Description
Book SynopsisThis collaborative collection considers the packaging, presentation and consumption of medieval manuscripts and early printed books in Europe 1350–1550. It showcases innovative research on the history of the book from a range of established and younger scholars from the US and Europe in the fields of English and French Studies, History, Music, and Art History. The collection falls naturally into three sections: • Packaging and Presentation: The physical context of the manuscript and printed book including its binding, visual presentation and internal organization • Consumers: Producers, Owners, and Readers • Consuming the Text: The experience of the audience(s) for books These three strands are interdependent, and highlight the materiality of the manuscript or printed book as a consumable, focusing on its ‘consumability’ in the sense of its packaging and presentation, its consumers, and on the act of consumption in the sense of reading and reception or literal decay.
Trade ReviewReviews 'The individual essays are all very well contextualised within their own specific fields, and, significantly, they are aided very substantially by the construction of this volume... This book forms a very valuable contribution to current scholarship in the field of medieval and early modern book production, consumption and reception.'
Elisabeth Salter,
English Historical Review'This volume highlights the wealth of research output from a number of different fields, as well as the value of interdisciplinary collaboration in producing synergistic outcomes.'
Erin Connelly, Nottingham Medieval StudiesTable of Contents
- Acknowledgements - Emma Cayley and Susan Powell
- Preface - Derek Pearsall
- List of Figures
- Section I: Packaging and Presentation: The Materiality of the Manuscript and Printed Book
- • Anne Marie Lane: ‘How can we Recognise “Contemporary” Bookbindings of the Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Centuries?’
- • Matti Peikola: ‘Guidelines for Consumption: Scribal Ruling Patterns and Designing the mise-en-page in later Medieval England’
- • Kate Maxwell: ‘The Order of the Lays in the “Odd” Machaut MS BnF fr. 9221(E)’
- • Sonja Drimmer: ‘Picturing the King or Picturing the Saint: Two Miniature Programmes for John Lydgate’s Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund’
- • Yvonne Rode: ‘Sixty-three Gallons of Books: Shipping Books to London in the Late Middle Ages’
- Section II: Consumers: Producers, Owners, and Readers
- • Anna Lewis: ‘“But solid food is for the mature, who …have their senses trained to discern good and evil”: John Colop’s Book and the Spiritual Diet of the Discerning Lay Londoner’
- • Anne Sutton: ‘The Acquisition and Disposal of Books for Worship and Pleasure by Mercers of London in the Later Middle Ages’
- • Martha Driver: ‘“By Me Elysabeth Pykeryng”: Women and Printing in the Early Tudor Period’
- • Shayne Husbands: ‘The Roxburghe Club: Consumption, Obsession and the Passion for Print’
- Section III - Consuming the Text: Writing Consumption
- • Carrie Griffin: ‘Reconsidering the Recipe: Materiality, Narrative and Text in Later Medieval Instructional MSS and Collections’
- • Anamaria Gellert: ‘Fools, “Folye” and Caxton’s Woodcut of the Pilgrims at Table’
- • John B. Friedman: ‘Anxieties at Table: Food and Drink in Chaucer’s Fabliaux Tales and Heinrich Wittenwiler’s Der Ring’
- • Mary Morse: ‘Alongside St. Margaret: The Childbirth Cult of SS Quiricus and Julitta in Late Medieval English Manuscripts’
- • Emma Cayley: ‘Consuming the Text: Pulephilia in Fifteenth-Century French Debate Poetry’
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
