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Rolle Reassembled: Booklet Production, Single-Author Anthologies, And The Making Of Bodley 861, Andrew B. Kraebel

English Faculty Research

The assignment of value to manuscripts on the basis of their antiquity—that is, the notion that books written at a greater distance from the present were therefore more deserving of attention—reflects a sensibility more commonly associated with early modern collectors than with medieval scribes. Malcolm Parkes, for example, though describing many instances of archaizing hands in medieval manuscripts, tends to see these as pragmatic efforts driven by “the need to copy replacement leaves,” a more practical aim than the Tudor valuing of medieval scripts, which “came to be perceived as emblematic of the past.”¹ Within this framework, though generally …