Description
Book SynopsisEssays bringing out the richness and vibrancy of pre-modern textual culture in all its variety. Linne R. Mooney, Emeritus Professor of Palaeography at the University of York, has significantly advanced the study of later medieval English book production, particularly our knowledge of individual scribes; this collection honours her distinguished scholarship and responds to her wide-ranging research on Middle English manuscripts and texts. The thirteen essays brought together here take a variety of approaches - palaeographical, codicological, dialectal, textual, art historical - to the study of the English medieval book and to the varied environments (professional, administrative, mercantile, ecclesiastical) where manuscripts were produced and used during the period 1300-1550. Acknowledging that books and readers are no respecters of borders, this collection's geographical scope extends beyond England in the east to Ghent and Flanders, and in the west to Waterford and the Dublin Pale. Contributors explore manuscripts containing works by key writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Wyclif, and Walter Hilton. Major texts whose manuscript traditions are scrutinized include Speculum Vitae, the Scale of Perfection, the Canterbury Tales, and Confessio Amantis, along with a wide range of shorter works such as lyric poems, devotional texts, and historical chronicles. London book-making activities and the scribal cultures of other cities and monastic centres all receive attention, as does the book production of personal miscellanies. By considering both literary texts and the letters, charters, and writs that medieval scribes produced, in Latin and Anglo-French as well as English, this collection celebrates Professor Mooney's influence on the field and presents a holistic sense of England's pre-modern textual culture.
Table of ContentsIntroduction -- Margaret Connolly I: International Perspectives How English is it? -- Martha W. Driver Middle Hiberno-English Poetry and the Nascent Bureaucratic Literary Culture of Ireland -- Kathryn Kerby-Fulton II: Identities and Localities Famous Scribe, Unrecognised Stint -- Ralph Hanna The Handwriting of Fifteenth-Century Signet Clerks and the King's French Secretaries -- Sebastian Sobecki Seeking Scribal Communities in Medieval London -- Estelle V. Stubbs Scribes and Booklets: The 'Trinity Anthologies' Reconsidered -- Holly James-Maddocks III: Scribal Production Some Codicological Observations on Manuscripts of Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection -- Michael G. Sargent The First Emergence of the Ricardian Confessio: Morgan 690 -- Joel Fredell The Anonymous 'Kings of England' and the Significance of its Material Form -- Margaret Connolly John Benet, Scribe and Compiler, and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 516 -- Wendy Scase The Founders' Book of Tewkesbury Abbey (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Glouc. D. 2): Scripts and Transcripts --Susan Powell IV: Chaucerian ContextsWhen is a 'Canterbury Tales Manuscript' not Just a Canterbury Tales Manuscript? -- Daniel W. Mosser Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.15 and the Circulation of Chaucerian Manuscripts in the Sixteenth Century -- Simon Horobin Afterword: A Personal Tribute -- Derek Pearsall Linne R. Mooney: List of Publications -- Daryl Green
