HOW DO WE bring alive today the processes of designing and making which lay behind the objects of the past? The objects themselves can be shown in exhibitions or photographs, but visual and static displays do not readily tell stories of thinking and crafting. Curators of objects from all periods have noted how difficult it is to convey design as a process. This was a challenge for an exhibition about the ingenuity of design in medieval English manuscripts called Designing English at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2017– 2018. That exhibition presented handwritten books and other inscribed objects in English from the age of Alfred to the early Tudor period. The display focused on the process of making, by highlighting work in progress; a sheep's skin to show the preparing of parchment; unfinished pictures to show stages of work; seemingly identical pairs to reveal the effort of copying. The panels and captions in the gallery highlighted analogies between scribes’ and illuminators’ work on manuscripts and modern efforts at design—birthday cards, advertisements, “coffee table” books. We wanted people to whom medieval manuscripts might be unfamiliar to see continuities in the thought processes of design from the handwritten book to digital graphics.

To bring out that continuity, we invited contemporary artists to make new books inspired by our medieval ones for an accompanying display, Redesigning the Medieval Book. The twenty first century artist's book is a work of art that bears some relation, albeit often loosely, to conventional books. It might be modelled on the traditional western multi gathering codex, or on the small pamphlet, various other kinds of folded form (accordion or leporello, French fold and others), the roll, or the tablet. It might carry words or other signs, images, and patterns in some spatial arrangement like a text. Most often, it will have both these characteristics, but a codex structure with few words, or a text affixed to a shoe (to take two works for Redesigning the Medieval Book, by Helen Hayman and Jules Allen respectively) would also count as artists’ books. The origin of artists’ books is usually considered a response to the industrialization of printing in the 1800s, and medieval forebears are seldom prominent. But Michael Hampton has argued that the artfully made books of earlier centuries should equally be considered “proto artists’ books” or “cryptic examples of the artists’ book” avant la lettre.

Chapter 2 discusses the scribes’ handling of damage and irregularity in parchment in manuscripts of English literature. It sets out how damage and irregularity arose and describes the methods scribes used to repair or counteract those features of parchment. From these methods, the author infers that scribes ignored and even obscured the organic oddity and damage in parchment, instead hylomorphically pursuing an idea of the page more perfect and more rectilinear than was the matter on which they imposed it, and in some cases worried about disruptions to the text’s appearance and reception. Rather than engage with the agency of their materials, they imposed on them immaterial ideas about the book and the use of its texts.

Chapter 1 introduces the overall argument of the book: that the scribes of manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century were interested in their own craft conventions, in abstract conventions of page design and in the text as an abstract verbal artefact, and were less concerned to exploit the material features of the manuscript. It sets out the implications of the argument for the study of material texts and material agency, and advocates the value of craft theory for bringing to life the scribes’ work. It ends by noting the methods of the book, which combine codicology and textual criticism, quantitative methods and literary critical interpretation.

The Conclusion suggests some implications of this book’s observations on scribes’ concerns for future research on medieval English literary manuscripts: notably, a renewed interest in the scribes’ craft practices and a renewed interest in the ‘work’ as a verbal entity that could transcend the material text, even in edited form.

Chapter 3 explains the methods of scribes for ruling manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century, from a variety of works but especially those of Thomas Hoccleve. It notes that scribes imposed geometric designs onto materials hylomorphically. It then contrasts their failures to achieve regular design. It suggests that ruling patterns seldom had a practical function to articulate the text by means of page design, but that ruling was sometimes a craft process pursued almost habitually by scribes, and at other times was an inherited convention with a force of its own. It concludes that ruling on the material pages was less important to scribes than the immaterial ideas that governed page design. Ruling was ultimately jettisoned.

Chapter 5 examines the annotations by scribes and marginalia by readers in manuscripts of the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A quantitative survey of the treatment of margins shows that, although poets planned elaborate paratexts for their works, scribes and readers seldom used the page for annotation or marginalia. From this survey the author deduces that scribes and readers in the fifteenth century were more interested in reading the poem continuously and for kinds of reading aloud or for pleasure, in ways that do not lend themselves to written record in margins. The poem lives in an immaterial dimension of cognition and feeling, beyond what appears on the material page.

Chapter 4 considers the division of texts into pages and leaves in manuscripts in English poetry and prose in the fifteenth century. It suggests that this material format allowed scribes to fanfare their own craft process, when they decorated the division of the codex into pages for its own sake, as a mere convention without textual function. But it then argues that page breaks contributed little to the text itself. It notes other methods used by scribes to override the page breaks and argued that they were more interested in the continuity of the text and of the reading process beyond the literal limits of the page.

Chapter 6 considers the scribes’ copying of the text itself in the fifteenth century, especially in works by Thomas Hoccleve and Geoffrey Chaucer and spurious lines added to Chaucer’s poetry. It queries the assumption that scribes vary the text a lot, and in three quantitative samples it suggests that, despite the difficulties of transcription and the acceptability of revision, scribes could copy exemplars very closely. As a result, despite the material differences between books, what most distinguished them was verbal likeness. It suggests that this reproduction reflects an interest in the text’s survival as an immaterial, verbal artefact, partly out of respect for certain kinds of English poetry, and a disregard for its material form.

Overview of scripts, and the ways in which scripts spread across geographical space and through time. Various scripts’ biographies are overviewed, showing the diversity of possible scripts in early medieval Europe: their longevity and functionality