This chapter compares the patterns of capitalization in the earliest Anglo-Norman witness of the Roman de Brut with those of the Continental ‘Guiot’ manuscript.

The question of the possible significance of the placing of majuscules (i.e., capital letters) by the various scribes who have transmitted Wace's Roman de Brut to us surfaces with some regularity in informal discussions of the work. The issue arises primarily from the division of the poem into indented paragraphs by Ivor Arnold, in his edition of the work for the Société des Anciens Textes Français: the practice remains uncommented on in the Introduction or in the discussion of editorial principles, but these highly visible textual dividers naturally lead the reader to wonder about medieval scribal usage in this regard. Intuitively, one would expect a text of the length of the Roman de Brut (14,866 octosyllabic lines, typically well over 100 folios of parchment) to have displayed some form of structural division, possibly from the earliest days of manuscript tradition, simply for practical reasons. As pointed out by Mary Carruthers in her now classic study The Book of Memory and Paul Saenger in his groundbreaking Space Between Words, manuscript layout was an important element in the mnemonic techniques used by medieval readers. Moreover, the systematic study of the manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes over past decades has shown that the study of the placement of capitals can provide useful insights into the way a text was read.