Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books: Exploring the Manuscript Matrix

This book envisions the confines of medieval manuscripts as the potential territory of many virtual worlds: realms that readers call forth through their imaginative interactions with a book’s material features. Each component of a medieval manuscript–its alphabetical characters, pages, images, text, gloss–offers an avenue of involvement with the world of books, and with the worlds in books. The explorations presented here follow those paths in a selection of manuscripts and texts produced in late-medieval Britain, tracing the fortunes of characters who become subject to and sometimes subjects in the very books the read and write.