Michael Johnston is an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Ind., USA). He specializes in the history of the book, particularly the manuscript culture of fifteenth-century England. His work on this topic has recently appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Journal of the Early Book Society, Viator, and Yearbook of Langland Studies. He regularly offers courses on British literature and culture, primarily of the Middle Ages, as well as courses on the history of books.

"A special virtue of the book is that competence in Johnston's home territory of palaeography, codicology and dialectology is not required to follow his arguments, or to feel secure in his expert guidance. Another singular achievement is the bookâs lucid accounting of the relevance of such information to questions of literary interpretation and aesthetics." -- Glenn Wright (Syracuse University), The Journal

"This book will be of value to all who work on Middle English romance, not only for the specific readings it offers of these romances but also in providing a model of how an interdisciplinary approach (specifically one that fully integrates literary-critical and paleographical-codicological studies) can illuminate texts and account for previously puzzling aspects of them. As "popular" romance becomes increasingly prominent on undergraduate syllabi, this book should also prove a stimulus to students for the same reasons. In addition, it will help them, as modern readers who sometimes find medieval literature elusive in its strangeness, to ground the texts they study in specific situations that, as Johnson shows, are often highly engaging in their own right." --Gareth Griffith, Modern Philology