Codex Theory

Ruen-chuan Ma

This dissertation is broadly concerned with the role of codices, or bound manuscript books, in the imagination of late medieval English authors. I am interested in exploring how the visual and physical features of medieval books inform the aesthetic vocabulary of reading and inspire a hermeneutic rooted in the sensory experience of reading. Reading a book in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—the time of Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries—demands that readers digest an array of information besides the written word: are the words placed in the center, in the margins, in a single column or in double columns? What colors of ink are used? How do illustrations and decoration—initials and borders in particular—guide the organization of the written word and engage readers in analyzing the contents? I use the term “codicology” to refer to such features as layout, page design, ink...