Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts
In the recent 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom—a qualitative audit and analysis of all academics’ publications and research—the English Subject Panel made its report on the state of the discipline and potential future directions. In the detailed description, the panel noted the major strengths in scholarship in a number of fields, including manuscript-based studies and ‘history of the book and the sociology of texts’. The buoyancy of this area of research is evinced, too, by the creation of new groups, centres, degree programmes and book series all focused on the History of the Book in the broadest sense —an area of investigation that properly understood should extend from the emergence of sustained literacy in early cultures to contemporary digital technologies. While this volume cannot claim to have attended to every major facet of textual history along this extensive chronology, the range of material covered here does cover a good deal of ground from the Byzantine period to the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods into the high Middle Ages; and then hurtling through the Early Modern period, via Pepys, to the publication of electronic forms of bibliographic study.
Contents
- Introduction: Elaine Treharne
- The Composite Nature of Eleventh-Century Homilaries: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 421, Erika Corradini
- The Power and the Glory: Conquest and Cosmology in Edwardian Wales (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3514), Julia Crick
- Manuscript Production Before Chaucer: Some Preliminary Observations, Orietta Da Rold
- Vanishing Transliteracies in Beowulf and Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Martin K. 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 M. Smith
- Problematising Textual Authority in the York Register, Liberty Stavanage
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