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Kimberly K. Bell and Julie Nelson Couch, eds.
The Texts and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108: The Shaping of English Vernacular Narrative.
Publisher: Brill.
Series: Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts, 6.
Publication due: 2011.
Page count: 368pp.

Publisher's recommended price
Hardback ISBN 9789004192065, €130.00 / US$ 185.00

Description:

The late thirteenth-century, monolingual Oxford manuscript, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108, bears singular importance to medieval studies, for it preserves and anthologizes unique versions of several seminal Middle English texts, including The South English Legendary, Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and Somer Soneday. While critics have traditionally classified these poems by genre, this book returns them to their manuscript context in a comprehensive examination of this vernacular codex. Considering the manuscript as a "whole book" rather than a miscellany of romances, saints' lives, and religious poems, these inter-connected essays focus on the physical, contextual, and critical intersections of Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 108. Codicological evidence foregrounds the manuscript's investment in a particular vision of an English Christian identity.

Contributors are A.S.G. Edwards, Thomas R. Liszka, Murray J. Evans, Andrew Taylor, Diane Speed, Susanna Fein, Robert Mills, Andrew Lynch, Daniel Kline, Christina M. Fitzgerald, and J. Justin Brent.