Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 3. Reception Before The First Edition

This is a continuation of my notes on the manuscript HM1, the only manuscript source for the Towneley Cycle, begun here and continued in Part 2 here. I look at the manuscript in terms of what Jerome McGann calls “bibliographic codes,” features of the manuscript that communicate non-lexical meaning (that is, meaning apart from the signification of the actual words of the text).

In this post I look at the work’s reception before the first modern edition of the work.

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Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 2. Description of the Manuscript HM1

This is a continuation of my notes on the manuscript HM1, the only manuscript source for the Towneley Cycle, begun here. I look at the manuscript in terms of what Jerome McGann calls "bibliographic codes," features of the manuscript that communicate non-lexical meaning (that is, meaning apart from the signification of the actual words of the text).

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Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 1

One of my interests is old manuscripts and how they come into the modern world.  Whether those texts are biblical, legal, historical, poetic, or whatever, they tend to preserve in their physical form some fingerprints of the time and place in which they originate.  As products of human minds and endeavors, they therefore also contain signals about the minds that produced them.

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