Includes bibliographical references (pages 395-448) and indexes.

Introduction: The performance of reading -- "Silence visible" : Carthusian devotional reading and meditative practice -- Backgrounds : the Carthusian Order -- Carthusians and books -- Carthusians and art -- The shapes of eremitic reading in the desert of religion : the desert of religion as imagetext -- "ALS wildernes is wroght þis boke" : formats of monastic books -- Reading spiritual community in the wilderness -- Lyric imaginings and painted prayers -- The eremitic lyric and Richard Rolle -- Imagining the Carthusian reader -- Liturgical pageantry in private spaces -- Reading the liturgy : two models -- Performing the holy name -- Performing the canonical hours -- Performing the seven sacraments -- Envisioning dialogue in performance -- "In maner of a dyaloge it wente" -- Allegorical dialogues : the pylgremage of the soul -- Mystical dialogues : the treatise of the seven points -- Dramatizing the cell : theatrical performances in monastic reading -- Dramatic texts, lyric voices, and private readers -- Theatrical reading in additional 37049 -- Monastic closet drama -- Conclusion: Reading performances.

Print version record.

Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Dra.

English.