Overview

Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a book about books. Examining hundreds of early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Alexandra Gillespie writes a bibliographical history of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his follower John Lydgate in the century after the arrival of printing in England. Her study is an important new contribution to the emerging 'sociology of the text' in English literary and historical studies.At the centre of this study is a familiar question: what is an author? The idea of the vernacular writer was already contested and unstable in medieval England; Gillespie demonstrates that in the late Middle Ages it was also a way for book producers and readers to mediate the risks - commercial, political, religious, and imaginative - involved in the publication of literary texts.Gillespie's discussion focuses on the changes associated with the shift to print, scribal precedents for these changes, and contemporary understanding of them. The treatment of texts associated with Chaucer and Lydgate is an index to the sometimes flexible, sometimes resistant responses of book printers, copyists, decorators, distributors, patrons, censors, owners, and readers to a gradual but profoundly influential bibliographical transition.The research is conducted across somewhat intractable boundaries. Gillespie writes about medieval and modern history; about manuscript and print; about canonical and marginal authors; about literary works and books as objects. In the process, she finds new meanings for some medieval vernacular texts and a new place for some old books in a history of English culture.

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9780199262953

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Reviews

This densely detailed monograph combines an exhaustive knowlwdge of the transmission, in both manuscript and print forms, of Chaucerian and Lydgatian texts with a theoretical interest in the status of the author, and authorship, in the late medieval/early Tudor periods... there is ndoubting the author's learning. English Studies Readers are firmly in Gillespie's debt for this lucid, detailed, and scrupulous study in which the flight paths in the new culture of print of the two most significant English poets of the medieval period are so admirably charted Nigel Mortimer Medium AEvum Gillespie's dexterity in moving between manuscript and print... means for me that this book succeeds best as an introduction to the vast range of ways in which books of all kinds can construct meanings associated with authorship, and as a general discussion of the variety of forms in which 'authors' can be conceived and textually embodied. Julia Boffey, The Library ...a sharply focused examination. Isabel Davis, Times Literary Supplement at once an intense study ... and a cultural history of an age of religious reform... demands a careful reading [however] the importance of its findings will reward the reader's efforts. Isabel Davis, TLS

Author Information

Alexandra Gillespie is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Toronto.

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