Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms - (Material Texts) by Jessica Brantley

About the Book

"This book aims to provide a general introduction to manuscript studies for readers whose particular interests lie in medieval literature. The field of medieval literary studies has long depended on manuscripts, of course. The nineteenth-century editions that facilitated the widespread study of medieval texts made explicit their dependence on manuscript evidence. But that scholarly tradition was primarily textual and philological, concerned with how to reconstruct readable texts from fragmentary remains in order to develop histories of literature and language. More modern editions have typically moved farther from considering the original forms of the texts they encounter. But it is clearer than ever that manuscripts are important to literary analysis. Medieval books provide indispensable contexts for understanding literary culture, and even for establishing (or questioning) the historical parameters of the "literary" itself. Bringing the traditional archival strengths of medieval manuscript studies together with the larger, more synthetic, and theoretical achievements of recent approaches to material texts, this handbook aims to ask such big questions"--

Book Synopsis

In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance--as well as of the status of the literary itself.

Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book's classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.

Review Quotes

"An excellent resource on medieval English literary manuscripts before the age of print (c750-c1500), this handbook stands out from other recent introductions because of its clarity, systematic coverage, and elegant aesthetic appreciations--notwithstanding the challenges of immersing the reader in handwriting, languages, and forms and kinds of medieval literary works that are difficult for most modern readers even in curated, modern forms."-- "Choice"

"Clearly connecting two disciplines that are brought together often but uneasily, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms will be a crucial resource for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and its elucidation of key methodological and conceptual questions will be a useful provocation to all scholars in these fields."-- "Daniel Wakelin, University of Oxford"

About the Author

Jessica Brantley is Professor of English at Yale University and author of Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England.