Makers and Users of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A.S.G. Edwards

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.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Winning and Wasting in Wynnere and Wastoure and Piers Plowman - John A. Burrow The Reference Work in the Fifteenth Century: John Whethamstede's Granarium - Alfred Hiatt Pageants Reconsidered - Martha W. Driver Codicology, Localization and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 108 - Orietta Da Rold The Fillers of the Auchinleck Manuscript and the Literary Culture of the West Midlands - Susanna Fein Tanner 190 Revisited - Nicolas Barker Early Printed Continental Books owned in England: Some Examples in the Takamiya Collection - Toshiyuki Takamiya Early Printed Continental Books owned in England: Some Examples in the Takamiya Collection - Richard Linenthal The Two Issues of More's Book against Luther - A I Doyle Trinity College MS 516: A Clerical Historian's Personal Miscellany - John Scattergood Katherine de la Pole and East Anglian Manuscript Production in the Fifteenth Century: An Unrecognized Patron? - Carol Meale Past Ownership: Evidence of Book Ownership by English Merchants in the Later Middle Ages - Kathleen Scott From Poggio to Caxton: Early Translations of some of Poggio's Latin Facetiae - Lotte Hellinga Love in the 1530s - John J. Thompson Editorial Glossing and Reader Resistance in a Copy of Robert Crowley's Piers Plowman - Jane Griffiths Beaupré Bell and the Editing of Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century - Simon Horobin A. S. G. Edwards: List of Publications Index of Manuscripts General Index Tabula Gratulatoria

About the Author :
The late Derek Pearsall was Emeritus Gurney Professor of Middle English Literature at Harvard University; he wrote extensively on Chaucer, Gower, Langland and Lydgate, including biographies of Chaucer and Lydgate, an edition of the C-text of Langland's Piers Plowman.

Review :
[O]ffers a compendium of much of the research going on in Middle English manuscript and bibliographical studies and will be invaluable to scholars at all levels. These essays bring new findings to the table and deserve to be widely read by students of medieval books. An excellent volume that everyone working in early book studies will want to read, and from which those who do not normally engage with manuscript and print studies would learn a great deal. [The essays] are generous, rigorous, richly detailed and replete with fascinating discoveries about medieval books. It is precisely this sort of research that can offer clinching evidence for arguments about premodern books and the texts contained in them. It is vital that there remains a publishing space for this level of evidence.