Yet the elegant, early Harley 978 has carried the day. For modern readers, the Harley lais have taken on the stability of an authorized collection; they have become the Lais of Marie de France. Some scholars go so far as to claim the order of the lais is the very order Marie imposed in a final reworking or assembling of her work.2 Works that might be attributed to Marie but appear in other manuscripts receive far less attention.3 Despite the manuscript’s preeminence, however, there has been a staggering indifference to its full contents or to the history of its readers.
The debate on the identity of Marie de France offers a somewhat embarrassing illustration. Most scholars now accept that the author of the Lais, who at the beginning of Guigemar calls herself “Marie, ki en sun tens pas ne s’oblie” (Marie, who in her day should not be forgotten), is also the author of the translations of Aesop’s fables, who tells us in the epilogue, “Marie ai nun, si sui de France” (Marie is my name and I am from France), and is also the author of the tale of a knight’s descent into the otherworld, the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz, who tells us at the end, “Jo, Marie, ai mis en memoire/ le livre de l’Espurgatoire” (I, Marie, have recorded for memory the book of the Purgatory).4 Marie obviously must have been born in France but later lived in England for her name to make any sense. It is generally assumed that she was an aristocrat, someone elevated enough to know a “Count William,” for whom she translated the fables, and the “noble king,” probably Henry II, for whom she wrote the lais. Her career spanned several decades. The poet Denis Piramus, believed to be writing in the 1170s or even earlier, refers to her lais and their popularity scornfully, and a reference in the Espurgatoire to Saint Malachais, canonized in 1189, provides a terminus a quo for her later work. Her lais and fables suggest that she was well educated and apparently literate in Latin, at home in the court milieu, not at times unworldly in her attitudes (but also interested in the life of a convent), and proud of her success as an author. This description might fit, among others, the abbess of Shaftesbury, the abbess of Ramsey, the countess of Boulogne, and the daughter of Waleran II, count of Meulan (now often considered the most likely candidate).5 But it has also been suggested, precisely because of the manuscript’s provenance, that Marie may have been a nun at Reading, perhaps even its abbess. If Marie had been at Reading in the late twelfth century, it would be quite in order that about half a century later the abbey should acquire or make another copy of her lais, either because its members happened to have an earlier copy to work from, perhaps even her autograph, or because they were proud of the connection, or both. This would mean that the historical reader of Harley 978 was very close indeed to Marie and might even have been her successor. The images in the lais of educated women, independent of spirit but often painfully immured, would be matched in the real world, where writer and reader walked the same cloister. Admittedly, most scholars of Marie de France seem uneasy at the identification of Marie as nun or abbess of Reading, but no one, to the best of my knowledge, has dismissed it out of hand.
Somebody should have. There is a very simple reason why Marie cannot have been the abbess of Reading: by her day there was none. Before the Conquest there had been at least one and possibly two nunneries in Reading, but when the abbey was reestablished by Henry I in 1121 it was as an all-male house. There were no nuns and therefore no abbess.6
If this were simply a matter of a single critic advancing an ill-founded argument, it would be less alarming. But the failure to challenge this hypothesis reflects a general lack of historical information among literary critics about the texts’ circulation. We are confronting a disciplinary gap. One group of scholars reads Anglo-Norman lais and another reads English ecclesiastical history, and the two remain in splendid isolation. As a result, modern scholars are a long way from understanding anything about the milieu of one particular reader, or group of readers, of Marie’s work. Critics who do not know that there were no nuns at Reading after the Conquest probably do not know very much about Reading at all. They will not know that it was very nearly dissolved for bankruptcy in the 1280s or that the bishop chastized one of its dependent priories for keeping hunting dogs and birds of prey or that it was a center for avant-garde music or that one monk ran away from the abbey and joined a gang of brigands. The word “Reading” will not conjure up a detailed vision of a specific place for them, as it did for Jamieson Hurry, whose popular histories are always well illustrated (see fig. 10 below). In the commentary on Marie de France, “Reading” is merely a tag on which to project stereotypes of monasticism.
So far, I might feel warranted to write in a tone of moral indignation. But as we pursue the variety of Harley 978, it will become apparent that blunders of this kind will be very difficult to avoid. Doubtless I have made many, just as I have in my efforts to transcribe glosses from the Digby Timaeus or Royal 10. E.4. The sheer range of material, from medical texts to hawking manuals and from musical pieces to political satires, will defeat any single scholar. The lesson to be drawn, it seems to me, is that as medievalists we need to establish protocols for much more extensive collaboration, a question I shall return to in the final chapter.
The challenge of these manuscripts is not just the range of the materials, however, but the tensions or hostilities they evoke. The gap between the hawking manual, a guide to a particular form of erotically charged conspicuous consumption, and the Song of Lewes, a panegyric for a saintly Christian warrior, is but one example. The problem becomes most acute with Royal 10. E.4. This massive legal compendium demands a significant study of canon law from anyone who hopes to read it. My own rudimentary effort, as I piece my way through a single passage, draws heavily on the assistance of friends and on preliminary course work that I did years ago as part of a conservative training offered by the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, whose scholars expended much time on students such as myself who must often have seemed mere dilettantes. The Institute’s commitment to meticulous and traditional scholarship, to Latinity, and to a vision of the Middle Ages as a coherent period defined by certain well-recognized intellectual traditions was a good match for the demands of texts like those in the Royal manuscript. For many, the study of canon law is sustained by a vision of rational, and ultimately benevolent, order imposed upon human chaos or, to quote the title of a study by one of its most distinguished scholars, a vision of harmony from dissonance. The marginal images in Royal 10.E.4 are, however, fundamentally at odds with these values. The bottom margin in particular offers a marvelous comic strip that runs the length of the manuscript, switching from one story to another and drawing on romances, fabliaux, saints’ lives, and miracles of the Virgin. These images seem to celebrate dissonance and the resistance to higher authority, as do many of the best modern readers of marginalia. It would be far too reductionist simply to equate the legal text of the Decretals with authority and rational order and the images with populist resistance and the unconscious, but the tensions between the two do run somewhat along such lines, and scholars committed to one have so far, for the most part, had little to say about the other. If a proper investigation of Digby 23 would require at least two scholars, one specializing in medieval philosophy and one in the chansons de geste, a proper investigation of Harley 978 would require a team, and a proper investigation of Royal 10.E.4 would require at least two scholars who were in fundamental disagreement on matters of principle. There may, then, be an important sense in which Royal 10.E.4 is unreadable in the modern world, for no single modern person will be able to embrace the contradictions it contains.
The material has imposed certain demands that may sometimes burden or irritate my readers, and I ask in advance for their patience. It has seemed to me important to capture as much information as possible about specific human beings known to have used these books. I do not wish to imply that the ones I have managed to discover, William of Winchester, who owned Harley 978, or Henry of Langley’s friend, who owned Digby 23, hold the ultimate clue to what these works really mean or that they are in any sense definitive readers. But they were readers. And if more information survived and we could find other readers, even if we could find earlier readers from the “right” century or the “right” social group—twelfth-century knights and ladies for twelfth-century chivalric poems, for example—they too, if we knew them one by one, would prove no less idiosyncratic and elusive. It is the contact between these messy people and the more rarified order offered to them in books that I wish to explore. So I have
