Description |
xviii, 345 pages ; 24 cm. |
ISBN |
9781107076228 hardback |
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1107076226 hardback |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Contents |
Introduction -- Contexts -- Inviting correction -- Copying, varying and correcting -- People and institutions -- Craft -- Techniques -- Accuracy -- Writing well -- Literary criticism -- Diction, tone and style -- Form -- Completeness -- Implications -- Authorship -- Conclusion: varying, correcting and critical thinking. |
Summary |
"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"-- Provided by publisher. |
Series |
Cambridge studies in medieval literature ; 91.
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Library Class |
English E275
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Subject |
English literature -- Middle English, 1100-1500 -- History and criticism.
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Manuscripts, Medieval -- England -- History.
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Transmission of texts.
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Literature, Medieval -- Criticism, Textual.
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England -- Intellectual life -- 1066-1485.
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