Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a book about books. Examining hundreds of early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Alexandra Gillespie writes a bibliographical history of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his follower John Lydgate in the century after the arrival of printing in England. Her study is an important new contribution to the emerging "sociology of the text" in English literary and historical studies. At the center of this study is a familiar question: what is an author? The idea of the vernacular writer was already contested and unstable in medieval England;...
Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a book about books. Examining hundreds of early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Alexandra Gi...
Between roughly 1350 and 1500, the English vernacular became established as a language of literary, bureaucratic, devotional and controversial writing; metropolitan artisans formed guilds for the production and sale of books for the first time; and Gutenberg's and eventually Caxton's printed books reached their first English consumers. This book gathers the best new work on manuscript books in England made during this crucial but neglected period. Its authors survey existing research, gather intensive new evidence and develop new approaches to key topics. The chapters cover the material...
Between roughly 1350 and 1500, the English vernacular became established as a language of literary, bureaucratic, devotional and controversial writing...
