Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500
Daniel Sawyer
Abstract
This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers’ choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The e ... More
This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers’ choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers.
Keywords:
Middle English,
Middle English verse,
poetry,
reading,
history of reading,
form,
formalism,
codicology,
palaeography,
manuscript studies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198857778 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2020 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198857778.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Daniel Sawyer, author
Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature, Merton College, University of Oxford, UK
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