Reading “thise lettres rede”: Page Design, Visual Data, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Abstract: Focusing on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, I am interested in scribal treatments of the twelve-line verse summary of the Latin epic Thebaid , which appears in most surviving copies of Troilus at the point when it interrupts the English rime royal stanzas. The appearance of the Latin verses poses potential challenges for reading and page design—a twelve-line block of Latin verse among seven-line English stanzas. Readers are presented with a wide range of visual ideas of how a line or unit of verse should appear on the page; linguistic shifts are reflected in terms of different line lengths, stanzaic forms, and even ink color and script. The variety of scribal treatments acknowledges the Latinity of the verse summary while creating some sense of visual alignment with the English verse. Recalling Malcolm Parkes’s idea of “handwriting as image,” these treatments invite readers to think about various conjunctions of text and image, with such elements as ink color and decoration taking part in parsing the written text by language, form, and literary genre. Based on specific, coordinated elements of page design, these differing visual treatments of the Latin summary also form distinct units of meaning—a kind of visual grammar for reading Troilus . In this light, I aim to compare the information that we derive from individual manuscript witnesses within cumulative patterns that emerge when multiple manuscripts are viewed together. These patterns allow us to see how scribal treatments of the Latin lines affect its reception and the legibility of its visual grammar.