Chaucer's Early Modern Readers by Devani Singh

Chaucer's Early Modern Readers by Devani Singh

The first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, this book focuses chiefly on fifteenth-century manuscripts and discusses how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed in an age of the poet's prominence in print. Each chapter argues that patterns in the material interventions made by readers in their manuscripts – correcting, completing, supplementing, and authorising – reflect conventions which circulated in print, and convey prevailing preoccupations about Chaucer in the period: the antiquity and accuracy of his words, the completeness of individual texts and of the canon, and the figure of the author himself. This unexpected and compelling evidence of the interactions between fifteenth-century manuscripts and their early modern analogues asserts print's role in sustaining manuscript culture and thus offers fresh scholarly perspectives to medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the book. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

'Devani Singh reveals how extensively early modern readers engaged with Chaucer's worksThis is an important contribution to debates about periodisation. Singh's elegant study underlines the importance of the manuscript book in the age of print, and will increase awareness of the continuities in literary consumption across the period 1400–1600.' Margaret Connolly, University of St Andrews

Devani Singh is an SNSF Ambizione Research Fellow at the University of Geneva, where she specialises in medieval and early modern English literature and book history. Her recent work includes a critical edition of the commonplace book Bel-vedére (with Lukas Erne, Cambridge University Press, 2020) and essays which have appeared in Book History, The Review of English Studies, The Chaucer Review, and Digital Philology.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781009231114
ISBN 10	1009231111
Title	Chaucer's Early Modern Readers
Author	Devani Singh
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2023-06-22
Number of pages	300
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable