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This introduction positions the book in relation to past work in the history of reading, introduces the materials and methods used, and lays out brief overviews of the five chapters. The history of reading has an established large-scale narrative which offers little detail on the reading of vernacular poetry in later-medieval England. Readers’ own marginal comments on Middle English verse cannot supply this missing detail, as they are rare at this time, and so mark their writers out as atypical. A combination of methods is proposed for examining a broader range of evidence instead, including close reading and detailed manuscript case studies, but also quantitative surveys inspired by continental European scholarship. Middle English verse does, it is suggested, constitute an identifiable topic. A working taxonomy of canonicity in Middle English poetry is offered, and widely successful anonymous religious instructional poems such as The Prick of Conscience are proposed as useful comparanda for canonical texts. The introduction closes by summarizing what follows.

After his experience compiling a world history and composing various theological works, Rashid al-Din returned to the Blessed History of Ghazan and applied new ideas to the text and to its presentation. These included new ways to represent genealogical relationships, the inclusion of a series of illustrations, and a new imperative about the reproduction and preservation of the text. This chapter traces these changes, as well as a series of textual additions and modifications made to the dynastic history. Some of these modifications were the work of Rashid al-Din himself, while others were the product of early copyists and editors leaving their mark on the historical record. This chapter reconstructs the order of these modifications and demonstrates their impact on the historical record.

A century after Rashid al-Din’s death, his works experienced a period of heightened interest at the court of the Timurid ruler Shahrokh (1405-1447). Shahrokh’s court librarian, Hafez-e Abru (d. 1430) was involved in collecting, preserving, and correcting early copies of Rashid al-Din’s Collected Histories (Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh), and he used Rashid al-Din’s collection as a model for his own historical writing. This epilogue traces the basic contours of Hafez-e Abru’s use of Rashid al-Din’s work and shows that, were it not for the world of Hafez-e Abru, our reception of the Collected Histories would look very different than it does.

The first chapter establishes three distinct types of reversal in the fabliaux: rhetorical; narrative (or sociogenic); and structural (called inversion). Examples of each type demonstrate that reversal is a characteristic of the genre and that it serves to open the fabliaux to interpretation. Le Fablel de la Grue is taken as a model text in that it incorporates all three types of reversal. An analysis of the fabliau shows that they can combine different genres, such as exempla and lais, through reversal. A study of the manuscript contexts of La Grue shows how the fabliau interacts with contemporary texts and how each manuscript has its own characteristics.

This chapter summarizes the conclusions of the book, and explores some possible implications for future study in various manuscripts and texts. The manuscript presentation of Piers Plowman for reading is compared to the presentation of The Prick of Conscience, and the resulting similarities and differences illustrate the value of studying the filtration of formal choices through habits in book production. The chapter considers the presence and absence of the marking of rhyme in copies of The Canterbury Tales, and then closes by examining the work of the compiler Robert Thornton as a case study which draws together many of the book’s themes.

Chapter 3 argues that Eastern frame narrative collections such as the Seven Sages of Rome were being combined with Western stories in medieval manuscripts before Boccaccio wrote the Decameron. The fabliaux anthologies were often repositories of other short narrative collections, such as vernacular versions of the Seven Sages of Rome and the Disciplina Clericalis. More than other types of Western story collections, the fabliaux codices can be seen as prefiguring the combination of different narrative traditions in the Decameron. The levels of organization in the Decameron reflect Boccaccio's combining of the Eastern frame narrative with the Old French manuscript tradition, which also offers a structural archetype for the organization of the novellas and the arrangement of the ten days of storytelling.

