Sarum Use was the most widely used form of the liturgy in late medieval England, but its service books were much less standardized than their modern counterparts. The lack of uniformity is particularly marked in Sarum breviaries' lessons on saints, which can vary enormously from copy to copy. This book is the first comprehensive examination of those lessons and the manuscripts that preserve them. It provides a catalogue of over eighty manuscripts and twelve early printed versions, giving a brief description of each one, sometimes correcting previous views of its date and provenance, and identifying each copy's divergences from the standard Sarum roster of saints. The book also identifies the textual families into which the manuscripts fall and the extent of their divergence from the lessons in both the early printed versions and the inadequate nineteenth-century edition on which modern scholars have previously depended. The author's findings offer an introduction to the unexpectedly rich variety of hagiographical lessons that survive, identify some of the sources behind them, and shed new light on the ways in which the Sarum breviary developed and was disseminated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

A fresh close reading of the texts of one of the four surviving major manuscripts of Old English poetry, reappraising Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 to discover some of the preoccupations of its compilers.

The first full survey of crucial witnesses to the reception of Piers Plowman.

This collection of essays brings out the richness and vibrancy of pre-modern textual culture in all its variety.

A fresh appraisal of late medieval manuscript culture in England, examining the ways in which people sustained older books, exploring the practices and processes by which manuscripts were crafted, mended, protected, marked, gifted and shared.

Essays exploring the great religious and devotional works of the Middle Ages in their manuscript and other contexts.