Aesthetic Apprehensions: Silences and Absences in False Familiarities is a scholarly conversation about encounters between habitual customs of reading and seeing and their ruptures and ossifications. In closely connected discourses, the thirteen essays collected here set out to carefully probe the ways our aesthetic immersions are obfuscated by deep-seated epistemological and ideological apprehensions by focusing on how the tropology carried by silence, absence, and false familarity crystallize to define the gaps that open up. As they figure in the subtitle of this volume, the tropes may seem straightforward enough, but a closer examination of their function in relation to social, cultural, and political assumptions and gestalts reveal troubling oversights. Aesthetic Apprehensions comes to name the attempt at capturing the outlier meanings residing in habituated receptions as well as the uneasy relations that result from aesthetic practices already in place, emphasizing the kinds of thresholds of sense and sensation which occasion rupture and creativity. Such, after all, is the promise of the threshold, of the liminal: to encourage our leap into otherness, for then to find ourselves and our sensing again, and anew in novel comprehensions.

Essays on the writing and textual culture of Europe in the middle ages. Medieval Europe was characterized by a sophisticated market for the production, exchange and sale of written texts. This volume brings together papers on a range of topics, centred on manuscript studies and textual criticism, which explore these issues from a pan-European perspective. They examine the prolonged and varied processes through which Europe's different parts entered into modern reading, writing and communicative practices, drawing on a range ofapproaches and perspectives; they consider material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the Middle Ages. Dr Aidan Conti teaches in the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen; Dr Orietta Da Rold teaches in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; Dr Philip Shaw teaches at the School of English, University of Leicester. Contributors: Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Stewart Brookes, Aidan Conti, Orietta Da Rold, Helen Fulton, Marilena Maniaci, Debora Matos, Annina Seiler, Peter A. Stokes, Nadia Togni, Svetlana Tsonkova, Matilda Watson, George Younge.