Handling

This chapter asks how readers in this period physically handled books containing verse. Handling is explored through three qualities which significantly affect it: size, shape, and weight. The chapter explores some epistemological problems with the concept of size in the study of medieval manuscripts, and then offers the largest quantitative survey yet published of size and shape in manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Size evidence provides a broad overview of the ways in which particular texts might have been read. The shapes of books, meanwhile, appear to have been affected by literary form. The chapter then turns to weight, with the first ever survey of the weight of manuscripts from this period which retain period bindings. This survey reveals that the portability of poetry cannot be inferred simply from size or binding type, but must instead be worked out by considering size, shape, materials, and binding together. The chapter’s conclusions indicate how deeply embedded thought about form and the anticipation of future reading were in the production of manuscripts containing Middle English verse.