This chapter compares how the invitation to read nonlinearly, familiar in hypertext media today and made explicit in The Orcherd of Syon, is used to elicit and to represent reading practices across late medieval English secular as well as devotional literary works that also include Titus and Vespasian and John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, in explicit, implied, and hybridized ways. In addition, the discourse evoked by invitations to read nonlinearly illuminates how medieval writers conceived of their readers as agentive participants in the work of textual interpretation. Finally, nonlinear reading gives rise to concepts traced across subsequent chapters, relying as it does upon a discourse of mobility, space, and temporality.
Reorienting the narrative of digital media studies to incorporate the medieval, Participatory reading in late-medieval England traces affinities between digital and medieval media to explore how participation defined reading practices and shaped relations between writers and readers in England’s literary culture from the late-fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries. Traditionally, print operates as the comparative touchstone of both medieval and digital media, but Participatory reading argues that the latter share more in common with each other than either does with print. Working on the borders of digital humanities, medieval cultural studies, and the history of the book, Participatory reading draws on well-known and little-studied works ranging from Chaucer to banqueting poems and wall-texts to demonstrate how medieval writers and readers engaged with practices familiar in digital media today, from crowd-sourced editing to nonlinear apprehension to mobility, temporality, and forensic materiality illuminate. Writers turned to these practices in order to both elicit and control readers’ engagement with their works in ways that would benefit the writers’ reputations along with the transmission and interpretation of their texts, while readers pursued their own agendas—which could conflict with or set aside writers’ attempts to frame readers’ work. The interactions that gather around participatory reading practices reflect concerns about authority, literacy, and media formats, before and after the introduction of print. Participatory reading is of interest to students and scholars of medieval literature, book, and reading history, in addition to those interested in the long history of media studies.
This chapter examines how texts painted onto walls in the Percy family’s principal estates of Leconfield and Wressel, preserved in the British Library manuscript Royal 18 D.ii, and in the mural of the danse macabre installed in a cloister at medieval St. Paul’s Cathedral in London invite consideration of the relationship between architecture, text, and image within and without the manuscript space. By turning to digital media theorists focusing on space, particularly those addressing architecture and embodied space, this chapter argues that the wall texts in their architectural frames elicit participation from readers whose bodies become the framers of knowledge as they move through and read the different estate spaces provided with wall texts.
Mobility, alongside aural, textual, gestural, and performative meaning, becomes the focus of this chapter’s examination of John Lydgate’s “Sotelties for the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI.” Subtleties were presented at the 1429 Coronation banquet accompanied by verses composed by John Lydgate, which were performed as they were moved through the Great Hall at Westminster. This chapter argues that reading can be understood as an act that requires not simply participation through the apprehension of a textual message either visually or aurally—the most basic understanding of medieval literacy—but as an act that requires familiarity with other, material modes of meaning-making, all deliberately drawn on to invite and shape readers’ relations to the text. Drawing on understandings of forensic and formal materiality developed to evaluate digital works, this chapter intervenes in assessments of medieval materiality to offer a fresh framework for its analysis.
This chapter explores the significance of time to reading experiences by focusing on three fifteenth-century texts that encourage readers to make temporal choices as part of their reading experiences: Thomas of Erceldoune’s Prophesy, a prophetic text focused on the relationship between Thomas Rhymer and the Queen of Faerie; Dame Eleanor Hull’s Commentary on the Psalms; and Thomas Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy. In the way these writers and texts invite readers to make temporal choices and interpretations through the reading process, they encourage readers to perform reading shaped by temporality. Such temporal performativity includes inviting readers to rethink relationships created by the chronology of history by moving nonlinearly through time.
This chapter examine this particular mystic group and its special literary origins and the question of its attitude to those who converted to Christianity
In this study, the various aspects of the way the Jews regarded themselves in the context of the lapse into another religion will be researched fully for the first time. We will attempt to understand whether they regarded the issue of conversion with self-confidence or with suspicion, whether their attitude was based on a clear theological position or on doubt and the coping with the problem as part of the process of socialization will be fully analysed. In this way, we will better understand how the Jews saw their own identity whilst living as a minority among the Christian majority, whose own self-confidence was constantly becoming stronger from the 10th to the 14th century until they eventually ousted the Jews completely from the places they lived in, England, France and large parts of Germany. This aspect of Jewish self-identification, written by a person who converted to Christianity, can help clarify a number of
The attitude to women who convert to Christianity was different from the attitude described above, and extremely complex. There are almost no descriptions of women converting voluntarily. On the other hand there are discussions concerning women who were forced to convert. The discussion that we perceive as a Halakhic discussion is in fact an intellectual discussion that is particularly special.
It is impossible to understand the question of the attitude to converts to Christianity without examining the attitude to Christians who converted to Judaism. This attitude is the mirror image of the attitude to converts from Judaism. In the same way that converts to Christianity were rejected and members of Jewish communities would try to distance themselves from them, so they would try to become close with and appreciate converts to Judaism.