Orietta Da Rold & Elaine Treharne 
Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts 

New essays reappraising the history of the book, manuscripts, and texts.


The dynamic fields of the history of the book and the sociology of the text are the areas this volume investigates, bringing together ten specially commissioned essays that between them demonstrate a range of critical and materialapproaches to medieval, early modern, and digital books and texts. They scrutinize individual medieval manuscripts to illustrate how careful re-reading of evidence permits a more nuanced apprehension of production, and receptionacross time; analyse metaphor for our understanding of the Byzantine book; examine the materiality of textuality from
Beowulf to Pepys and the digital work in the twenty-first century; place manuscripts back into specific historical context; and re-appraise scholarly interpretation of significant periods of manuscript and print production in the later medieval and early modern periods. All of these essays call for a new assessment of the ways in which we read books and texts, making a major contribution to book history, and illustrating how detailed focus on individual cases can yield important new findings.


Contributors: Elaine Treharne, Erika Corradini, Julia Crick, Orietta Da Rold, A.S.G. Edwards, Martin K. Foys, Whitney Anne Trettien, David L. Gants, Ralph Hanna, Robert Romanchuk, Margaret M. Smith, Liberty Stanavage.

Table of Content

Introduction – Elaine Treharne

The Composite Nature of Eleventh-Century Homiliaries: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 421 – Erika Corradini

The Power and the Glory: Conquest and Cosmology in Edwardian Wales [Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3514] – Julia C Crick

Manuscript Production before Chaucer: Some Preliminary Observations – Orietta Da Rold

The Ellesmere Manuscript: Controversy, Culture and the
Canterbury Tales – A S G Edwards

Vanishing Transliteracies in
Beowulf and Samuel Pepys’s Diary – Martin Foys and Whitney Anne Trettien

Descriptive Bibliography and Electronic Publication – David L. Gants

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 647 and its Use, c. 1410-2010 – Ralph Hanna

The Idea of the Heart in Byzantium and the History of the Book – Robert Romanchuk

Red as a Textual Element during the Transition from Manuscript to Print – Margaret Smith

Problematising Textual Authority in the York Register – Liberty Stanavage

About the author

A. S. G. Edwards has taught at various universities in North America and England and currently holds honorary professorships at the University of Kent, University College, London, and King’s College, London.