The Production of Books in England 1350–1500 ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (review)

This stimulating collection of essays is presented in Derek Pearsall’s “Foreword” to the volume as a successor to Pearsall and Jeremy Griffiths’s Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475 (Cambridge, 1989). As Pearsall notes, the differences between the two volumes function as an index of how manuscript studies have changed over the last twenty years. The earlier volume navigated between survey and case study. In the section on book ownership in the 1989 volume, for example, surveys of the evidence for book ownership and the relationship between book ownership and social status sit somewhat uneasily alongside a case study of book ownership in Scotland. Similarly, the “Book Production” section in the 1989 volume comprises a series of case studies of production among different, specific groups, whether defined by geography, vocation, or community. In contrast, The Production of Books in England aims at the comprehensiveness of a field-defining work of reference. Its thirteen chapters on subjects such as “Materials” (Orietta Da Rold), “Decorating and Illustrating the Page” (Martha Driver and Michael Orr), “Bookbinding” (Alexandra Gillespie), and “Compiling the Book” (Margaret Connolly) combine state-of-the-field survey with new research on specific books, scribes, and modes of production. The result is a collection of articles essential not only as a first port of call for postgraduate students and researchers embarking on the study of manuscripts and early printed books in the British Isles in the late medieval period, but also as a guide to current trends in research.

While the chapters divide the study of book production into sections, they nonetheless simultaneously draw attention to the interconnectedness of all fields of codicological study. “Materials” may not be the most alluring chapter title I have seen, but Da Rold’s essay itself does much not just to state, but to demonstrate “the significance of the study of materials in British books” (12). Through a case study of the use of different paper stocks in the so-called Winchester Malory, Da Rold demonstrates that careful attention to paper use has much to tell literary scholars about the nature and completeness of exemplars to which scribes had access, and thus about the early circulation of literary works. Similarly, Daniel Wakelin (“Writing the Words”) invites us to rethink theoretical assumptions. He points out that close attention to modes of scribal copying can provide a research base “against which to test theories of scribal ‘variance’ “ (50). In cases where copies of Middle English texts can be compared directly with exemplars, Wakelin suggests, it is not the variability but the “consistency of scribes,” and the remarkable feats of “auditory and visual memory” required to achieve such consistency that are striking (53).

The volume’s chapters on the “Commercial Organization” of manuscript production (Erik Kwakkel) and “Vernacular Literary Manuscripts and Their Scribes” (Linne R. Mooney) are complementary, exploring distinct aspects of book production from different angles. Mooney reconstructs the professional scribe’s varied workload by tracing his hand in surviving documents and volumes. Kwakkel, on the other hand, looks at what the documentary evidence and the material forms of surviving books have to tell us about the organizational structures and processes that brought support, script, decoration, and binding together into book form, and considers the relationship between commercial concerns and material form. Together, the two chapters put the scribe and the book into multiple, overlapping contexts.

There are some areas of study that are conspicuously missing from this volume. The studies of the owners and readers of medieval books that filled more than a fifth of Pearsall and Griffiths’s 1989 volume have no counterpart here; the volume interprets the “production” of its title strictly, and, in any case, since 1989 the histories of book ownership and reading have grown into areas of study in their own right. One could argue that the attention paid in the volume to books containing canonical...