This course teaches students to read medieval texts in Old or Middle English in manuscript form from the period up to and including the English reformations. The books in which we will read these will be from the same or later periods, in order to familiarize students with all hands, including post-medieval hands, in which medieval texts have been preserved. There will be some emphasis on reading contemporary and post-medieval marginalia and ownership inscriptions (up to 1800) in medieval manuscripts. Practical palaeographical exercises will be supplemented by broader reading, discussion of, and a short essay about the relationship between scripts and scribal cultures, literature and criticism, and the history of the book.