Audience and Reception

Abstract

This chapter sketches a basic conceptual framework for identifying and analysing the audiences and receptions of the kind of medieval biographical collections studied in this special issue. To do so, it sets out the range of approaches taken by the contributors and situates these approaches in relation to previous scholarship on the reception and interpretation of textual sources. Particular attention is given to the dynamic relationships between those who wrote texts and those who read and utilised them, relationships which are especially pertinent for studying compilations. In the process of transmission and reception, old texts were imbued with new meanings as later readers excerpted, copied and compiled them into novel collections. It is argued that by exploring biographical collections in the light of audience and reception, it is possible to uncover some of the different ways that authors/compilers sought to articulate notions of community.