Reading from the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature

The six essays in Reading from the Margins explore new approaches to the textual study of medieval manuscripts. Ralph Hanna III and A. S. G. Edwards open the volume's broad inquiry into Chaucer's early readership by looking at the annotation on the flyleaves of the Ellesmere manuscript. Julia Boffey shows the ways in which bits of poems attributed and misattributed to Chaucer reflect the medieval literary vocation and shape our understanding of it. In a study of the manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde, Ardis Butterfield suggests what layout and decoration can tell us about authorial and scribal practice in France and in England. David Lorenzo Boyd looks at the "spurious" version of the Cook's Tale in MS. Bodley 686 and analyzes its literary and material situation in this opulent manuscript. The last two contributions span the textual and material range of the whole volume. David Greetham reveals the ways in which biological models have shaped the way we investigate and edit medieval texts. In a postscript on the rebinding and conservation of the Ellesmere manuscript, Anthony G. Cains suggests the importance of binding and repair in the transmission and reproduction of medieval manuscripts.