About the Book
Essays on book history, manuscripts and reading during a period of considerable change.
The production, transmission, and reception of texts from England and beyond during the late medieval and early renaissance periods are the focus of this volume. Chapters consider the archives and the material contexts in which texts were produced, read, and re-read; the history of specific manuscripts and early printed books; and some of the continuities and changes in literary and book production, dissemination, and reception in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Responding to Professor Julia Boffey's pioneering work on medieval and early Tudor material and literary culture, they cover a range of genres - from practical texts written in Latin to works of Middle English poetryand prose, both secular and religious - and examine an assortment of different reading contexts: lay, devotional, local, regional, and national.
TAMARA ATKIN is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early RenaissanceLiterature, and JACLYN RAJSIC is Lecturer in Medieval Literature, at the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.
Contributors: Laura Ashe, Priscilla Bawcutt, Martin Camargo, Margaret Connolly, Robert R. Edwards, A.S.G. Edwards, Susanna Fein, Joel Grossman, Alfred Hiatt, Pamela M. King, Matthew Payne, Derek Pearsall, Corinne Saunders, Barry Windeatt, R.F. Yeager.
Table of Contents:
Introduction - Tamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic
Gower's 'Epistle to Archbishop Arundel': The Evidence of Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98 - Robert F. Yeager
From Oxford to Eton with Master John Maunshull: Teaching the Tria sunt in Bodleian Library MS Laud misc. 707 - Martin Camargo
Gavin Douglas, Aesthetic Organisation, and Individual Distraction - Pamela M. King
Gavin Douglas's Eneados: the 1553 Edition, and its Early Owners and Readers - Priscilla Bawcutt
Caxton and the Crown: The Evidence from the Exchequer of Receipt Reconsidered - Matthew Payne
Late-Medieval Books of Hours and their Early-Tudor Readers in and Around London - Margaret Connolly
London, British Library, MS Harley 367 and the Antiquarian Ideals of John Stow - Joel Grossman
Writing Revelation: The Book of Margery Kempe - Corinne Saunders
'What strange ruins': Reading Back to Thebes - Robert R. Edwards
Tyre in Africa: Dido's Flight and Sallust's Jugurtha - Alfred Hiatt
Trinitarian Piety and Married Chastity in The Pistel of Swete Susan - Susanna Fein
True Image? Alternative Veronicas in Late Medieval England - Barry A Windeatt
The cureless wound: Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and the Poetry of Blood - Laura Ashe
Afterword - Derek Pearsall
Julia Boffey: A Bibliography - A S G Edwards
About the Author :
A. S. G. Edwards is Honorary Professor of Medieval Manuscripts at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature at the Department of English Studies, University of Durham. 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. LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford. Margaret Connolly is Professor of Palaeography and Codicology at the University of St. Andrews. PRISCILLA BAWCUTT, honorary professor at the University of Liverpool, was one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars of Older Scots. She edited The Poems of William Dunbar for the Association of Scottlish Literary Studies (1997/8), and The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas for the Scottish Text Society (revised 2003); she has written very widely and deeply on all aspects of Older Scots literature, includingher foundational study, Gavin Douglas (1976). IAN C. CUNNINGHAM, former Keeper of Manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland, has published extensively on Latin and Older Scots manuscripts, and edited and translated Theophrastus R.F. YEAGER is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Language, University of West Florida.
Review :
As the editors write, "For Julia, excellent scholarship is a conversation" (1), the essays collected in this volume are a testament to that ongoing conversation for scholars of varied subfields, methodologies, and interests.
