The Making of the Vernon Manuscript

The Making of the Vernon Manuscript PDF Author: Wendy Scase
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503530468
Category : Christian literature, English
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume addresses important questions in late medieval book production and the history of the medieval book through original and substantial studies of one of the most remarkable surviving examples. The Vernon Manuscript, carefully copied and lavishly decorated around 1390-1400 for pious users, is famous as the largest and arguably the most important Middle English anthology. Its sheer size and conservation concerns mean that up to now it has been little studied as a book. The essays in this volume exploit for the first time the mass of new data generated by the Vernon Manuscript Project. Specialists in art history, bibliography, codicology, historical linguistics, and palaeography have been commissioned to interrogate this material from their various disciplinary perspectives. The result is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary volume which sheds new light on an iconic medieval book and on a transitional period of innovation and experimentation in vernacular book production.

The Making of the Vernon Manuscript

The Making of the Vernon Manuscript PDF Author: Wendy Scase
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503530468
Category : Christian literature, English
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume addresses important questions in late medieval book production and the history of the medieval book through original and substantial studies of one of the most remarkable surviving examples. The Vernon Manuscript, carefully copied and lavishly decorated around 1390-1400 for pious users, is famous as the largest and arguably the most important Middle English anthology. Its sheer size and conservation concerns mean that up to now it has been little studied as a book. The essays in this volume exploit for the first time the mass of new data generated by the Vernon Manuscript Project. Specialists in art history, bibliography, codicology, historical linguistics, and palaeography have been commissioned to interrogate this material from their various disciplinary perspectives. The result is a ground-breaking interdisciplinary volume which sheds new light on an iconic medieval book and on a transitional period of innovation and experimentation in vernacular book production.

Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500 PDF Author: Daniel Sawyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599593
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. While much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weights of books in medieval bindings to relationships between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small-and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript sheds fresh light on poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their works were read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems, in a pattern of mutual influence.

Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature

Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Emily Steiner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521824842
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Emily Steiner describes the rich intersections between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late medieval England.

The Middle English Book

The Middle English Book PDF Author: Michael Johnston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192699814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science—but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. The Middle English Book addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the relationship between those copying literature and those reading it? To answer these questions, this book examines 202 literary manuscripts from the period 1350 to 1500. First, this study suggests that most surviving manuscripts fall into four categories, depending on the proximity and relationship of that manuscript's scribes and readers. But beyond proposing these new categories, this book also looks at the history of writing practices, and demonstrates the ubiquity of bureaucracies within late medieval England. As a result, The Middle English Book argues that literary production was a decentered affair, one that took place within these numerous, modest, yet complex, bureaucracies. But this book also argues that, because literary production arose in such scattered bureaucracies, manuscripts were local products, produced within the cultural and economic milieu of their users. Manuscripts thus form a fundamentally different sort of cultural artefact than the printed books with which we are familiar—a form of centralized, urbanized, and commercialized textual production that was just over the historical horizon in late medieval England.

Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England

Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England PDF Author: Mary C. Flannery
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137428627
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
We are living in an age in which the relationship between reading and space is evolving swiftly. Cutting-edge technologies and developments in the publication and consumption of literature continue to uncover new physical, electronic, and virtual contexts in which reading can take place. In comparison with the accessibility that has accompanied these developments, the medieval reading experience may initially seem limited and restrictive, available only to a literate few or to their listeners; yet attention to the spaces in which medieval reading habits can be traced reveals a far more vibrant picture in which different kinds of spaces provided opportunities for a wide range of interactions with and contributions to the texts being read. Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.

Middle English Devotional Compilations

Middle English Devotional Compilations PDF Author: Diana Denissen
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786834774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
The book offers a new perspective on late medieval compiling activity. Additionally, it offers a more nuanced perspective on late medieval religious culture in England. Lastly, it examines three major, but understudied Middle English texts in depth: the Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.

Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts

Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts PDF Author: Sharon M. Rowley
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030557243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts. In order to better understand the human agency, creativity and forms of sanctity of medieval England, these essays investigate both the production of medieval texts and the people whose hands and minds created, altered and/or published them. The chapters consider the writings of major authors such as Chaucer, Gower and Wyclif in relation to texts, authors and ideals less well-known today, and in light of the translation and interpretive reproduction of the Bible in Middle English. The essays make some texts available for the first time in print, and examine the roles of historical scholars in the construction of medieval English literature and textual cultures. By doing so, this collection investigates what it means to recover, study and represent some of the key medieval English texts that continue to influence us today.

Transforming Early English

Transforming Early English PDF Author: Jeremy J. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108356001
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such as spelling, script and font, and punctuation - often neglected in critical engagement with past texts - relate closely to dynamic, shifting socio-cultural processes, imperatives and functions. This theme is illustrated through numerous case-studies in textual recuperation, ranging from the reinvention of Old English poetry and prose in the later medieval and early modern periods, to the eighteenth-century 'vernacular revival' of literature in Older Scots.

Romance and Its Contexts in Fifteenth-century England

Romance and Its Contexts in Fifteenth-century England PDF Author: Raluca L. Radulescu
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1782041753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Although the anonymous pious Middle English romances and Sir Thomas Malory's 'Morte Darthur' have rarely been studied in relation to each other, they in fact share at least two thematic concerns, vocabularies of suffering and genealogical concerns, as this book demonstrates. By examining a broad cultural and political framework stretching from Richard II's deposition to the end of the Wars of the Roses through the prism of piety, politics and penitence, the author draws attention to the specific circumstances in which Sir Isumbras, Sir Gowther, Roberd of Cisely, Henry Lovelich's 'History of the Holy Grail' and Malory's 'Morte' were read in fifteenth-century England. In the case of the pious romances this implies a study of their reception long after their original composition or translation centuries earlier; in Lovelich's case, an examination of metropolitan culture leads to an opening of the discussion to French romance models as well as English chronicle writing.

Pastoral Care in Medieval England

Pastoral Care in Medieval England PDF Author: Peter Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317083407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Pastoral Care, the religious mission of the Church to minister to the laity and care for their spiritual welfare, has been a subject of growing interest in medieval studies. This volume breaks new ground with its broad chronological scope (from the early eleventh to the late fifteenth centuries), and its interdisciplinary breadth. New and established scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history and musicology, bring their specialist perspectives to bear on textual and visual source materials. The varied contributions include discussions of politics, ecclesiology, book history, theology and patronage, forming a series of conversations that reveal both continuities and divergences across time and media, and exemplify the enriching effects of interdisciplinary work upon our understanding of this important topic.