The Whole Book: Late Medieval English Manuscript Miscellanies and their Modern Interpreters
Derek Pearsall
Imagining the Book offers a snapshot of current research in English manuscript study pre-modern period on inter-related topics patrons and collectors, compilers, editors readers, identities beyond book. This volume responds to recent development institutionalization ‘History Book’ within wider discipline. Scholars working pre-printing era with material vestiges predominantly culture are currently establishing their own models production reception. Research this area is now an accepted part twenty-first century medieval studies. Within such context, it frequently observed that scribal found imaginative ways deal technological watersheds represented by transition from memory written record, roll codex, or script print. In ‘eventful’ environment, texts books not infrequently slip through semi-permeable boundaries laboured over previous generations medievalists, demarcate orality literacy; ‘literary’ ‘historical’; ‘religious’ ‘secular’; pre- post-Conquest compositions, ‘medieval’ ‘Renaissance’ attitudes writings. Once regarded as offering indices community- self-definition, piety good behaviour (and codices holding them statements prestige influence), book historian left contemplate real imagined importance status writing larger socio-political, often local, milieux which they were once produced read.
Medieval texts and cultures of Northern Europe