Medieval miscellanies are multi-text manuscripts, made up of varied contents, often in a mixture of languages. They might be the work of one compiler or several, and might have been put together over a short period of time or over many years (even over several generations). Such mixed manuscripts
are much more common that we might imagine and indeed are a typical environment for the survival of medieval texts.
Two novel and ambitious avenues for investigation form the core of the present volume. First, how can we define the miscellany and best engage with and exploit the complex
questions that it raises? Second - though of no lesser importance - is the cultural significance of this type of manuscript: how may the miscellany reveal processes and interactions that are otherwise obscured in modern editions or critical studies of individual texts?
The essays in this
volume discuss a great number of manuscript miscellanies produced in Britain in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Some of the essays offer new insights into very well-known miscellanies, whilst others draw attention to little-known volumes. Whilst previous studies of the miscellany have restricted
themselves to disciplinary or linguistic boundaries, this collection uniquely draws on the expertise of specialists in the rich range of vernacular languages used in Britain in the later Middle Ages (Anglo-French, Middle English, Older Scots, Middle Welsh). As a result it has been possible to draw
illuminating comparisons between miscellany manuscripts that were the products of different geographical areas and cultures. Collectively the essays in Insular Books explore the wide range of heterogeneous manuscripts that may be defined as miscellanies, and model approaches to their study that will
permit a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the production of these assemblages, as well as their circulation and reception in their own age and beyond
1. Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu: Introduction
2. Marianne Ailes and Phillipa Hardman: Texts in Conversation: Charlemagne Epics and Romances in Insular Plural-Text Codices
3. Keith Busby: Multilingualism, the Harley Scribe, and Johannes Jacobi
4. Susanna Fein: Literary
Scribes: The Harley Scribe and Robert Thornton as Case Studies
5. Ad Putter: The Organisation of Multilingual Miscellanies: the Contrasting Fortunes of Middle English Lyrics and Romances
6. Wendy Scase: John Northwood's Miscellany Revisited
7. Raluca Radulescu: Vying for Attention: the
Contents of Trinity College Dublin MS 432
8. Andrew Taylor: The Chivalric Miscellany: Classifying John Paston's 'Grete Boke'
9. Carol Meale: Amateur Book Production and the Miscellany in Late-Medieval East Anglia: Tanner 407 and Beinecke 365
10. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan: Writing Without
Borders: Multilingual Content in Welsh Miscellanies from Wales, the Marches and Beyond
11. Dafydd Johnston: Welsh Bardic Miscellanies
12. Emily Wingfield: Lancelot of the Laik and the Literary Manuscript Miscellany in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scotland
13. Deborah Youngs:
Entertainment Networks, Reading Communities, and the Early Tudor Anthology: Bodliean Library, MS Rawlinson C. 813
14. William Marx: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 12: The Development of a Bilingual Miscellany - Welsh and English
15. Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards:
Towards a Taxonomy of Middle English Manuscript Assemblages
16. Margaret Connolly: The Whole Book and the Whole Picture: Editions and Facsimiles of Medieval Miscellanies and their Influence
17. Ardis Butterfield: Afterword
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Margaret Connolly is Honorary Research Fellow at the School of English, University of St Andrews, UK. Raluca Radulescu is Reader in Medieval Literature, Co-Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Bangor University and Aberystwyth University.
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