The K-III-4 codex in the Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, dated to the late fourteenth century, brings together three narrative poems of the early thirteenth century (Book of Apollonius, Life of St. Mary of Egypt, and The three Kings of the Orient), whose formal differences are unified in the context of the manuscript codex. At the crossroads of the history of the medieval mansucript as a book unit, and the history of reading practices as the cornerstone of the process of transmission of texts in the Middle Ages, this volume addresses the issues and study of the codex as a unit. Particularly in medieval studies, analysis of manuscripts has become one of the most active areas of current research. Codices are no longer treated as inert witnesses to a culture whose character has been fully unveiled by scholars, but as active participants in the process of constant exploration and discovery. Claiming the materiality of something long thought immaterial, like literature, is to set aside a Platonic conception that a work transcends all possible material incarnations, in favor of a pragmatic view which postulates that no text exists outside the carrier material that transmits it.--Translated and adapted from book jacket.

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