I’ve just done the proofs for the first chapter in the collection Books, Readers, and Libraries in Fiction, edited by Karen Attar and Andrew Nash. My chapter explores the development of the idea of reading prompting a subsequent dream-vision in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; as a part of the Chaucer tradition, this is well-trodden ground, but I have some new things to say about the specific words and phrases that poets use to describe books and reading.
Since the rest of the collection looks at later material, I tried to make this chapter an accessible window for non-specialist readers on the complexities of the book before print and of social late-medieval reading. Chaucer features, of course, but so do Henryson, Lydgate, Robert Mannyng of Brunne, and James I of Scotland. The book is due out, open access, at the end of 2024 or early in 2025.
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