Scribal cultures in late medieval England: essays in honour of Linne R. Mooney

This collection of fourteen new essays offers important insights into England's pre-modern textual culture. The contributors, all distinguished experts, bring a range of perspectives – palaeographical, codicological, dialectal, textual, art historical – to the study of the manuscript book and the varied environments (professional, administrative, mercantile, ecclesiastical) where books were produced and used during the period 1300–1550. Major authors whose manuscripts receive attention include Chaucer, Gower, Hilton, Hoccleve, and Wyclif. Major texts whose manuscript traditions are scrutinized include Speculum Vitae, the Scale of Perfection, the Canterbury Tales, Confessio Amantis, and The Formulary, and a wide range of shorter works, including lyric poems, devotional texts, chronicles and other historical texts, is also covered. Naturally, in a volume inspired by Linne Mooney's field-shaping scholarship, there is considerable attention to metropolitan scribal culture, especially book-making activities in the vicinity of the London Guildhall, but textual production elsewhere is not neglected; scribes active in other cities, including York, and in monastic centres, are also considered, as is the singular book production (individual personal miscellanies) which developed from increased levels of wealth and education in the fifteenth century. The volume's focus is on late medieval England but frontiers are necessarily porous, and books and readers are no respecters of borders: thus the collection's geographical scope extends in the east to Ghent and Flanders and in the west to Waterford and the Dublin Pale. Attention is paid to 'English' textual production of material in Latin and Anglo-French, and to the documentary materials (letters, charters, writs) that medieval scribes produced alongside literary texts. The chronological coverage of this volume runs from the early fourteenth century to the sixteenth, with a rich concentration on scribal production in the fifteenth century, and with concomitant attention to circulation, book use, and reader reception extending into the early modern period. These fourteen essays respond to the distinguished scholarship of Linne Mooney, Emeritus Professor of Palaeography at the University of York; all present brand new scholarship in what is a vibrant research field.