Chapter 3 examines the consanguinity of Ovid’s two bodies, or corpora: his body of work (his textual corpus) and his physical body, which here represents his living body, corpse, tomb and biographical life. Medieval commentators took great interest in the relationship between Ovid’s bodies, responding diversely to the opportunities – and challenges – posed by Ovid’s insistent focus on the relationship. Their responses illuminate the mechanisms by which Ovid was transformed from an immoral, salacious poet to a moral, edifying one. A surprising element of that metamorphosis is that the pagan Ovid became a justifiably Christian poet for the medieval age. The chapter discusses Ovid’s presentation of his corpora in the exile poetry and the medieval obsession with Ovid’s tomb, before focusing on three medieval case studies: the Nolo Pater Noster anecdote, a medieval Latin narrative where two clerics are visited by the spirit of Ovid; Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine and John Lydgate’s English rendering of the text, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, where a figure on pilgrimage encounters Ovid’s exilic revenant; and Christine de Pizan’s Le livre de la cité des dames, in which Ovid is resurrected only to be castrated.

This chapter considers John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a poem in the mode of a universal chronicle that Lydgate composed for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, during the 1430s. I suggest that, in Lydgate’s historical poetry, and particularly in the Fall, the poet fixates upon the “surplus” of literary matter that the forms of his poetry leave out or exclude. In its most immediate sense, this “surplus” consists of those aspects of the historical record that Lydgate cannot, or will not, repeat within his poetry. But in a broader way, it also figures Lydgate’s view of history itself, which he feels is too vast, and too self-conflicted, to represent in full. I begin by examining Lydgate’s debts to the artes poetriae manuals, the formes fixes tradition, and practices of monastic historiography, all of which lie behind his belief in the surplus and shape his use of the idea. I then consider how the surplus, both as a term and as a concept, motivates the poetics of the Fall, and in particular, the pointed but ambiguous way that it speaks to matters of contemporary political concern to Humphrey of Gloucester.

Chapter 5 examines the annotations by scribes and marginalia by readers in manuscripts of the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A quantitative survey of the treatment of margins shows that, although poets planned elaborate paratexts for their works, scribes and readers seldom used the page for annotation or marginalia. From this survey the author deduces that scribes and readers in the fifteenth century were more interested in reading the poem continuously and for kinds of reading aloud or for pleasure, in ways that do not lend themselves to written record in margins. The poem lives in an immaterial dimension of cognition and feeling, beyond what appears on the material page.

Chapter 4 considers the division of texts into pages and leaves in manuscripts in English poetry and prose in the fifteenth century. It suggests that this material format allowed scribes to fanfare their own craft process, when they decorated the division of the codex into pages for its own sake, as a mere convention without textual function. But it then argues that page breaks contributed little to the text itself. It notes other methods used by scribes to override the page breaks and argued that they were more interested in the continuity of the text and of the reading process beyond the literal limits of the page.

Chapter 6 considers the scribes’ copying of the text itself in the fifteenth century, especially in works by Thomas Hoccleve and Geoffrey Chaucer and spurious lines added to Chaucer’s poetry. It queries the assumption that scribes vary the text a lot, and in three quantitative samples it suggests that, despite the difficulties of transcription and the acceptability of revision, scribes could copy exemplars very closely. As a result, despite the material differences between books, what most distinguished them was verbal likeness. It suggests that this reproduction reflects an interest in the text’s survival as an immaterial, verbal artefact, partly out of respect for certain kinds of English poetry, and a disregard for its material form.