Early English Rutter Explores Spatial Hermeneutics

An Early English Rutter: The Sea and Spatial
Hermeneutics in the Fourteenth

and Fifteenth Centuries
By M a t t h e w B o y d G o l d i e
The earliest English rutter, a maritime navigational treatise from the mid-fifteenth
century, is among the oldest of its kind to survive in Europe. Its three manuscripts,
one with vivid illuminations, and a sixteenth-century print edition address the
landmasses, coastal seas, and shores around England, Ireland, northern France,
Spain, and Portugal. From the rutter we can gain an intimate sense of how the
ecotones—the coastal areas—were perceived. Given the relatively large quantity of
available information about early owners, we also can begin to ask what this group
of people might have found attractive about a navigational text. The answers to
these inquiries, I will demonstrate, cast light on the geographical topic of the sea,
on the nature of anthology manuscripts, and on late-medieval understandings of
space more generally.
On the first point, geography and other kinds of spatial study have had a pro-
found influence on the humanities at least since the final quarter of the last century
and, within that broad trend, examinations of oceans, coasts, and insularity have
gained increasing prominence. Historians and others have drawn attention to an
Atlantic history, centering study on how the Atlantic has been historically defined
and described, and the myriad ways it has shaped European, African, and Ameri-
can histories. Others have focused on the earth’s largest geographical feature, the
Pacific, and its roles in non-Western and Western histories. Additional bodies of
water, vast and small, have also received attention, including in environmental
and ecocritical work, which has begun to move beyond green environmentalism to
focus on blue and other shades of aquatic bodies. There have also been worldwide
reconsiderations that challenge readers to rethink the boundaries and composition
of seas, shores, and islands.1
My gratitude for their generous help goes to the American Geographical Society Library at the
University of Wisconsin for a McColl Research Fellowship; the Saturday Medieval Group of New
York (Valerie Allen, Jennifer N. Brown, Glenn Burger, Steven F. Kruger, Michael G. Sargent, and
Sylvia Tomasch); the anonymous readers for Speculum; and Paula J. Massood. Thank you also to the
Jacqueline Brown Fund of the Medieval Academy of America for an award to obtain the images and
permissions.
1
Influential and useful works include, on the Atlantic, Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993), and David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic
History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick
(Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK, 2002), 11–27; on the Pacific, Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in
the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago, 2001), and Lamb, Vanessa Smith, and Nicholas Thomas, eds.,
Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology, 1680–1900 (Chicago, 2000); and for a more
general view of oceans, Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001),
Speculum 90/3 (July 2015) doi:10.1017/S0038713415001396 701

702 An Early English Rutter
While many of the general studies look past the contributions of the Middle
Ages, this situation has begun to change. We might even say that a more general
relationship between geographical studies and the humanities has already hinged
on the medieval period. After all, Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World played a foundational role in a change of emphasis in the
humanities when he recognized the utility of looking to the sciences and evoked
geography’s broader sense of time in support of la longue durée.2 The “spatial
turn” in the humanities might be better characterized as a pelagic one, urging a
consideration of the sea and to address what the land looks like from it.
The rutter under examination extends and historicizes the discussion about
oceans and littoral spaces. It survives in New York, Pierpont Morgan Library,
MS M 775; London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 285; a fragment in Oxford,
Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D 328; and a 1541 print edition. Together
the versions suggest that not only the representation of space but also people’s
comprehension of space could be quite different from how we might tend to
think today about maritime and terrestrial space. These ways of understanding
space—the spatial hermeneutics—existed within the university and more popular
and practical arenas. Consider for a moment that when people today imagine
where they are, their perspective is often from the sky. We have an understanding
of ourselves in a place within a few city blocks, suburban streets, or country
roads; or within a region of natural or man-made topographical features; or in
an area in an irregularly shaped country, if not a dot on a part of the globe. A
current place is here and next to another place that is beside us, or up or down,
from where we are. These hermeneutics are not timeless. To borrow a phrase
from the conclusion of the first volume of J. B. Harley and David Woodward’s
seminal History of Cartography, our firsthand perceptions of space, and pictorial
and verbal representations of physical area, have always undergone “cognitive
transformations,” a “developing picture of reality” into how “what was actually
perceived—was modified.”3
The rutter’s text and images exhibit a hermeneutics of space whose sense of
extent, edge, and continuity are quite distinct and aquatic, yet I hope to show that
this understanding was not atypical but instead was in many ways representative
of how people thought about the areas around them. First, the writing and images
exhibit an understanding of physical space as delimited rather than panoramic.
In a sense, the space might be called “horizonal” in that it is typically presented
as bounded by the horizon, not as infinite or with ever-receding boundaries.
and the special forum discussed below, “Oceans of History,” published in American Historical Review
111 (2006): 717–80.
2
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (New York, 1949;
repr., 1972–73), 1:23. See also Fernand Braudel, “The Situation of History in 1950,” in On History
(Chicago, 1980), 17.
3
“Concluding Remarks,” in The History of Cartography, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward,
vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (Chicago,
1987), 504. Pietro Janni influentially cautioned against “taking for granted the thought-world of easy,
habitual, map-literacy”: Janni, La mappa e il periplo: Cartografia antica e spazio odologico (Rome,
1984), 58–65, trans. A. D. Lee, Information and Frontiers: Roman Foreign Relations in Late Antiquity
(Cambridge, 1993), 86–87. See also Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago, 2013), 144–45.
Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

An Early English Rutter 703
The interest lies in what was contained in these bounds. The area perceived is
horizonal also in the sense that the view is ordinarily parallel to the earth in
a zone or band near the ground or sea. An unlimited and an overhead aerial
perspective and understanding of space was possible for people at this time, but
it was not how people customarily thought about or presented the areas around
them. The horizonal typically reaches out from the viewer in a planar fashion
and ends at the reach of the viewer’s temporally limited perspective. Second, the
structure of the rutter text is episodic rather than integrating its itineraries into
one subsuming arc. The voyages in the rutter are divided into segments of varying
length. Such a structure is a consequence of the first spatial hermeneutic, and it
also registers a practical navigational origin for the writing. Turning also towards
the rutter’s audience, it was a form that appealed to its readers and was common
across a number of contemporary presentations of travel and geographical areas.
While the first section of this essay explores the rutter’s apprehensions of seas,
coasts, and islands, tracing its understandings of space, the essay goes on to
examine its appearance in miscellany manuscripts and an early print edition,
and its early ownership. It does so in part to contribute towards an effort to
“rehistoricize the traditions of the anthology itself,” especially since anthologies
are more common in late-medieval English literature, taken broadly, than single-
author texts.4 The rutter nevertheless offers a kind of extreme test of that request
because its presence stretches the nature, purpose, and genre of the anthologies in
which it appears. The second part of the essay examines the owners, members of
the lower gentry and middle strata of English society, including Sir John Paston II.
Were there historical or practical reasons for their interest in a maritime treatise,
or might its inclusion in their books be due to some form of moral, pedagogical,
or literary appeal that can be found in the other texts in the manuscripts?
The third and final section of the essay turns that last question of what may have
been appealing about the rutter in another direction by placing it in the context of
contemporary geographical ideas and writings that were spatial in nature. These
overlapping contexts—some more philosophical and others experiential—help
account for the strange, often mundane, qualities of the rutter. The suggestion is
that its presentations and understandings of space were common, and the rutter
therefore found a place in the manuscripts and an appeal for its fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century audiences.
Seas, Coasts, and Islands in the Rutter
While the spatial turn might have favored inland places and regions, the sea,
islands, and coasts have always been there. So it is not exactly accurate to name
recent examinations of the sea new thalassology, but that is what this body of
scholarship is often called:
Maritime scholarship seems to have burst its bounds; across the discipline, the sea is
swinging into view. Historians of science have documented the discovery of longitude
4
Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” PMLA 118 (2003):
1255.

