| Description |
1 online resource : illustrations |
| Series |
Oxford English monographs |
|
Oxford English monographs.
|
| Contents |
1 'Diverse folk diversely they demed' -- Imagining Reading -- Structural Evidence -- Origins and Circulation -- Owners and Borrowers -- Conclusion -- 2 Navigating -- External Aids -- Summaries -- An Index -- Tables of Contents -- Internal Aids -- Physical Finding Aids -- Navigation and Compilation -- Conclusion -- 3 Handling -- Size and Shape -- Problems of Knowledge -- Size -- Shape -- Portability -- Conclusion -- 4 Rhyming -- Punctuating Rhyme Units -- Drawn Rhyme -- Reading Couplets -- Decoration -- Conclusion -- 5 Wider Reading |
| Summary |
"This volume offers the first book-length history of reading for Middle English poetry. Drawing on evidence from more than 450 manuscripts, it examines readers' choices of material, their movements into and through books, their physical handling of poetry, and their attitudes to rhyme. It provides new knowledge about the poems of known writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve by examining their transmission and reception together with a much larger mass of anonymous English poetry, including the most successful English poem before print, The Prick of Conscience. The evidence considered ranges from the weights and shapes of manuscripts to the intricate details of different stanza forms, and the chapters develop new methods which bring such seemingly disparate bodies of evidence into productive conversation with each other. Ultimately, this book shows how the reading of English verse in this period was bound up with a set of habitual but pervasive formalist concerns, which were negotiated through the layered agencies of poets, book producers, and other readers"--Publisher's description |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and indexes |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from web page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed on August 28, 2020) |
| Subject |
English poetry -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- Criticism, Textual
|
|
Manuscripts, English (Middle) -- History and criticism
|
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Manuscripts, Medieval -- England -- To 1500
|
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Manuscripts, Medieval
|
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Books and reading
|
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English poetry -- Middle English
|
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Manuscripts, English (Middle)
|
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England
|
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books
|
|
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
|
|
History
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780192599605 |
|
0192599607 |
|
9780192599599 |
|
0192599593 |
|
