Genre, Audience and the Scriptorium:
A Case Study of Manuscripts produced at Sainte Frideswide, Oxford, ca. 1200-1225
As the recent bloom of literary scholarship around manuscripts shows, the longstanding desire to
correct and emend their lessons has ceded to an appreciation of what we can learn about medieval
reading and writing practices from these invaluable artifacts. In their recent cluster in Speculum,
Christopher Cannon, Christopher Baswell, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Katherine Kerby-Fulton used
manuscript witnesses as points of departure for striking new observations about the interplay of
languages in late medieval England. At the same time, Andrew Taylor and others have clarified that the
development of contemporary conceptions of medieval genres actually occurred in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. However, these admirable studies can benefit from being brought into
conversation with one another: the information contained in manuscripts about medieval scribes and
audiences illuminates the question of genres as “social phenomena” (Hans Robert Jauss 1982). This
paper straddles these two conversations, looking at the question of genre through the specific output of
the Austin canons at Sainte Frideswide, Oxford, from ca. 1200 to ca. 1225, in order to use the material
knowledge we have about these manuscripts (formerly part of the so-called “Edwardes” manuscript) as
a point of departure for a reconsideration of the generic relationship among the three texts contained in
these witnesses. The manuscripts produced at Sainte Frideswide can serve as a medium, or point of
mediation, between the medieval textual traditions of which they are witnesses and the modern
scholar’s perception of these same texts. At first glance, these texts seem generically diverse: Gui de
Warewic (British Library Additional 38662) is known as a romance, La Chanson de Guillaume (BL Add.
38663) as a chanson de geste, and the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (BL Add. 40142) as a French translation
of a Latin “historical” text. Using the prologue and epilogue of the fourth text known to have been
produced at Sainte Frideswide, Brother Anger’s holograph translation of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues
(Bibliothèque Nationale Française, fr. 24766), further gives an eyewitness perspective from a
contemporary experience of the copying program at this scriptorium. To make conjectures about the
purpose of these texts for their primary audience, we must consider the texts as they appear in these
manuscripts, as mutually informative thanks to their material cousinage. I argue that underlying the
three apparently disparate works from the “Edwardes” manuscript is a concern for recording history:
rather than being received as generically distinct, these texts all transmitted the past to their audience
in a register of truth.
Hannah Weaver
Romance Languages and Literatures
Harvard University