and the plumbing of underwater depths; historians of ideas have mapped the conceptual
geographies of beaches, oceans, and islands; historians of labor and radical politics have
drawn arresting new portraits of maritime workers and pirates; historians of business
have tracked maritime commerce; historians of the environment have probed marine
and island ecologies; and historians of colonial regimes and anticolonial movements
alike have asserted the importance of maritime arenas of interaction. No longer outside
time, the sea is being given a history, even as the history of the world is being retold
from the perspective of the sea.5
Medieval thalassology, old or new, nonetheless presents a number of prob-
lems. The first is how to define the object of study, because “ocean,” “the sea,”
and even individual “seas,” including the Mediterranean, remained unfixed units
despite older Greek and Roman classifications. We may remember that Braudel
focused attention on individual Mediterranean areas and actually questioned the
coherence of a Mediterranean Sea.6 Oceans and seas are difficult to perceive as
wholes in the Middle Ages because they were more commonly seen in parts: local,
coastal areas and individual routes rather than large expanses. Modern research
on the period has followed this tendency, so instead of studies of “the sea,” we
have regional models—Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Hanseatic, and so on—and
of course smaller areas of focus. As a consequence of the difficulty of defining
the object of study and because of the regionalism, there is no history of a British
ocean. It was not, after all, until as late as 1406 that Henry IV extended dominion
to the sea, and late-medieval England’s claims to the North Atlantic archipelago
remained—and remain—complicated because of Irish, Welsh, and Scottish juris-
dictions; competing rights from other neighboring nations; and England’s own
jurisdictions in northern France and elsewhere. Until recently, one needed to turn
to studies of British shipbuilding or trade to find anything about the ocean, but
that situation has begun to change with Sebastian Sobecki’s and others’ works,
which make the point that “Britain appears to be a maritime argument.”7
Studies of islands throughout history have struggled with questions of definition
even more than examinations of the sea. Historical scholarship of all periods has
asked whether a category of insularity existed in Western thought. The opposite is
true of many sciences, which have, at least since Darwin, depended on insularity
within oceans and other environments to define their scientific objects. When
5
Kären Wigen, “Introduction,” in “Oceans of History,” American Historical Review 111 (2006):
717.
6
Braudel, “Preface to the First Edition,” The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World, 1:17.
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s more recent arguments for considering the Mediterranean as
a cohesive unit are convincing insofar as they trace the evolving and changing senses of what a sea is,
whose sea “the Mediterranean” is, the relationships of its parts to a whole, and so on. See especially
the first chapter and the bibliographical essay, “What Is the Mediterranean?,” in The Corrupting
Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), 9–25, 530–33. See also Brent D. Shaw’s
substantial review essay, “Challenging Braudel: A New Vision of the Mediterranean,” Journal of
Roman Archaeology 14 (2001): 419–53.
7
Sebastian Sobecki, “Introduction: Edgar’s Archipelago,” in The Sea and Englishness in the Middle
Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture, ed. Sebastian Sobecki (Cambridge, 2011), 2. Other
works include Sobecki’s The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2008); Susan Rose,
The Medieval Sea (London, 2007); and Richard Gorski, ed., Roles of the Sea in Medieval England
(Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 2012).

history has looked at islands, it has frequently borrowed from biology, evolution,
or anthropology and consequently has tended to picture islands as isolated from
other lands, cut off by encircling oceans. Such a view has gradually changed,
however, so that historians are coming to observe the connective nature of the
sea and other waters. Of particular assistance in bringing about this change in
thinking has been the work of anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa and others in history
and the sciences.8 As with oceans, insularity in modern scholarship on the Middle
Ages nevertheless tends to be considered according to regional models despite the
fact that islands existed as a separate class of lands in the ancient literature that
formed the basis for medieval geographical thinking. Modern studies continue
to focus on Mediterranean islands, Baltic islands, Malaysian islands, and so on.
This situation is also true for the terms Britain, Great Britain, British Isles, the
North Atlantic Archipelago, and so on, each carrying its own historical freight.
We can say, however, that the role of the Middle Ages in the ongoing redefinition
of British islands has been central. Most medieval studies, in addition to the
ones on seas, have focused on English nationalism and claims over adjacent and
more distant lands in historical practice and as imagined communities, but spatial
senses of islands, and of seas, always existed alongside national ones without
the geographical and political understandings of British islands always informing
each other.9
Historians have written of beaches and other “not pure” “interactive” spaces,
key liminal areas of contact between land and sea.10 John Gillis, for instance,
examines the history of the shore and “humanity’s long relationship with the
sea as an edge species, occupying the ecotones where land and water meet.”11
Like the ocean and islands, coastal areas have recently gained more attention,
but individual, regional, and isolated studies also dominate here rather than
the coast being considered as a historically diverse but coherent environmental
8
See, for example, Epeli Hau‘ofa, “The Ocean in Us,” Contemporary Pacific 10 (1998): 391–411,
and “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell,
Vijay Naidu, and Hau‘ofa (Suva, 1993), 2–16.
9
On English nationalism and Britain, see Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language,
Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996); Derek Pearsall, “The Idea of En-
glishness in the Fifteenth Century,” in Nation, Court, and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century
English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney (Dublin, 2000), 15–27; Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval
Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York, 2003); Daniel Birkholz, The King’s Two
Maps: Cartography and Culture in Thirteenth-Century England (New York, 2004); Kathy Lavezzo,
ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis, 2004); Ardis Butterfield, “Nationhood,” in
Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (Oxford, 2005), 50–65; Lavezzo , Angels on the Edge of the World: Ge-
ography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca, 2006); David Matthews, Writing
to the King: Nation, Kingship and Literature in England, 1250–1350 (Cambridge, 2010); Andrea
Ruddick, English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 2013).
10
Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, “Introduction,” in Islands in History and Representation,
ed. Vanessa Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London, 2003), 5, 7, where they discuss Greg Dening’s
influential Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880 (Honolulu,
1980). Frank Lestringant has also written that the “island appears to some degree contaminated by
the marine world in which it is located. It thus displays a constitutive ambiguity: formed by land,
the island is nonetheless defined by the surrounding sea or lake. Its nature is, therefore, essentially
hybrid”: “Insulaires,” in Cartes et figures de la terre (Paris, 1980), 470–75.
11
John Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago, 2012), 9.

category. Coastal networks, however, rank among the most significant biological
and economic systems, and we are gradually becoming able to think of coastal
interactions across sometimes large aquatic distances. Coasts, both insular and
of other landmasses, frequently offer biological and human links to other lands,
including other islands, more than a coast might interact with an inland area of its
own landmass. Recent ideas about routes, networks, and flow outside a particular
time period may help to articulate an array of possible historical interconnections
among coasts, but in terms of the Middle Ages, coasts have mainly been the sub-
ject of regional and local studies, with individual port towns—especially London,
Bristol, and the Cinque Ports—looming large.
When scholarship addresses seas, islands, and coasts in late-medieval writings
there is a tendency to assume predominantly early modern conceptions of these
spaces and to impose those ideas on the earlier period. We forget the first work
Sir Thomas More had to perform to make his analytical and satirical points in
his 1516 Utopia. Utopia in that treatise was not always an island but had to be
constructed. Utopos, the founding “conqueror,” as the word is often translated,
transformed a peninsula into an island by having his soldiers dig a fifteen-mile-
wide channel to sever it from the mainland. This physical division allowed Utopos
to “transform,” we are told, “a pack of ignorant savages [rudem atque agrestem
turbam] into what is now, perhaps, the most civilized nation in the world.”12
This seemingly ideal society—with its distinct rules and death penalties, which
govern and enforce its slavery, its inhabitants’ monogamy, and other practices—
promulgated the idea of an isolated island in a surrounding sea with insignificant
coasts. By 1624, when John Donne rejected the idea that anyone could be an
island “entire of itself,” an image of the isolated island had become accepted to
the point that he could evoke it merely as a metaphor. These are constructs of
insularity that a modern reader often holds and projects onto the Middle Ages.
Consider briefly how the sea and coasts appear to serve as barriers rather than
being connective in the most frequently mentioned example from Middle English
literature: the black rocks of Brittany in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale.”
The focus in the scene is initially Dorigen’s perception of the rocks as “grisly,” an
adjective also applied to natural objects, like ditches; buildings, like Mars’s temple
in Thrace; and especially beasts and terrible wounds. Her complaint is charged
with their threat. Dorigen is so aghast at looking down upon them from her high
bank that she begins to question God’s providence, since the rocks appear to be
only a means of human destruction. The seashore has always been ambiguous to
boats, so the point soon becomes ironic in that the sea will enable Arveragus’s
transportation back, but it will be horribly frustrated by the shore. The passage
begins, after all, with Dorigen noticing the ships and other vessels on the water,
“Seillynge hir cours.” This sense of the connective nature of the sea, which has
made it possible for Arveragus to go to Britain in the first place, explains why
she invokes the wind at the end of her complaint. The wind ends her questioning
as to why God should make such ugly and dangerous things as rocks because it
is the force that may bring her husband back to her: “But thilke God that made
12
Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (New York, 1965; repr. 2003), 50.

13
wynd to blowe / As kepe my lord!” The rocks are a factual barrier that also
institute a narrative delay, but the coast, the wind, and the sea are connective,
and each serves as the narrative engine that powers Dorigen’s rash promise and
the men’s own promises and ultimate forgiveness of each other’s debt. Recall also
how crucially transitional, affiliating, and reuniting are the sea and coastal areas
in the Man of Law’s story of Custance in the Mediterranean and North Sea, or
Gavin Douglas’s complicated maritime metaphors in his prologue to Book 3 of
his Eneados where “Few knawis all thir costis sa far hens.”14
If we can put aside impressions of the sea as alien or barren and instead practice
thalassology, if we can not think of a coast only as an end-edge or barrier and
instead as a multivalent space that brings together sea and land, and if we can
move beyond a narrowed legacy of early modern perceptions of an island to
perceive insularity in terms of “networks” or “connectivity,”15 then we might be
able to appreciate a richer and more historically nuanced array of possibilities
in these spaces. Historical oceanography is an obvious place to start, but so too
are the many kinds of writings and artworks that seek a human understanding
of sea, coast, island, and other landmasses, indeed also of riverine and other
rich, complex areas where ocean meets fresh water in productive and destructive
interactions.
The rutter’s sense of the sea is of a volume of kinetic forces in which ocean is
always moving, a varied seascape of tidal currents with a depth that reaches to
seafloors that vary from location to location. Coastal regions are marked by out-
standing higher features of named or described natural and artificial structures of
towers, churches, peaks, and headlands; lower surface-level features, such as river
mouths, rocky outcrops, and havens; and sometimes submerged and sometimes
visible elements of rocks, spits, shoals, and sands. Islands are distinguished in
terms of their habitation or settlement, their size and physical makeup, and their
position relative to other islands and shores. Islands, in whole if they are smaller
or in part if larger, also offer particular opportunities to sight and line up with
more distant coastal features in order to aid navigation.
The rutter appears to be the oldest surviving northern European example of its
kind, since the earliest manuscript is c. 1450. It stands alone in medieval English
letters, but, as we will see, this does not indicate an inconsequential readership or
little cultural significance. The next British rutter is Alexander Lindsay’s Scottish
one, a list of directions around the coast of Scotland that is similar in style to the
earlier English one. Made for King James V of Scotland, it survives in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century versions.16 Despite knowledge of, and interest in, maps
13
The Riverside Chaucer, ed. David C. Benson (New York, 2007), 5.847–89.
14
Gavin Douglas, The Æneid of Virgil, Translated into Scottish Verse (Edinburgh, 1839), 3.14.
15
Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 6, 8–11; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “The Mediter-
ranean and ‘the New Thalassology,’” in “Oceans of History,” American Historical Review 111 (2006):
733.
16
Alexander Lindsay, A Rutter of the Scottish Seas, circa 1540, Abridged Version of a Manuscript
by the late Dr. A. B. Taylor, ed. I. H. Adams and G. Fortune, Maritime Monographs and Reports 40
(Greenwich, UK, 1980).

17
on the part of Henry VII, the history of visual presentations of coasts was not to
take a decisive turn until Henry VIII’s projects for mapping the coasts of England
in 1539–40. Concerned about the possibility of attack from Francis I and Charles
V, Oliver Cromwell responded by ordering “sadde and expert men of every shire
in Ingland beyng nere the see . . . to viewe all the places alongest the secost wher
any daunger of invasions ys like to be and to certifie the sayd daungers and also
best advises for the fortificacion thereof.”18
While historical studies of the sea and of archipelagic and insular spaces have
sometimes considered the English rutter, discussions of British literature that
involve the sea in significant ways—as in the “Franklin’s Tale” and “Man of
Law’s Tale,” the Libelle of English Policy, or Margery Kempe’s Book—have
tended to neglect it despite its significance and its connection to the Pastons.
The rutter is, after all, representative of how integral water travel was to late-
medieval English society. For example, a 1359 survey in East Anglia counted 151
vessels between ten and one hundred tons, and it has been suggested that in the
second half of the fourteenth century, England had between one thousand and
two thousand vessels, the majority likely over one hundred tons.19 Most of the
trade was among British lands until 1453 and the end of the Hundred Years’ War,
when England lost Normandy and Gascony, but Castile, Portugal, and Aragon
were also important to trade.
The rutter also resonates with pilgrimages, which involved water travel as much
as land travel, with some astounding numbers involved. Some of the routes the
rutter describes coincide with pilgrimage itineraries to Santiago de Compostela,
in which pilgrims crossed the five hundred miles of the Bay of Biscay directly from
western England or Ireland to Coruña—which is then only forty miles on land to
the shrine of Saint James—rather than take a longer, more expensive, and more
dangerous overland route via Calais or Bordeaux. Wendy Childs estimates that
between 1361 and 1484, some fifteen thousand pilgrims made their way across
the bay. Over three thousand pilgrims went in each of the jubilee years of 1428
and 1434.20 In 1417, when Margery Kempe made the pilgrimage from Bristol to
Santiago, the English vessel she boarded after some delay had just arrived from
Brittany. It took her seven days to make the crossing, she was in Spain for fourteen
days, and the return voyage took five.21 William Wey’s voyage from Plymouth
to Coruña in May 1456 occurred in a convoy of five vessels and took five days.
Upon return to Coruña after Santiago, he observed in the port that there were
“eighty ships with topcastles and four without. They included English, Welsh,
17
Peter Barber, “England I: Pageantry, Defense, and Government. Maps at Court to 1550,” in
Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early
Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago, 1992), 26–27.
18
Barber, “England I,” 34. Henry VIII’s mapping interests are well presented in David Starkey,
Andrea Clarke, and Susan Doran, eds., Henry VIII: Man and Monarch (London, 2009).
19
Ian Friel, The Good Ship: Ships, Shipbuiding, and Technology in England, 1200–1520 (Baltimore,
1995), 32.
20
Wendy Childs, “The Perils, or Otherwise, of Maritime Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella
in the Fifteenth Century,” in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 1999),
127, and 141, where Childs notes the manuscripts under discussion here.
21
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, 2000), 221–27.

Irish, Norman, French, and Bretons and others. The total of English vessels was
thirty-two.”22 From the point of view of the ship stakeholders, pilgrims were at
least as profitable as cargo.23
The rutter does not however confine itself to the sea routes for pilgrimages.
The following descriptions will give a sense of its texture. It begins in the north
of England at Berwick, a strategic town on the Scottish border, and its first
sections are down the east coast, noting tides as they encounter rocks, rivers, and
headlands. It opens as follows in the Pierpont Morgan Library manuscript:
Berwik lieth southe and northe . of golde stones . the ylonde and berwik haven . lyne
west north west and est southe est . and fro bamborow . to the poynte of the ylonde the
cours lieth north and southe and beware of the goldestones . hit floweth north north
west . and quarter tide . be owtyn fro tilmoth to fenyn ylonde . the cours is north northe
west . and south south est. and tilmothe is tide north est . and southe west . betwene the
hedlonde . and houndeclif fote . the cours is north west and south est . And it floweth
west southe west . and est north est. And at whitbyes halfe . And fro hounde clif fote .
to humbyr. . . .
After continuing down the coast, the itinerary turns along the south of England
to cover the Channel from near Dover towards the southwest, then it discusses
the Irish Sea area, the Bay of Biscay, then continues down the coast of Spain
and Portugal to the “straytis of marrok” (the Strait of Gibraltar). It is not, as
James Gairdner called it, a “circumnavigation of England,”24 although the text
does give directions for circumnavigating Ireland. The writing is organized into
larger sections—the northeast of England to the Thames, from the southeast to
Calais, across the south of England to Land’s End, across Brittany to Spain, down
the coast of Spain to the Strait of Gibraltar, from Spain to Ireland, and from
Ireland to Bristol—but the reader encounters it much more on the local level in
shorter sections like the one just excerpted. As that sample suggests, the writing
throughout the rutter is barely more than a list of coastal bearings, distances
between points, types of seabeds, and the strengths, directions, and times of tides
for distinct routes.
The writing is heavily paratactic in the sense that each route starts abruptly
and is not marked off by any marginalia or other visual sign in the manuscript:
“Berwick lieth southe and northe of golde stones the ylonde.” Each segment in
the remainder of the text begins in a similar way, with statements either starting
in the same manner or with “and”: “fro kirkle holmys to Oxfordenesse and the
wynde be on the londe saile yowre wey,” “And yf ye be bounde to calis havyn,”
“and yf ye turne in the downys,” and so on. The manuscript pages do not set
off each route, the punctuation (if that is what the dots in the manuscript are
and not pen rests) is not always grammatical, and initial capitalization of place-
names and of grammatical sentences is inconsistent. There is little to no indication
whether each new route follows on from a previous one or is a separate section
about another geographical area, nor is there always an indication of scale, that
22
William Wey, The Itineraries of William Wey, ed. and trans. Francis Davey (Oxford, 2010), 212.
23
Childs, “The Perils,” 138.
24
James Gairdner, ed., Sailing Directions for the Circumnavigation of England, and for a Voyage
to the Straits of Gibraltar (from a 15th Century Ms.) (London, 1889).

