Overview

Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Whilst much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weight of books in medieval bindings to the relationship between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology, to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small- and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 consults a wide range of evidence to shed fresh light on well-known poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their work was read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems and were read along with them.

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9780191890390

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Daniel Sawyer, Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature, Merton College, University of Oxford, UK Daniel Sawyer is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English at Merton College, Oxford. His research ranges across literary criticism, scholarly editing, and quantitative and qualitative codicology, all applied to English manuscripts and Middle English texts.

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