Scribes and Hypertext

Scribes and Hypertext
Author(s): David Burnley

Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 25, Non-Standard Englishes and the New Media
Special Number (1995), pp. 41-62
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3508817
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Scribes and Hypertext
DAVID BURNLEY
University
of Sheffield
Looking through the shelves of the secondhand bookshop recently, I came

across a copy of Brewer's edition of the Parlementof Foulys so heavily glossed
and annotated in bright blue ballpoint that it ought to have been an object of
wonder, the testament to a rare consistency and sense of purpose in the
glossator. Hardly any white space survived around the text. I was shocked.
How could anyone treat a book in this way? It seemed a kind of desecration.
But what justification was there for my perturbation? I can defend my
disapproval: such annotation might discourage later readers from exercising
their own interpretative judgement on the text. It imposes a particular
interpretation, and is therefore coercive. But this is really the rationalization
of a more fundamental distaste. A book is the artefact of many diverse skills
working towards the form in which it has been issued, a collaborative work of
art which should not be carelessly defaced. I think of this defacement much
in the same way as I should condemn graffiti on a public monument. Later
additions to texts by unauthorized persons may be deplored as vandalism.
This view is no doubt dependent upon print culture and a culturally
enshrined canon. It is an authoritarian one, and in this it is paralleled by the
ideal of a book as the product of its author, inviolate from printer's error or
editorial interference, which lies behind the principles of scholarly editing:
the editor's role is to restore the author's text as perfectly as possible for the
benefit of each reader. Each reader should confront the text exactly as the
author intended it should be, and negotiate its meaning in his or her own
way. It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is only an ideal, but neverthe-
less the technical possibility of the text's bearing a message from an author to
an audience gained strength from the development and perfection of print-
ing techniques in the last five hundred years. Yet, as a dream of the author
and scholar it is by no means a new one, and is eloquently expressed in
Classical Latin:
Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis
nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas.
cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius
ius habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat aevi:
parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum,
quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terris,
ore legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama,
siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam.
xv. 871)
(Metamorphoses,
42 ScribesandHypertext
And now my work is done, which neither the wrath ofJove, nor fire, nor sword, nor
the gnawing tooth of time shall ever be able to undo. When it will, let that day come
which has no power save over this mortal frame, and end the span of my uncertain
years. Still in my better part I shall be borne immortal far beyond the lofty stars and
I shall have an undying name. Wherever Rome's power extends over the conquered
world, I shall have mention on men's lips, and, if the prophecies of bards have any
truth, through all the ages shall I live in fame.
Ovid's final words in the Metamorphoses1were echoed by Christine de Pizan
in both her book in praise of Charles V and in her Avision Christine,2and were
perhaps in the mind of her correspondent Eustache Deschamps when he
wrote to Chaucer acknowledging him a fellow author writing for posterity.3
In the days before printing, however, when the transmission of texts relied
on the skills and attitudes of scribes, authorial control over their product was
quite evidently no more than a dream for these authors. Before the invention
of printing, the multiplication of the author's text was so hazardous that it
might threaten its very survival. Indeed both Christine and Chaucer, in
Troilusand Criseyde,expected no more than the survival of the content of their
compositions; poetic subtleties were likely to be lost. In the earlier middle
ages, tie situation was worse. Old English scribes wrote verse continuously
across the page, failing to emphasize its metrical structure. Some apparently
did not even understand the language which they were copying, and the one
who wrote a version of the Battle of Brunanburhin about io 6 substituted for
the line dictated to him: 'Gewitan him pa Nor4men naegledcnearrum' (the
Northmen departed from them in their nailed boats), the enigmatic
'Gewiton him pa Nor6men daeg gled on garum'.4
If the copyists were the necessary enemies of the author, users of books are
their partners in crime. Books may be designed with chapter divisions,
glossaries, indexes, and so on to facilitate whatever uses the author has
foreseen, but book users do not always share the priorities of authors and
scholars. The book is certainly an intermediary between its author and its
users, but there is no necessary communication between the two. Books have
always served other purposes than those foreseen for them by their creators:
King Alfred's Preface to his translation of the copy of Gregory's Pastoral Care
sent to the diocese of Worcester is glossed for arcane purposes known only to
the scribe whose peculiarly unsteady script identifies him to modern scholars
as the 'Worcester Tremulous Hand'. He was an industrious annotator of
1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1977).
2 Christine de
Pizan, LeLivredesFais etBonnesMeursduSageRoyCharlesV,ed. by S. Solente, 2 vols (Paris:
Champion, 1940), II, 132.
3
Deschamps's baladeis quoted with an English translation in Derek Brewer, Chaucer:The Critical
Heritage,2 vols (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 39-42.
4 British ed. by Alistair Campbell
Library, Cotton MSS, Tiberius B IV. See TheBattleof Brunanburgh,
(London: Heinemann, 1938), p. 89.
DAVID BURNLEY 43
Old English books, whose purposes we can only guess at.5 Some literal-
minded early copyist of Chaucer's Envoy to Scogan with an eye for the
geography of the Thames valley rather than poetic metaphor supplied for
later readers the erroneous gloss 'Windsor' to the phrase stremeshedeof grace
and balanced it by the gloss 'Greenwich' for the phrase solytariewildernesse.
John But was only one of those who modified Piers Plowman,6 and whoever
wrote the London Julius Chronicle(c. I435) appropriated without acknow-
ledgement Lydgate's poem on the entry of King Henry VI into London.7
The Paris manuscript of the CanterburyTales severely prunes the Squire's Tale
to suit the tastes of its owner. The divide between those on the one hand who
uphold and practise their right to put books to their own uses, annotating,
adapting, or purloining an author's text where desirable, or reproducing it
with less than scholarly accuracy, and those on the other whose purpose is to
enshrine and preserve the simple relationship between text, author, and
reader, is one which is probably as old as books. But the authoritarian cause
certainly gained great strength from the technological achievement of
printing using movable type. Since the late fifteenth century, the ideal of the
enduring artefact of the individual author has become the norm, and has
fostered both author-centred literary scholarship and respect for books
based on their status as cultural monuments rather than instruments of
entertainment or tools of instruction. This is what lies behind our distaste for
the maltreatment of books.
Although authors in English before the time of Chaucer were aware of the
Latin conception of their role exemplified by Ovid and others, a combination
of historical factors prevented them from adopting it with confidence. The
social status of English limited the patronage available for writers and cut
English off from sophisticated new literary themes; above all, the dialectal
variety of the language combined with this low status threatened the
integrity of any work composed in the language through inevitably careless
copying. Very few works in English were regarded as the sacred products of
an important author. In the case of anonymous and more popular work,
scribes had no such responsibility as they felt in copying Latin masterworks,
and the descent of many Middle English romances shows that scribes could
enter into unauthorized collaboration with the author. Indeed, this could
happen to such a degree that it becomes uncertain whether we are con-
fronted by several different works or several copying variants of the same
5 Christine Franzen, The TremulousHand of Worcester: A Studyof Old English in the ThirteenthCentury
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, I991). See also Wendy Collier, 'The Tremulous Worcester Scribe and his
Milieu: A Study of his Annotations' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, I992).
6 George Kane, 'The Text', in A Companion to PiersPlowman,ed. by John A. Alford (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 175-200.
7 TheLondonChronicles, ed. by C. L. Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), pp. 97-I 15.
work.8 Popular literature could, in other words, quickly become the property
of the community, rewritten by copyists, and its original authorship
forgotten.
The problem of rendering ideas in writing in a way which might be readily
understandable to their audience, and which might survive copying led to
certain features of medieval writing which will emerge as the discussion
continues, but it is a problem worthy of consideration first in a less narrowly
contextualized way. In general, ideas do not come to our minds in neatly
sequential order, logically related in the most convenient way. They are
often complex, admitting exceptions to our categories, alternatives, qualifi-
cations, or ranges of choice. We often have to struggle for the words,
syntactic structures, and sentence relationships in which to encode them
most clearly and effectively. The degree of complexity which we wish to
communicate can often be managed more easily in oral exchanges, since
conversation permits rephrasing, repetition, and modification of the utter-
ance to the needs of those with whom we are speaking. None of these
techniques is possible in quite the same way in written texts. Texts consist of
a sequence of visual symbols relatively fixed on the page and unable to
respond with any certainty to the needs of the reader. If authors wish to
maintain their status in the transaction, they have to try to foresee their
audience, and to manage their text to cater for it. They may try to adapt
some of the devices of rhetoric which they might employ in speech, but, at its
simplest, they have to find a technique of creating a text made from
significant units and links which enables their audience to interpret its
structure and understand its meaning. The integrity of text depends upon
the syntactical rules of the language used, and the usual processes of
cohesion, and these rules and processes are superordinate to the devices of
either speech or writing. But written language, and within that, verse, also
employ techniques of their own. Let us consider a simple, nearly linear,
narrative:
8
The uncertainty as to what constitutes an author's text in medieval English literatureis the occasion of
great debate, not simply in the expectation of answering the question in any one case, but also in terms of
the principles and possibilities of editing such difficult material. For well-argued doubts about the
validity of critical editions, see William E. Holland, 'Formulaic Diction and the Desent of a Middle
English Romance' Speculum, 48 (I973), 89-109. And for critical editions in the face of extreme difficulties,
see King Horn. An Editionbasedon CambridgeUniversityLibraryMS Gg.4.27 (2), ed. by Rosamund Allen,
Garland Medieval Texts 7 (New York and London: Garland, I984); TheAwntyrsoff Arthureat the Terne
Wathelyne: A CriticalEdition,ed. by Robert J. Gates (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1969); TheAwntyrsoffArthureat theTerneWathelyn: An EditionbasedonBodleianLibraryMS Douce324,ed. by
Ralph Hanna III, Old and Middle English Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, I974). The
last two editors are at variance as to whether their text constitutes one or two poems. Similarly, scholars
are in disagreement as to whether the so-called Z-text of Piers Plowmanis an authorial first draft or a
scribal remnant.
DAVID BURNLEY 45
The King asked The Dairymaid

