Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-n7qbj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-10T17:56:06.677Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Recent Directions in Medieval Manuscript Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2014

Derek Pearsall
Affiliation:
Former Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, York, and Professor of English at Harvard University
Get access

Summary

You may have noticed the divergences of my title from that of the conference as a whole: ‘Recent’ for ‘New’ and ‘Study’ for ‘Studies’. I am not confident that much of what I am going to talk about, nor, I suspect, other speakers, is entirely new, and whereas they may legitimately devote their interest and attention to single approaches in the study of manuscript books of the high and later Middle Ages, I believe my task is to try to survey and relate all in a more inclusive view, and, riskily, to supply anticipated omissions. I hope it will be seen that I am at a disadvantage in having to guess what the following speakers are going to discuss, from the titles they have given to their talks and what I know of some, if not all, of their previous work. I am taking it that our starting date is c. 1100, as first announced, and, from the programme, that the focus is on northern Europe and predominantly England.

I think I can best illustrate from my own experience the difference between probably the majority of students of medieval manuscripts, who concentrate on a restricted range of questions, if perhaps aware of wider ones, and those of us who have come to be inquisitive almost equally about every feature. Like many of the speakers here I started in English literature, by trying to discover who were the earliest readers and hearers of the late fourteenth-century alliterative poem of Piers Plowman, and when I decided that I could not find enough direct and indirect evidence about that work I extended my research to a much wider audience of Middle English religious verse and prose. These were of course not even then untrodden paths; they have come more recently to be called Reception Studies, by what I think is a legitimate extension of the sense of an older German or French term, but I am disinclined to theorize about it.

Type
Chapter
Information
New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies
Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference
, pp. 1 - 14
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×