Freedom from the press: Reading and writing in late medieval England (Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Margery Kempe)

The dissertation argues that the benefits readers derived from the press, in terms of better access to authorized texts, were countered by a profound loss of opportunity for inventive forms of reception. Before the growth of the printing industry, medieval readers enjoyed the liberties they were free to take with the texts they recopied. Manuscript culture encouraged readers to edit or adapt freely any text they wrote out, or to re-shape the texts they read with annotations that would take the same form as the scribe's initial work on the manuscript. The assumption that texts are mutable and available for adaptation by anyone is the basis, not only for this quotidian functioning of the average reader, but also for the composition of the great canonical works of the period. Chaucer, Langland and Margery Kempe construct themselves as vernacular authors partly by reading and reworking their source material in creative ways. Their poetical methodology views writing as an integral part of reading, and these authors meta-narratively encourage readers to use their works as source material in return, to read actively. Readers participated by producing new art in the fresh contextualization of these works in manuscript.; However, the new culture that developed along with the rise of the printing press, including the concept of copyright and the increased status of professional editors, placed limitations on this ethos of re-adaptation. Regulation of the business of printing gave new life to censorship legislation that had always been aimed at hindering readers more than writers. Nevertheless, I argue that a tradition of active reading persisted in manuscript copies made after printed editions were available, and even in the preparation of printed editions themselves. My work combines material history of the book with close readings of the poetics of intertextuality in works by Langland, Chaucer, and Kempe. I follow each work from the author's composition process through the text's afterlife in manuscript and print in order to track the metamorphosis of the relationship between readers and writers across the crucial divide of the printing press.