Marjorie Harrington

The English Franciscan poet, preacher, and theologian William Herebert’s notebook, now British Library Additional MS 46919, contains autograph copies of his Latin sermons and Middle English religious poetry. Acting simultaneously as scribe and author, Herebert manipulates mise-en-page to guide readers as they approach his works. He embeds English proverbs and translations of Latin distinctiones in his sermons as mnemonics, promoting deeper engagement with the themes of his sermons through recursive reading across languages. His Middle English poems, set aside as a self-contained literary group in the final quire of Additional 461919, are themselves translations of Latin hymns and related materials. In this grouping, Herebert engages with secular poetic traditions and produces poems that could be performed. Reading both sets of texts alongside each other, this article argues that Herebert is engaging in two separate modes of translation, responding to Francis of Assisi’s call first to preach, and then afterward to sing

Among the least studied of Oxford, BodL, MS Digby 86's wide-ranging contents is a compendium of utilitarian texts on fols. 1r-65r. This section of the trilingual household miscellany is concerned simultaneously with care for the soul and for the body, containing psalms, prayers, catechetic material, experimenta, medical recipes and guides for predicting the future by one's dreams or by the phases of the moon. Within this section, the scribe-compiler creates clusters of scientific, medical and prognosticatory material. Unlike the more literary sections of the manuscript, the scribe returns to these clusters to insert additional medical recipes and prognostications in the margins at several different points. Later hands also add to these texts, including an early fourteenth-century scribe who inserts marginal English translations of individual words in the medical recipes and scientific experiments. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, yet another scribe copies an eclectic collection of further medical recipes on a single unruled folio that was slipped inside and eventually bound into Digby 86 as folio 16. This sustained activity shows ongoing interest in Digby 86's practical texts over the course of more than a century. Digby 86 is best characterised as a lay person's miscellany or encyclopedia of information and entertainment and, as such, provides insight into the interests and concerns of a late medieval English gentry family.

This article contrasts Chaucer’s attitude toward dream visions and the Somniale Danielis tradition with English and Latin Somniale works in two of the Harley scribe’s manuscripts: London, British Library MSS Harley 2253 and Royal 12.C.xii. It includes an edition of the Royal Somniale Danielis, here edited and translated for the first time. I demonstrate that—in contrast to Chaucer’s skepticism—the Harley scribe viewed the Somniale tradition as a valuable source of knowledge worthy of transmission into English. The vast gap between these two figures’ approaches to dream interpretation reveals that fourteenth-century attitudes toward texts that bridge the practical/devotional divide were not homogeneous, and that Chaucer’s characteristic ambivalence toward and manipulation of dream genres should not be taken as representative.

Medieval languages existed in a state of constant contact and interaction with other languages. In this project, I argue that thirteenth- and fourteenth- century English trilingual manuscripts show the coalescing of distinctive approaches to the literary and pragmatic possibilities of multilingual clusters of texts. In particular, the construction of parallel-text translations becomes a catalyst for the generation of Early Middle English poetry. Through examination of three manuscripts linked to the vibrant West Midlands literary ecosystem (Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.39; William Herebert’s preaching notebook, British Library MS Additional 46919; and British Library MS Harley 913, the “Kildare manuscript”), I demonstrate how the production of paired translations fueled the development of English religious verse.
Interpreting medieval texts’ manuscript contexts is essential to understanding their meaning. This is especially true of paired translations, where the capacity of each language to reflect and comment on the other(s) is embedded in their material form. Whether a translation is inserted between the lines of its source text, interwoven with it in alternating stanzas, or copied in an adjacent column, these visual frameworks place the parallel texts and the registers associated with each of the languages in conversation with themselves.