Scholars working on manuscripts are increasingly aware of the importance of the evidence of writing surfaces and the technology of writing itself. Some of the most recent important studies along these lines include a miscellany on ancient and medieval writing materials; a collection of essays and a monograph on parchment, which consider its history, structure, production and conservation; a substantial monograph on paper; and another one on ink. The making of ink, parchment and paper has been researched from antiquity to the modern era, and brief descriptions or discrete sections are included in introductions to many histories of the book. However, most of these studies focus on continental book production, and there is still much ground to be covered on the significance of the study of materials in British books. This chapter focusses on why materials matter in book production and why looking at materials at a textual, social and cultural level yields new information about manuscript production.

Material culture has recently become an important point of departure for archaeological, anthropological and sociological studies. The study of material culture ‘centres on the idea of materiality [as] an integral dimension of culture, and indeed there are dimensions of social existence that cannot be fully understood without it’. Useful concepts such as objectification, commodification and agency help to explain that objects – in this case writing materials – have an identity as a cultural item to be studied.