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Matthew Parker and His Scribes University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2016 Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes Robert Scott Bevill University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Book and Paper Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Medieval History Commons, and the Medieval Studies Commons Recommended Citation Bevill, Robert Scott, "Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/4084 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Robert Scott Bevill entitled "Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Roy M. Liuzza, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Thomas J. Heffernan, Maura K. Lafferty, Anthony Welch Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Robert Scott Bevill December 2016 ii Copyright © by Robert Scott Bevill All rights reserved. iii Dedication In loving memory of my grandparents, James and Betty Babb. iv Acknowledgements This has been a project long in the making, and it would not have happened without the help of so many. I’d like to first thank my mentors at Clemson who pushed me to pursue a Ph.D. Barton Palmer, my thesis director, and Art Young cultivated my interests in the relationships between the medieval and the modern, and together they taught me how to write about it. Thank you both. I also would like to remember my M.A. advisor, Alma Bennett who passed away in 2012. Her endless generosity for her students and her deep intellectual curiosity in wide-ranging and interdisciplinary fields of scholarship provided me with a model of academic life that I can only hope to achieve. At the University of Tennessee, I have been fortunate in truly wonderful colleagues and mentors. Thank you to Andrew Eichel, Thomas Lecaque, Katie Hodges-Kluck, and Melissa Rack for their friendship and conversations over the years. A special thank you to Teresa Hooper, whose encouragement during a crucial stage of this dissertation project turned completion into a reality. To the folks at the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies—Vera Pantanizopolis-Broux, Lauren Whitnah, Heather Hirschfeld, Laura Howes, and Tom Burman— thank you for your commitment to an open, welcoming, innovative, and interdisciplinary environment. And thanks for letting me be a part of it! To my committee—Tom Heffernan, Maura Lafferty, and Anthony Welch—your patience and understanding over the last few years has been so important to me. Thank you for your guidance and mentorship. To my advisor, v Roy Liuzza, I can’t thank you enough for the gift of your time. Your encouragement and thoughts on this project over the years allowed it to develop into something I could not have imagined when I began. Thanks. This project was built through the cooperation of libraries and research institutes. I am grateful to the UTK English department, the Marco Institute, the Huntington Library, the Mellon Foundation, and the NEH for your generosity. I am also grateful to those who have helped with their comments and conversations on my research trips: Rolf Bremmer, Rebecca Brackmann, Heather Wolfe, Jonathan Wilcox, Cheryl Jacobsen, Siân Echard, and Timothy Graham. Also, I thank the librarians and reading room staffs of the British Library, Worcester Cathedral Library, the Bodleian Libraries, Queen’s College Oxford Library, Cambridge University Library, Huntington Library, and Folger Shakespeare Library for their expert assistance during my research. I especially thank the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Cambridge University Library; Trinity College Library, Cambridge; the Bodleian Libraries; and the British Library for their kind permission to reuse images of their manuscripts within this dissertation. My family has stood with me throughout the entire process. Thank you to Eve for sacrificing so much and for being the best part of my life for just over thirteen years of marriage now. I love you more than I can say. Thank you to Finn and Marlowe for giving me just a little bit more inspiration every day. Finn was just a few months old when we made the vi move to Tennessee to begin this process, and I defended the prospectus for this dissertation just three days before Marlowe was born. The story of this PhD is the story of their lives. And thank you to Eve’s wonderful parents, Todd and Beth, for your belief and support. To my Mom and Dad, you taught me so much while growing up, but nothing quite so essential as the importance of faith and love for my family. Thank you for 35 year’s worth of love, encouragement, and everything else. vii Abstract Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate viii for the manuscript original—image and text worked together to craft new meanings. By examining the material scribal practices of Parker’s household, considering the choices made by Parker in preserving texts through both print and manuscript media, and rethinking how early modern antiquaries approached scholarship, I argue that his transcribed manuscripts offer insights into the early modern origins of medieval literary scholarship. ix Preface One of the challenges of this dissertation was simply finding a way to organize the text. A descriptive handlist, or catalogue, of manuscripts is an admittedly unusual genre for a Ph.D. In this case, I thought it necessary to include a brief preface describing the organizing principles behind this project. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 may be seen together as a critical introduction to the handlist of manuscripts that makes up Chapter 3. Chapter 1 places Matthew Parker within the context of other antiquarian scholars. Chapter 2, while contextualizing information on the gaps in scholarship that the manuscript handlist fills, also provides a theoretical framework for scholars of both the early modern and medieval periods to study this corpus of manuscripts. The manuscript handlist itself is organized according to the standard practice of alphabetizing entries by city and library or archive. Each entry contains a paleographical description and an analysis of the manuscript’s original source with a transcription of an image in the appendices. My appendices offer further context to the manuscripts mentioned in both parts and should be considered as part of the entire document. Finally, when I refer to a manuscript within the handlist, I provide a crosslink to that entry with its number bracketed and bold: [3]. Electronic versions of the dissertations will be able to click this bracket as a hyperlink within the document. x Table of Contents Chapter 1: The Antiquarian Beginnings of Old English Studies ......................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Seamless Reconstructions? Matthew Parker and Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts ............ 26 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 449 and the
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