For undergraduate teachers like myself who have struggled to bring codicology into the classroom, this book is a gift... The authors do an excellent job of building characters around the shadowy figures of scribes, compilers, illuminators, binders, rubricators and annotators, explaining their impact on literature... Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts does an excellent job of... working to break down barriers between manuscript, print and digital cultures as well as distinctions between medieval and contemporary, author and reader, student and specialist, and elite (i.e. manuscript-holding) and non-elite institutions.
Janine Rogers
Review of English Studies
An attractively laid out and richly illustrated book. This book will be of interest to the seasoned manuscript scholar as to the neophyte.
Julia Boffey
Times Literary Supplement
Few universities in the US and the UK are able to offer their graduate students with properly supervised access to medieval manuscripts, despite the demand for such training. This superb volume fills a much-needed gap...The authors offer not just a masterly synthesis of the most recent (and even forthcoming) scholarship; they also break new ground.
Ruth Evans
Manuscripta: A Journal for Manuscript Research
One of the crucial accomplishments of this volume is establishing without a doubt the very foundational nature of manuscript work to all scholarship on the Middle Ages. In a volume that devotes itself to a pedagogical mission, self-consciously unpacking its freight for both novices and experts alike, Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts provides a great service to us all... Like the lectern-sized Riverside edition Kerby-Fulton discusses, It will become a standard in the field for both teaching and research purposes, and will hopefully drive a new generation of scholars into manuscript study.
Kathleen E. Kennedy
The Medieval Review
The book has an engaging, conversational tone. Reading it is like being in a seminar taught by three excellent scholars deeply engaged in a burgeoning field and eager to cultivate new approaches and voices... Fittingly for a work that examines book design as an intellectual enterprise, the book is beautifully produced and very generously illustrated with excellent color reproductions of the widest variety of works... In sum, the present work is a sterling demonstration of what the history of the book has to offer literary studies.
Erik Inglis
The Burlington Magazine