The late medieval period in book history is characterized by two remarkable developments in terms of the production and dissemination of vernacular literature, both of which continued to have a profound impact on the processes of making books and shaping readers in Britain long after the period. These developments were, first, a perceptible shift from memory to written record: at a varying pace right across the literary and bureaucratic cultures of Western Europe, there continued in this period a seemingly irresistible movement away from a predominantly oral-based culture of wisdom, instruction, entertainment and information gathering, in the direction of a culture dominated by the material text. Across a period extending hundreds of years, there was a shift in medieval European attitudes away from large-scale (one hesitates to say popular) participation in an oral culture based on consensus and folk wisdom, passed on by tradition and word of mouth, to, broadly speaking, a text-based book culture and archive-based documentary record. The cultural attitudes of literary audiences had to adjust to take on the business of reading a text as well as hearing it delivered orally. Secondly, following on from that first perceptible shift, the late medieval period in the west witnessed the beginnings of the movement from script to print. This was a movement away from a manuscript culture where texts were often written to order, either as part of an obligation-based system or as a bespoke trade towards the new technological miracle of printing for profit.