Written by an international cast of experts, The Materiality of Text showcases a wide range of innovative methodologies from ancient history, literary studies, epigraphy, and art history and provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on the physicality of writing in antiquity. The contributions focus on epigraphic texts in order to gauge questions of their placement, presence, and perception: starting with an analysis of the forms of writing and its perception as an act of physical and cultural intervention, the volume moves on to consider the texts’ ubiquity and strategic positioning within epigraphic, literary, and architectural spaces. The contributors rethink modern assumptions about the processes of writing and reading and establish novel ways of thinking about the physical forms of ancient texts.

Owen investigates what the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales reveal about the way they came into being. [see revs] This study of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Talescalls into question previous efforts to explain the complexities, the different orderings of the tales and the extraordinary shifts in textual affiliations within the manuscripts. Owen sees the manuscripts that survive, most of them collections of all or almost all the tales, as derived from the large number of single tales and small collections that circulated after Chaucer's death. This theory takes issue with all modern editions of the Canterbury Tales, which in Owen's view reflect the effort of medieval scribes and supervisors to make a satisfactory book of the collection of fragments Chaucer left behind. It is this collection of fragments, the authentic Tales of Canterbury by Geoffrey Chaucer, which reflects the different stages of the plan that was still evolving at his death. CHARLES A. OWEN Jr is former Professor of English and Chairman of Medieval Studies at the University of Conneticut.

Makes key resources widely availableThese books provide the only complete record -- much fuller than that available through any other printed source -- of the major manuscripts of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.Valuable primary informationThese editions -- with their expensive facsimile reproductions, beta-radiographs of the watermarks, detailed bibliographical descriptions, transcriptions, textural notes, collations, bibliographies of relevant studies of the MSS, and indexes -- will remain repositories of primary information on the poems and prose of the younger Romantics for the next century.

The twenty-eight essays in this collection showcase cutting-edge research in manuscript studies, encompassing material from late antiquity to the Renaissance. The volume celebrates the exceptional contribution of John Lowden to the study of medieval books.