Collaborative meaning in medieval scribal culture

"Before print technology, every book was unique. Two manuscripts of the "same" text could package and transmit that text very differently, depending on the choices made by the scribes, compilers, translators, annotators, and decorators. Is it appropriate, Elizabeth Bryan asks, for us to read these books as products of a single author's consciousness? And if not, how do we read them?"--BOOK JACKET. "In Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture, Bryan compares examples from the British Library Cotton Otho C.xiii manuscript of Lazamon's Brut, the early-thirteenth-century verse history that translated King Arthur into English for the first time. She discovers cultural attitudes that valued communal aspects of manuscript texts - for example, a view of the physical book as connecting all who held it."--BOOK JACKET. "Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture will be of interest to students and specialists in medieval chronicle histories, Middle English, Arthurian literature, and literary and textual theory."--BOOK JACKET.