The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches

Description

Traditional scholarship on manuscripts has tended to focus on issues concerning their production and has shown comparatively little interest in the cultural contexts of the manuscript book. The Medieval Manuscript Book redresses this by focusing on aspects of the medieval book in its cultural situations. Written by experts in the study of the handmade book before print, this volume combines bibliographical expertise with broader insights into the theory and praxis of manuscript study in areas from bibliography to social context, linguistics to location, and archaeology to conservation. The focus of the contributions ranges widely, from authorship to miscellaneity, and from vernacularity to digital facsimiles of manuscripts. Taken as a whole, these essays make the case that to understand the manuscript book it must be analyzed in all its cultural complexity, from production to transmission to its continued adaptation.

Michael Johnston is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Purdue University, Indiana and specializes in the circulation of literary manuscripts in fifteenth-century England. He is the author of Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (2014) and the co-editor, with Susanna Fein, of Robert Thornton and his Books: New Essays on the Lincoln and London Manuscripts (2014). Michael Van Dussen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at McGill University, Montreal and specializes in communication before print in the Latin West, with emphasis on England's relations with Central Europe. He is the author of From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2012) and the co-editor, with Pavel Soukup, of Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378-1536: Textual Transmission and Networks of Readership (2013).

'The editors and Cambridge University Press have made an excellent start by including this book in the high-profile Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, a series devoted to illuminating literature in relation to medieval culture and bodies of learning. It is to be hoped that the present volume will engage a new generation of literary scholars and cultural historians in discovering manuscript culture and investigating its meanings.' Review of English Studies 'This volume is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion about the place of the medieval manuscript book within both book history and medieval studies. Reflecting the continuing growth over the past forty years of manuscript studies in both the amount and the sophistication of its research, this collection will provide an accessible and provocative entry point for future scholars. In making plain the necessity of attending to medieval texts as inescapably bound to their physical manifestations, the essays here should establish as a given that any future work in medieval studies drawing on written records will perforce have to contend with the material nature of those records.' Benjamin C. Tilghman, Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript 'This volume, a worthy addition to the series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, contains twelve new essays (plus an introduction) by a diverse group of scholars ... This is a generous collection, offering not only examples of some of the best contemporary work on manuscripts but also suggestions and recommendations for further study and new paradigms for manuscript study.' R. M. Liuzza, Journal of English and German Philology