{"title":"Manuscript Culture In The British Isles","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"scribes-and-the-city-book-linne-r-mooney-9781903153406","title":"Scribes and the City","description":"Scribes played a crucial part in the flourishing and availability of literature in English during the time of Chaucer. This book reveals for the first time who they were, where and how they worked, and the crucial role they playedin bringing this literature to a wider public.  A sensational book... will permanently affect and change the way we see the history of the book in England. Professor Derek Pearsall, Harvard University.    Geoffrey Chaucer is called the Father of English Literature notbecause he was the first author to write in English - he wasn't - but because his works were among those of his generation produced in sufficient numbers to reach a wider audience. He and his contemporaries wrote before the age of print, so the dissemination of his writings in such quantity depended upon scribes, who would manually copy works like The Canterbury Tales in manuscripts.  This book is the first to identify the scribes responsible for the copying of the earliest manuscripts (including Chaucer's famous scribe, Adam). The authors reveal these revolutionary copyists as clerks holding major bureaucratic offices at the London Guildhall, working for the mayor andaldermen, officiating in their courts, and recording London business in their day jobs - while copying medieval English literature as a sideline. In particular, they contributed to the new culture of English as the language of notonly literature, but government and business as well.      LINNE R. MOONEY is Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Department of English and Related Literature, and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studiesat the University of York; ESTELLE STUBBS is a researcher in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics based at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49550975828241,"sku":"GOR013560895","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1903153409.jpg?v=1751156124"},{"product_id":"auchinleck-manuscript-new-perspectives-book-susanna-fein-9781903153789","title":"The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives","description":"Fresh examinations of the manuscript which is one of the chief compendiums of literature in the Middle English period.  Created in London c. 1340, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) is of crucial importance as the first book designed to convey in the English language an ambitious range ofsecular romance and chronicle. Evidently made in London by professional scribes for a secular patron, this tantalizing volume embodies a massive amount of material evidence as to London commercial book production and the demand for vernacular texts in the early fourteenth century. But its origins are mysterious: who were its makers? its users? how was it made? what end did it serve?   The essays in this collection define the parameters of present-day Auchinleck studies. They scrutinize the manuscript's rich and varied contents; reopen theories and controversies regarding the book's making; trace the operations and interworkings of the scribes, compiler, and illuminators; teaseout matters of patron and audience; interpret the contested signs of linguistic and national identity; and assess Auchinleck's implied literary values beside those of Chaucer. Geography, politics, international relations and multilingualism become pressing subjects, too, alongside critical analyses of literary substance.    SUSANNA FEIN is Professor of English at Kent State University and editor of The Chaucer Review.     Contributors: Venetia Bridges, Patrick Butler, Siobhain Bly Calkin, A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna, Ann Higgins, Cathy Hume, Marisa Libbon, Derek Pearsall, Helen Phillips, Emily Runde, Timothy A. Shonk, Míceál F. Vaughan.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50913798455569,"sku":"GOR009908692","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51053412319505,"sku":"NIN9781903153789","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52148898890001,"sku":"NLS9781903153789","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1903153786.jpg?v=1751186619"},{"product_id":"interpreting-ms-digby-86-book-susanna-fein-9781903153901","title":"Interpreting MS Digby 86","description":"A range of approaches (literary, historical, art-historical, codicological) to this mysterious but hugely significant manuscript.  Extravagantly heterogeneous in its contents, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is an utterly singular production. On its last folio, the scribe signs off with a self-portrait - a cartoonishly-drawn male head wearing a close-fitted hood - and an inscription: \"scripsi librum in anno et iii mensibus\" (I wrote the book in a year and three months). His fifteen months' labour resulted in one of the most important miscellanies to survive from medieval England: a trilingual marvel of a compilation, with quirky combinations of content that range from religion, to science, to literature of a decidedly secular cast. It holds medical recipes, charms, prayers, prognostications, magic tricks, pious doctrine, a liturgical calendar, religious songs, lively debates, poetry on love and death, proverbs, fables, fabliaux, scurrilous games, and gender-based diatribes.  That Digby is from the thirteenth century adds to its appeal, for English literary remnants from before 1300 are all too rare. Scholars on both sides of the vernacular divide, French and English, are deeply intrigued by it. Many of its texts are found nowhere else: for example, the French Arthurian Lay of the Horn, the English fabliau Dame Sirith and the beast fable Fox and Wolf, and the French Strife between Two Ladies (a candid debate on feminine politics). The interpretationsoffered in this volume of its contents, presentation, and ownership, show that there is much to discover in Digby's lively record of the social and spiritual pastimes of a book-owning gentry family.    