Chapter 2 discusses the scribes’ handling of damage and irregularity in parchment in manuscripts of English literature. It sets out how damage and irregularity arose and describes the methods scribes used to repair or counteract those features of parchment. From these methods, the author infers that scribes ignored and even obscured the organic oddity and damage in parchment, instead hylomorphically pursuing an idea of the page more perfect and more rectilinear than was the matter on which they imposed it, and in some cases worried about disruptions to the text’s appearance and reception. Rather than engage with the agency of their materials, they imposed on them immaterial ideas about the book and the use of its texts.

Chapter 3 explains the methods of scribes for ruling manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century, from a variety of works but especially those of Thomas Hoccleve. It notes that scribes imposed geometric designs onto materials hylomorphically. It then contrasts their failures to achieve regular design. It suggests that ruling patterns seldom had a practical function to articulate the text by means of page design, but that ruling was sometimes a craft process pursued almost habitually by scribes, and at other times was an inherited convention with a force of its own. It concludes that ruling on the material pages was less important to scribes than the immaterial ideas that governed page design. Ruling was ultimately jettisoned.

Chapter 5 examines the annotations by scribes and marginalia by readers in manuscripts of the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A quantitative survey of the treatment of margins shows that, although poets planned elaborate paratexts for their works, scribes and readers seldom used the page for annotation or marginalia. From this survey the author deduces that scribes and readers in the fifteenth century were more interested in reading the poem continuously and for kinds of reading aloud or for pleasure, in ways that do not lend themselves to written record in margins. The poem lives in an immaterial dimension of cognition and feeling, beyond what appears on the material page.