Manuscript stability and literary corruption: Our failure to understand the Beowulf manuscript

The Nowell codex, bound into BL MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, now contains five Old English texts: The Passion of St Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf, and Judith. Damaged by fire in 1731, and distorted by subsequent treatment, many readings in all of the texts are corrupted or lost; significant efforts have been made to restore readings by, for instance, the use of UV photography by Kevin Kiernan and Joseph McGowan. Despite the work of Kiernan in particular, relatively little attention has been paid to the manuscript's presentation its texts, and still less to how the scribes expected their work to be read. Recently, the texts have been published together for the first time since the eleventh century by Robert Fulk in the Dumbarton Oaks series, and the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts project has made extremely detailed examination of the manuscript possible. Based on the use of this facsimile, this paper will suggest that the most profound corruption is in the loss in understanding of the subtleties of manuscript presentation. I will share some of the previously unrecorded scribal indications of how the texts in the manuscript could be read that can be seen when using extreme close-up images. These include a possibly runic sign; crosses and letter-shaped signs in text and margin; and a complex heirarchy of capitals which varies across the texts. Some of these evidences of scribal practice provide clear evidence of expected reading processes others are not so easily decoded and point instead to the corruption in readers' understanding despite the preservation - indeed, the digital clarification - of the literary object