Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England

People in medieval England talked, and yet we seldom talk or write about their talk. People conversed not within literary texts, but in the world in which those texts were composed and copied. The absence of such talk from our record of the medieval past is strange. Its absence from our formulation of medieval literary history is stranger still. In Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England, Marisa Libbon argues that talk among medieval England's public, especially talk about history and identity, was essential to the production of texts and was a fundamental part of the transmission and reception of literature. Examining Richard I's life as an exemplary subject of medieval England's class-crossing talk about the past, Libbon advances a theory of how talk circulates history, identity, and cultural memory over time. Gathering together Richard I's textual intersections with figures such as Charlemagne and Roland, Libbon offers a literary history that accounts for the spaces between and around extant manuscripts. These spaces, usually dismissed as silent, tell us about the processes of writing and reading, and illuminate the intangible daily life in which textual production occurred. By revealing the pressures that talk about the past exerted on textual production, this book relocates the power of making culture and collective memory to a wider, collaborative authorship in medieval England.