The Queen, and She curtsied,
The Queen asked And went and told
The Dairymaid: The Alderney:
'Could we have some butter for 'Don't forget the butter for
The Royal slice of bread?' The Royal slice of bread.'
The Queen asked The Alderney
The Dairymaid, Said sleepily:
The Dairymaid 'You'd better tell
Said,'Certainly, His Majesty
I'll go and tell That many people nowadays
The cow Like marmalade
Now Instead.'
Before she goes to bed.'
The self-contained nature of this excerpt from a children's poem is striking.

It creates its own imaginary world of talking cows and palace relationships,
and, appropriately for children, the experience required of real world things
is very little indeed: a king may be referred to as 'His Majesty' and an
'Alderney' is a breed of cow, that is all you need to know. Indeed, it is
arguable that this latter is unnecessary knowledge because the cohesion of
the piece is so tightly drawn that it could be inferred from the text. Its
coherence is internal. The narrative consists of brief conjoined clauses, and
the connection between the clauses is most marked in the way in which the
object of one clause becomes the subject of the next. It is strongly lexically
coherent through the repetition of the words Queen, Dairymaid, and the
phrase Royal slice of bread, and through the semantic relationships between
King and His Majesty, and between cow and Alderney. In themselves, these
kinds of cohesion might be found in any connected discourse, but there are
also aspects of the patterning of this text which are characteristic of verse.
Two kinds of discourse are apparent: narrative and direct speech, and these
are distinguished by punctuation marks. But the patterning of their use is
also striking, with the latter occupying much longer verse than the former,
and terminated by a rhyme word. The phrases and short clauses of the
narration are carefully arranged in the line structure so as to emphasize their
parallelism and brevity. There are certainly other devices worthy of com-
ment, such as the amusing 'internal' rhyme cow: now, and the repetitive use
of trisyllables of similar stress patterns at line ends, but this is decorative
rather than structural and does not concern us, since what is at issue is the
way in which a series of verbal objects are distinguished and then linked into
decipherable text. In this simple piece, they are so linked through the
interaction of the normal processes of syntax and cohesion with a (partly
visual) patterning imposed upon them by the poet through punctuation and
layout.
The problem of creating a text which was interpretable and would survive
was one which exercised an Augustinian canon, probably in Bourne,
Lincolnshire towards the end of the twelfth century. Orm is interesting
because he was both the author and the publisher of his work. He wrote his
twenty thousand-line work in an ugly and unprofessional hand, but above all
he was concerned that the content should reach the consumer in the form in
which he had designed it. To this end, he developed his own spelling system,
even inventing a new letter form <g>for the plosive /g/, carefully punctuated
his text, and begged any future copyists to imitate his method precisely. It
has to be admitted, however, that he did not produce an attractive and
readily accessible document for his readers. The work is written in two
columns in a uniformly black ink. Occasionally, his layout is compromised
by holes in the vellum, lines are scored out, omitted lines clumsily inserted,
or he will write across the bottom of the page and use unaccustomed
abbreviations in order to start a significant sub-section of the text at the head
of the next column (as in fol. 70r). But his purpose is clear: he fitted his
phrasing into unrhymed lines of precisely fifteen syllables in length, marking
the beginning of each line by a capital letter, breaking the line into seven and
eight-syllable halves by the use of a punctuselevatusor, after questions, punctus
interrogativus.Changes of speaker or of topic are marked by the paragraphus.9
Above all, Orm relies upon his punctuation and spelling system to commu-
nicate his content, and perhaps compelled by financial exigency, does not
write his verse out line by line, but runs on continuously within each column.
The following transcription expands abbreviations, but follows Orm's
layout, punctuation, and, as far as possible capitalization. The last is
somewhat problematic, because the eight-syllable half-line usually begins
with an emboldened Tironian sign or a somewhat larger capital (for which
Annd and emboldening has been substituted) and the second, seven-
syllable, half line begins with a smaller capital (which is not distinguished in
the transcription).
9 For detailed treatment of the marks of punctuation, see M. B. Parkes,PauseandEffect:AnIntroduction to

