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Afterword: the book in culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2014

Wendy Scase
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Alexandra Gillespie
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Daniel Wakelin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 analyses its subject in starkly material terms. Problems addressed in this volume range from the material constituents of books, through the physical processes involved in their deployment, to the economic relations and ideologies that enabled and constrained production. What materials were books made from, how were they supplied and what did they cost? What kinds of people wrote the texts and decorated the pages, and what processes – linguistic, intellectual, physical – were involved in copying and decorating? What scripts, page layouts, decoration and illustration are used, how are the varieties to be explained, and what costs were involved? Where did scribes and decorators obtain exemplars? What materials and methods were used for binding books, who carried out this work, where and at what cost? How did all of these processes inter-relate on a practical basis: did someone serve as coordinator – as a kind of ‘project manager’ – or was it necessary for the person paying for the work to organize these processes? How did print culture relate to patterns of manuscript production? The purpose of this afterword is to reflect on the significance of the ideas and information in the foregoing chapters for the study of literature and history in the period c.1350–c.1500, to ask how it may help us to think about the medieval book in relation to culture.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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