Medieval Readers Research Articles

Boethian Humor and the Pseudo-Boethian De disciplina scolarium

The Pseudo-Boethian De disciplina scolarium reveals a facet of the medieval figuration of Boethius largely neglected in accounts of medieval Boethianisms, a humorous, raunchy Boethius who tells ambiguously moral exempla. Considered authentic from its “rediscovery” in 1230-1240 until 1498 and beyond, this widely-read advice text for scholars, written in the voice of Boethius, modifies the auctor’s serious self-presentation in the Consolatio Philosophiae to fit within the tonal and thematic conventions of thirteenth-century grammar school teaching texts. These texts - such as Maximianus’s Elegies, which includes a similar sexual and morally ambiguous Boethius - use titillation, violence, and transgression as pedagogical tools for young students. Rather than an odd outlier or exceptionally poor forgery, De disciplina’s playful, ironic Boethius would have seemed normal to medieval readers used to such schoolroom conventions. De disciplina’s Boethius, and his neglect, reveals a gap in our understanding of medieval Boethianisms and medieval conceptions of auctoritas.

Omnes homines natura scire desiderant. Anthropologie philosophique et distinction sociale

This paper reconstructs some important medieval interpretations of the first two words of the Aristotelian Metaphysics: “Omnes homines natura scire desiderant”. After presenting lay readings of the 14th-15th centuries, it returns to earlier scholastic and clerical interpretations of the Aristotelian “natural” desire for knowledge. Medieval readers of Aristotle coming from various backgrounds noted the strong discrepancy between the Aristotelian definition of man and the discriminatory social reality of their time. They elaborated different strategies of reading that allowed them to downplay or emphasize, to legitimize or challenge, the monopolization of knowledge by a clerical elite.

Christ, Creature, and Reader:

ABSTRACT This article reads The Book of Margery Kempe as a rhetorically innovative visionary text that offered late medieval readers a powerful new method of accessing the vernacular Word of God. Through the textual representation of Christ's visionary speech and Margery's spoken responses, the Book establishes a devotional mode within which Margery's imitative prayer and public instruction exemplify effective verbal engagement with Christ. This departure from traditional critical views of the Book as the quintessential expression of medieval women's affective corporeality shows the Book in a new light: as the textual exemplar of a literary mode of engagement with the divine through vernacular reading and participatory speech.

Christ, Creature, and Reader: Verbal Devotion in The Book of Margery Kempe

This article reads The Book of Margery Kempe as a rhetorically innovative visionary text that offered late medieval readers a powerful new method of accessing the vernacular Word of God. Through the textual representation of Christ’s visionary speech and Margery’s spoken responses, the Book establishes a devotional mode within which Margery’s imitative prayer and public instruction exemplify effective verbal engagement with Christ. This departure from traditional critical views of the Book as the quintessential expression of medieval women’s affective corporeality shows the Book in a new light: as the textual exemplar of a literary mode of engagement with the divine through vernacular reading and participatory speech.

Encountering the Dartmouth Brut in the Midst of History

The texts and manuscripts of the Middle English prose Brut resist easy classification, largely because they have resulted from a long and ongoing history of re-writing. The articles in this volume grapple with these dynamics by bringing comparative perspectives to a single manuscript. In this afterword, I seek to make clear some of the pluralities at the heart of encountering the digital, physical, and always contingent Brut . I highlight the complexities of transmission with an example of how one late medieval reader responded not to the text at hand, but rather to his memories or expectations of other histories and other texts.

