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

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...