Scribal Correction and Literary Craft

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft by Daniel Wakelin

This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

Daniel Wakelin is Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford. He is the author of Humanism, Reading and English Literature, 1430–1530 (2007) and co-editor with Alexandra Gillespie of The Production of Books in England, 1350–1500 (Cambridge, 2011).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781107431683
ISBN 10	1107431689
Title	Scribal Correction and Literary Craft
Author	Daniel Wakelin
Series	Cambridge Studies In Medieval Literature
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2017-03-23
Number of pages	368
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable