Medieval literary and intellectual culture intertwined ideas of reading with ideas of collection. Many surviving manuscripts bear witness to accretive and aggregative approaches to text. Medieval writers in Latin, French, and Middle English, in sophisticated theological texts and casual household books, characterize reading itself as a process of collection. This under-considered trope surfaces in vernacular literary collections, whether housed in manuscripts or textual frameworks. Such assemblages bear witness to the transmission and consumption of their collected contents even as they enact visual and textual interventions that condition their reception. My dissertation investigates the ways in which collections of texts self-consciously encode the processes of reading and of textual gathering and arrangement. Text collections shape a range of intellectual and morally-inflected activities encompassing consumption, reflection, and transformation. In doing so, they reveal how lay vernacular reading practices were theorized, prescribed, and performed.

The first part of the dissertation examines reading as a concept in the Middle Ages. I assess how Latin and vernacular treatises on reading and compilation metaphorically articulate the act of reading as a range of dynamic assimilative and generative processes. These discourses of compilation argue for a fundamentally integrated understanding of processes of reading and processes of collection and textual production. The second part of the dissertation explores the resonances of these metaphorical expressions and the processes they represent in English medieval vernacular literary production, with a particular focus on the Middle English Seven Sages of Rome and two manuscripts in which it was copied: Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Adv. 19.2.1 (Auchinleck) and Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354. These and other text collections render processes of reading visible and penetrable, fixing upon the page the reading mind's engagement with text. Textual framing devices--from brief headings to elaborate narratives--ventriloquize the guidance of compiling encyclopedists and spiritual advisors or the visions of dreamers and tale-tellers. Along with the material interventions of the physical framers of these texts, they work as textual intermediaries, conditioning not only what was read as collection, but also articulating how these texts might be read and interpreted well.