Introduction: The Cheese and the Worms and Robert Thornton

Summary

Why an entire essay collection on one manuscript compiler, who has left us but two manuscripts? Or so might the sceptical reader justifiably ask. And yet the value in sustained, focused and collective analysis of Robert Thornton and his manuscripts lies in the amazing wealth of detail we can find – details about the compilation and scribal practices of an identifiable historical figure; about the diversity and contours of vernacular and Latin literary culture in a provincial fifteenth-century English locale; about one specific instantiation of lay piety; about one individual’s understanding of literary genres and verse forms; about medieval medicinal beliefs and practices; about conceptions of illumination and decoration in the non-commercial book; about the book production industry in regions beyond London; and about the literary activities of the late medieval gentry. Of course, I could go on, but these occur to me as the primary ways in which Robert Thornton and his books matter, and these are the primary topics taken up in the essays to follow.

I want briefly to propose here that micro-history provides us with a model through which we might better understand Thornton and his two manuscripts – and why they matter. As Giovanni Levi states,

The unifying principle of all microhistorical research is the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously unobserved … Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalizations although the initial observations were made within relatively narrow dimensions and as experiments rather than examples.

Or, as Carlo Ginzburg more gnomically puts it, ‘A close-up look permits us to grasp what eludes a comprehensive viewing, and vice versa.’ Micro-historians exploit understudied archives that reveal information about the marginalized, those whose voices tend to be ignored or, more often, studiously written out of most surviving records. Most often these are freak survivals that happened to record the testimony of peasants or other non-dominant voices. Attending to such archives, these historians demonstrate, gives us access to the mental-ités and ideologies of both the dominant and the marginalized – and of the tensions therein – and thus yields a richer picture than when we rely on documents constructed by the dominant powers in society, like chronicles, statutes, courtly literature or epistolary correspondence.