Text In The Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268034966 ISBN 13: 9780268034962

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006

Synopsis

The Text in the Community brings together essays by a diverse group of medievalists to consider the multiple ways in which readers approach texts and manuscripts as part of "communities" of readers, authors, scribes, and scholars. The central premise of this volume is that texts do not exist in isolation. Each written work is embedded in contexts―literary, historical, geographical, social, political, and religious―and derives its meaning in part from the intersection of those contexts in the reader's experience of the text.

This collection is distinguished by a variety of approaches to the study of medieval texts and manuscripts and by the capacious time frame in which they are located, extending from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fifteenth century. Contributors demonstrate ways in which the insights gained from careful attention to the multiple dimensions, material as well as verbal, of medieval texts can extend and complicate our notions of the literary tradition, medieval reading practices and audiences, and modes of composition.

About this title

About the Authors

Jill Mann is Notre Dame Professor Emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Maura Nolan is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268034966
• ISBN 13: 9780268034962
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312
• Editor: Mann Jill, Nolan Maura