Dedicated to Judson Boyce Allen-whose work ranged from the specialized study of manuscripts through the interpretation of particular literary texts to the broadest issues of history-essays in this collection deal with such varied subjects as word and meaning in different versions of commentaries, manuals for preaching, manuscript materials for fourteenth-century vernacular texts and the claim of auctour, rubrics accompanying manuscript texts of Petrarch's story of Griselda, and women as writers and readers of manuscripts. The essays are written by friends in tribute to a scholar whose work and life inspired many. The volume will be of interest to medievalist scholars of literature, manuscripts, and manuscript culture.
Charlotte C. Morse was a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Penelope R. Doob is a professor of English at York University. Marjorie C. Woods is the Blumberg Centennial Professor of English and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Contents Introduction Dante's Comedy, the Codex, and the Margin of Error by R. Allen Shoaf In a Nutshell: Verba and Sententia and Matter and Form in Medieval Composition Theory by Marjorie Curry Woods How Was the ars praedicandi Taught in England? by Marianne G. Briscoe Contradictory Paradigms: The Labyrinth in Art and Literature by Penelope Reed Doob Bothe text and gloss: Manuscript Form, the Textuality of Commentary, and Chaucer's Dream Poems by Martin Irvine Talking Back to the Text: Marginal Voices in Medieval Secular Literature by Christopher Baswell Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets by Alastair J. Minnis Nimrod, the Commentaries on Genesis, and Chaucer by John M. Fyler John of Cornwall's Innovations and Their Possible Effects of Chaucer by Cynthia Renee Bland Langland's Reading: Some Evidence from MSS. Containing Religious Prophecy by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton What to Call Petrarch's Griselda by Charlotte Cook Morse Thys ys my mystrys boke: English Women as Readers and Writers in Late Medieval England by Josephine Koster Tarvers Publications by Judson Boyce Allen (1968-1985) Contributors