Participatory reading in late-medieval England (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)

This book traces affinities between digital and medieval media, exploring how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about increasing literacy, audiences’ agency, literary culture and media formats from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from well-known poems of Chaucer and Lydgate to wall texts, banqueting poems and devotional works written by and for women, Participatory reading argues that making readers work offered writers ways to shape their reputations and the futures of their productions. At the same time, the interactive reading practices they promoted enabled audiences to contribute to – and contest – writers’ burgeoning authority, making books and reading work for everyone. Front matter 1 Contents 6 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction: Reading practices and participation in digital and medieval media 10 Part I: Participatory discourse 34 Corrective reading: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and John Lydgate’s Troy Book 36 Nonlinear reading: the Orcherd of Syon, Titus and Vespasian, and Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes 71 Part II: Evoking participation 112 Reading materially: John Lydgate’s ‘Soteltes for the coronation banquet of Henry VI’ 114 Reading architecturally: the wall texts of a Percy family manuscript and the Poulys Daunce of St Paul’s Cathedral 137 Reading temporally: Thomas of Erceldoune’s prophecy, Eleanor Hull’s Commentary on the penitential Psalms, and Thomas Norton’s Ordinal of alchemy 176 Conclusion: Nonreading in late-medieval England 202 Appendices 213 Bibliography 244 Index 265 This book explores how modern media practices can illuminate participatory reading in England from the late-fourteenth to the early-sixteenth centuries. Nonlinear apprehension, immersion and embodiment are practices intimately familiar to readers of Wikipedia, players of video games and users of multi-touch mobile devices. But far from being unique to digital media, they have clear analogues in the pre-modern era. Participatory reading in late-medieval England traces how the affinities between old and new media can reveal fresh insights not only about the digital, but also about the long history of media forms and practices. It thus casts new light on the literary practices of a period pre- and post-print to demonstrate how participatory reading vitally contributed to and shaped these negotiations of fragile authority.