Restoring Medieval Manuscripts in the Eighteenth-Century: Completing or Perfecting?

Abstract

While today’s digital era raises new questions for the preservation of medieval manuscripts, the desire to preserve and transmit the literature of the Middle Ages is not new. Manuscript n°14 of Le Mans library (France) represents a telling example of these preservation attempts. The codex contains a peculiar version of La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin, an epic biography of the French constable written near the end of the fourteenth century. Although the text is complete, only half of the folios date from the Middle Ages. Additional parts were added to the text by an 18th-century Maurist monk, who decided to copy other medieval manuscripts of the Chanson in order to flesh out the fragments and rebuild an entire text for future readers. This reconstruction was the occasion for him to reshape, comment and annotate on the medieval codex as well as the copied text. As a result, arguably, he gave birth to a new literary object, similar to the original, yet still different. However, how did an eighteenth-century monk perceive what we now call restoration? How medieval is this literary object of the eighteenth century? Focusing on the manuscript’s description, this article seeks to answer these questions by trying to understand what practices can tell us about manuscript perceptions after the Middle Ages.