Brepols Online Books Medieval Monographs Archive v2016 - bobar16mome

This volume discusses the key shift from manuscript to print culture in the history of books, taking The Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Piers Plowman as models of the way in which a medieval text's unique tradition influenced its transition from manuscript to print. The forces of the Reformation era did not produce the same effect across the varied textual legacy of the Middle Ages. Every text that made the transition from manuscript to print brought with it a set of concerns, a tendency to address a particular readership in particular ways, a physical presence developed in manuscript culture, all of which might shape the pathways by which a text might arrive in print, and what it might look like when it got there. This study follows The Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Piers Plowman from their circulation in manuscript to their presentation in print, in order to track how each of them survived the metamorphosis of the relationship between writers and readers as the new technology was introduced. Taken together, the three case studies demonstrate to scholars of any medieval literature the variety of possible impacts made when texts composed in manuscript culture were prepared for printing. The great force exerted by the technological and cultural developments of the English Reformation, not least the more centralized legislative regulation of the press, has long been central to the study of the history of books. This volume takes into account the ways in which individual textual traditions pushed back or accelerated the forces of early modern reform, producing their own plural reformations.

Rievaulx abbey was one of the most prominent houses of white monks (Cistercians) in England, and became in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an important feature of the ecclesiastical and social landscape of Yorkshire. The present work is the first in-depth study devoted to Rievaulx's social history. The abbey's once extensive archives were largely destroyed after the Dissolution, but the surviving late-twelfth-century cartulary provides a fascinating insight into the process of creating institutional memory, preserving and shaping information about various neighbours of the abbey, and creating a 'map' of social networks that developed around Rievaulx. The complex picture of building and sustaining connections between the abbey and its lay patrons, benefactors and neighbours forms a core to this book. This study also examines how Rievaulx  co-existed with other religious institutions in the area, and particularly the practical dimension of friendships between abbots, declarations of mutual support between monastic communities, and how these were reconciled with a fierce competition for land and donations. Contacts between Rievaulx abbey and the nearby archbishops of York and bishops of Durham were intense and these contacts demonstrate how important these prelates were as potential supporters, and how broader ecclesiastical issues influenced their relationships with Rievaulx. Whilst exploring the case of one particular monastery this book is an important contribution to the current debate on the shaping of Cistercian practice, and particularly the mechanisms for the interaction between laity and monastic communities, during the High Middle Ages.

In Grosseteste we have on our hands a figure, not only of great complexity in himself, but of even greater complexity in the kind of evidence which we are required to use. It is worth remembering that, despite all efforts of the last half century, quite half of his works are still unpublished. When we turn to Grosseteste, we find a situation which is as different from this as it could well be. He presents a quite unique combination of problems. The range of subjects he studied, the way in which he studied them, and the order in which he studied them, seem to be - to a much greater extent than any of the great scholastic thinkers - to be an expression, not of any normal programme of university studies, but of his personality and of the obscure and varied background and circumstances of his life. His thoughts on the subjects which he chose to elaborate are markedly his own. In a word uniqueness of circumstances and personality.