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

ISBN-13: 9781349630004 / Angielski / Miękka / 2002 / 243 str.

Laurel Amtower; L. Amtower; Bonnie Wheeler

Opis

By drawing on images from late medieval culture as well as from historical documents and literary texts, Engaging Words shows how reading became a cultural metaphor in the late Middle Ages that transformed the way the Western world thought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.

Recenzje

"...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

Spis treści

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

O autorze

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