is, whether a new section is a route over a larger area or a smaller, contiguous
one. For instance, after describing the Falmouth-Dartmouth-Guernsey area of the
Channel of Flanders (as it was known), the rutter continues with “In spayne and
bretayne [Brittany] this is the cours and the tide.” It is also not uncommon for a
sentence fragment to introduce a new section, for instance stating, “A new cours
and tide betwene engelonde and erelonde,” but the same holds true in this case as
elsewhere in the text: the “new cours” could cover a larger area, as this example
suggests, or the sentence fragment might introduce a course that is more local and
follows, as it were, a previous route.
Morgan Library, MS M 775 contains martial and other images, and two illumi-
nations accompany its rutter that provide a sense of the sea’s various relationships
with the land and focus on vessels and seafaring activities. The images frame the
text at the beginning and the end, each measuring 9.5 × 6.5 inches (24 × 16.5 cm).
The first one follows a letter in the manuscript from Thomas, Duke of Glouces-
ter, to Richard II on “dedes of armes.” A half-blank page follows the letter, and
the first rutter image occupies a full page on the verso. The second image in
the manuscript follows the last lines of the rutter text and fills three-quarters of
a page below them. Both images are unusual in the history of illumination for
their view from an aerial elevation and their bright paint: vivid blue waters and
spires, green shades for the land, ochre and russet cliffs. Kathleen Scott states
that seascapes like these are unique in English manuscripts.25 Views of the sea,
coasts, and islands are, however, not unusual in illuminations, church carvings,
pilgrimage badges, stained glass, and so on, and they are very common in the
fifteenth century. The majority of manuscripts showing seafaring vessels at this
time in history are not religious, as they had been earlier, but are instead lay texts,
for example French, Flemish, and English chronicles, romances, and other works,
such as those attributed to Sir John Mandeville.26
In the opening image, the illuminator uses the edges of the page (which were
originally not that much bigger before slight cropping) to frame the compressed
scene. Care has been taken to individuate the landmasses, towns, vessels, and
people. In some places the sharply delineated cliffs are barriers to the vessels; for
example, on the left they isolate the towns from the sea. The cliffs also provide
landforms that appear as though they are distinctive enough for navigation. In
other places, at the top and bottom of the image, the coast is accessible, and the
towns and cities are distinctly open to the sea, with no discernible fortification.
On the lower shore, a burning lighthouse and a windmill stand on promontories
and frame the seaside walled city with its individuated towers, flagged spires, and
blue and red roofs. The wind appears to blow from the right in the top half of the
image and from the left in the lower half. The boats contain bright orange, gold,
and blue figures; three smaller vessels feature rowers (the ship emerging from the
lower left is being towed); and the large carrack in the lower right is anchored
with two ropes or chains. One person sits in it at the stern with a raised hand
25
Kathleen Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490, 2 vols. (London, 1996), 2:291.
26
Joe Flatman, The Illuminated Ark: Interrogating Evidence from Manuscript Illuminations and
Archaeological Remains for Medieval Vessels (Oxford, 2007), 21–22.

Fig. 1. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS. M 775, fol. 130v. Reproduced with
permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
facing four people seated in a row while five other figures tend to the boat, two
furling or unfurling the mainsail.
The second image, at the end of the rutter, shows the same variety of dis-
tinct coastal promontories and accessible landfalls, with towers, structures with
steeples, and, in the lower left, what appears to be a navigable river near a small
city and a tower on the other side of a river, a brown road leading from a bend in
the river, and a small figure riding up the road. The three-mast carrack displays
details of what was, in the mid-fifteenth century when the Morgan manuscript
Fig. 2. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS. M 775, fol. 138v. Reproduced with
permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
was made, fairly recent maritime technology.27 The bow has a hinged ramp held
up by a pulley and wheel extending from the forecastle in front of the square-
rigged foremast, and below those is a grey large-ringed anchor. The mainmast
has a single sail (although it appears to have enough room for a topgallant above
the topcastle), and a line extends from the top of the mainmast to the next mast
27
Friel, The Good Ship, 157–80.

back, the mizzenmast. That mast in the aft supports a furled, slanted lateen sail
attached to an outligger, the boom that protrudes beyond the stern. One or more
figures in the aft castle, dressed in light blue tunics, let down a long plummet,
the device used for gauging depth and also for gathering samples of the sea floor,
together serving navigation, a feature that is mentioned in several places in the
text. The fact that the men have shields with red Saint George’s crosses and the
pennants do, too, suggests this may be an English fighting vessel, though pen-
nants are common in depictions of vessels of all kinds. The carrack has no large
weapons, which is not altogether unusual, since maritime warfare relied in large
part on handheld arms. Then again, besides the shields, the people aboard are
not armed, unlike some figures depicted in other contemporary images of vessels,
for instance, Sir Thomas Holme’s mid-fifteenth century Book of Arms, showing
William the Conqueror disembarking, The Romance of the Three Kings’ Sons,
or the Warwick Roll from later in the same century.28 The two round openings
in the hull near the stern are most likely supposed to represent lading ports for
stocking the ship. As in the first image, here too the landforms sometimes separate
the buildings from the sea and the vessels, but they also offer places of transition
between the commerce of the sea and the land.
The rutter text and the images are in many ways very different in their content.
The rutter text does not concentrate so much on the vessel itself but focuses instead
on the sea and the coasts. It is instructional in that it directs a second person, “ye,”
but besides that it does not describe any human activity, unlike the illuminations,
which detail it: travel on land and work on boats, rigging, manning, sounding,
and so on. The text addresses, as it were, one vessel, so it might be said to have
more in common with the second image rather than the first, with its array of
vessels. Neither image is oriented in any direction, while the text repeatedly names
cardinal directions. The text and images are also unlike each other in the sense
that it is usually clear in the writing that one landmass is an island and another
not, whereas it is difficult to tell from either image whether the landmasses are
insular or continental.
Nevertheless, the written descriptions and the images of landmarks, seas, and
so on have several features in common. Just as each episode in the written text
describes a circumscribed area, so too the borders of the images limit the available
view. Once the specific piece of coastline is covered in the writing, the text then
moves without transition to another episode. The consequently tenuous sense of
position, despite the text’s details, may also be discerned in both illuminations,
even in the first. It shows a larger area, but its variable scale, which emphasizes the
vessels and coasts over the towns, subtly obscures any distinction between what
may be inlets within a strait or a larger sea area between what may be different
countries. The closing image is similar, with the edges of the page restricting the
view. The areas of the sea are slightly less ambiguous than in the first image, ap-
pearing to give out on to open water at the top and upper left, and to two possibly
navigable straits on the right. Furthermore, the second, closing illumination is not
a subsection of the larger area shown in the first image, as can occur in other
28
Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, nos. 334, 468, 495.

illuminations where a blown-up detail can appear even in the same illumination.
In that sense, the relation between the images is analogous to distinct episodes
of the text, in that they are unrelated to each other in any geographical, spatial
sense.
Perhaps one way to begin to appreciate the rutter text’s and images’ under-
standing of area might be to recall Eugene Walter’s distinction between place and
space in his influential study Placeways: “People do not experience abstract space;
they experience places. A place is seen, heard, smelled, imagined, loved, hated,
feared, revered, enjoyed, or avoided. Abstract space is infinite; in modern thinking
it means a framework of possibilities. A place is immediate, concrete, particular,
bounded, finite, unique.”29 The rutter text and images would initially seem to
have more of the characteristics of place in that their views of physical areas are
edged by perspectival and experiential bounds. The perceiver in the text looks out
on a finite space. The rutter’s structure is repeatedly circumscribed within discrete,
metonymic episodes, each segment of the navigational text alike in terms of ele-
ments and language: sandbars, seafloors, islands large and small, headlands, tides,
directions. The repetitive nature of the rutter, however, ultimately complicates the
distinction Walter makes between place and space (and the premodern-modern
distinction upon which he also relies), so it is not quite a registration of, or guide
to, one more than the other. It may be experiential in Walter’s sense and so tend
more towards describing an experience of place, yet its symmetries and repetitions
abstract towards the spatial. Its hermeneutics are bounded, so the “framework
of possibilities” for understanding space may not be “infinite,” but each framed
sequence in the rutter is replicable in an unlimited series.
The Manuscripts and the Rutter’s Audience
We can surmise some key facts about the lost source or sources of the rutter,
and it is also important to consider that source’s primary audience. The focus
of this discussion lies, however, in the audience of the surviving manuscripts
and an early print version. What is it about the rutter that appealed to its early
readers? To answer this question, we can consider three bodies of evidence: the
contents of the anthology manuscripts (and the print) and thus the textual setting
of the rutter, stylistic parallels among the various texts within them, and the
characteristics of the manuscript audiences. The contention is that the rutter
appealed to aristocratic and middle-strata readers because its hermeneutics, its
understanding and structural presentation of space, was familiar.
Our rutter probably started out as a pilot book, a list of local navigational
conditions made by sailors, possibly for use on vessels. The oldest such books
address areas in the Mediterranean and seem to have been written, and perhaps
consulted, on boats plying their trades within its regions and around its coasts.
The pilot book arises alongside technologies in the Mediterranean Sea, such as the
lodestone and compass, the plummet, and the portolan chart, which at the end
of the thirteenth century qualitatively changed Western ways of understanding
29
Eugene Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill, 1988), 142.

