In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Production of Books in England 1350–1500
  • A. S. G. Edwards
The Production of Books in England 1350–1500. Ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. 375 pp. £60. ISBN 978 0 521 88979 7.

This collection of essays sees itself in a relationship with an earlier collection of essays also published by Cambridge, Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, edited by the late Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall in 1989. It differs from this earlier volume by the fact it ‘considers books not in terms of their content, but in terms of contexts and systems for their production and distribution’ (p. 11). [End Page 206] Insofar as this claim constitutes a characterization of the earlier book it is not a very exact one. That laid considerable weight on previously neglected matters, particularly provenance and audience, matters that seem directly related to ‘production and distribution’. There are other overlaps: discussions of paper and of decoration appear in both, for example.

Nor are some aspects of the design and purpose of this volume altogether clear. John Thompson writes about English manuscripts produced in Ireland in a chapter titled ‘Books Beyond England’, but Wales and Scotland are not considered in this book. It also seems strange that a volume extending to 1500 should have no discussion of typography. One might also wonder why 1500 was chosen as a cut-off date. It is one that has significance for historians of early printed books but not obviously for manuscript historians.

What distinguished the earlier volume was the extent to which the various contributions were based on original research, often by scholars who were experts in their particular fields. Some of the chapters here are largely surveys of research in a particular area. Sometimes these are useful as with Martha Driver and Michael Orr’s overview of decoration and illustration (though they are ill served by the generally inferior quality of the illustrations). Simon Horobin offers an account of recent work on Middle English dialectology and its relationship to manuscript study. Alexandra Gillespie summarizes issues involved in the study of medieval English bookbinding.

Other chapters do offer a wider range of reference and demonstration of original research, notably Orietta da Rold’s impressive study of ink, parchment, and paper and David Rundle’s deft survey of the circulation of English books, both manuscript and print, between England and the Continent. Stephen Partridge’s study of page design, while primarily focused on Chaucer’s manuscripts, is based on a considerable amount of copy-specific analysis of his own, enabling him to write suggestively about this rather underexplored topic. Margaret Connolly has a useful discussion of ‘Compiling the Book’ and identifies some of the factors involved in the creation of composite manuscripts and the attendant problems of interpretation. And some chapters are of great value: Fiona Somerset gives an extremely important overview of questions of censorship. This chapter is a model of scrupulous scholarship, underpinned by detailed reference to a range of manuscripts. In another excellent chapter Erik Kwakkel discusses the economic structure of the book trade, paying particular attention to the figure of stationer and his role(s) in the implementing of book commissions, and also to the neglected question of costs. He outlines lines of enquiry of considerable potential.

Where the focus turns to the crucial figure in manuscript production, the scribe, discussion is less rewarding. Daniel Wakelin’s chapter is concerned with the nature of scribal activity: how long copying took, the range of handwritten representational possibilities, and the question of scribal accuracy. None of these is a question that yields very much of substance, particularly the last, which is self-evidently dependent on the availability of exemplar and transcript for purposes of comparison and the likelihood of establishing norms of error.

L. R. Mooney’s chapter on ‘Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and their Scribes’ seems largely to summarize her own writings on this question. Jean Pascal Pouzet has been charged to explore non-commercial manuscript production. But he clearly [End Page 207] finds the term and its implications difficult to examine, acknowledging at one point ‘there may be no such thing as...

pdf

Share