MARGINAL ANNOTATION IN MEDIEVAL ROMANCE MANUSCRIPTS

etween a work’s entire, real audience, and that for which we have evidence in the
manuscript annotations. As Anne Middleton observes with specific reference to Piers
Plowman the “audience” and “public” of a work are by no means identical. A work’s
“audience” is, in her terminology, “that readership actually achieved by the work,” the
people who actually read the text. 99 This may or may not differ from the work’s
“public,” or “the readership imagined and posited by the composer as a necessary
postulate in the practical process of bringing the work into being, for a certain effect
within certain perceived historical conditions.” 100 When the book-producing professional
readers create a manuscript, the annotations they produce are going to be directed at the
work’s perceived “public.” They imagine the types of people who will be reading the
work, and whom they wish to aid and influence by their marginal notes. Such a public
may or may not include women, regardless of whether, as other scholars have shown to
be the case, women formed a large part of the work’s actual audience.
Likewise, when the annotations are “after-market,” added by a real member of the
work’s audience, rather than by a book producer with an eye toward a notional public,
such notes still may not offer a fair sampling of the full range of that audience. Many
different types of evidence for use can be mustered, of which annotation is only one:
ownership marks in books, mentions of books in wills, references in the text to an
Studies: Literary and Visual Approaches, by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo
[Cornell University Press, 2012]). For this last point, see also Phillipa Hardman, “Domestic Learning and
Teaching: Investigating Evidence for the Role of ‘Household Miscellanies’ in Late-Medieval England,” in
Women and Writing c.1340-c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and
Phillipa Hardman (York: York Medieval Press, 2010), 15–33.
99 Anne Middleton, “The Audience and Public of ‘Piers Plowman’,” in Middle English Alliterative
Poetry and its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982),
101.
100 Ibid., 102.
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