Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms (Material Texts)

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 categorie