The study of paratexts in medieval and early-modern books in manuscript and print is far from a recent phenomenon in scholarship. But it is fair to say that the materiality of the book as an object of study is currently surfing a rising swell of popularity amongst both literary scholars and historians, who see it as a tangible means by which to trace and track matters of reception and readerly taste, thus allowing them to take their study beyond the mere evaluation of the content and form of the text itself. Gérard Genette famously coined the term ‘paratext’ to describe extra-textual matter that forms a type of threshold (seuil, in the original French) through which readers can step in order to experience a deeper understanding of the text proper. Scholars, he argues, can follow in their footsteps and cross these thresholds so as to gain a greater understanding of the nature of these previous readers’ engagement with the text. There is not sufficient space here to do justice to the many different facets of paratextual and materiality studies of the sort that have arisen in the wake of Genette's seminal work, which pertains as much to modern textual studies as it does to pre-modern, but some of the key areas of fascination can be summarised as follows: marginalia added by readers as keys to nuancing our understanding of reception (as well as more mundane matters such as ownership); prefaces and prologues as indexes of rewriting and motivation for publication; illustration and word/image connections as clues to the target reader's understanding and comprehension of the text, as well as to that reader's likely cultural knowledge; developing practices of book layout and finding-aid provision as insights into both historical reading practice and reading skills development, as well as changing use of, and even taste for, particular texts. The list could, of course, go on, but it is in this last area, layout and finding-aid provision, that this article finds its locus.

The study of the history of the book in this context might most profitably be seen as tracing and understanding the development of a particular technology, the book itself being that technology. Like all technology, it undergoes regular updates so as to remain operational to users as their own needs change and develop.

In January 2019, the convenor of a “History of the Book” module on the University of Bristol’s new MA Medieval Studies programme discussed with Bristol’s Special Collections Librarian, Michael Richardson, the provision of medieval manuscripts for teaching timetabled to take place in Special Collections. Reasoning that the programme would be well served by adding unknown manuscript fragments to existing inventories of medieval codices and fragments, Richardson asked Jane Bradley, Local Studies Librarian at Bristol Central Library, the city’s historic municipal library, about the prevalence of manuscript pastedowns in its rare book collection. Richardson arranged to view a selection of the relevant volumes and recruited his wife, Vassiliki Frangeskou, to assist in photographing them for later consultation. Richardson was especially intrigued by two folios bound as flyleaves in the front and rear of the first tome of a four-volume edition of the complete works of the medieval French reformer, Jean Gerson (1363–1429). These were exceptional in being written in French, rather than in Latin, as is more common for manuscript fragments recycled into bindings. His attention was drawn by the emergence of proper names from Arthurian literary texts. He sent some photographs to Leah Tether, a University of Bristol academic working on French Arthuriana, who identified the passage represented in the two fragments as extracts from the continuation of the Estoire de Merlin that forms part of the Vulgate Cycle (more often referred to nowadays as the Lancelot-Grail Cycle).

This continuation is known as the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, usually thought to have been composed ca. 1220–1225, and not to be confused with the Suite du Merlin, which is the continuation of the Merlin story contained in the Post-Vulgate Cycle. Tether confirmed this identification with Laura Chuhan Campbell, a specialist of Old French and Italian Merlin narratives at Durham University. As excitement grew, Tether convened a meeting at the Central Library with Campbell, Richardson, and Benjamin Pohl, a medieval book historian and palaeographer from Bristol’s Department of History. It soon transpired that there were in fact more than just the two fragments originally identified; in both the front and rear of each of the remaining three volumes of Gerson’s Opera was a further folio from the same manuscript bound as a flyleaf (except the fourth tome, where there was no front flyleaf).

Educated First at Wells Cathedral School and then at University College and Christ Church College, Oxford, Tobias Matthew was successively Dean (1583–1595) and Bishop (1595–1606) of Durham and, finally, Archbishop of York (1606–1628). The people from whom he procured many of his Oxford-bound books belonged to a community that gave regular custom to both the Half-Stamp Binder and other Oxford-based binders. In fact, of the “23 plus” books counted by Graham Pollard as bound by the Half-Stamp Binder, as many as thirteen (and quite possibly more) have annotations and/or ownership inscriptions suggesting that they were specifically made for monks of Durham Cathedral Priory studying at Durham (now Trinity) College, Oxford. Among them was one John Tutyng (sometimes Towten or Tuting), a monk and later canon of Durham Cathedral Priory from ca. 1527 until being deprived of his post in 1559–1560.