SUSANNA FEIN is Professor of English at Kent State University.    CONTRIBUTORS: Maureen Boulton, Neil Cartlidge, Marilyn Corrie, Susanna Fein, Marjorie Harrington, John Hines, Jennifer Jahner, Melissa Julian-Jones, Jenni Nuttall, David Raybin, Delbert Russell, J.D. Sargan, Sheri Smith","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51053458260241,"sku":"NIN9781903153901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52530913902865,"sku":"NLS9781903153901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1903153905.jpg?v=1751380377"},{"product_id":"robert-thornton-and-his-books-book-susanna-fein-9781903153512","title":"Robert Thornton and his Books","description":"Essays examining the compiler and contents of two of the most important and significant extant late medieval manuscript collections.  The Yorkshire landowner Robert Thornton (c.1397- c.1465) copied the contents of two important manuscripts, Lincoln Cathedral, MS 91 (the \"Lincoln manuscript\"), and London, British Library, MS Additional 31042 (the \"London manuscript\") in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. Viewed in combination, his books comprise a rare repository of varied English and Latin literary, religious and medical texts that survived the dissolution of the monasteries, when so many other medieval books were destroyed. Residing in the texts he copied and used are many indicators of what this gentleman scribe of the North Riding read, how he practised his religion, and what worldly values he held for himself and his family.  Because of the extraordinary nature of his collected texts - Middle English romances, alliterative verse (the alliterative Morte Arthure only exists here), lyrics and treatises of religion ormedicine - editors and scholars have long been deeply interested in uncovering Thornton's habits as a private, amateur scribe. The essays collected here provide, for the first time, a sustained, focussed light on Thornton and hisbooks. They examine such matters as what Thornton as a scribe made, how he did it, and why he did it, placing him in a wider context and looking at the contents of the manuscripts.    Susanna Fein is Professor of Englishat Kent State University; Michael Johnston is an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University.    Contributors: Julie Nelson Couch, Susanna Fein, Rosalind Field, Joel Fredell, Ralph Hanna, Michael Johnston, George R. Keiser, Julie Orlemanski, Mary Michele Poellinger, Dav Smith, Thorlac Turville-Petre.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51479382163729,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51479383736593,"sku":"GOR014297373","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52530893259025,"sku":"NLS9781903153512","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1903153514.jpg?v=1750726191"},{"product_id":"design-and-distribution-of-late-medieval-manuscripts-in-england-book-margaret-connolly-9781903153246","title":"Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England","description":"New essays on late medieval manuscripts highlight the complicated network of their production and dissemination.  One of the most important developments in medieval English literary studies since the 1980s has been the growth of manuscript studies. Long regarded as mere textual repositories, and treated superficially by editors, manuscripts are now acknowledged as centrally important in the study of later medieval texts. The essays collected here discuss aspects of the design and distribution of manuscripts in late medieval England, with a particular focus on vernacular manuscripts of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those in the first half consider material evidence for scribal decisions about design: these range from analysis of individual codices to broader discussions of particular types of manuscripts, both religious and secular. Later essays look at the evidence for the production and distribution of manuscripts of specific English texts or types of text. These include the major Middle English poems The Canterbury Tales  and  Piers Plowman, as well as key religious works such as Love's Mirror, Hilton's Scale of Perfection, the Speculum Vitae and The Pricke of Conscience, all of which survive in significant numbers of manuscripts. The comparison of secular and devotional texts illuminates shared networks of production and dissemination, and increases our knowledge of regional and metropolitan book production in the period before printing.    Contributors: DANIEL W. MOSSER, JACOB THAISEN, TAKAKO KATO, SHERRY L. REAMES, AMELIA GROUNDS, ALEXANDRA BARRATT, JULIAN M. LUXFORD, LINNE R. MOONEY, MICHAEL G. SARGENT, JOHNJ. THOMPSON, MARGARET CONNOLLY, RALPH HANNA, GEORGE R. KEISER.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52127639273745,"sku":"NLS9781903153246","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52756537803025,"sku":"NIN9781903153246","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781903153246.jpg?v=1757487372"},{"product_id":"women-and-writing-c-1340-c-1650-book-anne-lawrence-mathers-9781903153321","title":"Women and Writing, c.1340-c.1650","description":"Essays offering a gendered approach to the study of the move from manuscript to early printed book show how much women were involved in the process.  