The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, I: c.400–1100 ed. by Richard Gameson (review)

The penultimate volume to appear in this prestigious series is the first by scope and also covers the longest span of time, more than a millennium of writing. Unlike other volumes in the series, where the wealth of evidence causes its own problems, here, the contributors must conjure with dearth. Surviving texts, manuscripts, and contemporary booklists from the period are few and far between; and more than any other in this series, this volume draws as much on the learning of philologists, palaeographers, and liturgists for its conclusions as on the insights of historians of the book per se. The resulting work has a most satisfying shape. As with other parts of the series, this volume is set to be the port of first call for any reader wishing to know about the varieties of literate production in Britain, here in its earliest phase.

A grand narrative of the period would move in distinct fits, and show how literacy and book-production ebbed and flowed around historical cataclysms: specifically, repeated invasion from the European mainland. Literate culture was first brought to the Britons by the Romans and it is taken to have declined almost to extinction, certainly in lowland England, after the departure of the legions and the settlement by pagan Anglo-Saxons. A specifically Christian learned culture was reintroduced by missionaries from Rome and Ireland, and the subsequent melding of Anglo-Saxon and Irish book-arts and calligraphy would produce some of the treasures of the Insular period, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Viking attack so wasted the centres of literate production that by the second half of the ninth century few books could be counted that had come across the breach. The revival of learning and literacy that began under Alfred the Great produced in the tenth century some masterpieces of book-art, such as the Benedictional of Æthelwold, and also saw an increasing use of the vernacular as a text language, with a special script adapted to fit it. The Norman Conquest brought English learning into the European mainstream, and the new owners of institutional libraries set out to fill their book-chests with fashionable authors, copying those texts in a proto-gothic script that emerged from the collision of Norman styles and English writing practice.

With this narrative arc in mind, the essays in this volume are grouped thematically under headings: ‘the making of books’, ‘the circulation of books’, ‘types of books and their uses’, and ‘collections of books’. The organization is as sensible as it is com pre hensive. The first piece, by Richard Gameson, is a long survey of ‘the material fabric of early British books’, an innovative chapter in which the author seeks to contextualize every aspect of physical construction, his conclusions drawn entirely from first-hand experience of the books themselves. (Only bindings are reserved for a separate chapter, by Michael Gullick.) Several helpful surveys follow on the design and decoration of manuscripts and on the varieties of script that were used in the period. Rebecca Rushforth provides an astute overview of Anglo-Caroline minuscule that is extended by Tessa Webber past the Conquest to 1100. Also welcome is David Ganz’s introduction to Square minuscule, a script of the tenth century that appears to have been provoked into being by scribes close to the royal centre of the Alfredian educational reform programme.

It falls to Roger Tomlin’s highly entertaining essay on the book in Roman Britain—by which, of course, we should understand rolls, not books—to date the arrival of Latin literacy to these shores: on 25 September 54 bc Julius Caesar and Quintus Cicero, the orator’s younger brother, wrote to Cicero in Rome ‘from the nearest shores of Britain’ as the first invading army prepared to quit the island. The common Latin culture of Roman Britain...