the History of Punctuationin the West (Aldershot: Scolar, 1992). More specific accounts of medieval
punctuation practices in English manuscripts can be found in Paul G. Araklian, 'Punctuation in a Late
Middle English Manuscript', Neuphilologische Mitteilungen,76 (1975), 614-24; A. C. Cawley, 'Punctuation
in the Early Versions of Trevisa', LondonMedievalStudies,I (I937), I6-33; Peter Clemoes, Liturgical
Influenceon Punctuationin Late Old EnglishandEarlyMiddleEnglishManuscripts,University of Cambridge,
Department of Anglo-Saxon, Occasional Papers (Cambridge, I952); Pamela Gradon, 'Punctuation in a
Middle English Sermon', in FiveHundredYearsof WordsandSounds:A Festschriftfor EricDobson,ed. by E. G.
Stanley and Douglas Gray (Cambridge: Brewer, I983), 39-48; P. L. Heyworth, 'The Punctuation of
Middle English Texts', in MedievalStudiesforJ.A. W.Bennett,ed. by P. L. Heyworth. (Oxford:Clardendon
Press, I98I), I39-57; P.J. Lucas, 'Sense-Units and the Use of Punctuation MarkersinJohn Capgrave's
Chronicle', ArchivumLinguisticum, n. s. 2 (197 ), 1-24; M. B. Parkes, 'Punctuation, or Pause and Effect', in
MedievalEloquence:Studiesin the Theoryand Practiceof MedievalRhetoric,ed. by J.J. Murphy. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978), 127-42; Elizabeth Zeeman, 'Punctuation in an Early Manuscript of
Love's Mirror', RES, n.s. 7 (1956), I I-I8.
DAVID BURNLEY 47
Annd affterrpatt te tid wass
gan fPe33 wendenn fra
Pe temmple. Annd ferrdenn to-
warrd nazaraep.An da33ess
gang till efenn. Annd wenndenn
[P]att te laferrd crist. Wipp hemm
patt gate come. Annd he wass pa
bihinndenn hemm. Bilefedd att te
temmple. Annd tatt ne wisste nohht
hiss kinn fAcc wennde patt he come.
Annd 3edenn heore we33efor /f
Till patt itt comm till efenn. Annd ta
pe33misstenn pe33rechild fannd itt
hemm offerkuhhte. Annd 3edenn till
annd sohhtenn himm fBitwenenn sibbe.
annd cupe. Annd te33ne fundenn nohht
off himm fforr he wass att te temmple.
Annd te33 pa wenden efft onn3aen.f
[p]att dere child to sekenn. Annd co-
men efft till 3errsalaem.To se-
kenn him paerbinnen. Annd te33
himm o pe pridde da33. fPaer fundenn
ike temmple. Bitwenenn katt iudiss-
kenn flocc. fPatt leredd wass o bo-
ke. Annd taerehe satt to fra33nenn
hemm. Offpe33re bokess lare.
Annd alle patt himm herrden
paer.fHemm puhhte mikell wunn-
derr. Off att he wass full 3aepand
wis. fTo swarenn annd to fra33nenn.
VAnnd Sannte mar3e comm till himm. annd se33-
de himm puss wipk worde. Whi di-
desst tu lef sune puss. WiPP uss
forr uss to swenkenn?Witt ha-
fenn sohht te widewhar fIcc
annd ti faderr bape. Wipp serrhfull
herrte. annd sari3 mod. Whi di-
desst tu kiss dede?
(fol. 70r-)
The passage above is the scene in which Joseph and Mary, returning from
Jerusalem, realize that they have left their child behind in the city.10 Orm is
determined to explain the circumstances, but does very little to dramatize
them. Simple declaratory clauses are connected by the conjunction annd.
The counterfactual conjunction Acc is used one in line o, but was equally as
necessary in line 7. Only in the last line does Orm rise to a causal relation.
Generally he adopts two or three significant words and builds the cohesion of
his text on their repetition: till efenn situates the events in time; pe temmple
10
Quoted with revised layout from David Burnley, TheHistoryof the EnglishLanguage:A SourceBook
(London: Longman, I992).
defines the place; and the verb wenndenn,which often has counterfactual force
in Middle English, illustrates the confusion. Orm relies heavily upon lexical
repetition at verbal and phrasal level to carry his message, and on the
watchfulness of his reader for his punctuation and syllable count.
Orm's efforts to clarify the structure of his text may seem modest enough,
even childish, but they nevertheless represent the efforts of an author to
communicate his meaning unambiguously. Although human language has
its own structures identifiable by linguistic investigations at phonological,
syntactical, and other levels, the users of a language may not be keenly aware
of the units into which linguists analyse their language, or that they observe
certain behavioural patterns even in conversation. People learn to speak
without conscious analysis, but when we come to write our language some
conscious analysis is necessary. In the longer historical perspective, the
degree of analysis and control which Orm attempted was in fact quite
considerable. In the western world, from earliest times the spoken language
had been divided into phonic segments which were represented by letters;
letters and their accompanying sounds were recognized as syllables, and
were grouped into words, which represented ideas and objects external to
the language, as well as performing intra-linguistic functions. It is a notor-
ious fact that the boundaries between words are often blurred in speech, and
prior to the establishment of standard spellings for words, this uncertainty
was normally reflected in manuscripts. Manuscript writing preserved some-
thing of the continuity of speech. Indeed the earliest Latin manuscript
writing is sometimes in scriptio continua,that is, continuously written words
without any spacing or punctuation, often using the verse line as the primary
unit of textual analysis.11 This was especially the case when the text was
viewed as a utilitarian object, the property of the user, who was granted the
right to mark it up with word-divisions, pauses, and intonation patterns as
best suited his interpretative convenience or his purpose in delivering an
oration. Scriptiocontinuawas obsolete by the twelfth century, but in the Roman
de la Rose, Jean de Meun still speaks of the responsibility of punctuation
falling on the reader rather than the producers of a text:
Ifony be that can it say
And poynte it as the resoun is
Set for other gate ywys
It shall nought wel in all thyng
Be brought to good vndirstondyng
For a reder that poyntith ille
A good sentence may ofte spille.
of theRose,B.2156)
(Romaunt
Scriptiocontinuahad fulfilled a practical role in earlier times in school texts or
oratorical exercises, but by the twelfth century literature was being studied
as part of an ethical education aimed at reforming the soul rather than at any
11 Parkes,
pp. io- I.
DAVID BURNLEY 49
short term vocational purpose. The syllabus consisted of auctores,and the
name and purpose of the author were always of great importance, forming
part of the accessusor introduction to any important Latin work. Authors
were highly respected, their works formed part of a recognised (authentici)
curriculum, and their texts were copied with special exactness. It was to this
body ofauctoresthat Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Deschamps all aspired
to belong. The author was considered to transmit his meaning through his
art, and it was his duty to communicate his purpose as effectively as possible
to his audience. Such a view was the bedrock of medieval literary theory, and
even Orm was motivated by this responsibility. Rhetorical arts were com-
posed whose sole purpose was to equip new Latin authors with the composi-
tional skills necessary for transmitting their intention in poetry, prose,
sermons and official documents (the artespoetriae, dictamines,praedicandi,and
notariae).
Medieval poetics was exclusively intentionalistic and some medieval
authors, unashamedly admitting that the meaning was the raison d'etre of
their writing, sought, like Orm, ways in which they could preserve it to a
significant degree. Orm's fellow townsman, Robert Mannyng, writing in
1338, was well aware that in vernacular languages the dream of an imperish-
able work of art was unrealizable, and he claims deliberately to have written
in a verse form and style which could be readily understood.12 This means
stripping his verse of the vanities of style and aiming for a simplicity of
discourse which could not be easily misunderstood and might survive rough
handling:
I see in song in sedgeyng tale
Of Erceldoun and of Kendale,
Non ,am says as bai,am wroght,
and in per sayng it semes noght;
pat may Pou here in Sir Tristrem;
ouer gestes it has ]pesteem,
Ouer alle that is or was,
if men it sayd as made Thomas;
But I here it no man say
Pat of som copple som is away;
So pare fayre sayng here beforn
is liare trauayle nere forlorn
bai sayd it for pride & nobleye,
Pat non were suylk as Pei;
And all kat pai wild ouerwhere,
all lat ilk will now forfare.
(1.93)
No doubt Mannyng was well aware of the presumed responsibility of the
author when he came to write his Chronicleof England and he employed a
12 TheStoryof Englandby RobertManningof Bourne,ed. by F.J. Furnivall, Records Commission, Iv.87,

