Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages

by L. Amtower

Overview

Acts of reading appear everywhere in the late Middle Ages, from the margins of Books of Hours to self-portraits of authors in their studies. What relevance did this image have for the late medieval imagination? Engaging Words is an interdisciplinary study on the conception of reading in late medieval society. Beginning with an examination of the social conditions that produced a viable reading public, the book proceeds to examine popular tastes, the interrelationship between manuscript form and content, and finally the theory and poetry of late medieval authors. By drawing on images from late medieval culture as well as from historical documents and literary texts, Engaging Words shows how reading became a cultural metaphor in the late Middle Ages that transformed the way the Western world thought about identity and social roles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312233839
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	12/18/2002
Series:	The New Middle Ages
Edition description:	2002
Pages:	243
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Laurel Amtower is Associate Professor of English at San Diego State University.

Table of Contents

Introduction Engaging Texts Chapter One: The Reading Public Literary Production and the Book Trade Book Owners and Book Readers Literacy: Public Performance and Private Cognition Reading, Privacy, and the Self Chapter Two: The Image of the Book: Mediating the Aesthetics of Reader Response The Late Medieval Best-Seller Marginalia and the Iconography of Reading The Reader in the Text Chapter Three: Authorized Readers, or, Reading Authority The Medieval Commentary Tradition Beyond the Book: Humanist Reading and the Poetics of the Self Glossing the Self: The Vita Nuova Re-reading Augustine: Petrarch and the Book Chapter Four: The Ethics of Reading Chaucer and the Ethics of Reading The Origins of Language The Ethics of Fame Authorizing Readers Chapter Five: Textual Subjects Reading as Foresight: Cassandra and the Book of History 'The Text Ful Hard is to Fynde' Experiential Poetics: The Prioress and the Wife of Bath The Fate of Readers Conclusion: Identity and the Book Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"...this brave project is fascinating..." - Alison Frazier, Libraries & Culture

"...substantial in scope...it calls on various disciplines to weave a large and intriguing argument about the understanding of reading from the High to the Late Middle Ages." - History:Reviews of New Books

"Amtower succeeds in showing a sophisticated, varied, and often-ironic sense of reading as a metaphor for all manner of comprehension in late-medieval art and literature." - Choice

From the Publisher

Amtower [shows] a sophisticated,varied,and often-ironic sense of reading as a metaphor ... in late-medieval art and literature.

Choice

In an interdisciplinary study, Amtower (English, San Diego State U.) begins by examining the social conditions that produced a viable reading public. Then he surveys popular tastes, the interrelationship between manuscript form and content, and the theory and poetry of late medieval authors. He draws on images as well as texts to show how reading became a cultural metaphor that transformed how the western world thought about identity and social roles. Distributed in the US by Palgrave. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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