The transition from medieval manuscript to early printed book is currently a major topic of academic interest, but has received very little attention in terms of women's involvement, a gap which the essays in this volume address.They add female names to the list of authors who participated in the creation of English literature, and examine women's responses to authoritative and traditional texts in revealing detail. Taking its cue from the advances made by recent work on manuscript culture and book history, this volume also includes studies of material evidence, looking at women's participation in the making of books, and the traces they left when they encountered actual volumes.Finally, studies of women's roles in relation to apparently ephemeral texts, such as letters, pamphlets and almanacs, challenge traditional divisions between public and private spheres as well as between manuscript and print.   Dr Anne Lawrence-Mathers is Lecturer in History, University of Reading; Phillipa Hardman is Senior Lecturer in English, University of Reading.    Contributors: Gemma Allen, Anna Bayman, James Daybell, Alice Eardley, Christopher Hardman, Phillipa Hardman, Elizabeth Heale, Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Adam Smyth, Alison Wiggins, Graham Williams","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52350796955921,"sku":"NLS9781903153321","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52756737556753,"sku":"NIN9781903153321","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781903153321.jpg?v=1758180444"},{"product_id":"prose-brut-and-other-late-medieval-chronicles-book-jaclyn-rajsic-9781903153666","title":"The Prose Brut and Other Late Medieval Chronicles","description":"Essays on the medieval chronicle tradition, shedding light on history writing, manuscript studies and the history of the book, and the post-medieval reception of such texts.  The histories of chronicles composed in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and onwards, with a focus on texts belonging to or engaging with the Prose Brut tradition, are the focus of this volume. The contributors examine the composition, dissemination and reception of historical texts written in Anglo-Norman, Latin and English, including the Prose Brut  chronicle (c. 1300 and later), Castleford's Chronicle (c. 1327),and Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles (c. 1334), looking at questions of the processes of writing, rewriting, printing and editing history. They cross traditional boundaries of subject and period, taking multi-disciplinary approaches to their studies in order to underscore the (shifting) historical, social and political contexts in which medieval English chronicles were used and read from the fourteenth century through to the present day.  As such, the volume honours the pioneering work of the late Professor Lister M. Matheson, whose research in this area demonstrated that a full understanding of medieval historical literature demands attention to both the content of theworks in question and to the material circumstances of producing those works.     JACLYN RAJSIC is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London; ERIK KOOPER taughtOld and Middle English at Utrecht University until his retirement in 2007; DOMINIQUE HOCHE Is an Associate Professor at West Liberty University in West Virginia.    Contributors: Elizabeth J. Bryan, Caroline D. Eckhardt,A.S.G. Edwards, Dan Embree, Alexander L. Kaufman, Edward Donald Kennedy, Erik Kooper, Julia Marvin, William Marx, Krista A. Murchison, Heather Pagan, Jaclyn Rajsic, Christine M. Rose, Neil Weijer","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52472043995409,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52472044486929,"sku":"NLS9781903153666","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781903153666.jpg?v=1759837274"},{"product_id":"auchinleck-manuscript-new-perspectives-book-susanna-fein-9781903153659","title":"The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives","description":"Created in London c. 1340, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) is of crucial importance as the first book designed to convey in the English language an ambitious range of secular romance and chronicle. Evidently made in London by professional scribes for a secular patron, this tantalizing volume embodies a massive amount of material evidence as to London commercial book production and the demand for vernacular texts in the early fourteenth century. But its origins are mysterious: who were its makers? its users? how was it made? what end did it serve? The essays in this collection define the parameters of present-day Auchinleck studies. They scrutinize the manuscript's rich and varied contents; reopen theories and controversies regarding the book's making; trace the operations and interworkings of the scribes, compiler, and illuminators; tease out matters of patron and audience; interpret the contested signs of linguistic and national identity; and assess Auchinleck's implied literary values beside those of Chaucer. Geography, politics, international relations and multilingualism become pressing subjects, too, alongside critical analyses of literary substance. Susanna Fein is Professor of English at Kent State University and editor of The Chaucer Review. Contributors: Venetia Bridges, Patrick Butler, Siobhain Bly Calkin, A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna, Ann Higgins, Cathy Hume, Marisa Libbon, Derek Pearsall, Helen Phillips, Emily Runde, Timothy A. Shonk, Miceal F. Vaughan.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52530913444113,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52530913837329,"sku":"NLS9781903153659","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781903153659.jpg?v=1760654402"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/manuscript-culture-in-the-british-isles-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}