Major
English
Advisor
Travis D. Williams
Advisor Department
English
Date
5-2025
Keywords
Chaucer, Manuscript Study, Codicology, Paleography
Abstract
“Rinceaux: Authority and Botanical Transcendence in Medieval Authorship” is a research paper I composed which followed a semester of research that sought to explore various constructions of authorship throughout the late-medieval period. My research considered the field of Chaucer Studies as its main subject, making central the ways in which methodologies such as paleography, codicology, and literary analysis can provide different contexts with which we may understand late-medieval writing and authorship. Throughout the research period I consulted scholarship from a variety of disciplines, analyzed digital manuscript facsimiles, compared textual variations in manuscript transliterations, and studied modern printed editions of medieval poetry alongside their paratextual elements. As a result of my studies, I composed a paper which brought together materials from the Chaucerian textual corpus to express the concord and discord of medieval and modern ways of understanding textuality. In juxtaposing modern formulations of authority and ownership with medieval contexts of scribal and manuscript culture, my research and commentary explored the reality that modern readers find the medieval text as a composite of modern and medieval forms, all of which provide necessary and valuable modes of reading and understanding.
Included in
Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Medieval History Commons