Overview
- Examines questions of authority, authenticity, and textual stability of medieval texts
- Illustrates how medieval English scribes acted as scriveners, redactors, translators, editors, and authors
- Considers the role of modern editors in understanding adaptation, reproduction, and mediation
Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages (TNMA)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Middle English Clerks, Texts and Readers
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The Lollards, Their Saints and Their Texts
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Old English and Its Afterlife
Keywords
About this book
This collection of essays explores the literary legacy of medieval England by examining the writers, editors and exemplars of medieval English texts. In order to better understand the human agency, creativity and forms of sanctity of medieval England, these essays investigate both the production of medieval texts and the people whose hands and minds created, altered and/or published them. The chapters consider the writings of major authors such as Chaucer, Gower and Wyclif in relation to texts, authors and ideals less well-known today, and in light of the translation and interpretive reproduction of the Bible in Middle English. The essays make some texts available for the first time in print, and examine the roles of historical scholars in the construction of medieval English literature and textual cultures. By doing so, this collection investigates what it means to recover, study and represent some of the key medieval English texts that continue to influence us today.
Reviews
“A fitting tribute to a scholar who has shared her vast expertise with generations of medievalists. Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts brims with original research on the ways in which any number of hands shaped medieval texts and manuscripts, and on how scholars in recent centuries have further molded medieval legacies. This collection reveals, among other things, the continued importance of stripping back the layers of varnish—and of scrutinizing the important work of those who applied it.” (Michael Van Dussen, Associate Professor of English, McGill University, Canada)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editor
Sharon M. Rowley is Professor of English at Christopher Newport University, USA. Her publications include The Old English Version of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (2011), “Bede and the Northern Kingdoms” (2013) and “Textual Studies, Gender and Performance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (2003). She is currently editing the Old English Bede with Greg Waite.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Writers, Editors and Exemplars in Medieval English Texts
Editors: Sharon M. Rowley
Series Title: The New Middle Ages
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55724-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-55723-2Published: 25 December 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-55726-3Published: 26 December 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-55724-9Published: 24 December 2020
Series ISSN: 2945-5936
Series E-ISSN: 2945-5944
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 360
Number of Illustrations: 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Medieval Literature, History of the Book, History of Medieval Europe, Biblical Studies