2 vols (London, 1887).
device so simple and ubiquitous that we normally regard it as diagnostic of

the poetic mode, overlooking its more utilitarian function in a semi-literate
culture: that device is rhymed verse. Whatever the decorative qualities of
Mannyng's octosyllabic couplets, they imposed a pattern on his discourse
which would have facilitated accurate copying, scribes unconsciously regis-
tering the eight syllables, perhaps, but responding above all to the rhymes.
There is at least a general truth in the statement that scribes tended to
preserve the rhymes in the works they copied even when changing words and
spellings in the line, and the scribe of London, Lambeth Palace, MS i 3
faithfully followed Mannyng's line structure. Of course, copyists made
mistakes and omitted lines, but Hand i of the more or less contemporary
Auchinleck manuscript must have been alerted to his errors when copying
the Short Metrical Chronicle,since, having omitted a line, he recognizes his
omission when he comes to the failure in rhyme, and, on three occasions, he
inserts the omitted line at the foot of the column preceded by a letter a and a
cross, which refer to a b and cross at the proper place in the text (fols 311 ,
312V, 3I7r).13 Mannyng feared that more complex verse forms, such as tail
rhyme, might confuse his audience and perhaps copyists, yet in a study of the
handling of narrative in that genre Diirmiiller argues that in addition to its
rhyme scheme, the tail-rhyme stanza can commonly be broken into four
topics which can be combined in various fairly predictable ways.14 In a
twelve-line stanza, the first three often tend to introduce a topic, the next two
groups of three develop it in some way whilst the final three close it, selecting
some aspect which connects to the next stanza:
Some tyme there was in Almayn
An Emperour of moche mayn;
Syr Dyoclysan he hyght;
He was a bolde man and a stowte;
All crystendome ofhym had dowte.
So strong he was in fyght;
He dysheryted many a man,
And falsely ther londys wan,
Wyth maystry and wyth myght,
Tyll hyt felle vpon a day,
A warre wakenyd, as y yow say,
Betwene hym and a knyght.
(Erleof Toulous,1. 13)
Thus expectation of the genre smooths the path of understanding for readers
of tail-rhyme romances, but at the same time encourages integrity in
copying. The editorial doctrine of difficiliorlectio is based on the assumption
that where wording is unexpected, scribes will tend to normalize it. It
13 Derek Pearsall and I. C.

Cunningham, The AuchinleckManuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates'
MS. I9.2.1 (London: Scolar, 1979).
14 Urs
Diirmiiller, Narrative Possibilities of the Tail-Rime Romances (Bern: Francke, I975), p. 28.
DAVID BURNLEY 51
follows, therefore, that to preserve a text recognizable patterns and familiar

phrasing have an important role to play.
The use of rhyme and regular metre defines the line as an object, and helps
to preserve the author's content. Stanzaic patterns have a similar function,
sometimes extended by verbal links chaining stanzas into larger units.
However, none of these devices has validity for prose or for larger units in
couplet verse. In these cases authors tended to fall back upon the rhetorical
devices proper to oral delivery, and we find devices of antithesis, repetition,
and sequence (sometimes enumerated sequences) being used. In legal and
administrative prose of record, and in technical prose where clarity was of
prime importance, a highly cohesive, and lexically repetitive kind of dis-
course was developed. The curial style emerged first in Latin, but was
imitated in French and appeared in English at the close of the fourteenth
century. In the next century it made its transition from utilitarian prose to
become a mannered style exploited most elaborately in the prologues and
epilogues of translations intended for the broader secular audience of the
period. The passage below is from a petition placed before Parliament in
1421 by the Physicians of London.15
Hey and most myghty Prince, noble and worthy Lordes Spirituelx and Temporelx,
and worshipfull Communes, for so moche as a man hath thre things to governe, that
is to say, Soule, Body, and wordly Goudes, the whiche ought and shulde ben
principaly reweled by thre Sciences, that ben Divinite, Fisyk, and Lawe, the Soule
by Divinite, the Body by Fisyk, wordly Goudes by Lawe, and these conynges sholde
be used and practised principaly by the most connyng men in the same Sciences, and
most approved in cases necesssaries to encrese of Vertu, long Lyf, and Goudes of
fortune, to the worship of God, and comyn profyt. But, worthy Soveraines, as hit is
knowen to youre hey discrecion, many unconnying and unapproved in the forsayd
Science practiseth, and specialy in Fysyk, so that in this Roialme is every man, be he
never so lewed, takyng upon hym practyse, y-suffred to use hit, to grete harme and
slaughtre of many men: Where if no man practised theryn but al only connynge men
and approved sufficeantly y-lerned in art, filosofye, and fisyk, as hit is kept in other
londes and roialms, ther shulde many man that dyeth, for defaute of help, lyve, and
no man perysh by unconnyng. Wherfore pleseth to youre excellent Wysdomes, that
ought after youre soule, have mo entendance to your body, for the causes above
sayd, to ordeine and make in Statuit, perpetualy to be straytly y-used and kept, that
no.man, of no maner estate, degre, or condicion, practyse in Fisyk, from this tyme
forward, bot he have long tyme y-used the Scoles of Fisyk withynne som Universitee,
and be graduated in the same; that is to sey, but he be Bacheler or Doctour of Fisyk,
havynge Lettres testimonyalx sufficeantz of on of those degrees of the Universite in
the whiche he toke his degree yn; undur peyne of long emprisonement,and paynge XL
li. to the Kyng; and that no Woman use the practyse of Fisyk undre the same payne.
This is a noteworthy piece of drafting in the curial style, using the referential
devices (the whiche, the same ..., the forsayd), paired synonyms (harme and
slaughter,londesandroialms), and inflected postposed adjectives (casesnecessaries)
characteristic of this elevated style, but also exploiting devices of semantic and
'1 Rotuli Parliamentorumut et petitiones et placita in Parliamento, 7 vols (London, 1783-I 832), IV, 158.
syntactical patterning more characteristic of work meant for oral presenta-