This chapter argues for the variety and vitality of the reading of Middle English verse in the period c.1350–c.1500, drawing on evidence from poems themselves and from surviving evidence of their later-medieval ownership and transmission. Since some of the successful poems used as comparanda for canonical writers in this study might be less familiar to readers, the chapter briefly introduces The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, considering their origins, organization, and internal depictions of reading. It is argued that such long, anonymous poems display interesting variety, not homogeneity. Allusions, provenance evidence from manuscripts, and records in wills and inventories all show how these texts were read in combination with many other types of material, by all kinds of readers and throughout the period, in ways which modern literary history is not necessarily capable of predicting. These findings should, it is suggested, encourage caution in the extrapolation of reading tastes and habits from individual pieces of surviving evidence.

This chapter addresses the seventeenth-century vogue of distilling Montaigne's Essays into aphoristic form, assimilating Montaignian thought into vernacular-wisdom literature. It relies not only on early modern commonplace books and study notes which extract and condense ideas from Montaigne's Essays as translated by Florio, but also upon a previously-unknown anonymous English translation of portions of Montaigne which dates from the mid-seventeenth century. Aphoristic adaptation provides an exceptionally clear instance of Montaignian reception among early modern English readers. But the impulse toward compressed extraction also helps significantly to explain the gradual demise of Florio's translation and the appearance, in 1685, of Cotton's tighter, plainer, more thoroughly censored, and far less exuberant rendering of the Essays.

In chapter 2, the relationships of fabliaux to other types of works, particularly fables, reveal the generic specificity of the fabliau form as well as the interwoven structure of the system of genres in medieval literature. MS BNF 2173 offers an exemplary case, it is argued, of the manuscript compiler's deliberate mixing of genres. The analyses of various individual fabliaux demonstrate that rhetorical reversal in the fabliaux serves to undermine the genre's ostensible didactic aims, whereas similar techniques in fables reinforce the didacticism of that genre. The manuscript as a whole presents a progression of texts from the divine to the mundane.

Manuscript translations reveal a different side of Virgil’s reception than is apparent in printed texts. Several substantial English translations never entered print in any form during the Renaissance. These include an anonymous translation discovered at Castle Ashby in 1977 (now BL Add. MS 60283), the version of Book 6 Sir John Harington presented to King James and Prince Henry in 1604 and Sir William Mure’s rendition of Books 1 and 4 in the Edinburgh University Library. These courtly translations treat Virgil’s epic with a freedom that is rare in printed versions. This chapter shows that Virgil was not always stern and dour in early modern English translation. The more mischievous Aeneids found their audiences through manuscript distribution, while print offered the more obviously useful, or propagandistic, versions of the epic.

This chapter consists of two manuscript case studies concerning Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5667 and British Library Royal 20 D 1. The former is manuscript of the Tristan en prose that is confected from two parts, one made in France and one in Italy. The second is the earliest manuscript of the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, made in Naples but then moving from Italy to Spain and from Spain to France. Both artefacts, though in different ways, are the result of textual bricolage. We trace this bricolage in each instance and the movement of books that produce cultural networks.

This chapter focuses on the manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne made in Acre between roughly 1260 and Acre’s fall in 1291. The four Acre manuscripts are not just highly sophisticated, visually exquisite artefacts: they are also cultural productions of a specific place and time, and we situate them in the beleaguered frontier-land that is the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. That this text written in French had currency in the Latin Kingdom is significant in that French was the common vernacular in the crusader states; and the French they used was particularly mobile and translatable, thus adapted to further diffusion to audiences in Europe. Language and texts—and the vision of past, present, and future they purveyed—were one of the main instruments of the network on which the Latin Kingdom depended for its fragile survival.

This chapter pursues the theme of travel, focusing on how both the representation and, crucially, the non-representation of movements, travels, and networks become key to the retooling of some texts in transmission. In the first section of this chapter, we show how the prose Tristan is made to travel, indeed is relocated to the Mediterranean, through a prologue and lengthy prequel; the whole of British culture is thereby glossed as a dislocation of, and exile from, the holy East. The second section takes a well-known and much-studied manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, and follows a textual (non-)thread via the Paon (Peacock) cycle of Alexander texts, to trace the career of a poet, Jean de le Mote, whose career exemplifies cultural networks that today are often overlooked.