the world. Concurrent scientific methodologies consolidated previous knowledge
about the earth, the Mediterranean region in particular, and also developed dif-
ferent ways of appreciating that area and, soon, the Atlantic. It has been said of
the sea chart and local mapping techniques that at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, “Empiricism and experience prevail where formerly the conceptual dom-
inated.”30 Tony Campbell estimates that 180 marine charts and atlases survive
from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries alone, “a minute fraction of what
was originally produced,” since many of them are presumed lost, including lost at
sea since they were used on ships. These charts “preserve the . . . sailors’ firsthand
experience,” and by the fourteenth century they were used to chart areas in the
North Atlantic.31
Whether visual charts gave rise to written descriptions, or vice versa, or whether
the regional and climactic conditions of northern Europe necessitated a greater
reliance on written rather than visual media to communicate information about
coastal travel, pilot books of the North Atlantic are believed to have existed from
at least the beginning of the fourteenth century. Rutters survive in the German
Seebuch of c. 1470 and the French Le routier de la mer of 1502–10; earlier versions
may have existed in the Baltic region and the North Sea. The writing in the English
rutter and the continental ones is obviously practical and is probably derived from
actual pilots’ memories or their notes about coastal navigation, but whether they
were subsequently used is unknown. Sailors may have relied on their experience
as much as anything else, sailors such as Chaucer’s Shipman, who could calculate,
or
rekene wel his tydes,
His stremes, and his daungers hym bisides,
His herberwe [harbors], and his moone, his lodemenage [navigational skill]
and who could also remember

alle the havenes, as they were,
Fro Gootlond to the cape of Fynystere,
And every cryke in Britaigne and in Spayne.32
It may thereafter be a relatively simple matter of a pamphlet, here of pilotage,

coming to be copied into the longer miscellany manuscripts we are considering,
but one needs to be careful with such extrapolations, even via analogy with other
compilations. First, rutters in general are not always objectively accurate, which
would be key in making them useful at all for navigation; consider especially
the English translator and printer of Le routier, a book we will return to later,
who describes the challenge of rendering “the termes of maryners, and names of
the coostes and havens” and admits that he “never came on the see, nor by no
30
Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Monique de La Roncière, Sea Charts of the Early Explorers: 13th
to 17th Century (New York, 1984), 11.
31
Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in The History of
Cartography, ed. Harley and Woodward, 1:372–73, 1:409–10.
32
The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 1.401–9.

33
cost therof.” Second, surviving forms of rutters also suggest intermediate copies
between an original and what exists today.34 Either way, the inclusion of the
rutter in the anthologies suggests a scribe who is thinking about the audience of
the manuscript now who was not a pilot or captain. As anthologies, the books are
more typical kinds of late-medieval texts than ones associated with an individual
author or a single title and, as Ralph Hanna has argued, with Seth Lerer following
his suggestion, they therefore have the potential to provide revealing information
about late-medieval reading preferences and expectations.35 The question remains
why the rutter then appears in manuscripts, some of which were costly, and what
the appeal was for the readers of the anthologies.
Our three manuscripts and the early printed book ultimately seem to descend
from a single pilot book, since all four begin in Berwick and describe very similar
routes, and the rutter is as integral as it can be to all three manuscripts, given their
compiled nature. The Pierpont Morgan Library manuscript is 320 pages long, and
its main contents are Vegetius’s De re militari in English, John Lydgate and Bene-
dict Burgh’s Governance of Kings and Princes, and Stephen Scrope’s translation of
Christine de Pizan’s Epistle of Othea to Hector. These texts and the others in the
manuscript impart a sense of the whole as a collection of martial, philosophical,
practical, and moral advice, like many other miscellanies at this time in history.
The rutter appears on folios 130v–138v, preceding the Governance, and it is writ-
ten in the same hand as the main one in the majority of the manuscript. Even if an
attempt is made to reconstruct the book back into its fifteenth-century form from
its current sixteenth-century gatherings, it does not substantially alter the sense of
its main contents, and the rutter was still integral to the compiled book.36
The rutter is also integral to British Library, Lansdowne MS 285, which is
similar to Morgan M 775. It has been argued that they either share a common
exemplar, or the Lansdowne manuscript is copied from Morgan M 775.37 The
principal contents of its 219 folios are Vegetius’s De re militari and Lydgate
and Burgh’s Governance, affirming the close correspondence between it and the
Morgan, and its other contents show additional similarities between the two.
The rutter on folios 138r–143v follows the Vegetius. Lansdowne 285 is in six
hands, but the scribe of the rutter is the scribe of the English and French combat
materials, the Vegetius, and the Lydgate-Burgh text, that is, the majority of the
33
The Rutters of the Sea: The Sailing Directions of Pierre Garcie. A Study of the First English
and French Printed Sailing Directions, with Facsimile Reproductions, ed. D. W. Waters (New Haven,
1967), 53.
34
Lindsay, A Rutter of the Scottish Seas, 28.
35
Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, 1996),
7–9.
36
G. A. Lester, Sir John Paston’s “Grete Boke”: A Descriptive Catalogue, with an Introduction, of
British Library MS Lansdowne 285 (Cambridge, 1984), 32–33; and “Sir John Paston’s Grete Boke:
A Bespoke Book or Mass-Produced?,” English Studies 66 (1985): 96–101.
37
Ian Doyle, “The Work of a Late Fifteenth-Century Scribe, William Ebesham,” Bulletin of the
John Rylands Library 39 (1957): 306; Lester, Sir John Paston’s “Grete Boke,” 7–8, 33–34; and “Sir
John Paston’s Grete Boke,” 102–4. My reading of the rutter variants agrees with their interpretation
that the Morgan manuscript is likely the source of the Lansdowne.

pages. It therefore also is a book of advice for princes, although here the focus
appears to be slightly narrower, centering on the feats of contemporary knights.
The third manuscript survival of the rutter is a fragment in Bodleian Library,
MS Rawlinson D 328, with the rutter just one paragraph on folio 183r. Despite
this being a manuscript of a very different sort from the Morgan and Lansdowne,
and considerably less integrated, here too the rutter does not appear to have
been singled out as unusual in comparison with the other contents. One hundred
and ninety-four folios long, Rawlinson D 328 is a grammatical practice book that
seems to show the development of a certain Walter Pollard’s handwriting, possibly
over as many as forty years.38 It contains Latin grammatical exercises, enigmata,
records of accounts, a version of “Stans puer ad mensam” and other short poems
in English, and more. The rutter appears on an added folio separable from the rest
of Rawlinson D 328, but the page is not different in kind from many other added
pages, nor indeed is it different in kind from the rest of the manuscript as a whole
in the sense that the rationale for choosing and including the excerpts appears
somewhat arbitrary. The rutter is an excerpt only eight lines long on folio 183r, a
page that also contains some legal pledges and the beginning sentences of Burgh’s
Cato, suggesting a tantalizingly closer connection to the other two manuscripts,
but one that is frustrated by its random nature.
All these anthologies would appear well suited for analysis in terms of Hanna’s
suggestion that miscellanies can offer a larger amount of information about me-
dieval reading desires and tastes than single-author or single-title works. Hanna
proposes that such collections of writings are “more readily assimilable to our
concept theme than to our concept genre,” although he concedes the theme may
be “diverse.”39 The inclusion of the rutter excerpt in Rawlinson D 328 is per-
haps easiest to account for in terms of Hanna’s concept of “theme” despite the
fact that this manuscript is the most diverse—or perhaps because it is the most
diverse—anthology. It is part of the writer’s or writers’ admittedly opaque copy-
ing and composition choices, which nevertheless seem understandable since this
is a loose practice book of short and longer notes. The Morgan and Lansdowne
manuscripts with their rutters present a challenge, however, to Hanna’s proposal
when it comes to discerning their theme. It is clear that the Morgan manuscript
is comprised almost entirely of advice for princes, but the sailing directions stand
out. No other texts in the manuscript show any interest in maritime martial ac-
tivities or indeed maritime activities at all. The Lansdowne manuscript is similar,
as we might expect since it is probably derived from the Morgan, but because
the manuscript’s theme is more clearly martial, the inclusion of the sailing di-
rections, which do not correspond with any known transportation of particular
individuals, groups of soldiers, or any other military activity, is equally if not more
puzzling. These are deliberately produced and expensive manuscripts in which the
historical and contemporary martial writings reinforce each other, and it seems
unlikely that the rutter was randomly selected.
38
David Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts (New York,
1979), 290–91.
39
Hanna, Pursuing History, 9.

