Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. While much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weights of books in medieval bindings to relationships between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small-and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript sheds fresh light on poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their works were read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems, in a pattern of mutual influence.

About the Author
Daniel Sawyer is the Fitzjames Research Fellow in Medieval English at Merton College, Oxford. His research ranges across literary criticism, scholarly editing, and quantitative and qualitative codicology, all applied to English manuscripts and Middle English texts.

Reviews
Sawyer's study reminds all Middle English scholars that manuscripts can shed light on medieval perceptions of form, genre, and geographically based literary traditions in ways that modern ingrained academic disciplinary divisions, traditions, and schools of thought can miss, neglect, or obscure. It also, excitingly, reveals that no aspect of the material text should escape our notice: from the ruled text block to the punctus elevatus, the most minor codicological and paleographical features can reflect deep, far reaching cultural developments that transform our understanding of the past. * Elizaveta Strakhov, Manuscript Studies *
If the book impresses in its "total" approach to evidence, many of its most interesting claims come in the form of brief but evocative suggestions: the need for a history of non-ownership of books, the need to catalogue different kinds of discontinuous reading, even the need to find new measures of book size. Sawyer offers the groundwork for exploring these issues but also poses them, modestly, as challenges to scholarship. These timely provocations about methodology and canonicity ought to elicit plenty of further response. * Joel Grossman, Speculum *
This study joins its own lively community of scholars looking beyond canonical poets and their most famous manuscripts to discover how much or most of literary life transpired in late medieval England as a whole. * Joel Fredel, Southeastern University, Studies in the Age of Chaucer *
... a very learned book on manuscript verse texts, wide-ranging in scope and detailed in analysis, as one would expect from this very promising young scholar of medieval English manuscripts. * Linne R. Mooney, The Library *
It is remarkable that a monograph on such a fundamental issue had not been written before now. Students of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature are fortunate that it was Daniel Sawyer who wrote it. * Eric Weiskott, Boston College, The Review of English Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198857778
Author Daniel Sawyer
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 494g
Dimensions(mm) 237mm * 163mm * 21mm