Bridging the gaps

: the journey of blank spaces in medieval manuscripts from scribe to screen

Abstract

This thesis examines examples of blank spaces in two medieval literary manuscripts: Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 7, one of forty-nine witnesses to Gower’s Confessio Amantis; and Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 409, the only extant multi-folio manuscript of the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose. Through their different manuscript contexts and bibliographical history, these ostensibly similar literary manuscripts offer multiple forms of blank spaces which have been examined and tracked through their subsequent editions. Chapter One outlines the categories of blank space created from the examination of the key manuscripts and how the terminology currently used to describe gaps biases the reader against blank space. Chapters Two and Three analyse these manuscripts and examine the evidence of the manuscripts’ usage provided by the blank spaces. These chapters also contain identifications of the potential sources of any inserted material along with their impacts on the manuscripts as they now appear. Chapters Four, Five, and Six trace the history of these gaps, filled or otherwise, in every printed edition of Romaunt of the Rose and Confessio Amantis to ascertain editors’ reactions to blank space. Chapter Seven does likewise for the digital editions of these texts. These chapters contain print stemmas of both texts showing the interrelations of editions and editors and map fashions of print and digital editions categorised by time period and exemplar. This thesis shows that blank spaces provide evidence of the manuscripts’ usage during and after construction and that tracking the changes in appearance of blank spaces in editions can create a pattern of data that can be used for stemmatic analysis. The silences speak.

Date of Award	2 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Margaret Connolly (Supervisor)