The Making and Meaning of a Medieval Manuscript

<b>Develops a method for placing book-historical evidence in dialogue with literary meaning through a detailed investigation of a MS Bodley 851.</b><br><br><br>How do you read a medieval book? And what is the relationship between the study of manuscripts as material artifacts and the study of their textual contents? This book develops a method for placing book-historical evidence in dialogue with literary meaning. Medieval manuscripts do not simply witness the texts they contain: through the process of their making they preserve and generate knowledge about literature itself. <br><br>Central to the expression of method in this study is a detailed investigation of an immensely complex composite manuscript Oxford Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851. This manuscript survives as an important representative of textual cultures popular in late-medieval England: it attests the work of at least eight scribal agents and contains an infamous scribal version of <i>Piers Plowman </i>(Z-text) the sole surviving copy of Walter Map's <i>De nugis curialium</i> and an array of satirical Anglo-Latin poetry including the <i>Apocalypsis goliae episcopi</i> the <i>Speculum stultorum</i> and the Bridlington <i>Prophecy</i>. Close attention to the production of Bodley 851 underpins critical examinations of fragmentary misogamy the construction of literary sequences and the extent of pseudonymous authorship in the manuscript record.