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The Text in the Community brings together essays by a diverse group of medievalists to consider the multiple ways in which readers approach texts and manuscripts as part of "communities" of readers, authors, scribes, and scholars. The central premise of this volume is that texts do not exist in isolation. Each written work is embedded in contexts—literary, historical, geographical, social, political, and religious—and derives its meaning in part from the intersection of those contexts in the reader's experience of the text.
This collection is distinguished by a variety of approaches to the study of medieval texts and manuscripts and by the capacious time frame in which they are located, extending from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fifteenth century. Contributors demonstrate ways in which the insights gained from careful attention to the multiple dimensions, material as well as verbal, of medieval texts can extend and complicate our notions of the literary tradition, medieval reading practices and audiences, and modes of composition.
"These excellent essays discuss a wide range of literary and art historical topics covering the full chronological span of the medieval period." —Louis Jordan, University of Notre Dame
“If this collection of articles is somewhat factitious in its makeup, there is no doubting its overall quality. Scholars of the various specialties represented in it will profit from reading its individual contributions.” —Modern Philosophy
“The Text in the Community contains papers delivered at a conference held at Notre Dame University in 2001 to celebrate the inaugurations there of Michael Lapidge and Jill Mann as professors of English and the University library's recent purchase of a fifteenth-century manuscript, formerly in the Foyle collection and now Notre Dame MS 67, containing A Mirror to Devout People and The Craft of Dying.” —The Richardian
“This volume contains eight papers from a 2001 conference at the University of Notre Dame entitled 'Medieval Manuscripts at Notre Dame.' Most of these treat late medieval topics. Two, however, deal with earlier medieval literary culture and are therefore of interest to scholars of the early Middle Ages.” —Early Medieval Europe
“The essays demonstrate most effectively how shifting the focus from isolated text to communal text can not only add to our knowledge of the complex web of relationships operating between books and their contexts, but also prompt us to re-evaluate previously accepted interpretations of the canon.” —Modern Language Review
Maura Nolan is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jill Mann is Notre Dame Professor Emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame.