Fresh contributions to the study of medieval manuscripts, texts, and their creators.

Essays offering a gendered approach to the study of the move from manuscript to early printed book show how much women were involved in the process.

Essays examining the compiler and contents of two of the most important and significant extant late medieval manuscript collections.

Created in London c. 1340, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) is of crucial importance as the first book designed to convey in the English language an ambitious range of secular romance and chronicle. Evidently made in London by professional scribes for a secular patron, this tantalizing volume embodies a massive amount of material evidence as to London commercial book production and the demand for vernacular texts in the early fourteenth century. But its origins are mysterious: who were its makers? its users? how was it made? what end did it serve?
The essays in this collection define the parameters of present-day Auchinleck studies. They scrutinize the manuscript's rich and varied contents; reopen theories and controversies regarding the book's making; trace the operations and interworkings of the scribes, compiler, and illuminators; tease out matters of patron and audience; interpret the contested signs of linguisticand national identity; and assess Auchinleck's implied literary values beside those of Chaucer. Geography, politics, international relations and multilingualism become pressing subjects, too, alongside critical analyses of literary substance.

Susanna Fein is Professor of English at Kent State University (Kent, Ohio) and editor of The Chaucer Review.

Contributors: Venetia Bridges, Patrick Butler, Siobhain Bly Calkin, A. S. G. Edwards, Ralph Hanna, Ann Higgins, Cathy Hume, Marisa Libbon, Derek Pearsall, Helen Phillips, Emily Runde, Timothy A. Shonk, M-l F. Vaughan.

A range of approaches (literary, historical, art-historical, codicological) to this mysterious but hugely significant manuscript.

The histories of chronicles composed in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and onwards, with a focus on texts belonging to or engaging with the Prose Brut tradition, are thefocus of this volume. The contributors examine the composition, dissemination and reception of historical texts written in Anglo-Norman, Latin and English, including the Prose Brut chronicle (c. 1300 and later), Castleford's Chronicle (c. 1327), and Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles (c. 1334), looking at questions of the processes of writing, rewriting, printing and editing history. They cross traditional boundaries of subject and period, taking multi-disciplinary approaches to their studies in order to underscore the (shifting) historical, social and political contexts inwhich medieval English chronicles were used and read from the fourteenth century through to the present day.
As such, the volume honours the pioneering work of the late Professor Lister M. Matheson, whose research in this area demonstrated that a full understanding of medieval historical literature demands attention to both the content of the works in question and to the material circumstances of producing those works.

Jaclyn Rajsic is a Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London; Erik Kooper taught Old and Middle English at Utrecht University; until his retirement in 2007; Dominique Hoche is an Associate Professor at West Liberty University in West Virginia.

Contributors: Elizabeth J. Bryan, Caroline D. Eckhardt, A.S.G. Edwards, Dan Embree, Alexander L. Kaufman, Edward Donald Kennedy, Erik Kooper, Julia Marvin, William Marx, Krista A. Murchison, Heather Pagan, Jaclyn Rajsic, Christine M. Rose, NeilWeijer