Engaging Words

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Laurel Amtower

   Pages 1-16

3. The Reading Public

   • Laurel Amtower

   Pages 17-43

4. The Image of the Book: Mediating the Aesthetics of Reader Response

   • Laurel Amtower

   Pages 45-77

5. Authorized Readers, or, Reading Authority

   • Laurel Amtower

   Pages 79-120

6. The Ethics of Reading

   • Laurel Amtower

   Pages 121-144

7. Textual Subjects

   • Laurel Amtower

   Pages 145-181

8. Conclusion

   • Laurel Amtower

   Pages 183-187

9. Back Matter

   Pages 189-243

   PDF

Acts of reading appear everywhere in the late Middle Ages, from the margins of Books of Hours to self-portraits of authors in their studies. What relevance did this image have for the late medieval imagination? Engaging Words is an interdisciplinary study on the conception of reading in late medieval society. Beginning with an examination of the social conditions that produced a viable reading public, the book proceeds to examine popular tastes, the interrelationship between manuscript form and content, and finally the theory and poetry of late medieval authors. By drawing on images from late medieval culture as well as from historical documents and literary texts, Engaging Words shows how reading became a cultural metaphor in the late Middle Ages that transformed the way the Western world thought about identity and social roles.

• culture
• history
• identity
• Late Middle Ages
• Middle Ages
• society
• Tradition

"...this brave project is fascinating..." - Alison Frazier, Libraries & Culture

"...substantial in scope...it calls on various disciplines to weave a large and intriguing argument about the understanding of reading from the High to the Late Middle Ages." - History:Reviews of New Books

"Amtower succeeds in showing a sophisticated, varied, and often-ironic sense of reading as a metaphor for all manner of comprehension in late-medieval art and literature." - Choice

Laurel Amtower is Associate Professor of English at San Diego State University.

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