Description: Reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts surviving in medieval manuscripts as authored.
Review Quotes: "This is an innovative and learned study, important for our thinking about medieval cultures of the book, and more broadly for our thinking about the nature of authorship and textuality in any period. Fisher's arguments persistently perforate our still-under-examined, overly rigid categories of author, exemplar, copyist, text, and reader. Instead, Fisher works within a new array of categories of scribal activism, which will become important tools in the critical vocabulary medievalists are building as they focus increasingly on the physical culture of their texts. Equally, critics at work on the labile textuality and the destabilizing of the author/reader distinction in current web culture will have a great deal to learn from this book. Fisher's superb book is also an important piece of medieval scholarship, in its attention to a body of history writing whose manuscript sites (among other things) marked it as a fully literary genre in the Middle Ages. Fisher brings a unique critical eye to this material, as well as frequent forays into scribal activity where historiography overlaps with poetry, liturgy, and other forms. This enriches our sense of the role of history writing in the emergence of medieval vernacular culture." -- Christopher Baswell, Barnard College and Columbia University