The first extended study of the reception of Chaucer's medieval manuscripts in the early modern period, this book focuses chiefly on fifteenth-century manuscripts and discusses how these volumes were read, used, valued, and transformed in an age of the poet's prominence in print. Each chapter argues that patterns in the material interventions made by readers in their manuscripts – correcting, completing, supplementing, and authorising – reflect conventions which circulated in print, and convey prevailing preoccupations about Chaucer in the period: the antiquity and accuracy of his words, the completeness of individual texts and of the canon, and the figure of the author himself. This unexpected and compelling evidence of the interactions between fifteenth-century manuscripts and their early modern analogues asserts print's role in sustaining manuscript culture and thus offers fresh scholarly perspectives to medievalists, early modernists, and historians of the book. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Author(s): Devani Singh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 286
City: Cambridge
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of
Figures
Acknowledgements
List of
Abbreviations
Introduction
1
Glossing, Correcting, and Emending
2
Repairing and Completing
3
Supplementing
4
Authorising
Afterword: Perfecting Medieval Manuscripts
Bibliography
Index of Manuscripts
Index of Early Printed Books
General Index
