Acts of reading appear everywhere in the late Middle Ages, from the margins of Books of Hours to self-portraits of authors in their studies. What relevance did this image have for the late medieval imagination? Engaging Words is an interdisciplinary study on the conception of reading in late medieval society. Beginning with an examination of the social conditions that produced a viable reading public, the book proceeds to examine popular tastes, the interrelationship between manuscript form and content, and finally the theory and poetry of late medieval authors. By drawing on images from late medieval culture as well as from historical documents and literary texts, Engaging Words shows how reading became a cultural metaphor in the late Middle Ages that transformed the way the Western world thought about identity and social roles.

Introduction Engaging Texts Chapter One: The Reading Public Literary Production and the Book Trade Book Owners and Book Readers Literacy: Public Performance and Private Cognition Reading, Privacy, and the Self Chapter Two: The Image of the Book: Mediating the Aesthetics of Reader Response The Late Medieval Best-Seller Marginalia and the Iconography of Reading The Reader in the Text Chapter Three: Authorized Readers, or, Reading Authority The Medieval Commentary Tradition Beyond the Book: Humanist Reading and the Poetics of the Self Glossing the Self: The Vita Nuova Re-reading Augustine: Petrarch and the Book Chapter Four: The Ethics of Reading Chaucer and the Ethics of Reading The Origins of Language The Ethics of Fame Authorizing Readers Chapter Five: Textual Subjects Reading as Foresight: Cassandra and the Book of History 'The Text Ful Hard is to Fynde' Experiential Poetics: The Prioress and the Wife of Bath The Fate of Readers Conclusion: Identity and the Book Bibliography

Laurel Amtower is Associate Professor of English at San Diego State University.