Tutyng had been a student at Durham College, Oxford (1530–1538), after which he graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity. Among Tutyng’s books bound by the Half-Stamp Binder was the three-volume copy of Pierre Bersuire’s Prima pars Dictionarij (Nuremberg: Anton Koburger, 1499) now held at Ushaw College, Durham (xvii.E.4.3–5), whose bindings are rather similar to those of the Gerson volumes. Several of Tutyng’s books were later owned by Adam Holiday (sometimes Haliday), who became canon in 1561 and remained in Durham until his death in 1591. Thanks to his extant ownership inscriptions, we know that Holiday acquired a wide variety of books bought by Durham monks in Oxford, including other books bound by the Half-Stamp Binder, such as the copy of Guillelmus Duranti’s Rationale Divinorum officiorum (Strasbourg: Georg Husner, 1493) that is now in Durham Cathedral Library (ChapterLib Inc. 63). The number 23 written in ink across the book’s fore-edge may link it to an inventory of books belonging to the aforementioned Tobias Matthew, which in turn includes a notice of an analogous book received from Holiday. As alluded to above, this is far from the only book of Holiday’s, or indeed of the Durham monks’ more generally, that later ended up in Matthew’s possession.

As Noted in the Introduction, the seven fragments contain an uninterrupted section of the narrative of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, covering (for the most part) the Battle of Trebes episode of the story. A full concordance of the section of text present in the fragments with their parallel passages in modern editions of the text is to be found in this book’s Appendix. According to Stones’s enumeration of all Lancelot-Grail manuscripts, there are thirty-two extant manuscripts containing the Suite Vulgate du Merlin. According to Trachsler’s list, however, there are thirty-one. While these lists do mostly tally, there are more discrepancies between them than just the one item suggested by this numerical difference. Specifically, Trachsler’s list includes St. Petersburg, National Library, MS fr.F.pap.xv.3 and Vatican City, Vatican Library, MS Reg. 1687 where Stones’s does not, while Stones’s list contains Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 9246, London, British Library, MS Add. 32125, and Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, MS L.iii.12, which are not listed in Trachsler’s article.

In all of the manuscripts listed by Stones as containing the Suite Vulgate, it is always preceded by the Estoire de Merlin, perhaps unsurprisingly since, as a “seamless” continuation of that very text, and one whose opening lines are never explicitly stated in any manuscript as commencing a new text, the Suite Vulgate would make little sense if copied in isolation. Additionally, in twenty-eight of the thirty-two manuscripts that Stones lists, the Estoire del saint Graal precedes the Estoire de Merlin. A varied combination of the Queste del saint Graal, La Mort le roi Artu, and the Lancelot en prose (in two cases the Lancelot is announced but not present) is found in just thirteen of the thirty-two and, in any case, the earliest manuscript to have any of these texts in addition to the Estoire del saint Graal and the Estoire de Merlin is Bonn, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 526, dated (by its scribe) to 1286. Given the likely dating of the Bristol Merlin fragments to ca. 1250–1275 (see below), therefore, the most plausible scenario is that the original manuscript that contained the fragments comprised of the Estoire del saint Graal, the Estoire de Merlin, and the Suite Vulgate.

Our study of the Bristol Merlin has yielded several conclusions that have each been presented in the preceding chapters, but which are worthwhile reiterating briefly here. The manuscript that once contained our fragments was likely composed in northern (possibly northeastern) France ca. 1250–1275, and is likely to have also contained other Lancelot-Grail Cycle texts—almost certainly at least the Estoire del saint Graal and the Estoire de Merlin. That manuscript carried the α redaction of the Suite Vulgate, indicating that the Estoire de Merlin that would have accompanied it would also have been α. The fragments attest a version of the α redaction that does not differ substantially from that in other α manuscripts (the closest textual sibling being MS fr. 344), except in one respect. Sexual connotations in the exchange between Merlin and Viviane appear to have been toned down, being even more family-friendly in the Bristol Merlin than in the other manuscripts that are very close textual siblings.

