York Manuscript and Early Print Studies – serie

Essays bringing out the richness and vibrancy of pre-modern textual culture in all its variety.Linne R. Mooney, Emeritus Professor of Palaeography at the University of York, has significantly advanced the study of later medieval English book production, particularly our knowledge of individual scribes; this collection honours her distinguished scholarship and responds to her wide-ranging research on Middle English manuscripts and texts. The thirteen essays brought together here take a variety of approaches - palaeographical, codicological, dialectal, textual, art historical - to the study of the English medieval book and to the varied environments (professional, administrative, mercantile, ecclesiastical) where manuscripts were produced and used during the period 1300-1550. Acknowledging that books and readers are no respecters of borders, this collection's geographical scope extends beyond England in the east to Ghent and Flanders, and in the west to Waterford and the Dublin Pale. Contributors explore manuscripts containing works by key writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Wyclif, and Walter Hilton. Major texts whose manuscript traditions are scrutinized include Speculum Vitae, the Scale of Perfection, the Canterbury Tales, and Confessio Amantis, along with a wide range of shorter works such as lyric poems, devotional texts, and historical chronicles. London book-making activities and the scribal cultures of other cities and monastic centres all receive attention, as does the book production of personal miscellanies. By considering both literary texts and the letters, charters, and writs that medieval scribes produced, in Latin and Anglo-French as well as English, this collection celebrates Professor Mooney's influence on the field and presents a holistic sense of England's pre-modern textual culture.

Essays exploring the great religious and devotional works of the Middle Ages in their manuscript and other contexts.Michael G. Sargent's scholarship on late medieval English devotional literature has been hugely influential on the fields of Middle English literature, religious studies, and manuscript studies. His prolific work on a great range of English and French texts, including visionary writing, devotional guidance, and drama, devoting scrupulous attention to the physical forms in which these texts circulated, has established the scope and impact of religious writing across the social spectrum in England, enabling a nuanced understanding of the complex literary interactions between the cloister and the world.The essays in this volume demonstrate and pay tribute to Sargent's influence, extending and complementing his work on devotional texts and the books in which they traveled. The themes of translation, manuscript transmission and the varieties of devotional practice are to the fore. Inspired by Sargent's work on Love's Middle English translation of pseudo-Bonaventuran devotional texts, some chapters explore other Middle English translations within this tradition, considering the implications of translation strategies for shaping readers' practices, while others examine Carthusian and Birgittine texts as they appear in new contexts, probing the continuing influence of these orders on devotional life and theological controversy. Whether looking at devotional guidance, visionary texts, or hagiography, each contribution works closely with texts in their material contexts, always considering a question central to Sargent's scholarship: how texts gain distinct cultural meanings within particular circumstances of copying, transmission and ownership.

Comprehensive catalogue of the hagiographical lessons in Sarum breviaries, with key studies of the most crucial elements.Sarum Use was the most widely used form of the liturgy in late medieval England, but its service books were much less standardized than their modern counterparts. The lack of uniformity is particularly marked in Sarum breviaries' lessons on saints, which can vary enormously from copy to copy. This book is the first comprehensive examination of those lessons and the manuscripts that preserve them. It provides a catalogue of over 80 manuscripts and 12 early printed versions, giving a brief description of each one, sometimes correcting previous views of its date and provenance, and identifying each copy's divergences from the standard Sarum roster of saints. The book also identifies the textual families into which the manuscripts fall and the extent of their divergence from the lessons in both the early printed versions and the inadequate nineteenth-century edition on which modern scholars have previously depended. The author's findings offer an introduction to the unexpectedly rich variety of hagiographical lessons that survive, identify some of the sources behind them, and shed new light on the ways in which the Sarum breviary developed and was disseminated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

A fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, examining the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared.During the "long fifteenth century" (here, 1375-1530), the demand for books in England flourished. The fast-developing book trade produced them in great quantity. Fragments of manuscripts were often repurposed, as flyleaves and other components such as palimpsests; and alongside the creation of new books, medieval manuscripts were also repaired, recycled and re-used. This monograph examines the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared. Drawing on the codicological evidence gathered from an extensive survey of extant manuscript collections, in conjunction with historical accounts, recipes and literary texts, it presents detailed case studies exploring parchment production and recycling, the re-use of margins, and second-hand exchanges of books. Its engagement with the evidence in - and inscribed on - surviving books enables a fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, looking at how people went about re-using books, and arguing that over the course of this period, books were made, used and re-used in a myriad of sustainable ways.

