The Text in the Community brings together essays by a diverse group of medievalists to consider the multiple ways in which readers approach texts and manuscripts as part of "communities" of readers, authors, scribes, and scholars. The central premise of this volume is that texts do not exist in isolation. Each written work is embedded in contexts--literary, historical, geographical, social, political, and religious--and derives its meaning in part from the intersection of those contexts in the reader's experience of the text.