A reader annotation suggests that the Bristol Merlin manuscript was probably in England by the early fourteenth century. The location of the manuscript’s medieval “home” in England remains uncertain, but seems likely to have been with a private owner, who might have subsequently donated it to a religious house, probably in the vicinity of either Oxford or Cambridge. Alternatively, and owing to some of its less than lavish characteristics and its unexecuted decoration, the book might have served, from its earliest days, as an exemplar in the (English) book trade.

Wherever it was once housed, by the late-fifteenth to early-sixteenth century its owner had discarded the book for unknown reasons, possibly for a nominal sum, to a bookbinder in either Oxford or Cambridge for recycling into new bindings. Assuming it was not due to a more arbitrary matter, the timing might suggest two possible reasons for this disposal: the recent availability of printed copies of (French) Arthurian texts and/or the likelihood that Arthurian texts in Old French (especially in England) were becoming “outdated” after, and perhaps as a result of, the composition and circulation of Malory’s Morte Darthur. The receiving binder then broke the manuscript down into quires and used some of its leaves for pastedowns in the bindings he made for a set of four volumes containing the complete works of Jean Gerson, which had probably been imported unbound from Strasbourg by one of his customers.

Multi-Spectral Imaging for the Edition

The damage to the fragments described above—which is mostly a result of the glue used when the fragments were pastedowns and the consequent ripping caused when the fragments were lifted and turned into flyleaves—means that large sections of the fragments have been rendered illegible. In an attempt to salvage some of the damaged text for this edition, the project team brought Professor Andrew Beeby (Department of Chemistry, Durham University) to Bristol Central Library to carry out multi-spectral imaging of the Bristol Merlin leaves. He has developed a mobile spectrometer for manuscript imaging as part of his work for Team Pigment (Durham University). This project team is systematically analysing pigments used in medieval manuscripts held in British libraries and special collections using (Raman) spectroscopy.

The multi-spectral images of the Bristol Merlin were recorded using a Canon EOS-60D camera, modified for operation across the full spectrum, and equipped with an apochromatic lens, f = 60 mm (Jenoptik). Spectral images were recorded through a set of bandpass filters centred at 365, 400, 450, 500, 550, 600, 650, 700, 750, and 850 nm with a bandpass of 20 nm (Edmund scientific), with the sample illuminated by a bank of LEDs selected to give full coverage of the filter packs. The images were processed using Adobe Photoshop, with adjustments to blacks, whites, contrast, sharpness, and exposure to bring out any ink residues left in damaged areas.

While large sections of the text remained unreadable even after the images were processed, certain areas became more legible—or at least legible enough to fill in some of the lacunae with reasonable certainty (see Fig. 10 for an example). The various different filters proved both more and less effective depending on the type of damage present. For example, ultra-violet and infra-red filters worked more effectively on sections of parchment where glue had pulled off a relatively thin layer of the surface, meaning that enough ink residue had seeped through to the layer below so as still to be detectable. Areas of text from which the glue had ripped off a thicker layer of the parchment proved irretrievable, since all ink residue had been torn away with the writing surface.

Redaction

Ever since Alexandre Micha published his classification of the manuscripts of the Merlin en prose in 1958, it has been broadly accepted that there exist two discrete redactions of the Merlin narrative in Lancelot-Grail manuscripts, even if the reason for the existence of two separate redactions and which of the two is the older remain subjects for debate. Micha referred to these two redactions as alpha (α) and beta (β), and each of them he set out as being made up of several families. At the risk of generalizing, and notwithstanding continuing scholarly debate, there is broad consensus that α may be rather closer than β to Robert de Boron’s original Merlin (that which formed part of the probable trilogy of texts attributed to him, sometimes referred to as the Livre du Graal). This conclusion is based in large part on the difference in the order by which the Grail hero must achieve the adventures of the Perilous Seat at the Round Table and the Grail Table. In α, the Grail Table comes before the Round Table while, in β, the reverse is true. In short, this modification, alongside various others, are believed to demonstrate that α works more obviously to complete Robert de Boron’s trilogy, where β introduces modifications and—importantly—abridgements that are designed precisely to allow the narrative to transition towards the Queste and Mort Artu, which are the concluding chapters in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Even if β was designed for the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, though, there are actually more extant Lancelot-Grail manuscripts that contain α, which might raise questions as to when β first entered circulation and how warmly it was received.5

While Micha’s identification of two redactions for Merlin seems secure enough, he pays only fleeting attention to the often-present Suite Vulgate suffix and its associated redactions. As Trachsler also notes, Micha’s only real reference to variance in the Suite Vulgate is in a footnote, where he states: “Il n’y a pas deux Suite-Vulgate différentes, mais, semble-t-il, le texte de nos manuscrits α n’est pas identique à celui des manuscrits β.” On the one hand, then, Micha does not believe that a similar classification of α versus β is appropriate for the Suite Vulgate, but does note, on the other, that the level of textual difference in the Suite Vulgate between the two families of manuscripts is marked.

