Objects of Affection: The Book and the Household in Late Medieval England

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Description

This study investigates the affective agency of the book, through the emotional literacy training that a single codex provided a late-medieval English household.

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.

Reviews

"A provocation and a fruitful alternative to our typical ways of approaching a manuscript ... This books synthesis of codicologylong one of the most traditional of disciplineswith some of the highest of high theory will cause readers who come from each respective field to stretch and read out of their comfort zone. This is a good thing, to be clear."
Michael Johnston, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"Objects of Affection is in part a book about a love affairSeamans, for Ashmole 61and the ways in which scholarly affection can produce new and invigorated ways of reading ... The result is a book with much to offer those working on late medieval English households and the objectsincluding books like Ashmole 61that mattered to and moved their inhabitants."
Lisa H. Cooper, Speculum

"Myra Seamans thoughtful and thought-provoking study of MS Ashmole 61 accommodates both an incisive analysis of the varied contents and moral contributions of this late-medieval household book, and a powerful rumination on the nature and appeal of the codex in an increasingly digital age ... Objects of Affection adroitly pushes against the perception of household books or miscellanies as merely haphazard, offering an impressive recuperation of neglected or disparaged texts as well as a compelling invitation to a way of reading that emphasizes how humans form part of communities that include non-human agentive objects."
Megan G. Leitch, Arthuriana

Author Bio

Myra Seaman is Professor of English at the College of Charleston