Rouse, Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse. Bound Fast with Letters: Medieval Writers, Readers, and Texts. Notre Dame, In.: Notre Dame University Press, 2013

Rouse, Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse. <i>Bound Fast with Letters: Medieval Writers, Readers, and Texts</i>. Notre Dame, In.: Notre Dame University Press, 2013

Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages by Mark Amsler (review)

Reviewed by: Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages by Mark Amsler Rachel Yuen-Collingridge Amsler, Mark, Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages (Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 19), Turnhout, Brepols, 2012; hardback; pp. xxvi, 424; 5 b/w, 5 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503532363. This formidable work is the nineteenth issue of a notable series that encourages connections across disciplines and a geographical and chronological broadening of focus. The vitality of the series, and this volume in particular, comes from a determination to let a diversity of approaches deepen our understanding of human activity. The book contains seven chapters – minimally annotated – an Introduction and Afterword, and is supported by a lengthy bibliography and indices. The Introduction and first three chapters present the dense theoretical landscape within which Mark Amsler situates his study. The last four chapters of the book use these theoretical tools to explore specific areas of socially constructed literacy in the period of 1100 to 1510. Amsler’s central argument is that ‘later medieval literacies were fundamentally shaped by their persistent multilingualism and textual performativities and that different literate groups reworked ideas of grammar and textual authority to create new relations of power, agency, and resistance from the production and reception of written texts’ (p. xxii). It is an argument that draws heavily on the work of James Gee’s Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (Routledge, 2008), among others including Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Bakhtin, and Street. Within this framework, texts are given agency as sites for the social construction and deconstruction of power and identity. The first chapter, ‘Theorizing Medieval Literacies’, seeks to reconsider the validity of entrenched, simple binaries, especially the opposition of literate clergy and illiterate laity, and the privileged position Latin holds within that framework. For Amsler, literate discourses are more heterogeneous than this model suggests. The diversity of literate products, inclusive of written, oral, administrative, literary, religious, paratextual, private and public modes, and the interactions between these illustrate the fallibility of simple oppositions. What is apparent is the indivisibility of these textual behaviours, of Latin and vernacular literacies, from one another. Chapter 2, ‘Language Ideology and Marginal Latins’, describes how Latin and vernacular literacies express and disrupt power structures in the [End Page 137] Middle Ages with a particular focus on England. The activities in which these literacies met, in glossing, code switching, translation, style, and syntax, were wide ranging. Amsler is as attentive to the impact of contemporary debates about the place of Latin in the linguistic spectrum (drawing on the work of Robert Kilwardby, Roger Bacon, Guillaume de Conches, Peter Helias, and Dominicus Gundissalinus, among others) as he is to the way that linguistic authority was physically mediated on the manuscripts themselves. Chapter 3, ‘Affective Literacies’, treats in detail the practices and attitudes that constitute the subject of the whole volume. Affective literacy for Amsler denotes ‘a range of emotional, spiritual, physiological, somatic responses readers have when reading or perceiving a text’ (p. 103). Amsler explores this by looking at the fetishisation of texts as objects and the way this regulated and destablised social relations. Chapter 4, ‘Reading Assimilation and Jewish Latin Textuality’, is the first of a sequence of focused studies that trace the themes established in the first section in particular contexts. In this chapter, Amsler uses the contentious Opusculum de conversione sua, attributed to Hermann of Scheda and defined as a ‘borderland text’ by Gee, to explore the way the relationship between Hebrew and Latin literacy constructed identity and authority. In Chapter 5, ‘Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers’, Amsler looks at a range of interpretative strategies devised to deal with morally problematic scenes, the rape narratives, in the Ovidian corpus as a means of engaging with the inter-textual politics of canonicity through the notion of the hypo-text and archive. Amsler traces this politics from Ovid through to Berchorius, Christine de Pizan, and Chaucer, among others. Chapter 6, ‘Grammar of Unruly Latin in Middle English Writing’, challenges traditional accounts of medieval vernacularisation by demonstrating how normative multilingualism and multi-literacy was. In this complex context, Amsler shows how Latin was not...

Chapter 5 Adversarial Relationships between Humans and Weather in Medieval English Literature

