Description
Book SynopsisInvestigating the reception of medieval manuscripts over a long century, and the members of the Tudor gentry family who owned them, reveals an unexpectedly strong interest in works of the past, and the continuing intellectual and domestic importance of medieval manuscripts in an age of print.
Trade Review'Overall, Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books offers a compelling case study of a kind of reading and class of readers … it is well written, copiously documented, and should serve as a model to other researchers working in a similar vein.' Megan L. Cook, The Library
'… this book is an important contribution to our understanding of how and why books were read during the English Reformation.' Hilary Maddocks, Script & Print
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Family matters: the Roberts family of Willesden; 2. Private faces in public places; 3. Devotional reading in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII; 4. Out of the cloister, out of the family; 5. Books and their uses; 6. Devotional reading in the reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I; Conclusion: Newly reformed readers?; Postscript: after the family: the manuscripts' later histories; Appendix 1. Timeline of key events during the lifetimes of Thomas and Edmund Roberts; Appendix 2. Summary list of contents of manuscripts owned by the Roberts family; Appendix 3. Manuscripts and printed books of uncertain association; Appendix 4. Other families named Roberts; Bibliography; Index of manuscripts; General Index.