The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.The fifty-plus surviving manuscripts of William Langland's Piers Plowman cast important light on the early public life of this central Middle English work, but they have been relatively neglected by scholarship. This first full study of the subject examines the textual variants, marginal rubrics and companion texts in the manuscripts. It illuminates a reception quite distinct from the reformist poems written by Langland's imitators in "the Piers Plowman tradition". It reveals how the earliest scribes devised various traditional forms of presentation that proved remarkably durable in the poem's subsequent reception, even surviving into the age of print. Exploring Piers Plowman's appearances in the manuscripts, paired unexpectedly with such genres as romance, hagiography and travel literature, the book demonstrates the surprisingly affective responses of medieval readers to the represented lives of the narrator Will and the title figure Piers the Plowman. At the same time, it shows that the evidence for individual scribal agendas in particular copies is more ambiguous than often assumed, with each book reflecting the activities of an unknown number of hands and an uncertain mixture of design and accident. By drawing on evidence from textual scholarship as well as codicological and literary approaches, the author offers fresh insight into Piers Plowman's place in literary history and proposes new ways of understanding the late medieval manuscript as a multi-layered, collaborative product. Sarah Wood is Associate Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Warwick

A fresh close reading of the texts of one of the four surviving major manuscripts of Old English poetry, reappraising Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 to discover some of the preoccupations of its compliers.Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry to survive and the only one of these to have had a planned sequence of illuminations. Junius 11 is made up of different poems - Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan - compiled to resemble a long narrative that represents salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. While the poems draw inspiration from biblical, apocryphal and commentary traditions, they combine in the manuscript to create powerful effects that can also be understood through an appreciation of the distinctive craft and complexity of early medieval vernacular verse. But can the language of the poetry within the manuscript tell us anything about the aims of the Junius 11 project, or the preoccupations of its compilers? This book approaches Junius 11 as an ambitious poetic endeavour that was designed to offer counsel through the medium of Old English verbal art. Tracing thematic language across and between the poems, and offering close readings of them in their manuscript context, MS Junius 11 and its Poetry argues that it is early medieval political ideas represented by the Old English words ræd (good counsel) and unræd (ill counsel) that emerge as the key components underlying the central conflicts of the history of humankind the makers of this manuscript sought to create. The poems themselves, by giving us many examples of rulers and leaders falling to ruin, have the potential to offer their own ræd to those who may have found themselves in relatable positions. But Junius 11 demands work for such gifts. Its poems generate impressions cumulatively and collectively, offering instruction to those who might build connections across pages, demanding audiences become attentive and active readers so that they might find solace and advice in a world that moves towards destruction.

Explores the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared.During the "long fifteenth century" (here, 1375-1530), the demand for books in England flourished. The fast-developing book trade produced them in great quantity. Fragments of manuscripts were often repurposed, as flyleaves and other components such as palimpsests; and alongside the creation of new books, medieval manuscripts were also repaired, recycled and re-used. This monograph examines the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared. Drawing on the codicological evidence gathered from an extensive survey of extant manuscript collections, in conjunction with historical accounts, recipes and literary texts, it presents detailed case studies exploring parchment production and recycling, the re-use of margins, and second-hand exchanges of books. Its engagement with the evidence in - and inscribed on - surviving books enables a fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, looking at how people went about re-using books, and arguing that over the course of this period, books were made, used and re-used in a myriad of sustainable ways.

Examines manuscripts of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, Nicholas Love and Arthurian tales, alongside other devotional works and archival evidence.Professor Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's scholarship has transformed the study of medieval manuscripts and readers, particularly in the areas of devotional literature, professional scribal production and clerical writing. The essays collected here celebrate and reflect her influence and practice of giving careful attention to material contexts and archival sources when reading literature produced in late medieval England. They offer new interpretations of scribal practices, professional readers' activities, documentary evidence and challenging material and cultural contexts. They also reconsider scholarly practices and assumptions, while demonstrating how manuscript and archival studies can energize scholarship on such varied topics as authority, reader reception, modern editorial perspectives, gender and religious activities.

Richly illustrated venture into book production in Cambridge.William Dyngley (Peterhouse, 1393-1441), known for his personal library of at least 29 manuscripts, was primarily an editor. In the second decade of the fifteenth century, he began a major patristic project that ultimately comprised eight volumes of Augustine of Hippo, anthologies of Origin, Ambrose and Jerome, and a patristic miscellany. Dyngley also constructed thirty-five indexes for Augustine's works, which he copied in tandem with his primary text writer, the so called "Fish Scribe".This richly illustrated monograph considers the people who made the books, the network of Cambridge scribes who copied the texts, the limners who decorated them and the remarkable man behind the project. Dyngley, placed here in the context of contemporary life in a Cambridge college, is shown to be in charge at every stage of production, acquiring exemplars, correcting scribal errors, storing incomplete quires, reassigning texts from one volume, copying and revising tables of content and tallying expenses. The volume also examines the constituent features of the manuscripts themselves, non-verbal cues as well as content. Overall, it sheds considerable new light on manuscript production in the period more generally.