Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England

Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England
Author: Michael Johnston
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2023-10-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501516485

Susanna Fein’s long and distinguished scholarly career has helped to redefine how we understand the role of scribes and manuscripts from late medieval England. She has carried out groundbreaking research on seminal manuscripts (e.g., Harley 2253, the Thornton Manuscripts, John Audley’s autograph manuscript, and the Auchinleck Manuscript). She has written extensively on the more complex and challenging metrical forms the period produced. And she has edited foundational primary texts and collections of essays. A wide range of scholars have been influenced by Fein’s work, many of whom present original research—much of it following trails first laid down by Fein—in this volume.

Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England

Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England
Author: Matthew Fisher
Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814211984

Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts surviving in medieval manuscripts as authored. Culling evidence from history writing in later medieval England, Matthew Fisher concludes that we must reject the axiomatic division between scribe and author. Using the peculiarities of authority and intertextuality unique to medieval historiography, Fisher exposes the rich ambiguities of what it means for medieval scribes to "write" books. He thus frames the composition, transmission, and reception--indeed, the authorship--of some medieval texts as scribal phenomena. History writing is an inherently intertextual genre: in order to write about the past, texts must draw upon other texts. Scribal Authorship demonstrates that medieval historiography relies upon quotation, translation, and adaptation in such a way that the very idea that there is some line that divides author from scribe is an unsustainable and modern critical imposition. Given the reality that a scribe's work was far more nuanced than the simplistic binary of error and accuracy would suggest, Fisher completely overturns many of our assumptions about the processes through which manuscripts were assembled and texts (both canonical literature and the less obviously literary) were composed.

Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England

Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England
Author: Daniel Wakelin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2022-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009100580

Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft
Author: Daniel Wakelin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2014-11-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316062120

This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature

Author, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature
Author: Rory G. Critten
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1843845059

The works of four major fifteenth-century writers re-examined, showing their innovative reconceptualization of Middle English authorship and the manuscript book.

Chaucer's Scribes

Chaucer's Scribes
Author: Lawrence Warner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2018-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108426271

Important intervention in Middle English studies that challenges widely accepted narratives on the identities of Chaucer's scribes.

Participatory reading in late-medieval England

Participatory reading in late-medieval England
Author: Heather Blatt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2018-05-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526118017

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book traces affinities between digital and medieval media, exploring how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about increasing literacy, audiences’ agency, literary culture and media formats from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from well-known poems of Chaucer and Lydgate to wall texts, banqueting poems and devotional works written by and for women, Participatory reading argues that making readers work offered writers ways to shape their reputations and the futures of their productions. At the same time, the interactive reading practices they promoted enabled audiences to contribute to – and contest – writers’ burgeoning authority, making books and reading work for everyone.

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England
Author: Matthew Giancarlo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-06-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521147729

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England investigates the relationship between the development of parliament and the practice of English poetry in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this period, the bureaucratic political culture of parliamentarians, clerks, and scribes overlapped with the artistic practice of major poets like Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, all of whom had strong ties to parliament. Matthew Giancarlo investigates these poets together in the specific context of parliamentary events and controversies, as well as in the broader environment of changing constitutional ideas. Two chapters provide fresh analyses of the parliamentary ideologies that developed from the thirteenth century onward, and four chapters investigate the parliamentary aspects of each poet, as well as the later Lancastrian imitators of Langland. This study demonstrates the importance of the changing parliamentary environs of late medieval England and their centrality to the early growth of English narrative and lyric forms.

Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England

Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England
Author: Margaret Connolly
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2022-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 184384575X

Essays bringing out the richness and vibrancy of pre-modern textual culture in all its variety.