ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Red Book of Darley (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 422) as a window into the broader book culture that subsumed them. Rather than tracing the bonds shared by schoolmasters and pupils or patrons and poets, the chapter traces the similarly intimate, if occasionally more private, affective entanglements of early medieval English readers and their manuscripts, as embodied by the images and poems in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 422. CCCC 422 offers a case study for early medieval thinking about books themselves and the ways in which they could shape the lives of the people who lived alongside them—as well as a testament to the global investments of early medieval English bibliophiles, who imaginatively assembled knowledge from far-flung libraries in Libya, Greece, and India, as in the Old English poems known as Solomon and Saturn I and II, which form a part of CCCC 422’s decidedly global entanglements.