tion. Notice, for example, the introduction and subsequent exploitation of
the triad Soule, Body, and wordly Goudes,and the play on connyngin the second
and third sentences.16
Thus authors sought to establish by various intrinsic means the links by
which their subject matter could be woven into enduring text. Of these, some
were internal to the language, as functional in spoken English as on the page,
others were the property of rhetoric. Some, combining syntactical and
metrical patterning were best exploited or only exploitable at all in writing.
The elaboration of the layout or ordinatio,and of the punctuation, of a text
were of the latter kind.17 Medieval punctuation of vernacular texts is limited,
but, linked with ordinatio; could still indicate intended structures to a
considerable extent; but these were the aspect of the presentation of a written
work over which the author had least control.
The Auchinleck manuscript was produced in London in the generation
before Chaucer (c. I330) by six scribes working in collaboration, and the
texts in it give us a fairly representative picture of the possibilities of
punctuation and ordinatioas interpretative aids. It contains a variety of verse
romances and saints lives, and a number of shorter verse pieces, mainly on
religious themes. Most of the texts in it are copied from other sources, so that
punctuation schemes do not represent those of the authors of the works with
any degree of consistency, and they vary between the copyists. Only three
punctuation marks are used: the paraph (T), the littera notabilior(any more
prominent form of letter, enlarged, capitalized, or decorated, for example),
and a raised dot. Rubrics and a few illuminated capitals mark the beginnings
of texts. The fundamental unit of the lay-out is the verse line, and this fact
sesms to have been particularly carefully observed by the main scribe
(Hand I). The first extant item he wrote, the 'Life of St Gregory', consists of
eight-line stanzas consisting of four couplets each. He wrote these in an
economical way arranged as quatrains with an internal rhyme. The end of
each of the eight lines is marked by a dot, and the first line of each stanza is
distinguished by a paraph. This layout must have appeared unsatisfactory
either to him or to his employer, since he wrote all subsequent items in the
collection unambiguously in two columns per leaf, marking the line ends by
the final dot and the line initials by a separated and rubricated initial letter.
Although two of the other copyists used the separated intial letter, only
Hand 6 followed him in use of the final dot. Hand 3 began by using this dot,
but apparently came to regard it as redundant and abandoned its use.
The paraph is used to mark the first line even of obvious stanzaic
arrangements, but both the paraph and the littera notabiliorare also used to
16
For more details of the curial style, see J. D. Burnley, 'Curial Prose in England', Speculum,6I (I986),
593-6I4.
17
M. B. Parkes, 'The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatioand Compilatioon the Development of the
Book', in MedievalLearningandLiterature: EssaysPresentedtoRichardW. Hunt,ed. byJ.J. G. Alexander and
M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1976), I I5-41.
DAVID BURNLEY 53
mark other subdivisions within the text. Although there is no inherent
distinction in their value, the text of the ShortMetrical Chroniclein Auchinleck
demonstrates the beginning of a distinction by which major divisions are
indicated by litterae notabilioresand lesser, embedded, divisions by paraphs.
This distinction is probably one imposed by the main scribe of Auchinleck.
It is not found in the version of the text in British Library, MS Additional
I9677, where similar textual units are distinguished by invariable
paraphs.18 But, even within the Auchinleck manuscript, and within individ-
ual works in it, practice varies. Despite their co-operation in constructing the
volume, the scribes did not adopt a uniform method of text division through
the book. In the ABC poem, the divisions are inevitably marked by capitals,
but this practice also extends to the Harrowing of Hell (Hand I). The Seven
Sages of Rome, written by Hand 3, has text divisions marked by capitals
except on folio 88r, where a single paraph appears before the line 'Pan seide
maister bancillas'; Sir Degarre, in the same hand, although perhaps compiled
especially for inclusion in the manuscript, evolves from a mixture of
capitals and paraphs to capitals only by its close. The process of creating
this punctuation was complex. Whilst writing the text, scribes decided the
punctuation and placed marks for the paraphs and coloured capitals which
were added to the manuscript by rubricators after the scribe had completed
his work. This process was not foolproof, and rubricators may have been
illiterate or simply bloody-minded: in Arthourand Merlin, line 3510 (Hand I)
the rubricator inserted a capital 'S' where the context demanded an 'I'; the
paraph was placed opposite line 4113 instead of line 41 I2 despite scribal
instructions; and at line 6768 the last of an intended sequence often paraphs
is omitted by the rubricator. A technology of production existed, but
managerial and organizational weaknesses formed part of the process of
medieval book production.
The items in the Auchinleck manuscript were originally numbered at the
head of the page, suggesting the existence of a lost contents page, providing
ready access to any text in a bulky volume.19 Despite omissions and
inconsistencies, the paraphs and litteraenotabilioresin the Auchinleck manu-
script also serve as a device to assist access to the text. Although in stanzaic
verse they usually indicate the stanza structure, in couplet verse content not
structure determines the placing of paraphs, which serve to draw attention
to information worthy of note. There are two major kinds of use, which tend
to overlap: those uses connected with establishing the important constit-
uents of the narrative plot, and those with a sententious purpose. Of the
former, calls for attention from the narrator (Herkenep,Listenep) are prefixed
18 Ewald Zettl illustrates the variant
punctuation schemes of the manuscripts in An Anonymous
Short
EnglishMetricalChronicle, EETS OS 196 (London, I935).
19Timothy A. Shonk gives strong reasons for believing that the manuscript was produced as a
collaborative venture, and not from the compilation of unrelated pamphlets, as had earlier been
suggested. 'A Study of the Auchinleck Manuscript: Bookmen and Bookmaking in the Early Fourteenth
Century', Speculum, 60 (1985), 7I-91.
by a paraph, as are various scene-setting (deictic) devices necessary to the

