Reading English verse in manuscript c.1350-c.1500 /
"This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers' choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford, United Kingdom :
Oxford University Press,
2020.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Series: | Oxford English monographs.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers' choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers"--Publisher's description. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource : illustrations |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9780192599605 0192599607 9780192599599 0192599593 |