Chapter 5 Adversarial Relationships between Humans and Weather in Medieval English Literature Michael W. George The seduction of pleasant weather is seen consistently in the settings of Middle English literature. We need only reflect on the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to verify this assertion: Whan that Aprill with his shoures sooteThe droghte of march hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veyne in swich licourOf which vertu engendred is the flour;Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breethInspired hath in every holt and heethThe tendre croppes, and the yonge sonneHath in the Ram his half cours yronne,And smale foweles maken melodye…Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages. (1, lines 1–12)1 [When April with its sweet showers / Has pierced the dryness of March to the root, / And bathed every vein in such moisture / By which power the flower is engendered: / When the west wind also with its sweet breath / Has breathed life into every grove and field / The tender shoots, and the young sun / Has in the Ram its course half run, / And small birds make melody / … / Then people long to go on pilgrimages.] This spring opening has been considered a standard topos of medieval literature, related to the locus amoenus of classical literature.2 Why is this opening used so often? In this essay, I will offer some speculative insights into the seductiveness [End Page 67] of the spring setting by commenting on its opposite—inclement weather and the hardships it brings with it. In this light, standard literary settings such as spring and its pleasant weather take on an added seductiveness stemming from the writer’s and readers’ experience with actual weather. Pleasant late-spring and summer weather is something on which the medieval reader should be able to count, if we take these spring openings as any indication. After the cold of the winter people desire some relief. However, is this a realistic expectation on the part of the medieval reader, or is it simply wishful thinking? I will argue that in many cases it is the latter. Scholarship dealing with the opening of The Canterbury Tales, for instance, often addresses the perceived realism of the setting. Some critics consider the weather in these lines to be representative of actual weather patterns: following a dry March, April rains nourish the fertile soil in preparation for the flowering of May. Others consider this situation to be more representative of a Mediterranean climate than of weather in England.3 Both positions could be defended using twentieth- and early twenty-first-century climate patterns. However, none of these studies takes into consideration climate change. Paleoclimatology shows us that the medieval climate was different from the climate that twentieth-century scholars experienced. Reconstructing Fourteenth-Century Weather Climate change does happen, and paleoclimatologists use a variety of methods to reconstruct the climate of previous eras. Tree rings, ice cores, peat cores, corals, speleothems (mineral deposits formed from groundwater, found in caves), pollen, and sediment deposits all provide data that can be used to give us a reasonable estimate of past temperatures and precipitation.4 These reconstructions tend to agree on two points. First, during much of the early Middle Ages, Western Europe experienced warmer-than-average temperatures, perhaps about as warm as we are experiencing now. Beginning in around 950 CE, this period has become known as the Medieval Warm Period or Medieval Climate Anomaly.5 The end of the Medieval Climate Anomaly ushered in what has commonly become known as the Little Ice Age. Jean Grove has convincingly argued that the Little Ice Age began around 1300, when the Alpine glaciers began to advance.6 This was not an ice age, of course. Rather, it was a period of average cooling, only 1 to 3 degrees Celsius throughout the period, characterized by expanding glaciers, the main effects of which were not felt until much later.7 Still, we can see some early effects of this cooler weather. After a long period of relative stability (which permitted, among other things, wine production in northern Europe), we begin to see periods of fluctuation in temperature and rainfall. We must resist the idea...

Mise en page, mise en écran

This article surveys aspects of medieval ‘publishing’ practice in manuscript format and relates them to, as well as draws comparisons with, the fast-moving culture of the written word in the digital age. By means of an analysis of three key trends—‘navigational aids/hypertexts’, ‘non-sequential reading’, and ‘interactive reading’—the article demonstrates how medieval and digital reading cultures share considerable similarities, all of which are linked to a reader’s ability to exercise power over the texts they read. The analysis explores why medieval readers seem to have engaged more readily with interactive reading experiences than their digital counterparts. It investigates the extent of a manuscript reader’s influence on both texts and later readers and considers whether the digital age has as yet managed to replicate successfully this kind of non-static reading environment. In sum, the article traces analogous trends in reading in the two periods and makes tangible suggestions as to how its findings can be used to inform the publishing trade about the needs of the digital reader.

