Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection explores analogies of erasure and rewriting observed in editorial and literary practices underlying the production of texts from medieval England.

Foreword: Homage to André Crépin; L.Carruthers Introduction: Palimpsests and 'Palimpsestuous' Reinscriptions; R.Chai-Elsholz PART I: PERMANENCE AND IMPERMANENCE OF WRITING ON THE PAGE  An Anglo-Saxon Palimpsest from Fleury: Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS 342 (290); A.Papahagi Recovering Anglo-Saxon Erasures: Some Questions, Tools and Techniques; P.Stokes Some Psalter Glosses in Their Immediate Context; J.Roberts The Palimpsest and Old English Homiletic Composition; P.E.Szarmach 'Ic Beda'...'Cwæð Beda': Reinscribing Bede in the Old English Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum ; S.Rowley Vernacular Engravings in Late Medieval England; F.Bourgne PART II: IMPERMANENCE AND ACCUMULATION IN THE LITERARY IMAGINATION Rewriting Genres: Beowulf as Epic Romance; L. Carruthers   Palimpsestic Philomela: Reinscription in Chaucer's Legend of Philomela ; G.Aloni The Middle English Breton Lays and the Mists of Origin; C.Vial Enquiries into the Textual History of the Seventeenth-Century Sir Lambewell (British Library, Additional 27897); C.Stévanovitch Elucidations: Bringing to Light the Aesthetic Underwriting of the Matière de Bretagne in John Boorman's Excalibur ; J-M.Elsholz