Manuscript Studies: New Directions for Appreciating Middle English Romance

Abstract

Recent years have seen a marked increase in scholarly attention to Middle English (ME) romance manuscripts and their relevance to our literary-critical and historical-critical appreciation of the romances which they contain. The effect of much of this attention has been codicological, that is, concerned with the study of manuscripts as wholes, rather than merely with particular items in their contents or some one aspect of their make-up, such as script or watermarks. Thus the sometimes disparate approaches of textual scholarship and literary criticism concerning ME romance have had more exchange, and there now exists a considerable body of scholarly literature which combines the two approaches, or closely bears on their combination. Surprisingly, there is no analytical survey of these studies yet in print. As a result, those interested in investigating the subject need themselves to expend some effort in assembling a working bibliography. My essay is meant to facilitate this process by providing an overview of recent work on the subject. I shall deal first with conceptual background for the field and some other foundational material, then with three influential scholars for the combination of romance manuscript studies with literary criticism, and finally with examples of the two predominant directions of recent studies to date.KeywordsFifteenth CenturyFourteenth CenturyBook ProductionManuscript StudyEnglish PoetryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.