Includes discussions of some relevant manuscripts containing French verse (e.g. Reynard the Fox).

This is a book about absence, the absence from medieval French literary studies of a codicological dimension. While scholars of post-medieval lterature are generally aware of the material nature of the printed book and the text it contains, my guess is that many of those who describe themselves as medievalists remain largely unaware in practice of the nature of the medieval book and its implications for the object of their study. The reasons for this state of affairs are multiple, but chief among them are a distaste for the minutia: of philology and an obsession with drawing grand revisionist conclusions about medieval culture, conclusions often predetermined by the nature of approaches to literature often applied all too hastily to medieval texts. If it is understandable that medievalists would wish, for political reasons, to be seen as being in the vanguard, and if such efforts have not been entirely fruitless, it is regrettable, if not unforgivable, that medieval literature has been made to conform to the paradigm of the modern and divested of its alterity. I believe that this is where we can be found wanting as medievalists, namely in our failure to exploit and rejoice in what makes our material unique. Where other areas have stressed cultural diversity and have even developed new specialisms in response, we have been content to hitch rides on other critical wagons, following lan1ely, sheepishly, and often apolo- getically, on the heels our modernist colleagues. The alterity of medieval literature is due in large part to its preservation and transmission in manuscript form, which necessarily remains our only direct means of context with the textual reality of the Middle Ages. - [Author]

Language: English

978-90-420-1399-5