Multilingualism, the Harley Scribe, and Johannes Jacobi

After a brief discussion of the ‘miscellany’, this chapter considers the interaction in their manuscript context of some of the texts copied in or around Ludlow by the ‘Harley scribe’. A brief survey of the kinds of literature in the langue d’oïl copied by Italian scribes then precedes the examination of a bilingual Arthurian manuscript in which one of the scribes switches from French to Italian and back again. The chapter concludes by looking at the work of a scribe called Johannes Jacobi from Verona, who copies texts in French, Occitan, Italian, and Latin. Both the Harley scribe and Johannes Jacobi reflect the narrower interests of their time and place, as well as a corpus of literature in the langue d’oïl that has a universal appeal transcending local contexts.