RITING MATTER is a study of handwriting in the Renaissance; its focus is on manuals of instruction, the materials and the materiality of a practice that extends from the manuals to the hand of the writer, and on the social and historical positions that these instructions and those instructed come to occupy. Multiple institutional sites of a practice that is itself hardly uniform, questions of their historicity, and the parameters of their ideological effects and aims are engaged in the pages that follow. Although a description of the field of handwriting entails a range of texts and questions that extend well beyond the immediate practices examined, I have directed my attention to Renaissance England as a way of delimiting the issues. This circumscription is not merely an arbitrary choice, nor one dictated solely by my own interests in the period; for within a history of handwriting, most narrowly defined, England is one site for a momentous shift in the history of handwriting. The handwriting manuals, which exemplify and attempt to regulate a multiplicity of hands—suited for specific institutional sites or social circumstancesalso introduce into England (and on a large scale, thanks to printing) the italic hand, an Italian import, which came, in the course of the sixteenth century, to signify socially as the mark