The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks by Alan J. Fletcher (review)

alan j. fletcher, The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks. Cursor Mundi 14. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012. Pp. x, 304. isbn: 978-2-50353-680-4. euro 80.Approached as a summa of Alan J. Fletcher's distinguished career to this point, The Presence of Medieval English Literature: Studies at the Interface of History, Author, and Text in a Selection of Middle English Literary Landmarks repays attentive reading for its insightful treatment of a wide range of canonical Middle English texts. The book is really a loosely juxtaposed collection of essays, however, for its organizing logic amounts to little more than 'travels through the medieval English literary canon' (51) from a broadly historicizing perspective. Apprehended as a putatively unified whole, therefore, The Presence of Medieval English Literature adds up to rather less than the sum of its parts.This is unfortunate, since those constituent parts-chapter-length essays on The Owl and the Nightingale, Sir Orfeo, Pearl, Piers Plowman, works of Chaucer (chiefly The Canterbury Tales), and Malory's Morte Darthur-are often valuable on their own, individual merits. Chapters on Sir Orfeo and Pearl aie especially impressive, and I will treat them in more detail below. As I suggested above, however, the unifying logic by which the six core chapters have been stitched together is overly broad. Specifically, Fletcher's titular phrase, 'the presence of medieval English literature,' refers first to his selected texts' presence' today in the literary canon; his goal is to make these 'canonically privileged texts appear richer and stranger than they may hitherto have done...by restoring them to their [historical] moment in ways that allow aspects of their former presence to live again' (3). In practice, what this goal amounts to is historicist contextualization, typically the identification of an explanatory cultural lens for some element(s) of a given text (thus heresy for Chaucer's works, for example).Fletcher is at his most interesting when he bumps up against the limitations of this interpretive mode, as he does in the chapters on Pearl and Sir Orjeo; indeed, his chapter on Pearl is called, simply and powerfully, 'Pearl The Limits of History.' There, even as he identifies a new explanatory context for elements of the poem (preaching texts on the Feast of the Holy Innocents), he persuasively urges readers to 'guard against reading his [the /fc^rZ-poet's] text deterministically as if it were a thing available to be flattened into identity with matters that may have impinged upon it' (91). His chapter on Sir Orjeo, meanwhile, asks what explanatory contexts would have been available to medieval readers for the 'extraordinary chamber of horrors' (52) of folk taken to fairyland and then displayed there in various states of distress, death, or dismemberment. After considering three such explanatory contexts-aspects of Christianity, astrology, and fairy lore-that ultimately prove 'incapable of satisfactorily containing chaos in one totalizing explanation' (74), he concludes that 'the harper, and through him the consolidating power of performative culture that his harping represents, is allowed to become stability's champion' (79). These essays represent Fletcher at his best: widely read, intellectually curious, and interpretively nimble.The chapter on Malory will especially interest readers of Arthuriana, so I will summarize it at some length here. In 'Morte Darthur, the Endgame of Authority,' Fletcher argues that Malory's text is a meta-quest for stable sources of authority and meaning, and that although 'authority's traditional bedrocks may sometimes afford no absolutely secure foothold...Malory's sustained commitment to his authorityquest suggests his equally persevering belief, in principle, in authority's achievability (217). Most of the chapter is spent identifying 'tropes of authority' and 'formulas of authority' (I never fully understood the difference between these formulations, if any) that Malory evokes across his massive work. …

Dreaming of dragons: on the imagination of real life

This article draws on studies of medieval monasticism and northern indigenous ontologies to show how we might heal the rupture between the real world and our imagination of it, which underpins the official procedures of modern science. Though science is not averse to dreams of the imagination as potential sources of novel insight, they are banished from the reality it seeks to uncover. Ever since Bacon and Galileo, nature has been thought of as a book that will not willingly give up its secrets to human readers. The idea of the book of nature, however, dates from medieval times. For medieval readers as for indigenous hunters, creatures would speak and offer counsel. But in the transition to modernity the book was silenced. This article suggests that by acknowledging our imaginative participation in a more‐than‐human world, and the commitments this entails, we can reconcile scientific inquiry with religious sensibility as ways of knowing in being.

