The Trilingual Book: Multilingualism, Manuscript Culture, and the Shaping of Insular Verse from the Eadwine Psalter to the Harley Lyrics

“The Trilingual Book: Manuscripts, Multilingualism, and the Shaping of Insular Verse from the Eadwine Psalter to the Harley Lyrics” studies the influence of multilingualism and vernacular manuscript culture on the development of Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Latin poetry in the centuries following the Norman Conquest. Built on a corpus of one hundred and thirty-eight medieval manuscripts consulted in-person, this dissertation focuses on Insular verse as it appears in the extant trilingual books from the period. These manuscripts, I argue, bespeak a vibrant material and linguistic subculture in which scribes were encouraged to experiment with the expressive potential of vernacular verse, primarily through the juxtaposition of texts of different genres, languages, and verse forms, but also through translation and the visual presentation of texts in the mise-en-page. The multilingual scribe thus lays the foundation for the canonization of vernacular authorship in the later fourteenth century. The first chapter studies early attestations of this literary subculture in the multilingual psalters of the twelfth century; the second chapter examines textual sequences crafted by scribes in devotional and theological manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the third chapter turns to lyric poetry in the margins and flyleaves of trilingual manuscripts; the fourth chapter centers around the multilingual miscellanies of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The dissertation concludes with an epilogue discussing how the Trilingual Book and its anonymous scribes lay crucial groundwork for the multilingual Ricardian poets of the later fourteenth century. These manuscripts are thus essential in understanding the development of vernacular literary culture in high and later medieval Britain.