Objects of Affection

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 affirms both the physical and moral agency of nonhumans, who fashion spiritually generous and socially mindful human household members. -- .

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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. -- .