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  1. Home
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  3. Scribal Correction and Literary Craft
  • Cited by 39
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781139923279
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139923279
Subjects:
Literature, Printing and Publishing History, Anglo Saxon and Medieval Literature
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (91)
Information

Book description

This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

Awards

Co-Winner of the 2015 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Book History Prize, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)

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