Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

Jessica Brantley's Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms provides an innovative introduction to manuscript culture, using nearly 200 illustrations to explore physical forms, cultural histories, and significant literary witnesses. It discusses ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance, with high-quality digital surrogates available online for further exploration. The book aims to inspire readers to think through the implications of manuscript culture for the study of literature and book cultures of any era.

Format: Hardback
Length: 376 pages
Publication date: 13 December 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

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 books classroom use.

Medieval English manuscripts and literary forms offer an innovative introduction to manuscript culture, using artifacts to open critical theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many in color, the book provides a comprehensive survey of physical forms and cultural histories, alongside case studies of significant literary witnesses. These include 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 are interspersed with considerations of ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance. Each case study includes an essay guiding analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Thanks to high-quality digital surrogates available online, readers can access the manuscripts in their entirety, fostering individual exploration and enhancing classroom use. This book aims to inspire a broad audience with the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century, offering interpretive frameworks that extend beyond the study of medieval literature to understand book cultures of any era.

Weight: 1100g
Dimension: 188 x 263 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780812253849