Fencing Bear at Prayer

It’s so amazing, it’s almost impossible fully to articulate. I have spent, yes, another week in the Manuscripts Reading Room at the British Library copying out texts, particularly Hours and Psalters of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (For those of you who are wondering what it is that historians do all day, for medievalists, at least, this is part of it.) Okay, so maybe that’s not so amazing, although I am fairly impressed at how well I can read the variety of scripts. After all, I do have a laptop which, thanks to the Apple Corporation, means that all the copying I am doing involves not quill pen and ink, but simply typing.* It is, I admit, slightly burdensome having constantly to go to the Formatting Palette whenever I want to change font size or color so as to reproduce as closely as I can in Microsoft Word the overall appearance of the texts.** But, then, of course, the scribes who made the books I am reading had not only to write everything—EVERYTHING—out by hand, but also make all...

Last week it was jet lag. Today, well, let’s call it semiotic overload. Consider the following manuscript folio. Imagine that you are in the British Library Manuscripts Reading Room and you have only one day to work with the manuscript—Arundel 157, if you would like the shelfmark--in which this folio (146recto) appears (click on the image if you would like to see it enlarged). Pretend, for the moment, that you can read the language (Latin) and script (an early thirteenth-century Gothic bookhand from England, probably around Oxford) in which it is written and that you are familiar with the conventions of abbreviation that the scribe has used. You cannot take photographs of the manuscript (this is, after all, the British Library; they will be very happy to make a limited number of photographs for you—at a price) and you do not know whether a microfilm is available. Assume, for the moment, that it is not; in any case, even if it were, it would not be in color. What would you inclu...