plot, for example, changes of time reference 'It was opon a somers day' (Guy
of Warwick,1. 4939); 'In May it was also ich wene' (Guy, 1.4502). Any change
in narrative focus upon the actor in events is often marked by a paraph, as is
the change of speaker in a conversation. When action follows on from
deliberation, a paraph may be used to mark that development ('He hete chese
carpenters' (Arthourand Merlin, 1. 486)). References to the source often merit
recognition ('Sone after as ich finde in boke' (Arthourand Merlin, 1. 63)). This
reference to sources is conceptually adjacent to the second major function of
the paraph which may be used to demand attention to items quite marginal to
the narrative development of the story. Here it reflects a secondary function of
medieval story. In addition to entertainment, and the artistic control neces-
sary to provide it, medieval texts were assumed to have an instructive and
exemplary function. The paraph is also used to promote this. Noteworthy acts
by individuals, noteworthy utterances, the names of historically significant
figures, indeed, any list of factual details, are all likely to provoke marking by
paraphs. Thus, in the ShortMetrical Chronicle,litteraenotabiliorestend to mark
references to each new king of England as his name appears, and paraphs
indicate significant acts, turning the narrative into a readily accessible regnal
list and condensed gesta. Although the paraph was often used dramatically to
mark change of speaker or a change from narrative to direct speech, it was
often used in exemplary mode to draw attention to anything that Chaucer
might later have called 'a sovereyn notabilitee' (Nun's Priest's Tale, 1. 318I).
The utterance of characters might be marked not as dramatically conceived
direct speech, but as remarkable, and quotable, sententiae.More conscientious
scribes, such as the main scribe of the Auchinleck manuscript, seem to have
used paraphs and litterae notabilioresin some systematic relationship when
copying lengthy couplet narratives. The paraphs are used to emphasize
sentential content and to highlight narrative shifts, the litteraenotabilioresto
mark major structural divisions in the work.
In the Hengwrt manuscript of Chaucer's CanterburyTales, the Parson's Tale
exhibits a rather elaborate apparatus of presentation, a considerable
advance on Auchinleck. This can be illustrated by a short passage from the
discussion of the vice of Envy.
? The speces of enuye ben thise f? Ther is first sorwe of oother mennes goodnesse
and ofhir prosperitee/and prosperitee is kyndely matere of Ioye/thanne is Enuye/a
synne agayns kynde ? The seconde spece of Enuye/is Ioye of oother mannes
harm/and that is proprely lyk to the deuel that euere reisoyseth hym of mannes
harm ? Of thise .ij. speces comth bakbitynge/and this synne of bakbitynge/or
detraccion/hath certeyn speces/as thus 7 Som man preiseth his neighebore by a
wikked entente/for he maketh alwey a wikked knotte atte laste ende/alwey he
maketh a .but. at the laste ende/bat is digne of moore blame/than worth is al the
preisynge/? The Seconde spece is/lat if a man be good/& dooth/or seith a thyng/to
good entente/the bakbiter wol turne al thilke goodnesse vp so down/to his shrewede
entente ?TThethridde/is to amenuse/the bountee of his neighebore ?The ferthe
DAVID BURNLEY 55
spece of bakbitynge/is this 7 that if men speke goodnesse of a man/thanne wol the
bakbitere seyn/par fey/swich a man/is yet bet than he in despreisynge/ofhym that
men preise 1 The fifthe spece is/for to consente gladly/and herkne gladly/the harm
that men speke ofoother folk/this synne is full greet & ay encreseth/after the wikked
entente of the bakbitere.
(Parson's Tale, 1. 49 )
In the manuscript, the passage is identified in the margin by the note 'The
speces of Enuye'. It employs not only a careful itemizing structure, but a
fairly complex punctuation system to define it. As in the romances of the
Auchinleck manuscript, paraphs mark the items of this list in a sequence
from one to five. Lesser items, when introduced by a demonstrative declara-
tion (as thus.. ., is this...), are also marked by a paragraphus 7, and important
material dependent on what precedes is introduced by a kind of ligature
perhaps derived from a punctus elevatus:fJ Smaller sense groups are distin-
guished by use of virgules, and the metalinguistic status of the word but is
indicated by enclosing it between points.
It is uncertain how much of this strategy of punctuation derives from the
author, but this is unimportant for our present purposes. Its existence
demonstrates the activities of a scribe who, not only here but again in the
Ellesmere manuscript, was willing to employ a technique of text presenta-
tion of considerable complexity when transmitting the work of an author in
the English language. It is true that Orm rivalled the complexity of the
technique, if not the presentational skills, of the Hengwrt/Ellesmere scribe,
but he was working on his own behalf, inspired by a religious motive. By the
time of Chaucer, a sophisticated machinery for the transmission of texts was
in existence. It was a technology which, although intended to transmit
meaning with greater precision, could, by its very existence, distance the
author from his audience. The interpretation of the text fell into the hands of
copyists, intermediaries who could, if they wished, adapt it for their own
purposes, interposing their interpretations between the author and his
audience. It has been argued, for example, that the rather simple ordinatiofor
the presentation of tail rhyme, as in the Auchinleck rendering of The Simonie,
where the tail line is ranged right, has been elaborated into a complex system
of columns and brackets in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere versions of
Sir Thopas, with a clear satirical purpose.20
Over five centuries, the development of printing abolished many of the
uncertainties in the scribal handling of punctuation and layout. The accur-
ate multiple reproduction of the author's intended text and the cherished
dream of direct communication with posterity became real possibilities. The
development of computer technology and of desktop publishing in the last
dozen years seems to have thrown the whole history of the relation between
20Judith Tschann, 'The Layout of Sir Thopasin the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Cambridge Dd.4.24, and
Cambridge Gg.4.27 Manuscripts', Chaucer
Review,20.4 (Winter, I986), I-I3.
author, text, and audience back into the melting pot.21 Desktop publishing
facilitates the activities of a modern Orm: a writer who can control and
distribute his own work without outside interference, using novelties of
presentation or even of characters. There is a certain satisfaction even as I
write in generating special characters which I know might cause problems to a
conventional publishing operation, but which I could easily have circulated
by printing and copying this paper myself. As with Orm, the resultant
publication may not have matched the design skills of a professional printing
house, but my control would have been absolute. But the title of this paper
mentioned hypertext, which is far more than simply a method of distribution.
It is also a refashioning of the structure of text: an opportunity not only to
re-negotiate the relation between the producer and the user, but also to throw
away the traditional punctuation, and the traditional medium, and encounter
text organized in quite a different way from those inherited from the past.
What foundation is there, however, for this libertarian zeal? The term
'hypertext' was coined in the i96os by Theodor Holm Nelson whose cult
book, Literary Structures,describes his idea of hypertext (defined as 'non-
sequential [...] writing'), and his progress towards creating software to
implement it.22 The book was written in three main parts, the first of which
consisted of several alternative Chapter Is, and the last of which offered
alternative Chapter 3s. Readers were invited to start with any Chapter I
they liked, proceed through a common Chapter 2 to any Chapter 3 which
took their fancy, thereafter repeating the process, but varying the ends of the
cycle. On any one page, there is a simplified account of the argument as a
running gloss on the serious matter. As a book, the layout is unusual, but as
an instructional manual, or viewed in parallel with recent magazines
produced by desk-top publishing techniques, it is unremarkable. Most
popular magazines on computing, for example, now have a page make-up
consisting of the main text, inserted graphics, and boxes of text as glosses or
expansions of the main part. They are organized, in other words, not unlike
windowing computer screens, or the more complex ordinationesof medieval
manuscripts, with their miniatures, text, and surrounding glosses, set apart
by a distinct writing style (anglicana, perhaps, instead of textura,which was
reserved for the text itself).
Paper hypertext is neither new nor especially significant. True hypertext is
electronic text, and this is the centre ofNelson's conception. Butjust what is it?
Nelson's description of it is very much a product of the sixties, and has the
nostalgic feel of scientific idealism shared by the phrase 'the white heat of the
technological revolution'. It is dedicated to George Orwell and his 'devotion
to truth and human freedom' and it envisages a new information-oriented
21 The persistent authority of print is being questioned, sometimes by those who have traditionally been
its proselytizers, and the role of other media increasingly explored. See, for example, Andrew Gurr, 'The
Grapheme Conquest: Literature and the Post-Print Age' (Nottingham, i992).
22 Theodor Holm
Nelson, LiteraryStructures,5th edn (Swarthmore, PA: privately published, I983).
DAVID BURNLEY 57
society in which 'silverstands', like telephone boxes in the street, permit

