The Middle Ages In Text And Texture

The Middle Ages in Texts and Texture is an introduction to medieval Europe unlike any other. These 26 essays, written by accomplished scholars all trained at the University of California, Berkeley, reflect on medieval texts and the opportunities they present for exploration of the Middle Ages. Introduced in a foreword by Thomas N. Bisson (Harvard University), these essays present a textured picture of the medieval world and offer models for how to reflect fruitfully on medieval sources. To help orient the reader, three maps, the editor's introduction, and an index are provided.

The essays in this collection present a textured picture of the medieval world and offer models for how to reflect fruitfully on medieval sources.

Originally published in 1991, Medieval Texts and Images is a collection of essays which critically examines medieval manuscripts. The book contains a wide range of contributions, the first examines the relationship of the Légende Dorée and its relationship to the aristocratic patrons who commissioned these manuscripts; the second scrutinises the tradition of French illumination as it was developed in Paris in the so-called Bedford Master’s workshop in the 1420s. The text examines liturgical texts of the medieval period and written and liturgical contributions to Renaissance art. Other contributions include an investigation into the written scroll within the painted composition, comparing various compositional and thematic functions in the depiction of a Crucifixion and a study of Christian vernacular poetry. This collection provides a comprehensive overview of the use of text and image in medieval literature.

This work presents a thorough historicist account of the development of subjectivity in the medieval period, as traced in medieval literature and historical documentation.

Scholars of the Middle Ages are familiar with the notion of text as an inscribed document, whether that inscription occurs upon stone, metal, vellum or textiles, but the concept of inscription and, therefore, of text, can be extended to cover a range of evidence. Thus, one might speak of archaeological remains, land use patterns, traditional stories, remnant practices and revenant beliefs as constituting texts in their own right. Broadly defined then, text is the means by which we engage with the historical subject. The medievalist, however, faces particular constraints in interpreting these texts through the agencies of their transmission. Questions such as who authored these texts, when and why, intersect with problems of transcription, translation and redaction to inform a complex discourse. The majority of the chapters in this book started life as papers presented at a conference entitled Text and Transmission in Early Medieval Europe and the title of this book ultimately derives from that theme. The subjects these chapters deal with range in geography from Ireland through to Byzantium, and cover almost a millennium of European history, but they are united in their effort to prise from their subjects some truths about texts, transmission and the critical literacies needed to interpret both.

In Printing the Middle Ages Siân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings. Each chapter of Printing the Middle Ages focuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of the Canterbury Tales and the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.

A re-evaluation of the Latin-texted motet during the age of Du Fay.