Introduction: Medieval Libraries, History of the Book and Literature

Sunderland, Luke

doi:10.1093/fs/knw004

Introduction: Medieval Libraries, History of the Book and Literature

Sunderland, Luke

Authors

Professor Luke Sunderland luke.sunderland@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

Medieval libraries are studied as collections of books, but much less frequently as collections of ideas. They are somewhat neglected by literary scholars, who tend to define the parameters of their studies in terms of authors, genres, themes, traditions, or movements, rather than library collections. Such critics are interested in where individual texts come from or where they go, and much less in which texts were gathered together in libraries and thus made sense together. Studies have increased awareness of the intertextuality of medieval literature, especially of the interplay between literature and philosophy in the later Middle Ages: medieval literary texts were of course in dialogue with other sorts of knowledge.1 But the potential for using popular literary texts — the incontournables of medieval libraries — to inform an idea of what those libraries symbolized, or how they were conceived or used, remains unexploited. Nor has the medieval library...

Citation

Sunderland, L. (2016). Introduction: Medieval Libraries, History of the Book and Literature. French Studies, 70(2), 159-170. https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knw004

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Oct 15, 2015
Online Publication Date	Feb 21, 2016
Publication Date	Apr 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Apr 28, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Feb 21, 2018
Journal	French Studies
Print ISSN	0016-1128
Electronic ISSN	1468-2931
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	70
Issue	2
Pages	159-170
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knw004

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Copyright Statement
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in French Studies following peer review. The version of record Luke Sunderland; Introduction: Medieval Libraries, History of the Book, and Literature. French Studies 2016; 70 (2): 159-170 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knw004.