• Objects of affection
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Objects of affection

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This study investigates the affective agency of the book, through the emotional literacy training that a single codex provided a late-medieval English household. It demonstrates how MS Ashmole 61 a...
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  • 17 January 2023
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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.
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Price: £25.00
Pages: 296
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture
Publication Date: 17 January 2023
ISBN: 9781526167187
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval, Literary studies: ancient, classical & medieval, HISTORY / Europe / Medieval, LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600, Ancient, classical and medieval texts, European history: medieval period, middle ages
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"A provocation and a fruitful alternative to our typical ways of approaching a manuscript ... This book’s synthesis of codicology—long one of the most traditional of disciplines—with some of the highest of high theory will cause readers who come from each respective field to stretch and read out of their comfort zone. This is a good thing, to be clear."
Michael Johnston, Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"Objects of Affection is in part a book about a love affair—Seaman’s, for Ashmole 61—and the ways in which scholarly affection can produce new and invigorated ways of reading ... The result is a book with much to offer those working on late medieval English households and the objects—including books like Ashmole 61—that mattered to and moved their inhabitants."
Lisa H. Cooper, Speculum

"Myra Seaman’s thoughtful and thought-provoking study of MS Ashmole 61 accommodates both an incisive analysis of the varied contents and moral contributions of this late-medieval household book, and a powerful rumination on the nature and appeal of the codex in an increasingly digital age ... Objects of Affection adroitly pushes against the perception of household books or ‘miscellanies’ as merely haphazard, offering an impressive recuperation of neglected or disparaged texts as well as a compelling invitation to a way of reading that emphasizes how humans form part of communities that include non-human agentive objects."
Megan G. Leitch, Arthuriana

'Myra Seaman’s Objects of Affection is an important, often enchanting contribution to this body of work, blending new materialist methodologies with traditional codicology and close reading to trace some of the literary and emotional effects produced by a single idiosyncratic book: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61.'
Arthur Bahr, A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies

Myra Seaman is Professor of English at the College of Charleston

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