Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.

'The author’s ability to identify strikingly anomalous details across this sprawling body of material is impressive.'

A. S. G. Edwards Source: Times LIterary Supplement

'Immaterial Text is, in the best sense, a provocation that will prompt a new kind of attention to the English literary manuscript.'

Sonja Drimmer Source: Studies in the Age of Chaucer

‘… deserves notice from Chaucerians, codicologists, and cultural historians.’

Eric Weiskott Source: Speculum

‘… offers a timely counterpoint to the material turn by investigating how scribes conceptualized and prioritized the immaterial through their work of copying, laying out, dividing, reading, and responding to the parchment of fifteenth-century English manuscripts, with particular attention given to the transmission of medical recipes, included to explore metaphorical resonances between textual subject matter and the material qualities of manuscripts, and the works of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Hoccleve … The book should be widely read by literary scholars and book historians, transcending the study of late medieval English literature.’

Heather Blatt Source: Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies