The Dynamics Of The Medieval Manuscript

This collection of essays examines the various dynamic processes by which texts are preserved, transmitted, and modified in medieval multi-text codices, focusing on the meanings generated by new contexts and the possible reader experiences provoked by novel configurations and material presentation. Containing essays on text collections from many different European countries and in a wide range of medieval languages, this volume sheds new light on common trends and regional differences in the history of book production and reading practices.

This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.

This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to the 20th century, in a range of historical genres and contexts of text production, mediation and consumption. However, more fundamentally, it also seeks to expand our conception of text and the communicative ‘spaces’ surrounding them, and probe the explanatory potential of the concepts under investigation. Though essentially rooted in historical linguistics and philology, the twelve contributions of this volume are also open to insights from other disciplines (such as medieval manuscript studies and bibliography, but also information studies, marketing studies, and even digital electronics), and thus tackle opportunities and challenges in researching the dynamics of text and framing phenomena in a historical perspective.

Drawing on statistical techniques and samples this book offers an estimate of medieval production rates of manuscripts in the Latin West. Such information is a helpful production indicator for a period of which we have so little other quantitative data.

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

The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.