Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Recent Directions in Medieval Manuscript Study
- Another Fine Manuscript Mess: Authors, Editors and Readers of Piers Plowman
- A New Approach to the Witnesses and Text of the Canterbury Tales
- Prospecting in the Archives: Middle English Verse in Record Repositories
- Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities
- Representing the Middle English Manuscript
- Skins, Sheets and Quires
- Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript
- Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman
- Professional Scribes? Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript
- Manuscript Production in Medieval Theatre: The German Carnival Plays
- The ‘Lancelot-Graal’ Project
- After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Recent Directions in Medieval Manuscript Study
- Another Fine Manuscript Mess: Authors, Editors and Readers of Piers Plowman
- A New Approach to the Witnesses and Text of the Canterbury Tales
- Prospecting in the Archives: Middle English Verse in Record Repositories
- Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities
- Representing the Middle English Manuscript
- Skins, Sheets and Quires
- Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript
- Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman
- Professional Scribes? Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript
- Manuscript Production in Medieval Theatre: The German Carnival Plays
- The ‘Lancelot-Graal’ Project
- After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The professional readers of Piers Plowman are a much maligned group. But I would like to suggest how further study of their habits and supposed atrocities can help us get closer to (in this case) the political circles in which Langland's poem actually travelled – circles a little different from the ones we have lavished much of our scholarship upon so far. ‘Professional readers’, as I define them here, are those whose job it was to make decisions on behalf of the medieval reader about how the text should go down on the page – conscious decisions, that is, about editing, annotating, correcting, rubricating, or illustrating a text. They are usually and traditionally denigrated by textual scholars for doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing in the production of books: ‘preparing’ (our misleadingly neutral word) the text for their immediate readers, whether specific bookshop patrons, or fellow monastics in a religious house, or the more anonymous ‘implied reader’ of the book prepared ‘on spec’. Such ‘preparation’, we know, might include any number of interventionist or creative activities, such as translating the original dialect, tinkering with the alliteration, suppressing or embellishing controversial content, imposing an unauthorized set of rubrics, or illustrating an episode contrary to what the text actually says – or said.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript StudiesEssays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, pp. 103 - 130Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000