Little direct connection exists between the early owners of these manuscripts
and maritime activities, but the evidence of early ownership provides insights into
the kinds of people who had enough interest in the rutter for it to be included in
their anthologies. The evidence of the numbers of copies and readers also indicates
that the rutter was reasonably popular, and internal evidence in the text suggests
it was meant to engage its audiences. We know that the Morgan manuscript was
owned by Sir John Astley soon after its compilation in about 1450 since his seal
appears on the manuscript, presumably placed there some time before his death
in 1468. It is not clear whether the manuscript was actually made for him, but
Astley’s arms are added in several places in the manuscript and he was renowned
in his lifetime for martial success. He was a minor gentleman from Leicestershire
who jousted successfully before King Charles VII in Paris and King Henry VI at
Smithfield, and he eventually carried a canopy at the funeral of Edward IV in
1483.40 The deluxe vellum manuscript is neatly written with flourished initials
and contains full- and half-page illuminations throughout, its best-known images
showing jousting on horseback and foot combat. Astley’s discernible engagement
with the sea included two appointments to investigate piracy in 1475 and 1478;
as far as the records show, he did not go on pilgrimage.41 Astley’s estate was near
Leicester, which is about as far inland as one can be in England, although he did
govern Bamburgh Castle (for less than a year), and Bamburgh is the first (and
most northern) location in England mentioned in the rutter.42 The Lansdowne
manuscript’s main sections were begun by the scribe William Ebesham for Sir
John Paston (the elder son, 1442–79) probably in 1468; it is known as the Grete
Boke. Records show that Paston’s Grete Boke cost about twenty-seven shillings
for its writing and rubrication.43 Sir John tried to maintain his father’s claims to
property along the Norfolk coast, but he did not own shares in boats or have
other substantial contact with them, and he seems to have spent most of his time
in London. Like Astley, he was interested in, and occasionally participated in,
tournaments. The Rawlinson practice book, a simpler manuscript, was possibly
all written by Walter Pollard of Exeter and Plymouth (fl. c. 1445). The Pollard
family were cloth merchants and landowners in the area, but Walter also does not
appear to have owned shares in boats.44 Finally, although we can pinpoint the
“themes” of the books generally, especially in the case of the related Morgan and
Lansdowne manuscripts, these themes do not encompass the rutter texts. We are
still left with the question about why the rutter was included and why it appealed
to its audience.
40
Harold Arthur, Viscount Dillon, “On a MS. Collection of Ordinances of Chivalry of the Fifteenth
Century, Belonging to Lord Hastings,” Archaeologia, 2nd ser., 57 (1900): 32–35; Doyle, “The Work
of a Late Fifteenth-Century Scribe,” 306; Lester, “Sir John Paston’s Grete Boke,” 100–101.
41
Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Records Office, 15 Edward IV, 525; 18
Edward IV, 112.
42
George Tate, The History of the Borough, Castle, and Barony of Alnwick, 2 vols. (Alnwick,
1866), 1:191.
43
Doyle, “The Work of a Late Fifteenth-Century Scribe,” 299–303; Lester, Sir John Paston’s “Grete
Boke,” 36–38.
44
Nicholas Orme, Education in the West of England, 1066–1548: Cornwall, Devon, Dorset,
Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wiltshire (Exeter, 1976), 51 n. 3.

The intended and unintended audiences of medieval texts in general and mis-
cellanies in particular are, of course, broader than just an initial or single owner;
members of the larger household and other potential readers frequently seem as
much a consideration in manuscript production as any single name associated
with a manuscript. It is not certain, for instance, that the Morgan manuscript was
made for Sir John Astley, and his family appear to have inherited the book upon
his death. In terms of the Lansdowne manuscript, in October 1469 Sir John Pas-
ton wrote to his mother Margaret in Norfolk, asking for two French books that
Ebesham might have finished writing by that date. The letter goes on to say that
if William has not finished, then he should leave and go to Sir John in London.
That is, William Ebesham appears to have been writing in Norfolk, where Mar-
garet was, which suggests she may have been either a potential audience for his
output, or involved in the manuscript production, or both.45 Even if it is true that
the Rawlinson manuscript is all in Walter Pollard’s hand, it is clear that others
were reading it, if not also writing it, because someone composed a couplet on
folio 162r that mocks Walter: “Walterius Pollard non est but a dullard. / I say
that Pollard is none mery gollard.”46 It is possible Pollard had the ability to mock
himself, but it seems more likely that the book was at least read by more than him.
Another factor to consider is that the rutter appears to have been relatively
popular. Lester’s analyses of the Morgan and Lansdowne were written in part to
correct earlier contentions that the manuscripts provide evidence of the mass pro-
duction of a “fifteenth-century best-seller.” He clearly shows that the arguments
for the anthologies being very popular are false, but this should not be confused
with the fact that the rutter held some attraction.47 The Lansdowne might be
copied in large part from the Morgan, but that is only to say that two individuals,
or groups of people, found it, including the section containing the rutter, to be
of interest. The dissimilarity between the Rawlinson’s text and that of the two
other manuscripts suggests it is unrelated to them (unless Pollard’s, or someone
else’s, copying was either extremely poor or the copy was carelessly created from
a recited text), so it appears that another version was in independent circulation.
Furthermore, the earliest print copy of the rutter is not directly related to any of
the manuscripts. The rutter appears in print in 1541 together with Robert Cop-
land’s Rutter of the See (first published without our rutter in 1528). The Rutter
of the Sea was a translation into English of Pierre Garcie’s 1520 Le grant routtier.
Beginning in 1541, a version of our text was included as the last ten pages of
the eighty-six page edition, where it had a separate title, A newe Routter of the
Sea, for the northe partyes: compyled by Rycharde Proude.48 “Compyled” could
mean either that the publisher Proude put it together with Garcie’s Grant routtier
or that he gathered the text of the “newe Routter” from a number of different
45
Doyle, “The Work of a Late Fifteenth-Century Scribe,” 304. Doyle speculates that the French
texts referred to in the letter may be some or all of the French writings in Ebesham’s hand in the Grete
Boke.
46
Reproduced in The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, ed. Celia Sisam (Oxford, 1970),
563.
47
Lester, “Sir John Paston’s Grete Boke,” 93–94.
48
Waters, The Rutters of the Sea, part 1, “Early Sailing Directions,” 4.

places. This printed edition’s text of the rutter has added or omitted words and
sometimes contains an entirely different text from that of the manuscript versions;
that is, it is so dissimilar it seems derived from a source other than the surviving
manuscripts or even their sources. The Morgan-Lansdowne version may not have
been a “fifteenth-century best-seller,” but the rutter was of sufficient interest to
be copied independently several times.
A further fact to note concerns the illuminator’s knowledge of maritime activi-
ties. The artist does not appear to have based his illuminations on the text, so the
details of the rigging, anchoring, towing, the variety of boats, and so on suggest
independent and firsthand understanding of the sea, coasts, and maritime work.
According to Scott, the illuminator is likely the same artist as the one who pro-
duced the images of the mounted jousting and unmounted (foot) combat earlier in
the manuscript;49 the two sets of images therefore share an interest in technical ver-
ity. However, while the martial images show armor, rituals, and activities that may
be derived from the writings, the maritime images do not (with the exception of
the plummeting); they were consequently made by someone who appears to have
been quite knowledgeable about rigging, sailing, and so on, and it was not unusual
for illuminators more generally to attempt verity when depicting boats and even
to attempt to keep up with latest changes in sailing technology.50 The illuminator
may therefore resemble the text’s intended larger audience, in being someone with
an interest in, and even a certain amount of knowledge about, seafaring.
There are other indications in the rutter concerning its intended audience. Its
instructional character seems to open it up for a larger audience’s future use. Its
second-person address is hortative and subjunctive. For example, a passage on
the opening page of the Morgan manuscript reads as follows: “And yf ye goo fro
leyrnes to the schelde ye schal goo est southe est . for to goo clene of Rosand .
and be southe And yf ye have an ebbe goo southe est and be est And yf ye goo
fro the spone to the schelde. and at the wynde be at north west your cours is
southe est. till ye be passid welle banke.” The whole text is in this kind of style,
providing prospective readers with possible situations they might be in (the “If
you are in X place” formula) and then the guidance (“go,” “ye must go,” “your
cours is,” “beware,” “come not nere,” “kepe not nere”). Both Morgan M 775 and
Lansdowne 285 also contain gaps in the text: they contain a conditional statement
that begins, “and yf ye be bounde,” while the remaining three-quarters of a line
in the Morgan and the remaining quarter of the line and beginning quarter of
the next line in the Lansdowne are blank. The Morgan line following the empty
space then reads, “goo west northe west and ye schal go clene of kidwale,” and
the Lansdowne is similar. In another place in the manuscript writing, they both
contain an approximately 2 cm gap (and four rubricated lines are blank in the
Morgan). The Morgan folio reads, “and take yowre slawhte . on the maynelonde
of walis rotlonde and the redbanke in chester water northe and southe.” Then
appears the gap, and then, “Opyn o geronde ther is wose and sonde to gedir and
it is bein xij or xiiij . or xvj . fadim deep.” These spaces further reinforce the idea
49
Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 2:290.
50
Flatman, The Illuminated Ark, 23–24.