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation:

[H]abit is an immensely powerful agent for regulating, even creating, the acuity of sentience. Just as one may regulate the amount of light by opening and closing one’s eyelids or by turning and tilting one’s head through hundreds of angles and planes, so habit acts to set in place countless gateways that either open and allow the world to rush toward one or instead close it to keep it wholly at bay. —elaine scarry1

Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas

Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial

Opening up Middle English manuscripts: literary and visual approaches

Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations Glossary of Key Manuscript Terminology Note on Transcriptions and Transcription SymbolsTHE FRONT PLATES: Transcriptions, Scripts, and Descriptive Analysis for Learning to Read Literary Texts on the Manuscript PageHow to Transcribe Middle English / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton-Bare Essentials 1: A Transcription Is Not an EditionIntroduction: The Order of the Plates and Scripts Most Commonly Found in Middle English Literary Texts / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton1. The Land of Cokaygne (British Library, ms Harley 913) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton2. Ihesu (Newberry Library, MS 31) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton3. The Pricke of Conscience (Newberry Library, MS 32.9) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton4. Chaucer's Cook's Tale (Hg) (National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 392D, Hengwrt MS 154) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton5. Chaucer's Cook's Tale (Cp) (Corpus Christi College, MS 198) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton6. Omnis plantacio (formerly The Clergy May Not Hold Property) (Huntington Library, MS HM 503) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton7. Hoccleve 's Chanceon to Somer and Envoy to Regiment des Princes (Huntington Library, MS HM 111) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton8. Langland, Piers Plowman (Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104) / Kathryn Kerby-Fulton9. Sir Degrevant (Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6, Findern MS) / Linda Olson10. Wisdom (Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.354, Macro MS) / Linda OlsonChapter 1. Major Middle English Poets and Manuscript Studies, 1300-1450 / Kathryn Kerby-FultonA Brief Overview of Topics Covered in This ChapterI. BL MS Arundel 292, Archaism, and the Preservation of Alliterative Poetry c. 1300-c. 1450II. BL MS Harley 2253 and Principles of Compilatio, or: Why Read the Harley Lyrics in their Natural Habitat?-Bare Essentials 2: Anglicana Script and Profiling the Individual ScribeIII. Gawain and the Medieval Reader: The Importance of Manuscript Ordinatio in a Poem We Think We Know-Bare Essentials 3: Assessing Emendation in a Modern EditionIV. The Rise of English Book Production in Ricardian London: Professional Scribes and Langland's Piers Plowman-Bare Essentials 4: Some Basic Concepts of Editing, Types of Written Standard Middle English, and Scribal Handling of DialectV. Some of the Earliest Attempts to Assemble the Canterbury TalesVI. The Scribe Speaks at Last: Hoccleve as Scribe EChapter 2. Romancing the Book: Manuscripts for Euerich Inglische / Linda Olson-Middle English Romances in the Auchinleck, Thornton, and Findern ManuscriptsI. Englishing Romance: The Auchinleck ManuscriptII. Romancing the Gentry Household: Robert Thornton's Homemade Family Library-Thornton Names in the Lincoln and London ManuscriptsIII. Courting Romance in the Provinces: The Findern ManuscriptChapter 3. The Power of Images in the Auchinleck, Vernon, Pearl, and Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts / Maidie HilmoI. Looking at Medieval ImagesII. The Auchinleck ManuscriptIII. The Vernon ManuscriptIV. The Pearl ManuscriptV. Two Piers Plowman Manuscripts and the Ushaw Prick of ConscienceVI. ConclusionChapter 4. Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts / Kathryn Kerby-FultonI. Categories of Marginalia: The Annotating and Glossing of ChaucerII. The Annotations in Manuscripts of Langland's Piers PlowmanIII. Annotations and Corrections in the Book of Margery Kempe: Cruxes, Controversies, and Solutions-Appendix on the Red Ink Annotator and Previous Annotators in BL MS Add. 61823IV. The Quiet Connoisseur: The First Annotator(s) of Julian of Norwich's Showings in the Amherst Manuscript (British Library, MS Add. 37790)Chapter 5. Illuminating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: Portraits of the Author and Selected Pilgrim Authors / Maidie HilmoI. IntroductionII. The Decoration and Borders of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere ManuscriptsIII. The Historiated Initial with an Author Portrait: A Further Development of the Hengwrt TraditionIV. The Ellesmere Traditions: Illustrated Pilgrim AuthorsV. ConclusionChapter 6. Swete Cordyall of Lytterature: Some Middle English Manuscripts from the Cloister / Linda OlsonI. Nourishing the Spirit of Religious Women: Vernacular Texts and ManuscriptsII. Monastic Manuscripts of Chaucer: Literary Excellence under Religious Rule-The Contents of London, British Library, MS Harley 7333III. Lots of Lydgate and a Little Hoccleve: Chaucer's Successors in Monastic HandsIV. Sadde Mete for Mind and Soul: Contemplative and Visionary Texts in the CloisterV. Taking it to the Streets: Middle English Drama from the CloisterReferences Cited Illustration Credits Index of Manuscripts and Incunabula General Index

