This volume gathers the contributions of senior and junior scholars--all indebted to the pathbreaking work of Derek Pearsall--to showcase new research prompted by his rich and ongoing legacy as a literary critic, editor, and seminal founder of Middle English manuscript studies. The contributors aim both to honor Pearsall's work in the field he established and to introduce the complexities of interdisciplinary manuscript studies to students already familiar with medieval literature. The contributors explore a range of issues, from the study of medieval literary manuscripts to the history of medieval books, libraries, literacy, censorship, and the social classes who used the books and manuscripts--nobles, children, schoolmasters, priests, merchants, and more. In addressing reading practices, essays provide a wealth of information on marginal commentaries, images and interpretive methods, international transmission, and early print and editorial methods.
""New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices" marks the heritage of the distinguished scholar Derek Pearsall while highlighting his continuing influence on medieval manuscript studies. Buoyed by fine work of senior scholars, the collection also introduces readers to stimulating work by an upcoming generation of more recent practitioners, all of whom address crucial issues in the field: the particulars of individual manuscripts, including scribal practice, marginal commentary, and audience reception. The result is a fine collection at once canonical in some respects and innovative in others." --Paul H. Strohm, Anna S. Garbedian Professor Emeritus of the Humanities, Columbia University

Material on the production and transmission of medieval literature and the early formation of the canon of English poetry. A wide range of poets is covered - Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, the Gawain poet, Langland, and Lydgate, along with the translator of Claudian's De Consulatu Stilichonis. The Turnament of Totenham is read in termsof theory of the carnivalesque and popular culture, and major contributions are made to current linguistic, editorial and codicological controversies. Going beyond the Middle Ages, the book also considers the sixteenth-century reception of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Post-Reformation reading of Lydgate. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the production and transmission of medieval literature, and in the early formation of the canon of English poetry. Contributors: JULIA BOFFEY, J.A. BURROW, CHRISTOPHER CANNON, MARTHA DRIVER, SIAN ECHARD, A.S.G. EDWARDS, KATE D. HARRIS, S.S. HUSSEY, KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON, CAROL M. MEALE, LINNE R. MOONEY, CHARLOTTE C. MORSE, V.I.J. SCATTERGOOD, ELIZABETH SOLOPOVA, ESTELLE STUBBS, JOHN THOMPSON.

Essays exploring different aspects of late medieval and early modern manuscript and book culture. Late medieval manuscripts and early modern print history form the focus of this volume. It includes new work on the compilation of some important medieval manuscript miscellanies and major studies of merchant patronage and of a newly revealed woman patron, alongside explorations of medieval texts and the post-medieval reception history of Langland, Chaucer and Nicholas Love. It thus pays a fitting tribute to the career of Professor A.S.G. Edwards, highlighting his scholarly interests and demonstrating the influence of his achievements. Carol M. Meale is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol; the late Derek Pearsall was Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and Honorary Research Professor at the University of York. Contributors: Nicolas Barker, J.A. Burrow, A.I. Doyle, Martha W. Driver, Susanna Fein, Jane Griffiths, Lotte Hellinga, Alfred Hiatt, Simon Horobin, Richard Linenthal,Carol M. Meale, Orietta Da Rold, John Scattergood, Kathleen L. Scott, Toshiyuki Takamiya, John J. Thompson.

New essays on late medieval manuscripts highlight the complicated network of their production and dissemination. One of the most important developments in medieval English literary studies since the 1980s has been the growth of manuscript studies. Long regarded as mere textual repositories, and treated superficially by editors, manuscripts are now acknowledged as centrally important in the study of later medieval texts. The essays collected here discuss aspects of the design and distribution of manuscripts in late medieval England, with a particular focus on vernacular manuscripts of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those in the first half consider material evidence for scribal decisions about design: these range from analysis of individual codices to broader discussions of particular types of manuscripts, both religious and secular. Later essays look at the evidence for the production and distribution of manuscripts of specific English texts or types of text. These include the major Middle English poems The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, as well as key religious works such as Love's Mirror, Hilton's Scale of Perfection, the Speculum Vitae and The Pricke of Conscience, all of which survive in significant numbers of manuscripts. The comparison of secular and devotional texts illuminates shared networks of production and dissemination, and increases our knowledge of regional and metropolitan book production in the period before printing. Contributors: DANIEL W. MOSSER, JACOB THAISEN, TAKAKO KATO, SHERRY L. REAMES, AMELIA GROUNDS, ALEXANDRA BARRATT, JULIAN M. LUXFORD, LINNE R. MOONEY, MICHAEL G. SARGENT, JOHNJ. THOMPSON, MARGARET CONNOLLY, RALPH HANNA, GEORGE R. KEISER.

