Harley Manuscript Geographies: Literary History and the Medieval Miscellany

British Library MS Harley 2253 is difficult to reduce to a single identity. Produced in the Welsh March in the fourteenth century, it contains love lyrics, devotional works, political songs, fabliaux, saints’ lives, courtesy texts, biblical narratives and travel writing in Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Latin.

Daniel Birkholz treats that variety as the starting point rather than a problem to be tidied away. He looks at how genres, languages, places and social identities meet within the manuscript, while also asking how modern scholarship has made sense of the codex as a coherent object. The book turns one remarkable miscellany into a study of literary geography and the cultural borderlands of medieval England and Wales.