1 - Introduction

Summary

In recent years, the shift of power to the reader has been marked. In both literary- and book-historical spheres, the role of the reader in constructing meaning out of texts is increasingly taken for granted. Whether the approach is phenomenological, deconstructive or sociological, it seems that the reader is, for the moment at least, a source of authority and a point of stability for many critical discourses. All too often however, this ‘reader’ is a transhistorical entity, almost a hermeneutic device through which traditional literary criticism can lay claim to new ground, new readings. In this book, I try to give textual and historical substance to the terms ‘reader’ and ‘reading’. I do not treat them as universal givens, but as strategies that can be described and analysed, which grow out of, reflect and help to shape very specific cultural practices and which are undertaken with particular aims in mind. As recent studies for the early modern period have shown, reading is always informed by context and, even more importantly, by purpose.

My evidence for medieval reading practice is glossing, specifically glossing on Horace's Satires in twelfth-century manuscripts from England and Northern France. This context is crucial. The twelfth century saw an increase in the production of classical texts, an expansion of education, and a series of crucial debates about language, signification and interpretation.