In examining how ideological concerns helped give shape to strategies of writing and how forms of communication influenced cultural developments, these case studies assess a wide range of texts, including legal treatises, saintly biographies, rhetorical handbooks, and vernacular poetry. As a whole, the collection makes the case for combining abstract analyses such as textual theory and intellectual history with more technical specialties such as editing and codicology. Rather than approaching pre-modern Italian textuality as something uniform, Textual Cultures of Medieval Italy engages with its fascinating plurality."--BOOK JACKET.