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Chrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and Its Verse ContinuationsChrétien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and Its Verse Continuations. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+263.

<i>Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner</i>, Chrétien Continued: A Study of the <i>Conte du Graal</i> and Its Verse Continuations<i>Chrétien Continued: A Study of the <i>Conte du Graal</i> and Its Verse Continuations</i>. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+263.

Reading Josephus at Vivarium? Annotations and Exegesis in Early Copies of the Antiquities

Some of the many medieval readers of Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities annotated their manuscripts of his works. This article investigates the origin of marginal notes found in early Latin copies of Josephus’s Antiquities. The notes seem to predate the extant manuscripts and may stem from notes appended to an early copy of the Latin Antiquities, c.600. Certain interests — exegetical, typological, oratorical, and iconographic — apparent in the notes may even suggest that they originated at Cassiodorus’s Vivarium. This centre produced the Latin translation of the Antiquities to which the notes are appended. These early notes, paired with some later Carolingian notes, offer a glimpse of Josephus’s medieval reception.

FAMILY, LOCALITY, AND NATIONALITY: VERNACULAR ADAPTATIONS OF THE "EXPUGNATIO HIBERNICA" IN LATE MEDIEVAL IRELAND

This paper examines two late medieval abridgements of Gerald of Wales’ Expugnatio Hibernica, one in Hiberno-English and one in Irish. The manuscripts in which these adaptations survive all date from the late fifteenth century and appear to bear witness to a sudden and pronounced interest in Gerald’s text. Drawing on evidence from the extant manuscripts, this paper explores the readerships of, and the nature of their interest in, these adaptations. A key conclusion is that the Expugnatio, which gives prominence to Gerald's own relatives, the Fitzgeralds, was valued as a family history by the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare and their allies. The Earls were at the height of their power in the period in which these manuscripts were produced. Examination of this neglected evidence of the adaptation and readership of the Expugnatio in late medieval Ireland suggests that, for some medieval readers at least, the primary identities Gerald’s text expressed were familial and local rather than colonial or national.

Editors and Scribes in Two Clerk's Tale Cruxes

Editors and Scribes in Two <i>Clerk's Tale</i> Cruxes

'Her Heed They Caste Awry': The Transmission and Reception of Thomas Hoccleve's Personal Poetry

Whereas most critics of Thomas Hoccleve's poetry have focused on elucidating the author's particular mode of self-presentation, this essay sets out to demonstrate that few fifteenth-century readers beyond the poet's initial addressees enjoyed his artful self-portraiture per se. Until now, Hoccleve Studies have been dominated by the texts preserved in the autograph manuscripts produced by the poet towards the end of his life. When we turn to the non-autograph traditions of his works, however, it becomes clear that Hoccleve's poems were preserved in a variety of forms and contexts and that medieval readers' experiences of these texts must have been considerably more varied than has typically been allowed. While Hoccleve's own exemplification of the link between self-fashioning and book production in the Series may have provided an important stimulus for the selective reception of this work, I explore the possibility that the highly unusual nature of the poet's most personal texts led to their sidelining in the reproduction of his corpus. Accordingly, I suggest, consideration of the fifteenth-century transmission and reception of Hoccleve's personal poetry can illuminate not only the often deeply self-serving nature of reading and textual reproduction in late medieval England; it can also provide a fresh indication of the extent to which some of Hoccleve's texts depart from the norms of the literary and codicological cultures in which their author participates.