Much can be learned about medieval romances by examining the manuscripts in which they are transmitted. The practical necessity of reading medieval texts in modern critical editions distances them from our only tangible contact with their historical contexts. Few, if any, romances survive in copies dating from a period near their date of composition, so the history of manuscript context is a history of reception. This chapter concentrates on Old French romance, with brief discussion of Middle English, Middle High German, Middle Dutch, and Old Norse. Consideration of the mise en texte, mise en page, and mise en livre of some major works and books which contain them, permits the construction of a model by which medieval romance may be approached in manuscript. Romances discussed include the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes and his epigones, the romans d’antiquité and other romans courtois. Briefer mention is made of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the unique manuscript of Malory; the Tristan of Gottfried von Straßburg and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach; and the texts of the Lancelot-Compilatie.

Even as she engaged with contemporary innovations in science and technology, Margaret Cavendish cultivated a cautious approach toward both artificial tools and quantitative methods. In that sense, she anticipated the “productive unease” of modern digital humanities scholars, who derive principles of a critical praxis from the tension between traditional humanistic research and computational techniques. This chapter examines the intersection between Cavendish studies and the digital turn in order to demonstrate the impact of digitally aided methods on interdisciplinary inquiries into Cavendish’s life and works and also to consider the influence that Cavendish’s own philosophy can have on digital humanities practices. It examines the contributions of the community associated with the Digital Cavendish (digitalcavendish.org) collaborative, and then addresses the larger question of how Cavendish’s awareness of the social dimensions of knowledge production and her pragmatic concerns about the limits of artifice might generate insights into the institutions, forms, and models of digital humanities research.

By mid-century, novel readers began to expect a printed framework for reading prose narrative consisting of cues such as page numbers, catchwords, chapter divisions and notes. This chapter tells the backstory of this navigational framework of the eighteenth-century novel that Sterne disrupts, before analysing his experimentation with mise en page. This study of Sterne’s manipulation of seemingly untouchable conventions of the printed page, such as pagination and catchwords, complements an approach to his more widely recognised interference with footnotes and chapters, and reveals the full extent of Sterne’s pioneering disruption of the format of the eighteenth-century book. I argue that Sterne’s innovations with footnotes, catchwords, chapters and pagination combine aspects of Scriblerian satire with more recent but perhaps lesser-known interventions in the codex by Thomas Amory in John Buncle (1756). Unlike Swift and Pope, however, and like Amory, Sterne deploys footnotes in the first edition of Tristram Shandy, encouraging the reader to approach at once all sections of the page in search of meaning and raising questions about literary authority from the outset.