[Ara] “[…] et tes genz? Ne saras venir a la bataille que tu n’i truises le roi Artu et le roi Bans, et li rois Bohorz a tout grant gent qu’il ont amenez del roiaume de Logres.”

[Q]uant Leonces entent celui qui si a parlé a lui, si le regarde et voit que ce est Merlin. Si le conout et li vet, les braz tenduz, et l’acole et enbrace, et li fet merveilleuse feste et li dist que bien soit il venuz, et autresi fait Phariens. Et quant il orent assez conjoï, si lor demandent noveles de lor seigneur, et il leur dit que par tans les porroient vooir come del plus preudomes del monde, “et chevauchent a grant efforz. Et vous alez, si devisez vos genz en quatre parties, et ait en chascune vm homes. Et vos metez au chemin demein a soir, si que vos soiez au siege a l’ajornee. Et sachiez que vos i troveroiz une des greignors batailles que vos oncques veïssiez.” “Sire,” fet Leonces, “a qui volez vos que je les baille a conduire?” “A vos iiii qui ci estes” fait il “qui estes sires et mestres. Si ait Antiaume la premiere, et Grassiens l’autre, et Phariens la tierce, et vos aiez la quarte. Et je vos conduirai jusqu’en l’ost.” “Sire,” fet Leonces, “vostre merci! Or sai ge bien que nos ne ferons se bien non puisque nos serons en vostre conpaignie.” Atant s’en vont li iiii et devisent lor genz en quatre parties: si en prent li seneschaux vm et les sevre a une part, et Grassiens vm et se met de l’autre part, et Fariens vm autresi, et Leonces remest en la piece de terre et fist sa gent molt bien apareiller et molt bien armer, qui bien furent vm et plus. Et li iautre se logierent a une part chascun par soi a toute lor gent, et sejornerent cel soir et l’andemein jusc’a l’esserir qu’il se mistrent au chemin tuit armé sor les chevaus et chevauchierent toute la nuit sans noise fere. Si ala Merlin tout devant, qui les conduisoit. Et ce fu le mardi devant la Seint Jehen, ce dit li conte, que les nuiz sont cortes come en esté el mois de juig, le grant mes.

All Four Gerson volumes (88–91/SR39) that today play host to the Merlin fragments were printed in folio in Strasbourg, though only the first three (88–90/SR39) were produced by the same printer in the same year—1494. As indicated in Chapter 1, though, the four certainly seem to have been intended to form a set. The printer of the first three volumes, Martin Flach, died in 1500, after which his son, also called Martin Flach, took over his printing business. Flach the younger’s mother then married another printer in 1501, Johann Knobloch, who took on the press, but who appears to have maintained a good relationship with his stepson. Using borrowed equipment from Knobloch, Flach the younger set up a second press nearby. The fourth volume of Gerson’s Opera omnia (91/SR39) was printed on this second press (for his cousin Matthias Schürer) in 1502, suggesting that Flach the younger may have taken it upon himself to complete, or at least add to, his father’s work on Gerson’s Opera omnia. Indeed, it is common to find the four volumes kept together as a set, and certainly it would appear that the first owner of the Bristol copies, who probably had them shipped unbound from Strasbourg, purchased the four volumes with precisely this intention, due to his/her having them bound in matching covers shortly following the final tome’s publication.

The bindings of the four volumes, except for the rear board of 88/SR39 (more about which below), are made of mid-brown calfskin over wooden boards and are typical of early sixteenth-century bindings of both Oxford and Cambridge, including a patch repair to the rear board of 90/SR39. The bindings as a whole are fairly robust, given that a later repairer, in an effort to conserve them, replaced their spines entirely, and took what remained of the leather covers and mounted them onto new ones (see below for more on these repairs). However, there had clearly already been heavy wear to the original leather covers, such that the blind-stamped impressions are not as clear as they must once have been; worse still, the mounted remnants of the original covers are now heavily cracked and flaking off in places, with some sections missing entirely.