Patient Reading/Reading Patience: Oxford Essays on Medieval English Literature

by Ralph Hanna

Overview

This volume brings together a variety of studies, some reprinted, some new; all are devoted to the literate culture of the English later Middle Ages. The studies hover about four foci: normative English polylingualism (across three grammatically distinct languages); the messiness and discontinuities of medieval manuscript production; drawing conclusions about historical audiences/literary communities on the basis of book-evidence; and finally, the Middle English poem Piers Plowman. In general, although all the essays here arrive at broad conclusions, their point is other. The essays exemplify methods of study, the identification of problems and the recognition of tools appropriate or helpful in addressing them. Perhaps particularly the volume gestures toward a range of skills appropriate for the task; these range from narrow observation of book-production techniques to bringing a local historical record to bear on an individual volume or group of them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786940551
Publisher:	Liverpool University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Series:	Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies LUP
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Ralph Hanna is Professor of Palaeography (Emeritus) and Emeritus Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, former Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute (Harvard University), and winner of the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize for English Language 2015. His books include Editing Medieval Texts (Liverpool University Press, 2015) and Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, their Producers and their Readers (Liverpool University Press, 2013).

Table of Contents

Abbreviations vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

I Language Barriers

1 Literacy, Schooling, Universities 11

2 Vernacular Exegesis in Fourteenth-Century England? 34

3 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 260, and the Problem of English Vernacularity 54

4 Editing 'Middle English Lyrics': The Case of Candet nudatum pectus 66

5 Performing Exegesis: Lyric and Sermon in Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.6.26 80

II Nasty Books: Collection Procedures

6 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenth-century Textual Transmission 95

7 Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93 107

8 A Fifteenth-century Vernacular Miscellany Revisited 124

9 Humphrey Newton and Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c.66 145

III Historicising the Archive

10 Yorkshire Writers 161

11 Some North Yorkshire Scribes and Their Context 182

12 Dr Peter Partridge and MS Digby 98 209

13 John of Wales and 'Classicising Friars' 238

IV Still Harping On - Reading(:) Patience in Piers Plowman

An Ideological Prequel 273

Prologue Langland's Kind of Poetry 276

1 On Patience 290

2 Conscience's Dinner 303

3 Hawkin and Patience's Instruction 319

4 The C Version Revisions 339

Bibliography 352

Indexes 357

Index of Manuscripts 358

Index of Scholars 361

General Index 366

Editorial Reviews

"Patient Reading constitutes a major contribution to book history. It also offers a sustained reflection on the reading practices that might best illuminate medieval texts ... Patient Reading presents a rich compendium of material, the fruit of Hanna's own 'patient . . . absorption' in the medieval archive (8). It also makes some stimulating and consequential claims about the creative, polylingual, exegetical practices that gave shape to medieval sermons and to medieval poems."
Alastair Bennett, Modern Philology

"Running alongside the erudition of this volume, there is a basic humility and unashamed bookishness that again points towards Hanna's implicit ideological position that historical literacy scholarship is worthwhile in and of itself."
Ian Felce, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen

"These separate studies are thick with historical and cultural detail, descriptive analysis, and codicological argument, and signpost many untrodden avenues for further research while also offering precise and informative discoveries."
Margaret Connolly, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

From the Publisher