MARGINAL ANNOTATION IN MEDIEVAL ROMANCE MANUSCRIPTS

The mnemonic model for annotations’ use, like the navigational “finding-aid”
model, emphasizes genealogy (or dynasty) as a narrative structure for rendering a Brut
text legible. If Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia organizes itself around
successive kings, then those texts that derive from it – whether Wace and the Royal Brut
(in Anglo-Norman), or Laȝamon, or Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle (both in
Middle English verse) or any number of Middle English Bruts, both verse and prose – are
naturally perceived by their contemporaries (as they must certainly be so perceived
today) as unrolling along this same structural axis. 151 Both models of annotation, the
mnemonic and the navigational, implicitly presume that the notes operate on the level of
the codex, and, furthermore, that they operate semi-independently of the text they sit
beside, whether as an aid to non-reading (nonsequential reading, after all, implies the
omission of selected passages in favor of the prioritization of others) or as a technique for
carrying the manuscript’s contents along in the memory, when the reader steps away
from the manuscript. But this is not, as we shall see, the entirety of the picture.
Let us for now, however, turn our attention to London, College of Arms MS
Arundel 58, to gain yet another witness as to the appearance of annotation within the
chronicle context. This manuscript is, principally, a copy of Robert of Gloucester’s
Metrical Chronicle, with some considerable revisions and supplements, including
additions adapted from Geoffrey of Monmouth and from sources like William of
Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, John of Glastonbury’s Cronica sive Antiquitates
151 See, for example, W. R. J. Barron, Françoise H. M. Le Saux, and Lesley Johnson, “Dynastic
Chronicles,” in The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature,
ed. W. R. J. Barron, Rev. ed., Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages 2 (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 2001), 11–46.
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