Collectively, the contributors to Imagining the Book offer a snapshot of current research in English manuscript study in the pre-modern period on the inter-related topics of patrons and collectors, compilers, editors and readers, and identities beyond the book. This volume responds to the recent development and institutionalization of 'History of the Book' within the wider English Studies discipline. Scholars working in the pre-printing era with the material vestiges of a predominantly manuscript culture are currently establishing their own models of production and reception. Research in this area is now an accepted part of twenty-first century Medieval Studies. Within such a context, it is frequently observed that scribal culture found imaginative ways to deal with the technological watersheds represented by the transition from memory to written record, roll to codex, or script to print. In such an 'eventful' environment, texts and books not infrequently slip through the semi-permeable boundaries laboured over by previous generations of medievalists: boundaries that demarcate orality and literacy; 'literary' and 'historical'; 'religious' and 'secular'; pre- and post-Conquest compositions, or 'Medieval' and 'Renaissance' attitudes and writings. Once texts are regarded as offering indices of community- or self-definition, or models of piety and good behaviour (and the codices holding them statements of prestige and influence), the book historian is left to contemplate the real or imagined importance and status of books and writing within the larger socio-political, often local, milieux in which they were once produced and read. All fourteen essays in this volume question the status of the book in a predominantly manuscript culture. Some focus on the practical politics of book production and local circumstances; others focus on the visual experience of early readers. In this volume, the idea of the pre-modern vernacular book is pursued in terms of its miscellaneity and its association with localised writing projects undertaken by (and occasionally also for) a polyglot and sometimes also socially-aware English readership. Such investigation is valuable since it enables us to recognise the textual networks, the sources and the readership that mark the pre-modern codex as an important medium of social and literary exchange quite distinct from printed books.

Influential scholars from Britain and North America discuss future directions in rapidly expanding field of manuscript study. The study of manuscripts is one of the most active areas of current research in medieval studies: manuscripts are the basic primary material evidence for literary scholars, historians and art-historians alike, and there has been an explosion of interest over the past twenty years. Manuscript study has developed enormously: codices are no longer treated as inert witnesses to a culture whose character has already been determined by the modern scholar, but are active participants in a process of exploration and discovery. The articles collected here discuss the future of this process and vital questions about manuscript study for tomorrow's explorers. They deal with codicology and book production, with textual criticism, with the material structure of the medieval book, with the relation of manuscripts to literary culture, to social history and to the medieval theatre, and with the importance to manuscript study of the emerging technology of computerised digitisation and hypertext display. The essays provide an end-of-millennium perspective on the most vigorous developments in a rapidly expanding field of study. Contributors: A.I. Doyle, C. David Benson, Martha W. Driver, J.P. Gumbert, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linne R. Mooney, Eckehard Simon, Alison Stones, John Thompson. DEREK PEARSALL is former Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, York, and Professor of English at Harvard University.

Wide-ranging essays engaging with all aspects of medieval romance, from textual studies to historical sources. The essays in this volume reflect the range and diversity of approach and of critical stance which have characterised romance studies in recent years. Amongst the areas of interest addressed are those of generic definition; the role of romance in relation to emergent ideas of nationalism; the complex associations between gender and genre, and between historical events and their expression in literature. Other issues explored are the transmission and reception of texts; the nature of the audiences; and the implications of critical theory for the reading of medieval romance. Contributors: MALDWYN MILLS, J.A. BURROW, DONNA CRAWFORD, A.S.G. EDWARDS, ARLYN DIAMOND, JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE, JOHN J. THOMPSON, THORLAC TURVILLE-PETRE, DIANA SPEED, JOHN SCATTERGOOD, COLIN RICHMOND, CAROL M. MEALE.

Farmer's markets, artisanal dark chocolate, home-made bread, craft-brewed beer, and independent boutique coffee shops may not immediately call to mind issues of faith, but they should. As the "American Dream" starts to fray at both ends, millions of people are embracing values that seem to hail from a bygone era. They are seeking out the local, the small, the responsible and the nourishing instead of the cheap, the homogenized, the mass-produced and the canned. Is it possible that this renewed interest in these pre-modern values may actually offer an open door into the hearts and minds of this generation? Is there a way to explore specific, inspiring stories about coffee, bread, chocolate and art that lead people toward a truly Biblical understanding of the person, words and work of Jesus to reveal the truth, goodness and beauty of the Gospel? With fascinating stories and a thread of memoir, Jesus, Bread, and Chocolate explores the emerging-actually re-emerging-values of this post-industrial age and points out parallels between them and the teaching and ministry of Jesus and his earliest followers. Rather than seeking to tie the faith to trends in the culture, it shows how trends in the culture are already very close to the organic kind of faith that could reenergize the church and bring countless young and middle-aged people into a saving experience of Christ.