Texts and Transitions

Scotland’s Royal Women and European Literary Culture 1424–1587 seeks to fill a significant gap in the rich and ever-growing body of scholarly work on royal and aristocratic women’s literary culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There has to date been no book-length study of the literary activities of the female members of any one family across time and little study of Scotland’s royal women in comparison to their European and English counterparts. This book adopts the missing diachronic perspective and examines the wives and daughters of Scotland’s Stewart dynasty and their many and various associations with contemporary Scottish English and European literary culture over a period of just over 150 years. It also adopts a timely cross-border and cross-period perspective by taking a trans-national approach to the study of literary history and examining a range of texts and individuals from across the traditional medieval/early modern divide. In exploring the inter-related lives and letters of the women who married into the Scottish royal family from England and Europe — and those daughters who married outwith Scotland into Europe’s royal families — the resultant study consistently looks beyond Scotland’s land and sea borders. In so doing it moves Scottish literary culture from the periphery to the centre of Europe and demonstrates the constitutive role that Scotland’s royal women played in an essentially shared literary and artistic culture.

Under what conditions did women in late medieval France learn read and write? What models of female erudition and authorship were available to them in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? These questions often difficult to answer in the extant historical record are approached here via a number of perspectives namely the patronage and book ownership of women between the late medieval and early modern periods and their involvement in the translation of works from Latin to French.

Through a close analysis of the female patronage and manuscript production leading up to the early modern period this new study sheds important light on the development of female book ownership reading practices and patronage and ultimately female authorship in the fourteenth fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The monograph shows how female book owners in the fifteenth century in particular were provided visual and rhetorical models of female erudition and savoir - models which further encouraged these practices in the generations to follow. In particular a focus on translations from Latin to French produced for and by women reveals the ways in which female patrons participated in the production of not only books they were able to read in French but also individual manuscript exemplars that put forward new conceptual frameworks around women’s reading practices. Chapters examine adaptations and translations of Ovid’s Heroides and Boccacio’s De mulieribus claris; the libraries and patronage of Anne de Bretagne and Louise de Savoie; and works by Christine de Pizan Anne de Graville Marguerite de Navarre and Louise Labé.

This volume brings together essays by leading authorities on the production reception and editing of medieval English manuscripts in honour of Ralph Hanna on the occasion of his retirement as Professor of Palaeography at the University of Oxford. Ralph Hanna has made an enormous contribution to the study of Middle English manuscripts; his numerous essays and books have discussed the development of London literature alliterative poetry (especially Piers Plowman) regionalism and the production and circulation of manuscripts. The essays included in this volume are arranged into four major sections corresponding to Ralph Hanna’s core areas of interest: Manuscript production; Dialect; Regionalism; Reading and Editing manuscripts.

These essays written by leading scholars in their fields offer new insights into the manuscripts of major Middle English writers and on scribal practice as well as studies of individual codices. Essays cover a wide regional and chronological range stretching from the beginnings of London literature traced in the works of Peter of Cornwall to the circulation of John Lydgate’s Troy Book and encompassing manuscripts and texts composed and circulated outside the capital. Dialectal studies offer reconsiderations of the evidence for a Wycliffite orthography the dialect of William Langland and the vocabulary of the alliterative Morte Arthure. A final section on reading and editing investigates the structure and divisions in the manuscripts of the A Version of Piers Plowman and examines specific readings in the Prick of Conscience and the Canterbury Tales. The volume also includes a tribute to Ralph Hanna and a list of his extensive publications.

This volume offers a new intellectual framework for early print that bridges divisions between the study of print and the study of literature between manuscripts and printed books and between pre- and post-1500 textual cultures. Through an extensive focus on medieval texts and ideas it is demonstrated here that in the half-century before the Reformation English print was part of a highly energetic tradition of late medieval textual production. Central to this tradition was the expression of ethical agency or moral ‘entente’ through the creation of texts and books. This insight reveals how the first English printed books expressed the deliberate moral and cultural commitments of individual printers.

By following early print across a range of genres (history writing religious instruction hagiography law books and translation) this study also sheds light on the contexts within which the agencies of early printers mattered including mercantile politics civic and statute law and theological economics.

The volume which treats the pre-Reformation press as a whole is based in particular on the bibliographical evidence provided in editions by William Caxton Wynkyn de Worde Richard Pynson John Rastell and Thomas Berthelet as well as on close readings of texts and contextual materials. The questions raised here however are about more than old books and early printers: ultimately this study argues that the history of the material book is an intellectual history of agency and textual production.

This study is focused on bl ms Harley 494 a small manuscript book which can be dated between 1532 and 1535 and which has many of the features of a preces privatae volume or private prayer book. It contains prayers in English and Latin but also a number of brief devotional treatises in English. ms Harley 494 possesses two more features of interest: it belonged to a Hampshire widow Anne Bulkeley (and possibly later to her daughter Anne a nun at Amesbury Priory); and it emerged from a Birgittine textual community. Barratt edits and annotates the complete manuscript to provide an accessible and informative edition of this little known manuscript. However Anne Bulkeley and her Book is not a conventional edition of a late Middle English text. Rather Barratt carefully contextualizes the manuscript within its historical background just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries and meticulously investigates the varied and often unusual sources of many of the individual items in the book. In addition the discussion encompasses several related manuscripts (principally Lambeth Palace ms 3600 and the so-called Burnet Psalter (Aberdeen University Library ms 25)). This broad focus enables the volume to examine not only the evolution of the manuscript as a whole but also to answer wider questions of its owner’s identity her family connections and her (and her book’s) place in literary cultural and religious history.

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.