Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers

by James Andrew Taylor

Generations of scholars have meditated upon the literary devices and cultural meanings of The Song of Roland . But according to Andrew Taylor not enough attention has been given to the physical context of the manuscript itself. The original copy of The Song of Roland is actually bound with a Latin translation of the Timaeus .

Textual Situations looks at this bound volume along with two other similarly bound medieval volumes to explore the manuscripts and marginalia that have been cast into shadow by the fame of adjacent texts, some of the most read medieval works. In addition to the bound volume that contains The Song of Roland , Taylor examines the volume that binds the well-known poem "Sumer is icumen in" with the Lais of Marie de France , and a volume containing the legal Decretals of Gregory IX with marginal illustrations of wayfaring life decorating its borders.

Approaching the manuscript as artifact, Textual Situations suggests that medieval texts must be examined in terms of their material support—that is, literal interpretation must take into consideration the physical manuscript itself in addition to the social conventions that surround its compilation. Taylor reconstructs the circumstances of the creation of these medieval bound volumes, the settings in which they were read, inscribed, and shared, and the social and intellectual conventions surrounding them.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Credited as Andrew Taylor on most works.

Andrew Taylor has been a freelance writer since 2004, but he has been working in newspapers, magazines, and television, in both Europe and the Middle East, for nearly 35 years. Before that, so long ago that he can hardly remember, he read English at Oxford University.

After training on the Yorkshire Evening Post, in Leeds, he worked as a political journalist for the Press Association and the Daily Express in the House of Commons, Westminster, and then went to BBC Television News as a national news reporter. From there, he travelled to Dubai to work as a news editor, news reporter, news reader, and news-everything-else for Dubai Television (DTV) for five years, and then came back to England to run DTV’s London office.

He began writing books in the early 1990s. Then after being made redundant in a major reorganisation of DTV – an experience he later wrote about in Burning the Suit – he established himself in freelance writing and journalism.