Recent work on medieval textuality has disrupted the popular notion that books in the Middle Ages were universally treated with reverence as almost magical objects, although the notion remains disturbingly persistent. The past two decades have seen an increasing interest in destabilised texts, in reified meanings and in marginalia and glosses as a component of the text, rather than a defacement. Critics such as Peter Diehl, Siân Echard, Ralph Hanna and Carol Braun Pasternack have suggested variant editorial practices that recognise the complexity of texts, rather than reducing them to a single ‘correct’ edition. Other critics have argued the need for considering extra-codicological materials as part of the text; for instance, Andrew Taylor's argument about the need to consider sound as part of the text for the Song of Roland.

Indeed, many texts seem to indicate, self-reflexively, a pragmatic or flexible sensibility in their role in medieval culture. The physical book shows that the medieval sense of the codex was far from static, through the meta-text provided by marginalia, the emendation or alteration of the text, and the willingness to adapt, alter, and excerpt in transcription. These dynamic elements reveal the medieval use of the codex as a technology of information, rather than identical to the information it contains. Despite its visual similarity to the printed codex, a manuscript functions differently; the two are, in fact, fundamentally different technologies of information, working towards different purposes.

The dramatic

Critics of medieval drama have not been absent from these New Philological movements; in fact particularly relevant to this study is work that opened the medieval drama up to being more than a purely literary text. I am particularly indebted to scholars who have worked to clarify the material conditions of playing the Corpus Christi cycles: scholars such as David Bevington, Alexandra F. Johnston, David Mills or Pamela King, whose work has done so much to clarify the social contexts of the plays.

Nevertheless, despite these changes, ideas of the primacy of the written word over performance have endured.