Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.

"One of the most important developments in medieval English literary studies since the 1980s has been the growth of manuscript studies. The thirteen essays in this volume discuss aspects of the design and distribution of manuscripts in late medieval England, focusing particularly on vernacular manuscripts of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries." "This binary focus on secular and devotional texts illuminates shared networks of production and dissemination, and considerably expands current knowledge of regional and metropolitan book production in the period before printing."--BOOK JACKET.

In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.

Scholars of the Middle Ages are familiar with the notion of text as an inscribed document, whether that inscription occurs upon stone, metal, vellum or textiles, but the concept of inscription and, therefore, of text, can be extended to cover a range of evidence. Thus, one might speak of archaeological remains, land use patterns, traditional stories, remnant practices and revenant beliefs as constituting texts in their own right. Broadly defined then, text is the means by which we engage with the historical subject. The medievalist, however, faces particular constraints in interpreting these texts through the agencies of their transmission. Questions such as who authored these texts, when and why, intersect with problems of transcription, translation and redaction to inform a complex discourse. The majority of the chapters in this book started life as papers presented at a conference entitled Text and Transmission in Early Medieval Europe and the title of this book ultimately derives from that theme. The subjects these chapters deal with range in geography from Ireland through to Byzantium, and cover almost a millennium of European history, but they are united in their effort to prise from their subjects some truths about texts, transmission and the critical literacies needed to interpret both.

Essays suggesting new ways of studying the crucial but sometimes difficult range of medieval mystical material. This volume seeks to explore the origins, context and content of the anchoritic and mystical texts produced in England during the Middle Ages and to examine the ways in which these texts may be studied and taught today. It foregrounds issues of context and interaction, seeking both to position medieval spiritual writings against a surprisingly wide range of contemporary contexts and to face the challenge of making these texts accessible to a wider readership. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, incorporate historical, literary and theological perspectives and offer critical approaches and background material which will inform both research and teaching. The approaches to Middle English anchoritic and mystical texts suggested in this volume are many and varied. In this they reflect the richness and complexity of the contexts from which these writings emerged. These essays are offered aspart of an ongoing exploration of aspects of medieval spirituality which, while posing a considerable challenge to modern readers, also offer invaluable insights into the interaction between medieval culture and belief. Contributors: E.A. Jones, Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden, Santha Bhattachariji, Denis Renevey, A.C. Spearing, Thomas Bestul, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Barry A. Windeatt, Alexandra Barratt, R.S. Allen, Roger Ellis, Ann M. Hutchison, Marion Glasscoe, Catherine Innes-Parker

This volume suggests new ways of reading and thinking about the religious culture of late-medieval England. It explores an unusually wide spectrum of Latin and vernacular religious texts, from catechetic handbooks to descriptions of mystical experience, and pays particular attention to the transmission and reception of these texts. The book collects together some of Vincent Gillespie's most influential and important articles from the last twenty-five years. In addition, the author offers a substantial introduction and commentary, which looks at changes in the field, as well as suggesting further reading and areas for future research. The first section "What to Read" discusses lay access to devotional materials; the second, "How to Read," looks at vernacular texts and the modes of reading those texts facilitate and encourage, while section three, "Writing the Ineffable," considers mystical writing's affective and imaginative engagement with the ineffable.

In the Middle Ages, rolls were ubiquitous as a writing support. While scholars have long examined the texts and images on rolls, they have rarely taken the manuscripts themselves into account. This volume readdresses this imbalance by focusing on the materiality and various usages of rolls in late medieval England and France. Researchers from England, France, Germany and Singapore demonstrate in 11 contributions how this approach can increase our understanding of the rolls and their contents, as well as the contexts in which they were produced and used.