Printing the Middle Ages

The Introduction to this book, ‘Plowmen and Pastiche: Representing the Medieval Book’ (1-20), traces the fate of the frontispiece of Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.14, the image of plowing, which serves as ‘a rich instance of the general argument of this book, which is that from an early period, the texts of the Middle Ages have been understood at least in part in terms of their appearance’ (2). Echard discusses the adaptation of the image in various nineteenth-century works (e.g., Wright’s edition), in which the image ‘can be seen as a crystallization of the process by which many medieval texts have made their way into our hands’ (17).