When Professor John Thompson examines an early manuscript, he is studying more than the text. He is fascinated by who read it originally and the impact it had on them.
John says, ‘I’m interested in the way textual cultures can be identified that reflect on how we understand our own identities. Textual study is a very venerable aspect of English studies. However I’m interested not just in textual studies per se but in the readers and reading practices, the way the texts have been received, both in the period in which they were written and then hundreds of years later by us or by collectors.’
John is Chair of English Textual Cultures at Queen’s. He has recently finished leading a project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, called Geographies of Orthodoxy, a collaboration with the University of St Andrews. The project uses 21st century technology to bring medieval writings to a broader readership. An electronic database has been created which is opening up a whole body of manuscripts to the scholarly community and to wider critical debate.
It has also led to new funding, this time from the Joint Information Systems Committee, which is driving innovation in UK education and research, in which Queen’s is linking with several other universities to create a database called Medieval Manuscripts Online.
And there is a further project, a collaboration with colleagues in France and Germany which is the biggest yet attempted in terms of looking at historical and cultural transitions between ‘medieval’ and ‘renaissance’ and the pre- and post- Reformation period across Europe.
John says, ‘I’m interested in the way writings in the Middle English period, from 1066 to 1600, have influenced what we understand by religious identity and national identity. With Geographies"The impact is huge in how our work will relate to the repositories of heritage." of Orthodoxy we looked at how texts which have an orthodox feel about them, or veneer, were actually circulated and how they were received by readers. We call this cultural mapping.’
The texts on which the research focussed were Lives of Christ, based on the Gospel treatments, and one in particular, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, translated from the Latin.
‘We investigated the survival of those manuscripts that belonged to the same tradition as Nicholas Love. We learned about reading practices – evidence in the books of marginalia and under-linings. We studied collectors – who they were, how they were collecting them, what other materials they were assembling alongside them.
‘Often we found that marginalia was just in the opening pages, showing the reader running out of history or patience. On other occasions we found that readers were profoundly influenced by the text and named it in their own subsequent writing.
‘The way a text is copied – mise en page – is also important. It reveals something of the way it was intended to be read. The writers often left instructions. There were also alterations through the generations. For example, some readers who had experienced the Reformation went back into these texts and expunged words like the Pope and also added their own commentary.’
John notes that there are two approaches in the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages. ‘You either get a huge emphasis and priority on transcribing the text exactly – with some translations looking almost as if they’ve been factory-produced – or, on the other hand, you have texts that are more romanticised retellings of Biblical stories where the scribes had enormous freedom and would adjust the texts in all kinds of ways.’
He is delighted with what the work is delivering. ‘The handmade books belonging to this tradition, that were copied, owned and read in the period, have never before been systematically analysed. We have high prestige projects here at Queen’s that link with other high prestige projects elsewhere in the UK and Europe. The impact is huge in terms of how our work will relate to major archives which are a repository of heritage. We are making openly and freely accessible highly specialised information that allows us to rewrite how we understand the history of English literature and printing.’
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