that Ebesham copied the Lansdowne’s rutter from the Morgan manuscript, and
they also suggest that the gaps were left to be filled in by someone with more
familiarity with an area and route.
The conclusion of this evidence suggests that a fairly coherent and interacting
spectrum of owners—lower aristocracy, upper-middle stratum, middle stratum—
were expected to have an interest in this kind of maritime writing. The proposition
is not, however, that the text was appealing because of its practical nature, since
none of the owners were pilots or other kinds of shipmen. The rutter also does not
fit with the martial or grammatical themes of the anthologies. It nevertheless ap-
pealed to a loose but defined segment of society. The fact that it does not fit a theme
in the anthologies might even strengthen this impression of its attractiveness, since
it is clear that it was deliberately added. It seems to have been considered appro-
priate for these gentlemen and their households—something with which these
kinds of households were, or should be, familiar. That intended familiarity may
have been of a practical nature, the idea being that minor gentry and members
of a newer middle stratum should have some knowledge of maritime activity or
that they already had a general interest in aquatic as well as terrestrial travel. The
rutter was, however, hardly constructed as a practical product, or at least not
only with a heuristic aim. The lavish pictures in the Morgan version, the careful
hands in the Morgan and the Lansdowne versions, and the inclusion of the text
in a grammatical book suggest also an aesthetic, or stylistic, appeal.
Spatial Understanding and the Rutter’s Familiarity
The rutter text and images in the Morgan, Lansdowne, and Rawlinson
manuscripts, as well as the Proude edition, suggest a moderately widespread
understanding of seas and coasts, which can either separate islands and other
lands or connect them. They also imply that knowledge of maritime technol-
ogy was somewhat pervasive or at least was a subject worthy of interest to a
crafter such as the illuminator, to the middle strata, and to the lower gentry.
This discussion therefore examines further the characteristics of that knowledge,
including its structural aspects, by first briefly reviewing geographical thinking
more broadly, then looking at the rutter and its images in relation to sea charts,
and finally examining the text in light of land-based narratives. The conclusion
from this analysis reinforces the idea that the rutter’s audience may already have
had an understanding of space in which each local area is perceived to be discrete,
rather than habitually understood according to an overview where locales are
geometrically related to each other, each being considered in terms of whether it
is above, below, or to the right or left of another. The rutter is not, in this sense,
cartographic. The view is horizonal, not bird’s-eye, and it is not even sequential
or proximate in any meaningful way. Objects only relate to each other within a
small area. In this sense we might say it has an affiliation with portolan charts
that are interested in navigating across small reaches in the Mediterranean and
elsewhere. But in the rutter one distinct region is not, strictly, related to another.
The coastal areas it describes are merely juxtaposed, offering segmented, finite
areas for the reader’s or viewer’s comprehension. The short voyage, the waters
beneath the traveler, the area perceivable from one place: these are the significant
units in its spatial hermeneutics.
A large part of the difference between how we might apprehend physical area
today and how physical area appears to have been understood in the late Middle
Ages may be accounted for by briefly looking to ancient and earlier medieval
thinking about space and the terms geography, chorography, and topography.
Since the Enlightenment, these three fields of study have come to be associated
with disciplines based only on the size of the area studied: geography was a disci-
pline that studied the known earth; chorography, a region; and topography, the
landscape within a region. This is however a later distinction, which drew on
early modern readings of Ptolemy and emphasized the disciplinary particularities
and privileged geographical projections of the heavens and of earthly coordinates
on the flat surface of a map.51 The late Middle Ages, on the other hand, was not
interested in making a disciplinary and quantitative division, and instead engaged
much more with the qualities of each of the different ways of seeing and rep-
resenting that geography, chorography, and topography implied. Chōrographia
and topographia were the prime areas of interest. According to Ptolemy, chorog-
raphy “sets out the individual localities, each one independently and by itself,
registering practically everything down to the least thing therein (for example,
harbors, towns, districts, branches of principal rivers, and so on). . . . The goal of
[chorography] is an impression of a part, as when one makes an image of just an
ear or an eye,” rather than the whole body.52 Chorography, initially associated
with astrology, “appears most often in classical sources to describe a space which
is finite and bounded, land which need not necessarily be perceived in a single
glance, but whose extent is nonetheless known.”53 It was a way of thinking about
the physical world in terms of “relationship[s] between events and the places
and times at which they have occurred. . . . [T]he surface of the earth was not
seen as a surface of infinite variation” as on the geographical grid. Instead, “the
world itself—terrestrial and celestial—acted as what one today might think of as
a kind of information storage device, one that operated via what amounted to a
set of signs or symbols.”54 If we were able to explore, for example, the Atlantic
51
Fred Lukerman, “The Concept of Location in Classical Geography,” Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 51 (1961): 195.
52
Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters, trans. J. Lennart
Berggren and Alexander Jones (Princeton, 2000), 57. I use this translation even though Berggren and
Jones inadvertently emphasize a Kantian distinction when they translate chōrographia as “regional
cartography,” thus suggesting its subordinate role.
53
Jesse Simon, “Chorography Reconsidered: An Alternative Approach to the Ptolemaic Definition,”
Mapping Medieval Geographies: Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300–1600,
ed. Keith D. Lilley (Cambridge, 2013), 31.
54
Michael Curry, “Toward a Geography of a World without Maps: Lessons from Ptolemy and Postal
Codes,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95 (2005): 682. Curry is among recent
scholars who have reexamined Hesiod, Hippocrates, Ptolemy, and other ancient theorists of physical
space. See also Kenneth Olwig, “Choros, Chora, and the Question of Landscape,” in Envisioning
Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, ed. Stephen Daniels et al. (Milton Park,
Abingdon, 2011), and the works cited therein in nn. 8, 9, 10, and 12. For a discussion of chorography
in relation to spaces in Anglo-Saxon literature, see, for example, Alfred Hiatt, “Beowulf off the Map,”
Anglo-Saxon England 38 (2009): 11–40.

archipelago without recourse to a map (which would contrast, for instance, the
relative size of England and Ireland), we might consider instead each land, each
area of sea. Indeed, one’s conception of Britain as a replete archipelago might not
exist; one could be invested in a particular appreciation of one’s own location,
even if it were a space that was aquatic as well as coastal, or even if it included
more than one island or other landmass.
Ptolemy’s topographia is also distinct from the geography of the world cartog-
rapher. In his formulation, topography is “landscape drawing” and, like chorog-
raphy, requires artistic proficiency—though writing was also a suitable medium
for topographia—while the world geographer has to be proficient in mathemat-
ics.55 Quintilian defines topography as “clear and vivid descriptions of places.”56
Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernia is a good example: it consists of a de-
lineation of the land, flora and fauna, prodigies, and inhabitants of Irish lands.
Topography, like chorography, is also related to mnemonics, in that a place is
recognized in literature or visual media because it has one or more memorable
qualities. Like memorial activities, topographia also tends to involve movement,
as Gerald’s itineraries suggest, because descriptions of different parts of an area
or aspects of a location are needed to build a topographical list of features. Its aim
is “to describe places by describing what one experiences as one moves around
within a place, and [it] relies upon the relative ease of remembering the nature of
places when those accounts are couched within narrative terms.”57 Topographic
ways of representing space in terms of memory formation and retrieval, and move-
ment and narrative, are also more closely tied to everyday practices rather than
being only scholastic or even rhetorical exercises, as is often typical of mnemonic
techniques. They are the ways one describes places to oneself as well as to others.
Ancient and medieval chorography and topography may therefore go some way
to accounting for the delimited and episodic nature of the rutter. It contains views
of spaces within sets, and within those, shorter episodes. An overarching narrative
is not important, indeed, fails to manifest itself.
The rutter does not, however, describe a route with motion as part of it, which
is surprising for what we might expect from a set of directions and unlike topo-
graphic ways of perceiving physical area in which movement is significant. The
rutter details the actions of tides and winds, and each new course has a direction,
which can be different depending on the conditions. Yet nowhere in the text do
we get the sense of changing topography, as if the addressee (the “ye”) of the text,
or the vessel, were moving. Astrological navigation, the knotted line, and other
methods were used to measure boat speed at this time in history, but the text
does not offer crucial relative measurements beyond differing tides and winds.
There are also no conditionals that depend on the location of the vessel. The text
55
Ptolemy’s Geography, trans. Berggren and Jones, 58.
56
“Locorum quoque dilucida et significans descriptio,” Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H.
E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1920–22), 9.2.44. George Puttenham’s Arte of
English Poesie provides Chaucer’s Clerk’s description of Saluce at the beginning of “The Clerk’s Tale”
as his example for the term topographia: Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Dodge Willcock and Alice
Walker (Cambridge, 1936), 239.
57
Curry, “Toward a Geography of a World without Maps,” 683.

