The Middle English book : scribes and readers, 1350 -1500 /
"The Middle English Book addresses a series of quite basic--but largely, as yet, unanswered--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 diver...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press,
[2023]
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| Series: | Oxford studies in medieval literature and culture.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "The Middle English Book addresses a series of quite basic--but largely, as yet, unanswered--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 1350-1500 (that is, every surviving and substantially complete pre-1500 copy of The Prick of Conscience, William Langland's Piers Plowman, and John Lydgate's 'Dietary' and 'Stans puer ad mensam'). 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, demonstrating the ubiquity of bureaucracies within late medieval England. As a result of this examination, The Middle English Book argues that literary production was a decentred affair, one taking place within these numerous modest, yet complex, institutions that supported writing. But it 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"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xv, 288 pages ): illustrations. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9780191968006 0191968005 9780192699800 0192699806 9780192699817 0192699814 |