PART READ LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture

Late-medieval England witnessed a remarkable rise in the prominence of poetry and the sophistication of the English vernacular, to which both writers and readers contributed in fundamental ways. But while the transition of the medieval writer into the modern author, with a modern understanding of authority and the ownership of a text, has been extensively studied, the crucial role of the reader has been overlooked.

Tracing affinities between digital and medieval media, this book explores how participation helped to define reading practices and shape relations between writers and readers from the late fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries. It draws on a wide variety of works - from Chaucer to banqueting poems and wall-texts - to demonstrate how medieval writers and readers engaged with practices familiar in digital media today. This includes such apparently modern ideas as crowd-sourced editing, nonlinear apprehension, mobility, temporality and forensic materiality. Writers turned to these practices in order to control readers' engagement in ways that would benefit their reputations and encourage the transmission and interpretation of their texts. Readers, meanwhile, pursued their own agendas, which often conflicted with or simply ignored writers' intentions.

Shedding light on a previously unexplored area, Participatory reading in late-medieval England will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval literature and the history of the book, as well as those interested in the long history of media studies.