Introduction Absent Narratives and the Textual Culture of the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

The primary function of the medievalist is to locate missing stories. Lost manuscripts, anterior sources, and earlier textual versions structure the way we think about the literature of the Middle Ages. Medieval literary works always bear witness to an other text, most often figured materially as the textual ancestor from which it has been copied. Such ancestral others—others that are typically imagined as the medieval exemplars of our final copytexts—are not the only texts lurking behind modern print. Sometimes the work remains other to itself and must be (re)assembled from the various and sometimes corrupted manuscript versions and early printed editions that have survived.