Description
Book SynopsisThis volume brings together a variety of studies, some reprinted, some new; all are devoted to the literate culture of the English later Middle Ages. The studies hover about four foci: normative English polylingualism (across three grammatically distinct languages); the messiness and discontinuities of medieval manuscript production; drawing conclusions about historical audiences/literary communities on the basis of book-evidence; and finally, the Middle English poem
Piers Plowman. In general, although all the essays here arrive at broad conclusions, their point is other. The essays exemplify methods of study, the identification of problems and the recognition of tools appropriate or helpful in addressing them. Perhaps particularly the volume gestures toward a range of skills appropriate for the task; these range from narrow observation of book-production techniques to bringing a local historical record to bear on an individual volume or group of them.
Trade Review‘Patient Reading constitutes a major contribution to book history. It also offers a sustained reflection on the reading practices that might best illuminate medieval texts […] Patient Reading presents a rich compendium of material, the fruit of Hanna’s own “patient . . . absorption” in the medieval archive (8). It also makes some stimulating and consequential claims about the creative, polylingual, exegetical practices that gave shape to medieval sermons and to medieval poems.’
Alastair Bennett, Modern Philology
'Running alongside the erudition of this volume, there is a basic humility and unashamed bookishness that again points towards Hanna's implicit ideological position that historical literacy scholarship is worthwhile in and of itself.'
Ian Felce,
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen‘These separate studies are thick with historical and cultural detail, descriptive analysis, and codicological argument, and signpost many untrodden avenues for further research while also offering precise and informative discoveries.’
Margaret Connolly,
Speculum: A Journal of Medieval StudiesTable of ContentsAbbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction [I] Language Barriers 1. Literacy, Schooling, Universities 2.Vernacular Exegesis in Fourteenth-Century England? 3.Lambeth Palace Library, MS 260 and the Problem of English Vernacularity 4.Editing 'Middle English Lyrics': The Case of
Candet nudatum pectus 5.Performing Exegesis: Lyric and Sermon in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.26 [II] Nasty Books: Collection Procedures 6.Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenth-Century Textual Transmission 7.Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93 8.A Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Miscellany Revisited 9.Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c.66 [III] Historicising the Archive 10.Yorkshire Writers 11.Some North Yorkshire Scribes and Their Context 12.Dr Peter Partridge and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 98 13.John of Wales and 'Classicising Friars' [IV] Still Harping On – Reading(:) Patience in
Piers Plowman An Ideological Prequel Prologue: Langland's Kind of Poetry 1. On Patience 2. Conscience's Dinner 3. Hawkin and Patience's Instruction 4. The C Version Revisions Bibliography Index