connection to a central information store, which can be accessed, manipu-
lated, and annotated by any subscriber. This huge information exchange is
without limits on the points of access or order of reading. The silverstands are
to be manned by technologically aware and appropriately dressed (Star Trek?)
young assistants. All this could be dismissed as fantasy were it not for the fact
that a project to write the necessary software was initiated, and given the title
Xanadu. Some progress has been made, but, although work still continues on
project Xanadu, the vision looks extremely unlikely ever to be realized in its
original form. In the same year that LiteraryStructuresappeared, IBM intro-
duced the personal computer, and the world of computers and computer
communications took a different direction, away from the giant centralized
mainframes of project Xanadu towards distributed computing and bulletin
boards. Hypertext, as it has in fact come into existence, although its distrib-
utors pay lip service to Nelson and his ideas, is a very much more restricted
phenomenon. Most people encounter it in the help systems ofWindows-based
or Macintosh computer programs, and some use ready-made packages such
as Guide, Toolbook, KnowledgePro, Hypercard, Hyperdoc, or Authorware
to create their own hypertext documents. Hypertext is a convenient method of
access to certain kinds of structured information. So far hypertext of this kind
shows no special propensity for revolutionizing literary attitudes or struc-
tures, although, with future technological development, and in combination
with live video, it may well form one of the resources by which electronic forms
of communication will seriously weaken traditional literacy in the future.
Apart from its contribution as part of a more general assault by electronic
media on traditional literacy, will hypertext change the literary world? Does
it favour the author or the user in their prolonged tussle for possession of the
text? An electronic Orm seems a real possibility; could there be an electronic
Ovid, completing the authoring of his hypertext with comparable senti-
ments? The technique of writing with a pen first on vellum and then on paper
endured for thousands of years. The conception of making decisions 'of
record' necessarily involved these media. But not all medieval literacy did
so. Ancient and medieval writers did not use them for ephemera, preferring a
tile, shell, or piece of slate. The thirteenth-century litterateurHenri d'Andeli
remarked of thefabliau genre that its representatives were not worthy to be
written on parchment, but should be distributed on wax tablets normally
used for everyday notes and calculations.23 Which is the electronic hyper-
text: parchment or wax tablet? Thus far, in terms of function, it seems to be
the latter: a place to store useful information, but not the medium of art.
There is a good reason for this utilitarian restriction. Anyone who has
suffered a system breakdown or inadvertently erased their text by perverse
and subtle means beyond the remedy of rescue packages will appreciate that
23 Per
Nykrog, LesFabliaux:Etuded'HistoireLittiraireetdeStylistiqueMediivale(Copenhagen: Munksgaard,
1957), p- 40.
electronic media are not best equipped to survive the wrath ofJove. It might
be objected that, although they are volatile, electronic texts are easily copied,
duplicated exactly, and easily distributable, so that their fragility can be
forgiven. Yet what computer system can look forward to hundreds of years of
readability? University mainframes are everywhere being replaced by
incompatible systems less than ten years after purchase. Some degree of
compatibility between current personal computers and the IBM of 1981 is
likely to be maintained until the turn of the century, but after that the future
is uncertain.24 True, if the importance of a work were to be immediately
recognized, it could be adapted for the new systems, but it is not just a
question of the hardware. Software, too, determines the survival of a piece of
electronic writing. Even if it proves possible to display a ten-year-old work,
for how long will anyone wish to do so? Presentation is of extreme impor-
tance in hypertext, and here the graphically-based environments developed
first by Apple and then by Microsoft have made earlier character-based
applications seem grotesque. The rapid development of the technology thus
threatens the durability of a work more insidiously than by the obsolescence
of hardware: simply in terms of public interest, of fashionability. It may be
that electronic media will displace traditional publishing in terms of public
attention, but it is unlikely that they can replace it in the same cultural role:
ephemerality militates against a canon.
Although it does not score highly in terms of probable durability, electro-
nic authoring, of course, fulfils the ideal of enabling the author to communi-
cate directly with his audience. But it cannot ensure the integrity of the text.
Anyone with the appropriate software can modify a hypertext document,
indeed can transform it completely into something that serves their own
purpose irrespective of the wishes of the author. Like a folk tale re-worked by
a series of redactors into the multiply various versions of medieval popular
romance or the scriptio continuaproduced for the owner to punctuate and
annotate,the hypertext document becomes the property of the computer-
literate community. This might be welcomed; it is after all only a minor
modification of the original Xanadu conception. Attempts to restrict this
destiny either by copyright legislation or distribution on read-only media
such as CD-ROM are likely to prove futile because of the rapid development
and wide dissemination of the technology which will enable easy copying
and modification. In these respects, too, electronic authoring would, if
successfully attempted, tend to undermine a canonical view of literature.
In some respects, however, hypertext does not represent the ultimate
victory of the user over the producer, the reader over the author. In the
24
Writing in early 1990, J. Hillis Miller put the case for hypertext euphorically: 'This new form of book
will rapidly replace or ought to replace the traditional textbooks used in literature courses'. There is an
irony in the fact that what he cited in i990 as 'an excellent example' of this new form of book was being
developed on a system (NeXT) which, by early i993, had ceased production.J. Hillis Miller, 'Literary
Theory, Telecommunications, and the Making of History' in Scholarship and Technology in theHumanities,
ed. by May Katzen, British Library Research (London: Bowker-Saur, 1991), pp. I I-20 (p. I6).
DAVID BURNLEY 59
power struggle between author and user for mastery of the text, hypertext
favours the former in certain respects. If the user does not possess software
with authoring capabilities, then the original author has more absolute
control of reading habits than any author of a book. In historical develop-
ment, bound books succeeded scrolls because they had significant advan-
tages. A book, in contrast to a scroll, enables random access, and rapid look
up, using contents pages or indexes if necessary. Its pages can be designed to
emphasize those points which the author or editor thinks are important; but
the reader has the freedom to ignore such suggestions. If you choose to, you
can read a detective novel from the denouementbackwards. You can even see
two pages at once. Hypertext may be written to imitate either scrolls or
books, but denies its user many of the freedoms of the latter. Its highly
structured nature fits it best for instructional purposes involving discrete
pieces of information, and it is in fact mostly used for these purposes.25 It is
worth emphasizing this, since there seems to be a misconception that
hypertext offers to the reader previously unavailable means of utilizing the
author's text. In fact, hypertext normally consists of a system of objects and
links. The objects may be pictures or graphics, or they may be text or
executable programs. A link connects, for example, two disparate pieces of
text within the same or different documents, or it may connect text to a
program. When the link is activated from one piece of text, the other piece of
text may be viewed or the program run. Activating the link may cause the
reader to jump from one place to another in a book, or it may make a gloss
appear from an entirely separate document, switch to another document, or
simply cause further text to 'unfold' from that which constitutes the first
object. But it is essential to realize that these events do not take place
randomly: the links and the objects have been placed in relation to one
another by the author at the time of composition. Thus, hypertext may
permit unaccustomed ways of reading, but only under the control of the
absent author. In this respect, authorial hegemony is not threatened by
electronic hypertext: it is ideally suited not to argument, but to the dogmatic
presentation of authoritative opinion. The only exception to this determin-
ism is in systems where a particular word in context can be designated as a
search term, so providing immediate access to all other occurrences of that
word in the document or documents.
Writing hypertext presents the author with new challenges, especially
with regard to ordinatio:whether to permit scrolling on screen or to imitate
the pages of a book? If the latter is chosen, whether to permit navigation
through the text by a 'map' or through a traditional contents page? Whether
to use graphics, and how they should be placed? Which display scripts to
25 A
good brief account of the construction of a hypertext course is by John M. Slatin, 'Text and
Hypertext: Reflections on the Role of the Computer in Teaching Modern American Poetry' in Humanities
andtheComputer, New Directions,ed. by David S. Niall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I990), pp. I23-35.
employ in order to distinguish headings from texts? What colour schemes

