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.
Table of Content
Introduction: objects, assemblages, affects, ecologies
1 Objects of instruction
2 Objects of mercy
3 Objects of correction
4 Testimonial objects
5 Objects of liberation
Epilogue: fishing for answers
Appendix: contents of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Dr Anke Bernau is Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester
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