Medieval Manuscript Culture

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Mary Swan (University of Leeds)
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The modern notion of a book is very unlike the medieval one, and medieval attitudes to textuality, authorship and authority are significantly different from modern ones too. Modern readers have access to many medieval texts in recent editions or translations, and so it is easy to overlook how these printed versions differ from medieval manuscript copies, and how the mentality of our print-culture age differs from that of a manuscript culture.

Medieval European culture was fundamentally oral rather than written, in that the commonest means of composing and transmitting most texts (in the sense of imaginative stories and poems and also formal, legal and ritual discourses) was by speaking them aloud from memory and/or imagination. Gradually writing came to be used alongside oral transmission,

1904 words

Citation: Swan, Mary. "Medieval Manuscript Culture". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 September 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1324, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1324 Medieval Manuscript Culture 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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