The marks of many hands: Textual identity in early medieval scribal culture (Cynewulf)

My dissertation addresses issues of textual theory and textual criticism in medieval studies by examining how some Old and Middle English poetic texts were invested with meaning by the acts of scribal reproduction. My goal is to show how uniquely attested works resist the inclination of modern medievalism to read their singularity as evidence authorial intention and textual stability. Contrary to this inclination, I read these texts as in flux, both materially and rhetorically, in their relations with other manuscript texts and with traditional poetic languages upon which they are built. While most of the recent discussion of manuscript textuality addresses works appearing in multiple manuscripts, I examine texts that survive in a single manuscript version: Beowulf, Cynewulfs poetry, and one of the Harley lyrics. I challenge the prevailing tendency to reduce these texts to authorial discourse in two ways: first by focusing on how they invest meaning in their relationships with other manuscript texts, and secondly by reading their originality as effects of an inherited poetic tradition rather than the work of unique authorial genius. My introductory chapter surveys traditional and revisionist attitudes toward editing medieval literature, and then synthesizes an account of literary agency that emphasizes the collaboration between producers and consumers of writing in medieval scribal culture. Subsequent chapters on the Harley lyric "Earth" and Cynewulf's rune poems investigate the character and limits of the textual identity of a group of manuscript texts that, while unique, nevertheless exhibit "family resemblances." Here I disclose the rhetorical and material processes by which these texts inflect each other without referring back to the underlying presence of an original version governed by a unified set of authorial intentions. My chapter on Beowulf argues that its originality is a matter of the way it realizes a finite set of actual poetic lines from a larger range of compositional possibilities, possibilities that remain latent in its unique text. Examining the interplay between actual and potential poetic language, I contend that Beowulf 's originality is constructed against the backdrop of traditional formulaic composition.