Medieval Manuscripts Readers & Texts

Examines manuscripts of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, Nicholas Love and Arthurian tales, alongside other devotional works and archival evidence.


Professor Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's scholarship has transformed the study of medieval manuscripts and readers, particularly in the areas of devotional literature, professional scribal production and clerical writing. The essays collected here celebrate and reflect her influence and practice of giving careful attention to material contexts and archival sources when reading literature produced in late medieval England. They offer new interpretations of scribal practices, professional readers' activities, documentary evidence and challenging material and cultural contexts. They also reconsider scholarly practices and assumptions, while demonstrating how manuscript and archival studies can energize scholarship on such varied topics as authority, reader reception, modern editorial perspectives, gender and religious activities.

MISTY SCHIEBERLE is Professor of English at the University of Kansas.

James Simpson teaches English at Harvard University. He publishes on a wide range of topics in on late medieval and early modern Western European Literature.

Jeremy Smith was professor of English philology at Glasgow, where he remains a senior research fellow and emeritus professor, and an honorary professor at St Andrews. His specialisms include English historical linguistics, medieval studies, and book history, combined recently in Transforming Early English (2020).

AMANDA BOHNE is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.