Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts: (The New Middle Ages)

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.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction.- Part I Middle English Clerks, Texts and Readers.- 2. Reading Dreams, Casting the Future and Other Learned Mirths: The Harley Scribe as Proto-Chaucerian Clerk.- 3. Griselda as Mary: Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Alanus de Rupe’s Marian Exemplum.- 4. On Chaucer’s Clerk, His Books and the Value of Education.- 5. Freedom and Choice: Postnuptial Negotiation, the Flitch of Bacon Custom, and the Woe of Marriage in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and The Book of Margery Kempe.- Part II The Lollards, Their Saints and Their Texts.- 6. The Making of a Monumental Edition: The Holy Bible … The Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wyclif and His Followers.- 7. Paratextual Frames for the Middle English Reader: The Additional Pauline Prologues in Cambridge, Emmanuel College MS 108, a Wycliffite New Testament.- 8. Lollard Book Production and Richard Rolle’s English Psalter and Canticles.- 9. Blessed Hildegard: Another Kind of Lollard Saint.- Part III Old English and Its Afterlife.- 10. “In his heart he believed in God, but he could not speak like a man”: Martyrdom, Monstrosity, Speech, and the Dog-headed Saint Christopher.- 11. Hengist’s Tongue: Remembering (Old) English in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis.- 12. The Failed Masculinities of Tostig Godwinson.- 13. Elizabeth Elstob, Old English Law, and the Origin of Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Critical Edition of Samuel Pegge’s “An Historical Account of … the Textus Roffensis” (1767).

About the Author :
Sharon M. Rowley is Professor of English at Christopher Newport University, USA. Her publications include The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (2011), “Bede and the Northern Kingdoms” (2013) and “Textual Studies, Gender and Performance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2003). She is currently editing the Old English Bede with Greg Waite.

Review :
“Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts is an enjoyable edited collection that makes valuable contributions to early and late medieval literary studies.” (Patrick Outhwaite, Speculum, Vol. 99 (4), October, 2024) “This book is a collection of thirteen papers, mostly by established and distinguished Scholars … . Von Nolcken’s interest in textual scholarship and close attention to detail are well served by her colleagues in this collection. It continues many conversations: on lollards, on Chaucer’s marriage debates, on saints and martyrdom, on the complications of editing and the textual history of manuscripts and books. … a satisfying and productive read.” (M. J. Toswell, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 123 (1), January2024)