The power of not reading : amulet rolls in medieval England

• Main Author: Hindley, Katherine Storm
• Other Authors: Holz, Stefan G.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::English; Medieval English; Amulet Rolls
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/143938
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Faced with a text to copy, a medieval scribe or patron might also be faced with a choice: what form should the new copy take? As discussed elsewhere in this volume, certain types of document and certain bureaucratic institutions tended towards using either the roll or the codex. For many other texts, however, the decision of whether to create a copy in a codex or a roll seems to have been dictated neither by the text’s content nor by the workshop making the copy. For example, the same fifteenth-century workshop produced genealogical chronicles with closely related texts in roll form, codex form, and as a hybrid ‘roll-codex’.1 The religious poem ‘O Vernicle’ is another instance of a text that circulated in multiple forms. It survives in twenty manuscript copies, ten of which are codices and ten of which are rolls.2 The decision to produce such texts in roll form likely rested, therefore, on a combination of factors relating to the preferences of the scribe or patron, the practicalities of each form, and the interaction between the content of the text and the cultural meaning of the roll. This article examines amulet rolls as one type of manuscript in which the practicalities and impracticalities of the roll form contributed profoundly to the meaning of the textual object. The form adds to the object’s amuletic power through the orientation of the writing and through the physical interactions it encourages. As I argue here, the features of the amulet roll assure its user that its texts will function whether or not they are read.