may say—and even warn—that, if a certain wind is blowing or a particular tide
is occurring, one should watch out for this or that set of rocks or shallow water.
But it does not state something like, “If you have by now come to such and such
a place, you will see X or experience Y.” The rutter is devoid of time beyond that
implied by the moon.
One possible but partial answer that may account for the rutter’s appeal and
its inclusion in the anthologies lies in the fact that the rutter is similar to the
other writings in the manuscripts on a stylistic or formal level, and it may have
been in part its formal characteristics that held some attraction for its manuscript
readers. Although it might be difficult for us to appreciate the aesthetic today, the
three manuscripts contain lists of various kinds of items. The Morgan manuscript
contains descriptions of clothing and step-by-step procedures for jousts; calen-
dars of daily and annual expenses; and lists of measures and weights for bread
and ale. The Lansdowne Grete Boke has an order of service for English coro-
nations, including “Soteltes at the Coronation banquet of Henry VI,” the cer-
emonial order for creating Knights of the Bath, and programs of ordinances
of war. The Rawlinson is almost entirely a list-like series of items in the sense
that it consists of short excerpts, many of which are themselves lists of say-
ings, account records, letter excerpts, and other notes. The rutter is not differ-
ent in style from these kinds of texts and seems to answer to the cataloging
impulse of late-medieval scribes and readers. This changes with the sixteenth-
century Proude printed edition, because the text there was removed from these
contexts and grouped generically and thematically with another navigational
text.
It must not, however, have been only the formal characteristics of the rutter
that held appeal. Other chorographic and topographic ways of understanding
space offer insights into the rutter’s hermeneutics of space that its audiences may
have found familiar. One may think, for instance, of maps of Britain that seem
to provide a potential analogy with the images in the Morgan manuscript, but
those national maps exhibit a different understanding of space from the rutter
and have other intentions. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century visual depictions of
Britain, such as the Gough map, Totius Britanniae tabula chorographica (which
accompanies fifteenth-century versions of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the
Kings of Britain), and John Harding’s map of Scotland from about 1450 offer
views in overhead plan rather than the oblique aerial view of the two images
and, it is fair to say, are not as interested in the sea or even the coasts so much
as they are interested in inland towns, roads, and rivers. Maps of Britain, which
appear to be largely based on chronicles and other historical documents, also
are commonly distinguished in kind from Italian, Catalan, and Majorcan sea
charts.58 Indeed, the people involved in making nautical accounts and charts of
smaller regions at this time in history perceived a difference between previous maps
58
G. R. Crone, Early Maps of the British Isles A.D. 1000–A.D. 1579 (London, 1961), 5, 8; Michael
C. Andrews, “The British Isles in the Nautical Charts of the XIVth and XVth Centuries,” Geographical
Journal 68 (1926): 474–81; Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History
(Toronto, 1999), 7–48, 145–48, 152–54; Dan Birkholz, “The Vernacular Map: Re-Charting English
Literary History,” New Medieval Literatures 6 (2004): 11–77.

of the known world—such as mappaemundi and larger maps of nations—and
their own productions. One mid-fifteenth-century Genoese mapmaker contrasted
his map with others, saying, “This is the true description of the world of the
cosmographers, accommodated to the marine [chart], from which frivolous tales
have been removed.” A contemporary chart maker, Francesco Beccari, described
his revisions to a portolan map in search of “the marrow of the truth,” which he
gleaned, he says, from “the efficacious experience and most sure report of many,
i.e., masters, ship-owners, skippers, and pilots of the seas . . . and also of many of
those . . . who frequently and over a long period of time sailed [various] regions
and seas.”59
It may be possible to describe the Morgan manuscript’s deliberate pairing of
images with text as the same as, or similar to, the combination of word and
picture in portolan charts as they have been described: a “constructive cohab-
itation,” which “consist[s] essentially and not by accidental arrangement in the
conjunction of images and words,” a “complementarity of word and image that is
as theoretically legitimate as it is practically useful.”60 The Morgan manuscript’s
images could work in combination with the written language in these ways, its
text receiving representational confirmation in the images, and the images giving
slightly more of an overview than the lists of locations and conditions. The rutter
images are, however, quite different from the portolan charts in these respects.
It is impossible to see how the written and visual would work together on a
practical level for an audience, given that the images cannot with any certainty
be associated with a particular region or description. It is nevertheless feasible to
see parallels on a hermeneutic level in the sense that the paintings and the words
demonstrate a shared apprehension of delimited physical space.
In the end, the spatial perspectives of religious and secular itineraries, some with
accompanying images, provide the closest analogy to the rutter’s geographical
understanding rather than portolan charts or even the more closely historically
linked manuals of the sea. In their discussion of sea and land journeys, Catherine
Delano-Smith and Roger Kain suggest that “the normal manner of travel in pre-
modern times involved setting out knowing the destination, and sometimes the
names of intermediate places, but assuming that the way—the actual road itself—
would be revealed stage by stage. Way-finding was expected to be an ad hoc and
pragmatic affair. The whole process of travel was normally protracted, punctuated
by the need to feed, water and rest horses and other beasts of burden and to
find safe overnight lodgings.”61 A subset of this kind of travel is the pilgrimage,
which is obviously goal-oriented, but the penitential structure of the journey is
segmented and intended to be meditative. One might for instance be walking or
riding towards Santiago, Rome, or Jerusalem, but along the way the traveler is
intent on encountering each local shrine and sight. This experience could occur
even in the absence of actual physical travel. Consider, for example, the thirteenth-
century cloistered monks at St. Albans, who were probably the initial audience
59
Quoted in Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 372, 427–28, 439; and Peter Whitfield, The Charting
of the Oceans: Ten Centuries of Maritime Maps (London, 1996), 19–20.
60
Edward Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis, 2002), 186–87.
61
Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 144.

for Matthew Paris’s itinerary maps and histories in his Chronica majora and
Historia Anglorum. Their “imagined pilgrimage” toward Rome and Jerusalem
had a deeply meditative quality, one that called on them to engage in a kinetic as
well as spiritual manner with the itineraries and iconography of the routes and
places that Paris provided.62 William Wey’s itineraries to Jerusalem and Santiago
similarly focus on what one should prepare for and what the pilgrim will see in
distinct places along the route and around the holy sites. The pilgrim narrative
is segmented and nodal in that the significant features are places where one can
meditate and perform, penitentially or otherwise. The road does not connote an
infinitely receding visual perspective or unending kinetic experience. The rutter
appears in this sense to be like real or virtual pilgrimages except it is an earthly,
or rather aquatic, version of them.
The characteristics of these spatial understandings complicate arguments for
a distinct break between medieval and early modern periods in geography, car-
tography, and related fields despite the fact that there is undeniably a profu-
sion of maps and different mapmaking practices in the later era. Tom Conley,
among others, has argued that humanist maps indicate a radically different un-
derstanding of space from what had come before, one that in part arises out of
a contemplation of insularity. In a discussion of the isolario book, fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century collections about islands, Conley observes that the “world in
which symbols once prevailed now gives way to signs and diagrams that break
away from the discourse that had been integral to them. Diagrammatic forms do
not convey the analogies that once assured the presence of a divine plan; rather,
they mark a far more perspectival view of a world that can be motivated as one
chooses. . . . The way that cosmography fails to explain the world gives rise to
a productive fragmentation that momentarily allows various shapes of difference
to be registered without yet being appropriated or allegorized.”63 His argument
generalizes in a fashion that is difficult to sustain in light of texts, such as the
rutter, which build on maritime cartographic traditions. The rutter may not ap-
peal to an individual’s “choices,” but it nevertheless embodies a perspective that
is barely, if at all, symbolic, one in which the world is indeed fragmented. It rep-
resents moreover a qualitatively different mode of apprehending space from the
traditions of T and O mappaemundi and Macrobian zonal maps of the whole
earth.
Sir John Astley, Sir John Paston, and other audiences may not have found in
the rutter’s descriptions or images a practical utility, but they seem to have found
them interesting in the manner of William Wey, or in an imaginary sense that
is similar to what the monks, in a religious context, found in Matthew Paris’s
writings and images. Instead of the spectacular view from above or outside the
sublunary sphere, this manner of experiencing space is horizonal in that its somatic
62
Daniel K. Connolly, The Maps of Matthew Paris: Medieval Journeys through Space, Time and
Liturgy (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, 2009), 2–3, 28–29. See also Katharine Breen, Imagining an English
Reading Public, 1150–1400 (Cambridge, 2010), 138–44, 167–71; and Kathryn M. Rudy, Virtual
Pilgrimages in the Convent: Imagining Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2011).
63
Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis,
1996), 169.

and visual experience is edged by the horizon and within a band that is parallel
to the earth and sea. One kind of structure—literary—reflected, reinforced, and
otherwise embodied another kind of perspectival, experiential understanding of
space. Its episodic hermeneutics of space is delimited, measured, one in which the
viewer reads the local scene—aquatic, coastal, insular—for all its signs, even at
the risk, or with the appeal, of really being at sea.
Matthew Boyd Goldie is Professor of English at Rider University, Lawrenceville, New

Jersey (e-mail: mgoldie@rider.edu)

Early English Rutter Explores Spatial Hermeneutics

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Early English Rutter Explores Spatial Hermeneutics

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

An Early English Rutter: The Sea and Spatial

Hermeneutics in the Fourteenth

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015) doi:10.1017/S0038713415001396 701

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Seas, Coasts, and Islands in the Rutter

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

The Manuscripts and the Rutter’s Audience

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

and who could also remember

It may thereafter be a relatively simple matter of a pamphlet, here of pilotage,

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Spatial Understanding and the Rutter’s Familiarity

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

Matthew Boyd Goldie is Professor of English at Rider University, Lawrenceville, New

Speculum 90/3 (July 2015)

You might also like