| This dissertation asks how unreadability and erasure work as imaginative strategies in late medieval and early modern English texts. I use the term unreadable to encompass any writing that has been rendered illegible through changes made to the physical manuscript (through scribal erasure, deliberate or accidental textual effacing, damage to the manuscript, or revision), as well as any writings that cannot or must not be read as a result of fictive strategies in Middle English writing -- that is, where access to those writings is compromised by the strength of one's faith, the presentation of one's remorse, or the invitation to deliberately destroy or adapt that text or texts. The indecipherability of the text is not purely the result of the ravages of time or of human carelessness, but of a variety of changes that a text is subject to because of human agency. Further, these moments of unreadability may induce a response or a shift in response for scribes, authors, and their audiences as paradoxically both a risk in the process of meaning-making, and as a literary strategy. I add that the beginnings and endings of these texts in particular harbor these accounts of unreadability. It is in the prologues, epilogues, proems, and colophons that the matter-of-fact narration of a book's genesis begins to harmonize with the imaginative and literary techniques of the text. In the The Book of Margery Kempe, unreadability occurs in the transfer of an oral account to a written one. In Chaucer's Retraction, the opposite is true. In this statement, its author attempts to control readability by recanting certain literary texts that are already written, already circulating. And in William Caxton's edition of The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers readability becomes an issue of revision, from one medium to another, namely from manuscript to print. Rather than meaning being reduced by these practices and strategies, these texts offer more, not fewer, readings: unreadability is productive of meaning. Reading within this framework proves that in these late medieval and early sixteenth-century texts unreadability and erasure shape and are shaped by attitudes toward spirituality, retraction, and completeness. |
