This collection of essays examines how the paratextual apparatus of medieval manuscripts both inscribes and expresses power relations between the producers and consumers of knowledge in this important period of intellectual history. It seeks to define which paratextual features – annotations, commentaries, corrections, glosses, images, prologues, rubrics, and titles – are common to manuscripts from different branches of medieval knowledge and how they function in any particular discipline. It reveals how these visual expressions of power that organize and compile thought on the written page are consciously applied, negotiated or resisted by authors, scribes, artists, patrons and readers. This collection, which brings together scholars from the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, philosophy and music, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishing authority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shaping reader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscript culture.

Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information and Order in Medieval Manuscripts examines the role of the manuscript book in organizing and classifying knowledge. The essays demonstrate how the technologies of the book allow scholars to determine what medieval readers and writers thought information was and how it could be transmitted to others.

An exploration of the letters from the First Crusade, yielding evidence for a number of reinterpretations of the movement. The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority, and formed focal points for spiritual commemoration and para-liturgical campaigns. This volume, grounded on extensive research into the original manuscripts, and presenting numerous new manuscript witnesses, argues that some of the letters are post hoc "inventions", composed by generations of scribe-readers who visited crusading sites from the twelfth century on, adding new layers of meaning in the form of interpolations and post-scripts. Drawing upon this new understanding, and blurring the distinction of epistolary "reality", it rewrites central aspects of the history of the First Crusade, considering the documents in a new way: as markers of enthusiasm and support for the crusade movement among monastic clergy, who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading. Whether authentic letters or literary "confections", they functioned as communal sites for the celebration, commemoration and memorialisation of the expedition.

The inhabitants of early medieval Britain and Ireland shared the knowledge that the region held four peoples and the awareness that they must have originally come from 'elsewhere'. The Origin Legends of Early Medieval Britain and Ireland studies these peoples' origin stories, an important genre that has shaped national identity and collective history from the early medieval period to the present day. These multilingual texts share many common features that repay their study as a genre, but have previously been isolated as four disparate traditions and used to argue for the long roots of current nationalisms. Yet they were not written or read in isolation during the medieval period. Individual narratives were in constant development, written and rewritten to respond to other texts. This book argues that insular origin legends developed together to flesh out the history of the insular region as a whole.

'The Open Access publishing costs of this volume were covered by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Veni-project “Leaving a Lasting Impression. The Impact of Incunabula on Late Medieval Spirituality, Religious Practice and Visual Culture in the Low Countries” (grant number 275-30-036).' This volume explores various approaches to study vernacular books and reading practices across Europe in the 15th-16th centuries. Through a shared focus on the material book as an interface between producers and users, the contributors investigate how book producers conceived of their target audiences and how these vernacular books were designed and used. Three sections highlight connections between vernacularity and materiality from distinct perspectives: real and imagined readers, mobility of texts and images, and intermediality. The volume brings contributions on different regions, languages, and book types into dialogue. Contributors include Heather Bamford, Tillmann Taape, Stefan Matter, Suzan Folkerts, Karolina Mroziewicz, Martha W. Driver, Alexa Sand, Elisabeth de Bruijn, Katell Lavéant, Margriet Hoogvliet, and Walter S. Melion.

This volume contains work by scholars actively publishing on origin legends across early medieval western Europe, from the fall of Rome to the high Middle Ages. Its thematic structure creates dialogue between texts and regions traditionally studied in isolation.

VOLUME 12 (2022): COMMENTING AND COMMENTARY AS AN INTERPRETIVE MODE IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE Edited by Christina Lechtermann and Markus Stock Introduction: Commenting and Commentary as an Interpretive Mode in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Christina Lechtermann & Markus Stock The Pro-Active Scribe: Preparing the Margins of Annotated Manuscripts Erik Kwakkel Thinking from the Margins: Opening and Closing Illuminations and their Commentary Functions around 1000 Kristin Böse Reading Texts within Texts: The Special Case of Lemmata Andrew Hicks The In-/Coherences of Narrative Commentary: Commentarial Forms in the Anegenge Christina Lechtermann Dante’s Self-Commentary and the Call for Interpretation Elisa Brilli Spiritualizing Petrarchism, “Poeticizing” the Bible: Two Counter-Reformation Self-Commentaries Christine Ott and Philip Stockbrugger The Power of Glosses: Francesco Fulvio Frugoni’s Self-Commentary and Literary Criticism in the Tribunal della Critica Andrea Baldan Commenting on a Purged Model: The M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton libri omnes novis commentariis illustrati of the Jesuit Matthäus Rader (1602) Magnus Ulrich Ferber