The six essays in Reading from the Margins explore new approaches to the textual study of medieval manuscripts. Ralph Hanna III and A. S. G. Edwards open the volume's broad inquiry into Chaucer's early readership by looking at the annotation on the flyleaves of the Ellesmere manuscript. Julia Boffey shows the ways in which bits of poems attributed and misattributed to Chaucer reflect the medieval literary vocation and shape our understanding of it. In a study of the manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde, Ardis Butterfield suggests what layout and decoration can tell us about authorial and scribal practice in France and in England. David Lorenzo Boyd looks at the "spurious" version of the Cook's Tale in MS. Bodley 686 and analyzes its literary and material situation in this opulent manuscript. The last two contributions span the textual and material range of the whole volume. David Greetham reveals the ways in which biological models have shaped the way we investigate and edit medieval texts. In a postscript on the rebinding and conservation of the Ellesmere manuscript, Anthony G. Cains suggests the importance of binding and repair in the transmission and reproduction of medieval manuscripts.

Seth Lerer is the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.

"One of the chief points held in common by these six essays is the authority of scribes and readers, which in previous generations of editors was often dismissed—emended away—or simply not taken into account. This volume reminds its readers that the stemma and the critical edition are modern inventions, and with them the idea of an originary author. In Chaucer's time, authorship was no guarantee of textual ownership. Medieval texts were often fluid, existing in various forms. How this state of affairs may shed light on Chaucerian manuscripts is the question underlying this volume."—Anglia

"The essays demonstrate the value of more than four decades of renewed interest in questions relating to the writing, transmission, and reception of late-medieval literary texts and manuscripts, particularly those associated with the name of Geoffrey Chaucer."—Modern Language Review

"Reading from the Margins articulates a number of issues that have concerned recent textual critics and applies them directly to Chaucer. . . . Ralph Hanna III and A. S. G. Edwards consider the specific literary circles that produced the famous Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales and in the process demonstrate the inter-relations between Chaucer's reputation, Lydgate, and prominent east Midlands families like the Pastons, De Veres, and Drurys. As this essay makes clear, it was provincial traditions that individually transmitted works and genres, and if collectively these traditions can be regarded as the history of Middle English, such collectivity implies (misleadingly) a coherence and national character that the evidence belies. There's much good information here, and an appendix provides an edition of Rotheley's poem on the De Veres that prefaces the Ellesmere manuscript. Julia Boffey's 'Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon' is characteristically insightful, informed, and rigorously argued. She focuses on a short verse stanza bound with some other fragments at the front of London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius E.xi, a copy of John of Fordun's Chronica gentis Scotorum. This stanza is actually an extract from John Walton's translation of the Consolation of Philosophy and in tracing its transmission history Boffey demonstrates the interconnections of material and interpretive history and the importance book communities had for both in the Middle Ages."—Journal of English and Germanic Philology