1. Encountering a Dream-Vision: Visual and Verbal Glosses to Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pelerinage Jhesucrist

This chapter demonstrates the reception of a medieval text could involve complex interactions between reader and manuscript. The text might acquire glosses, that is, quotations from authorities to bolster its points or comment on it, and these glosses then might accompany some exemplars of the text as it circulated. The reader-viewer might then interact with this complex artifact in a variety of ways, including making insertions in the margin such as the word nota to call attention to specific passages, thereby changing the experience of a future reader-viewer of the manuscript. The multivocality of a glossed manuscript could thus actively come into to play. Finally, the exemplar itself might be copied, in the process of which every aspect of the instantiated text was subject to change, whether deliberate or inadvertent. The chapter explores all of these possibilities in this study of three manuscript copies. Keywords:glossed manuscript; Guillaume de Digulleville; Pelerinage Jhesucrist ; verbal glosses; visual glosses