Sian Echard – författare

Introduces readers to the history of books in Britain—their significance, influence, and current and future status Presented as a comprehensive, up-to-date narrative, The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction explores the impact of books, manuscripts, and other kinds of material texts on the cultures and societies of the British Isles. The text clearly explains the technicalities of printing and publishing and discusses the formal elements of books and manuscripts, which are necessary to facilitate an understanding of that impact. This collaboratively authored narrative history combines the knowledge and expertise of five scholars who seek to answer questions such as: How does the material form of a text affect its meaning? How do books shape political and religious movements? How have the economics of the book trade and copyright shaped the literary canon? Who has been included in and excluded from the world of books, and why?The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction will appeal to all scholars, students, and historians interested in the written word and its continued production and presentation.

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.

Bringing together scholarship on multilingual and intercultural medieval Britain like never before, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain comprises over 600 authoritative entries spanning key figures, contexts and influences in the literatures of Britain from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries. A uniquely multilingual and intercultural approach reflecting the latest scholarship, covering the entire medieval period and the full tapestry of literary languagescomprises over 600 authoritative yet accessible entries on key figures, texts, critical debates, methodologies, cultural and isitroical contexts, and related terminologyRepresents all the literatures of the British Isles including Old and Middle English, Early Scots, Anglo-Norman, the Norse, Latin and French of Britain, and the Celtic Literatures of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and CornwallBoasts an impressive chronological scope, covering the period from the Saxon invasions to the fifth century to the transition to the Early Modern Period in the sixteenthCovers the material remains of Medieval British literature, including manuscripts and early prints, literary sites and contexts of production, performance and reception as well as highlighting narrative transformations and intertextual links during the period

In The Book Unbound, scholars and editors examine how best to use new technological tools and new methodologies with artefacts of medieval literature and culture. Taking into consideration English, French, Anglo-Norman, and Latin texts from several periods, the contributors examine and re-evaluate traditional approaches to and conclusions about medieval books and the cultural texts they contain - literary, dramatic, legal, historical, and musical. The essays range from detailed examinations of specific codices to broader theoretical discussions on past and present editorial practices, from the benefits and disadvantages of digital editions versus print editions to the importance of including 'extratextual' material such as variant texts, illustrations, intertexts, and other information about a work's cultural contexts, history, and use. The Book Unbound presents important contributions to the discussions surrounding the editing of medieval texts, including the use of digital technology with historical and literary documents, while offering practical ideas on editing print and hypertext. The collection will be invaluable to historians, literary scholars, and editors.

An unprecedented cultural history of reproductions of medieval manuscriptsFacsimiles are, or claim to be, exact copies of objects, and medieval manuscripts have long been a focus for this kind of reproduction. Today, digitization delivers complete, high-resolution, full-color digital copies of thousands of medieval manuscripts to anyone with an internet connection. But for centuries, scholars in fields like art history, or paleography, or textual editing had to travel to see the manuscripts their work depended on. When they couldn't, they relied on copies—drawings, engravings, lithographs, and eventually monochrome photographs, usually of parts of a manuscript rather than the whole thing.Facsimile explores the prehistory of our digital present, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that witnessed rapid technological change; a renewal of interest in the Middle Ages in the public at large; the consolidation and emergence of scholarly disciplines; and the increase in institutions that cared for medieval manuscripts. Siân Echard shows how facsimiles of medieval manuscripts were central to all these developments. Focusing on Britain, Echard traces how predigital technologies of reproduction were viewed by their practitioners and consumers, and how they helped to form the ways people related to the medieval past. Facsimile users were scholarly and popular, with interests in text, or image, or books, or all these things at once. Four chapters—Letter, Figure, Color, Catastrophe—show how the human hand, the human eye, and the human imagination intertwined with technology, creating modern-medieval hybrids that sit at the intersection of past and present.From the rise of paleography and diplomatics as disciplines to the emergence of calligraphy as a craft and hobby, from the use of facsimiles in shaping narratives of national identity to the substitution of facsimiles for destroyed or damaged manuscripts in the development of preservation practices, Facsimile offers an unprecedented cultural history of reproductions of medieval manuscripts.

King Arthur is arguably the most recognizable literary hero of the European Middle Ages. His stories survive in many genres and many languages, but while scholars and enthusiasts alike know something of his roots in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain, most are unaware that there was a Latin Arthurian tradition which extended beyond Geoffrey. This collection of essays will highlight different aspects of that tradition, allowing readers to see the well-known and the obscure as part of a larger, often coherent whole. These Latin-literate scholars were as interested as their vernacular counterparts in the origins and stories of Britain's greatest heroes, and they made their own significant contributions to his myth.