In this Book

Printing the Middle Ages

Book
Siân Echard
2013
summary

In Printing the Middle Ages Siân Echard looks to the postmedieval, postmanuscript lives of medieval texts, seeking to understand the lasting impact on both the popular and the scholarly imaginations of the physical objects that transmitted the Middle Ages to the English-speaking world. Beneath and behind the foundational works of recovery that established the canon of medieval literature, she argues, was a vast terrain of books, scholarly or popular, grubby or beautiful, widely disseminated or privately printed. By turning to these, we are able to chart the differing reception histories of the literary texts of the British Middle Ages. For Echard, any reading of a medieval text, whether past or present, amateur or academic, floats on the surface of a complex sea of expectations and desires made up of the books that mediate those readings.

Each chapter of Printing the Middle Ages focuses on a central textual object and tells its story in order to reveal the history of its reception and transmission. Moving from the first age of print into the early twenty-first century, Echard examines the special fonts created in the Elizabethan period to reproduce Old English, the hand-drawn facsimiles of the nineteenth century, and today's experiments with the digital reproduction of medieval objects; she explores the illustrations in eighteenth-century versions of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton; she discusses nineteenth-century children's versions of the Canterbury Tales and the aristocratic transmission history of John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and she touches on fine press printings of Dante, Froissart, and Langland.

Table of Contents

Cover

pp. C-C

Title Page, About the Series, Copyright

pp. i-iv

Contents

pp. v-vi

Preface: The Mark of the Medieval

pp. vii-xvi

A Note on Bibliographic Formats

pp. xvii-xviii

Introduction. Plowmen and Pastiche: Representing the Medieval Book

pp. 1-20

1. Form and Rude Letters: The Representation of Old English

pp. 21-59

2. The True History of Sir Guy (and What Happened to Sir Bevis?)

pp. 60-96

3. Aristocratic Antiquaries: Gower on Gower

pp. 97-125

4. Bedtime Chaucer: Juvenile Adaptations and the Medieval Canon

pp. 126-161

5. Froissart's not French (or Flemish): The Travels of a Medieval History

pp. 162-197

Coda. The Ghost in the Machine: Digital Avatars of Medieval Manuscripts

pp. 198-216

Notes

pp. 217-270

Bibliography

pp. 271-296

Index

pp. 297-312

Acknowledgments

pp. 313-314
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