best suit the purposes of the document? All these questions hang on a narrow
interpretation of hypertext as simply text, and disregard the rapid develop-
ment of multimedia facilities: the addition of sound or recorded video to a
document. Nevertheless, it is apparent that electronic hypertext presents the
author with creative challenges which have not been faced since the middle
ages. Since the invention of printing, authors have been content, whatever
the drawbacks in terms of lack of immediacy, to hand over problems of
design to publishers and printers.
The creation of coherence in the text presents to the hypertext author
other choices which are not necessarily in the forefront of the consciousness
of most creative writers. Hypertext may be viewed as combining the
functions of medieval punctuation and ordinatio. It is by its very nature
hypotactic in structure, facilitating the breaking of the text into hierarchical
levels of relative importance. Hypertext favours sentential subordination.
But, instead of imitating writers in the fifteenth-century curial style, with
their endless chains of subordinated clauses, the hypertext author simply
hides those clauses which qualify the main, or which are subordinate to that
which the reader is intended to read first. Imagine the passage from
Chaucer's Parson's Tale written in hypertext:
? THE SPECES OF ENUYE BEN THISE

? Ther is first sorwe of oother mennes goodnesse and of hir prosperitee/ and
prosperitee is kyndely matere o Ioye/tianne is Enuye/a synne agayns kynde
? The seconde spece of Enuye / is loye of oother mannes harm / and that is
proprely lyk to the deuel that euere reioyseth hym of mannes harm
? Of thise .ij. speces comth bakbitynge / and this synne of bakbitynge / or
detraccion / hath certeyn speces / as thus
7 Som man preiseth his neighebore by a wikked entente / for he
maketh alwey a wikked knotte atte laste ende / alwey he
maketh a .but. at the laste ende/pat is digne of moore blame/
than worth is al the preisynge/
? The Seconde spece is
/ pat if man be good/ & dooth/ or seith a thyng/ to good
entente/ the bakbiterwol turne al thilke goodnesse vp so down
/ to his shrewede entente
? The thridde/is
to amenuse/ the bountee of his neighebore
? The ferthe spece of bakbitynge/ is this
Vthat if men speke goodnesse of a man / thanne wol the
bakbitere seyn / par fey / swich a man / is yet bet than he in
despreisynge/ of hym that men preise
? The fifthe spece is
/for to consente gladly/and herkne gladly/ the harm that men
speke of oother folk / this synne is ful greet & ay encreseth /
after the wikked entente of the bakbitere.
DAVID BURNLEY 6i
The reader would initially encounter the heading in small capitals and the
two distinct types of envy here printed in bold. Concealed at various levels
beneath these, represented here by the various degrees of inset, are
expansions and qualifications of the initial statements. Consideration of the
problem of precisely which segments of text at a superordinate level shall
act as a key linked to text at the lower level illustrates that hypertext
structures would probably necessitate slight re-wording here. Yet, it is
striking how the carefully structured nature of this kind of writing, and the
medieval punctuation and ordinatio could easily be transformed into the
structures of hypertext. Various cross references to other documents, or
relevant parts of the same document could be added. It is equally as
striking that hypertext authoring requires of its practitioner analysis of the
content which it is intended to transmit. The medium imposes this
necessity for clarity in declaration. It has a certain rigidity which is perhaps
antipathetic to traditional ideas of literary creativity, but it also has a
quality which neither manuscripts nor printed books could easily provide,
that is, the possibility of tailoring the same text to audiences of varying
interests and abilities without its being obvious that this is intended. It is,
for example, possible to write a simple version of any information to be
imparted at the surface level, and arrange for access to commentary or
expansion required for different interests and abilities from that level
without forcing it upon the attention of every reader.
Hypertext has a place in the history of text technology. It is neither as
different from what has gone before as its proponents claim, nor as
inconsequential as its critics would like to believe.26 One can draw
analogies, but in terms of the way the text is composed and distributed
nothing quite like it has previously existed. The nearest analogies seem to
be to the medieval authors and scribes who set out to compose text with a
blank piece of vellum and a quill pen. Their intimate possession of the
technology, and their control over both the linguistic composition and the
presentation of their texts, gave them great creative freedom. This freedom
was however traded for efficiency through collaborative production of
manuscripts. Some great works of art were produced in Latin manuscripts,
but vernacular manuscripts were largely regarded as utilitarian or ephem-
eral. Authors who chose to write in the vernacular faced an uncertain
future. The electronic authors of today are in a similar position: they have
the technology and no doubt the creative skills, but the languages and text
structures of computers are not culturally analogous to Latin in the Middle
Ages. In seeking a technological analogy, it is rather as though the
26 The two
points of view may be represented by George P. Landow, 'Connected Images: Hypermedia
and the Future of Art Historical Studies' (Katzen, pp. 77-94) and D. F. McKenzie 'Computers and the
Humanities: a Personal Synthesis of Conference Issues' (Katzen, pp. 157-69).
development of paper in the fifteenth century had been accompanied by the

invention of the fountain pen; and there may always be a comparable
revolution to that of printing just around the corner.

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Looking through the shelves of the secondhand bookshop recently, I came

The King asked The Dairymaid

The self-contained nature of this excerpt from a children's poem is striking.

9 For detailed treatment of the marks of punctuation, see M. B. Parkes,PauseandEffect:AnIntroduction to

12 TheStoryof Englandby RobertManningof Bourne,ed. by F.J. Furnivall, Records Commission, Iv.87,

device so simple and ubiquitous that we normally regard it as diagnostic of

13 Derek Pearsall and I. C.

follows, therefore, that to preserve a text recognizable patterns and familiar

syntactical patterning more characteristic of work meant for oral presenta-

by a paraph, as are various scene-setting (deictic) devices necessary to the

society in which 'silverstands', like telephone boxes in the street, permit

employ in order to distinguish headings from texts? What colour schemes

? THE SPECES OF ENUYE BEN THISE

development of paper in the fifteenth century had been accompanied by the

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