“Thys ys my boke”: Imagining the Owner in the Book

Abstract

To the reader of the fourteenth, fifteenth, or early sixteenth centuries, notes of ownership would have been familiar sights. These notes occur in prominent places, mostly on the first or last pages of texts or on the flyleaves and pastedowns that enclose manuscripts. Some are neat, even calligraphic; many are scruffily jotted in blank bits of books long after their production. The wording is unexceptional and familiar: Iste liber pertinet or Iste liber constat are common, meaning “this book belongs to,” as is the word liber or ‘book’ with the person’s name in the genitive (liber Radulphi), and as is simply the name alone. These notes are familiar sources, too, for palaeography, literary history, and other branches of medieval study, which regularly glean from them information about the provenance of books and the prosopography of people. Such gleanings need to continue, for the history of the book, the history of reading, and thus cultural history of all sorts depend on our knowledge of the ownership of books (Hanna III, 2013b: 217; Pearson, 1998: 2–3). But as well as looking through these notes for evidence of other things, we could look directly at them as phenomena interesting in their own right—as a genre of writing about books. What functions or imaginative effects might they have had for the readers who recorded themselves in these ways, or for the further readers who saw such records?

Thys ys my boke who so Euer sathe naye

(BodL, MS Ashmole 1481, f. 4r; described in Eldredge 1992: 93–96)¹