding reading practice in literature in early Middle English. Here, reading is often used as a metaphorical or symbolic act - representing piety, devotional practice, or intellectualism - but how reading took place, how users engaged with books, is rarely figured. Other seams of evidence are therefore needed to access the reading process. The corpus of manuscripts on which I focus consists of thirty-three multilingual books containing English, Latin, and French produced in England between 1066 and c. 1300. Using this corpus, and inspired by the work of Leah Price, Juliet Fleming, Kathryn Rudy, and others, I seek to test the boundaries of what has previously been considered permissible evidence for reading, thereby adjusting and expanding current conceptions of the range of activities and practices high medieval book use entailed. The thesis begins with a case study of some important readers: scribes. In chapter one, using the seven surviving copies of Poema Morale as a corpus I read against current critical considerations of variance in manuscript transmission as a sign of 'scribal authorship' in order to establish practices of scribal reading. Chapters two and three go on to demonstrate how these 'scribal readers' prefigured a work's use as they copied, particularly when they chose to introduce or exclude textual apparatus in the form of titles, capitals, or paraph marks. The final part of the thesis examines the retrospective evidence of use left by readers who marked and altered their books to determine the extent to which readers conformed to the practices imagined by manuscript producers. As a whole, then, the thesis showcases the variegated nature of reading practice - from critical analysis to nugatory scanning - and the alternative uses for books in English in this period. It shows that vernacular reading was a work of 'embodied intellectual labour' that benefitted from the material form of the book, and that engagement and manipulation of this form was not just tolerated, but expected, and perhaps actively encouraged.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 278 is an early-fourteenth-century trilingual manuscript of the Psalms from Norwich Cathedral Priory, an urban cathedral church staffed by Benedictine monks. This manuscript is notable because it contains one of six Middle English Metrical Psalters, the earliest Middle English translation of the Psalms, as well as a full Anglo-Norman Oxford Psalter, the most popular French translation of the Psalms in late medieval England. While the Middle English Metrical Psalter is a remarkable and understudied text in and of itself, the Metrical Psalter of CCC 278 is even more interesting because of its monastic provenance and innovative layout. This thesis explores the questions of why a monastic institution would produce a manuscript of two complete, prominently displayed, vernacular Psalters with only highly abbreviated Latin textual references; what sociolinguistic and political forces drove the production of this innovative manuscript; and how the Middle English Metrical Psalter in particular was read, and by whom. Because there are no annotations, colophon, prologue or external documentation to provide clues to either the intended or actual use of the manuscript by the Priory monks, this thesis undertakes a detailed historicization and contextualization of the book in its urban, religious, linguistic and social settings. In addition, the lenses of community, mediation, and authority are applied, leading to the conclusion that CCC 278 and its Middle English Metrical Psalter were likely used by the monks to reach out to Norwich’s élite laity in order to form a mixed reading community around the book—a reading community controlled by the Priory.

In this study, I read late medieval vernacular texts of Mandeville’s Travels, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, and Margery Kempe’s Book in terms of memory, place and authorial identity. I show how each author constructs ethos and alters narrative form by using memory and place. I argue that the discourses of memory and place are essential to authorial identity and anchor their eccentric texts to traditional modes of composition and orthodoxy. In Chapter one, I argue that memory and place are essential tools in creating authorial ethos for the Wife of Bath, Margery Kempe, and John Mandeville. These writers use memory and place to anchor their eccentric texts in traditional modes of composition and orthodoxy. Chapter two reads Mandeville’s treatment of holy places as he constructs authority by using rhetorical appeals to authority via salvation history and memory. His narrative draws on multiple media, multiple texts, memoria, and collective memory. Chapter three examines the rhetorical strategy of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale as directly linked to practices of memoria, especially in her cataloguing of ancient and medieval authorities and scripture. Chaucer’s Wife legitimates her travel and experience through citing and quoting from medieval common-place texts and ultimately makes a common-place text of her own personal experience. Chapter four argues that memory is the central structuring strategy and the foundation for Margery’s arguments for spiritual authority and legitimacy in The Book of Margery Kempe. I read the Book’s structure as a strategic dramatization of Margery’s authority framed by institutional spaces of the Church and by civic spaces of the medieval town. Chapter five considers the implications of reading the intersections of memory and place in late-medieval construction of authority for vernacular writers as contributing to a better understanding of medieval authorial identity and a clearer appreciation of structure, form, and the transformation of the pilgrimage motif into the travel narrative genre. This project helps strengthen ties between the fields of medieval literature, women’s writing and rhetoric(s), and Genre Studies as it charts the interface between discourse, narrative form, and medieval conceptions of memory and authorial identity.