Skip to Main Content

Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print

Online ISBN:
9780191789434
Print ISBN:
9780199654512
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print

Jane Griffiths
Jane Griffiths

Tutor and Fellow in English

Wadham College, Oxford
Find on
Published online:
19 March 2015
Published in print:
11 December 2014
Online ISBN:
9780191789434
Print ISBN:
9780199654512
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book examines the glossing of a variety of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts by authors including Lydgate, Douglas, Chaloner, Baldwin, Bullein, Harington, and Nashe. It is concerned particularly with the use of glosses as a means of authorial reflection on the writing process, and with the emergence of the gloss as a self-consciously literary mode. One of the main questions it addresses is to what extent the advent of print affects glossing practices. To this end, it traces the transmission of a number of glossed texts in both manuscript and print, but also examines glossing that is integral to texts written with print production in mind. With the latter, it focuses particularly on a little-remarked-upon but surprisingly common category of gloss: glossing that is ostentatiously playful, diverting rather than directing its readers. Setting this in the context of emerging print conventions and concerns about the stability of print, it argues that—like self-glossing in manuscript—such diverting glosses shape as well as reflect contemporary ideas of authorship and authority, and are thus genuinely experimental. The book reads across medieval-renaissance and manuscript-print boundaries in order to trace the emergence of the gloss as a genre and the way in which theories of authorship are affected by the material processes of writing and transmission.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close